The MalaCast

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”  -Voltaire

"The proportion of people killed annually in wars is less than a quarter of what it was in the 1980s, a seventh of what it was in the early 1970s, an eighteenth of what it was in the early 1950s, and a half a percent of what it was during World War II. Genocides, once common, have become rare. In most times and places, homicides kill far more people than wars, and homicide rates have been falling as well. Americans are half as likely to be murdered as they were two dozen years ago. In the world as a whole, people are seven-tenths as likely to be murdered as they were eighteen years ago. Life has been getting safer in every way. Over the course of the 20th century, Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accident, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths, 92 percent less likely to die by fire, 90 percent less likely to drown, 92 percent less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job."  -Steven Pinker

Interestingly, many diseases have been falling for longer than we had vaccines or even treatments for them.  The reason?  Mostly sanitation and bug extermination.  Plumbers, civil engineers, and exterminators have done more to lengthen life than doctors have.

All of human history has been ravaged by communicable disease.  To give a pretty typical year, about 500/100,000 people died in NYC in 1849 of TB.  In the US in the past year, about 160/100,000 people have died of Covid.

But people in the past didn't panic at this -- it was simply normal.  Perhaps that's our future:  Things are unbelievably good and safe, and we all are clutching our knees in a corner, shaking in fear.

“All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow."  -

Walter Scheidel

"I tell my doctors that in nearly nine years of taking this walk four times a week, I have never seen a single instance of anyone attempting to clean his yard. But I have seen much litter dropped; on a good day I can even watch someone standing at the bus stop dropping something on the ground no farther than two feet from the bin.

Apart from the anti-social disregard of the common good that each little such act of littering implies (hundreds a week in the space of 800 yards alone), the vast quantity of food consumed in the street has deeper implications. I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never – not once – have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave."  -Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom

Let me give you a few sentences that were never true in the decades or centuries prior to 1989, but which are, by some definition, true today:

"Men give birth."

"Two men can marry."

"Black people can't be racist."

And we also have the old definitions, too, so now each of these statements is literally both true and false.  In other words, confusing.  Why have some unscrupulous academics sought not clarity, but befuddlement?

"Nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul."  -Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom

Ed O'Neill finds lesbian weddings funny.  I find his willingness to say so -- to a camera -- quite refreshing.  I hate fakeness.

“At a time when compliance is demanded, everyone willing to resist those calls is going to be more than usually needed.”  -Douglas Murray

A majority of House Democrats voted to reduce the voting age to 16.  It's hard to think of a worse idea than that.

Many times a country is better off with contradictions than without, since contradictions are so often resolved wrongly.

"The day before Evergreen melted down I presented this model: the population is made up of four types of people: A small number hunt witches. A large number go along with the hunt. A larger number are silent. A tiny number oppose it. The final group--as if by magic--become witches.

I literally drew a chart on the board. Because I did so before I was falsely and publicly demonized, some students wondered if I could possibly have arranged everything to teach this important lesson."  -Bret Weinstein

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.  —Eric Hoffer

First, Cuomo mandated nursing homes take Covid patients.

Then, his top aide admitted to withholding the nursing home death toll from lawmakers because "we froze."

But now it looks as though Cuomo might be through.  Why?  "Sexual harassment."

Our society is puritanical about 1's and nonchalant about 10's.  Be sure to question your society's values so you don't accept them in all their absurdity and morbidity.

"See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it really means to know something. And therefore, I see how it is that they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it—they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know how this stuff is done and they are intimidating people by it."  –Richard Feynman

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/politics/andrew-cuomo-nursing-homes-fact-check/index.html

https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/cuomo-aide-admits-they-hid-nursing-home-data-from-feds/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/andrew-cuomo-sexual-harassment-nursing-homes-scandal.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1#Sec7

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.  —Eric Hoffer

First, Cuomo mandated nursing homes take Covid patients.

Then, his top aide admitted to withholding the nursing home death toll from lawmakers because "we froze."

But now it looks as though Cuomo might be through.  Why?  "Sexual harassment."

Our society is puritanical about 1's and nonchalant about 10's.  Be sure to question your society's values so you don't accept them in all their absurdity and morbidity.

"See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it really means to know something. And therefore, I see how it is that they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it—they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know how this stuff is done and they are intimidating people by it."  –Richard Feynman

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/politics/andrew-cuomo-nursing-homes-fact-check/index.html

https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/cuomo-aide-admits-they-hid-nursing-home-data-from-feds/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/andrew-cuomo-sexual-harassment-nursing-homes-scandal.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1#Sec7

Arms are not yet taken up; but virtually, you are in a civil war. You are not people of differing opinions in a public council;—you are enemies, that must subdue or be subdued, on the one side or the other. If your hands are not on your swords, their knives will be at your throats. There is no medium,—there is no temperament,—there is no compromise with Jacobinism.  –Edmund Burke

A famous French actor was accused of raping -- an actor?  Which doesn't make much sense (as men are difficult to rape) until you realize the Independent is using the word "Actor" quite loosely -- to include women.

The New York Times, perhaps the foremost purveyor or leftism in the West today, wrote this line, "The story highlights the tensions between a student's deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it."

These two cases prove something:  The left will throw away anything in order to appeal to a small group of woke leftists.  Clarity.  An insistence upon objective truth.  Anything.

Still, these visions of Saigon did not depress me as the frigid, sterile concrete grandeur of Pyongyang had depressed me. ‘You won’t see signs of poverty in Pyongyang like in other Asian cities,’ a sympathiser with North Korea had told me proudly before I went. He did not mention that I would see no signs of life either; whereas in Saigon, for all its squalor, there was activity, movement, laughter, argument.  –Theodore Dalrymple

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/french-actor-gerard-depardieu-charged-with-rape-claims-report-b1806326.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html

"Marxism:  the methamphetamine of the masses."  -Jordan Peterson

Clarence Thomas is, as always, brilliant in his most recent dissent.  And never at a more consequential time.  If, as the SCOTUS has said previously, "[c]onfidence in the integrity of our electoral process is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy," why does the Court repeatedly give us no reason to believe in the integrity of our elections by not hearing case after case, no matter how compelling?

As Thomas put it, "One wonders what this Court waits for."

I do not, however, wonder what the Court waits for.  I believe I know:  The left never understands the injustice of what it does until it is done to them.

"In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases."  -Edmund Burke

"Marxism:  the methamphetamine of the masses."  -Jordan Peterson

Clarence Thomas is, as always, brilliant in his most recent dissent.  And never at a more consequential time.  If, as the SCOTUS has said previously, "[c]onfidence in the integrity of our electoral process is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy," why does the Court repeatedly give us no reason to believe in the integrity of our elections by not hearing case after case, no matter how compelling?

As Thomas put it, "One wonders what this Court waits for."

I do not, however, wonder what the Court waits for.  I believe I know:  The left never understands the injustice of what it does until it is done to them.

"In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases."  -Edmund Burke

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom -- go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!  -Samuel Adams, 1776

The inimitable Rush has died.

He was called many things by the left which only showed how effective he was at thwarting them (the left use "-ism" accusations more often not as truth-claims but only to denote who threatens their grasp on power.  That is why Rush (with his beloved black producer) was a "racist" and the very similar Trump, with his Jewish grandkids and beloved son-in-law was "anti-semitic."

By that measure, Rush was great.

I know I am a target and I know I will be destroyed eventually. I fear that all I have accomplished and all the wealth I have accumulated will be taken from me, to the cheers of the crowd.  -Rush Limbaugh

Once you hate evil you can’t hate anything else.  -Dennis Prager

A guy on Twitter used slavery to attack the right.  The right alone stands in the way of the left having total power.  He did not attack Mauritania for still having hundreds of thousands in bondage.  So does he hate slavery or what?

Pete Buttigieg wants America to get loads of high speed rail.  The only problem is:  High speed rail is stupid.  Or, as Cato puts it, "airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile."  The left's solutions never change.  It's the problems that come and go.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country. So maybe he owes all of us an apology...  –PJ O’Rourke

https://www.cato.org/blog/global-leader-obsolete-technology