The MalaCast

"Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire.  A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience, that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it."  –Hitchens

Many of the reactions upon OJ's passing were deeply disturbing.  I share them with you so you know what to expect.

"Pervasive antiwhite antagonism is perhaps the best-kept secret about black inner-city culture."  –Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops

"Taste is relative" is the excuse adopted by those eras that have bad taste.  -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

A man gave his coat to a homeless bum and the homeless bum up and stole his wallet as thanks.

Solar eclipses are so overrated as to be barely worth looking up for.  Rarity aside, solar eclipses are about as interesting as rain.

"Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”  -CS Lewis

https://twitter.com/AmiriKing/status/1776344677991453080

Happy Easter!

I discuss the enslavement of perhaps 1,000,000 white/Christians by the barbary pirates and the man who finally brought that trade to an end.

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."  -GK Chesterton

Seems like just yesterday Conan O'Brien et al were telling us about what a lovely place Haiti was, on account of Trump said it wasn't.  As the corpses are roasting in the streets, join me on a stroll down memory lane.

"I am terrified of Africa.  I don't want to be from this place."  -Keith Richburg

"I'm leaving Africa now, so I don't care anymore about the turmoil in Rwanda and have no interest in this latest tragic development."  -Keith Richburg

“It has been said critically that there is a  tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war.”  January-February 1929, The Military Engineer, “Some Notes on the World War” by J. L. Schley (Lieutenant Colonel, Corps of Engineers), pg. 55, col. 1L

I read the State of the Union address and will give my thoughts.

““Did you ever in all your life see the head of a human being which so closely resembled that of a cod fish?”

“He is not responsible for his head or his face. But why do you say he is a fraud? The newspapers call him a reformer, and give him credit for great efficiency.”

“I deny your conclusions,” he replied. “A man of fifty is responsible for his face! Yes, I know he is courting the newspapers: that proves him a humbug and presumptively a fraud.”

A few months later the official in question was found guilty by a court-martial of peculation and fraud in the management of his bureau and dishonorably expelled from the service.”  -Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, quoted by Lucius Crittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration

“Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good?"  -Stephen Pinker

According to my rough calculation, 50 million people were killed by their non-government countrymen in the 20'th century.  According to RJ Rummel, about 250 unarmed people were intentionally killed by governments over the same span.  5:1

"The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another one dead."  -Stephen Pinker

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

-Robert Frost. "The Secret Sits" (1942)

@psychiconfire makes a good point on Twitter.

Sometimes it is impossible to do good without appearing mean.

What does doing evil feel like?  Sometimes, *exactly like* doing good.

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation says we will pass 300% debt:GDP ratio in 2044, 500% in 2058, and 1000% in 2078.  It's probably later than you think.  This present system of vote-buying will end, one way or another.

Certain jobs can only be done properly by people who don’t care too much if they are fired.

Out of the crooked timber of man, no straight thing was ever made.  -Immanuel Kant

A Welsh slave was once given a direct order by his captor and notorious butcher of men, sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco.  He refused it and lived.

This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.  –Stephen Kotkin

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings - no matter what color or creed any of them are.  –Thomas Sowell

"How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint."  –Robert Frost

"One woman died and more than 20 others were injured when gunfire erupted at the Kansas City parade."  -BBC

What I hate about Bill Maher - no retractions.

“Where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident.”  -Dr Johnson

Nikki Haley:  "I am going to beat President Trump." 

"In the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective." -CS Lewis