Quotulatiousness

July 1, 2016

British Artillery At The Somme – Brusilov Offensive Implodes I THE GREAT WAR Week 101

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 30 Jun 2016

This week 100 years ago, the British Army starts their preparations for the Battle of the Somme with a week long artillery bombardment which fails to weaken the German defenses considerably. At the same time the Brusilov Offensive in the East implodes as Russian General Evert fails with his offensive against the Germans even with superior numbers.

Is the end in sight for California’s high speed rail fiasco?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Virginia Postrel says the state’s high speed rail boondoggle may finally run out of chances:

California’s high-speed rail project increasingly looks like an expensive social science experiment to test just how long interest groups can keep money flowing to a doomed endeavor before elected officials finally decide to cancel it. What combination of sweet-sounding scenarios, streamlined mockups, ever-changing and mind-numbing technical detail, and audacious spin will keep the dream alive?

Sold to the public in 2008 as a visionary plan to whisk riders along at 220 miles an hour, making the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a little over two and a half hours, the project promised to attract most of the necessary billions from private investors, to operate without ongoing subsidies and to charge fares low enough to make it competitive with cheap flights. With those assurances, 53.7 percent of voters said yes to a $9.95 billion bond referendum to get the project started. But the assurances were at best wishful thinking, at worst an elaborate con.

The total construction cost estimate has now more than doubled to $68 billion from the original $33 billion, despite trims in the routes planned. The first, easiest-to-build, segment of the system — the “train to nowhere” through a relatively empty stretch of the Central Valley — is running at least four years behind schedule and still hasn’t acquired all the needed land. Predicted ticket prices to travel from LA to the Bay have shot from $50 to more than $80. State funding is running short. Last month’s cap-and-trade auction for greenhouse gases, expected to provide $150 million for the train, yielded a mere $2.5 million. And no investors are lining up to fill the $43 billion construction-budget gap.

In the UK (and in the USA), the peasants are revolting

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Questions and Observations, Dale Franks writes about the distrust of the traditional “elites” among the non-elites of society:

There’s a growing sense, not only in Great Britain, but in the US as well, that the elites, or the political class, or whatever you’d like to call them, are incompetent and have been leading us astray. And the response from elites is to call those criticisms illegitimate. Those doing the carping are assumed to be racists or nationalists, both of which, of course, are unpleasant, dirty types of people. Both the UK’s Leavers and the US’s Trumpers share some commonalities. Among them are skepticism over free trade and free immigration; concerns that elites dismiss as foolish and uneducated. And, of course racist.

But perhaps the Leavers weren’t so concerned with brown people because they were brown, but because they were concerned at seeing buses being blown up in London, British soldiers being beheaded in broad daylight in the High Street, and dozens of children being raped for years in Rotherham. Perhaps, the British people have come to wonder about immigration because many immigrants seem less interested in becoming British than they are in making Britain more like the Middle East. And, maybe, just maybe, the Leavers prefer to live in Britain, in the free and modern culture that has developed over the last 1,500 years, rather than go back to live in the year 692. Maybe they wouldn’t be any more interested in living in the 13th-century culture of Richard the Lion-Hearted any more than they are in living in the Dark Age culture of Middle Eastern immigrants.

When people come into your country from elsewhere, they don’t do so simply as fungible economic units, but as real people, who bring along cultural and political ideas that may conflict those that are traditional in your country. It is almost at the point where elites cannot even conceive of an argument that implies the superiority of one culture over another, so they dismiss this argument as nationalism and nativism. But, the thing is, a free society that continually imports immigrants who have no interest in individual liberty, religious freedom, and political pluralism, will eventually have none of those things. The problem isn’t race. It’s culture.

National sovereignty means something. At the very least, it means that the people of a country have the absolute right to restrict immigration to the sort of people that will, in their judgement, benefit the country, and, once the immigrants arrive, to force them to assimilate to the country’s national culture more than the country accommodates the culture of the immigrant. No obligation exists, in any sense whatsoever, that requires the people of a country to allow entry to immigrants who desire to transform the country into something different. It is entirely legitimate to reject calls for sharia in the UK, just as it’s entirely legitimate to be upset by seeing political protestors in the US waving Mexican flags or wearing “Make America Mexico Again” hats, explicitly letting us know where their primary political allegiance lies. Nor is it illegitimate to wonder why such people are in this country, and not in the corrupt shithole of a country that they so obviously prefer, yet so oddly fled.

QotD: The USA is finally over the War of 1812

Filed under: Cancon, History, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On behalf of the United States of America and the Department of Defense, I wish our partners in North American defense a very Happy Canada Day.

We have long stood on the same team, as allies, except for the War of 1812, which was 200 years ago and no one really remembers that anymore. I certainly don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how insane it would be to ever trust a Canadian, and definitely never think about how fast and easy it would be to grow the United States from 50 states to 60.

This day celebrates over 148 years of a united Canada, one of the most peaceful, democratic and stable nations on Earth. You are an example to the world, and we as Americans celebrate alongside you, not to keep an eye on what you’re doing to make sure you don’t start building a coalition to say, bombard Baltimore Harbor again, but because the lessons of the past make us stronger together. And really, we should be even closer together.

Canada Day recognizes the day in which three independent colonies united as one Canada. America, too, is a nation of independent colonies, united under a shared vision of liberty and justice for all. If one were to really think about it, it would make a lot of sense to have a larger America, from sea to shining Arctic sea, and really it probably would have happened a century ago if some of the colonies wouldn’t have started backing the British, even after they interfered with Atlantic shipping.

We could have called it, I don’t know, “Amerida” for a while, but honestly United States of America is a great name so I think we’d just go for that. Occasionally I toy around with thinking about how we could have solved that bi-lingualism burden Canada has. Like Montreal, Atlanta was a beautiful, old world city too — until November 16, 1864. I think we’d get rid of that quirky metric system, too. If you ask me, freedom isn’t divisible by ten. But that’s certainly not the kind of thing that I’d think about on Canada Day. Canada Day is a joyful day for celebration.

“Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter”, “SECDEF: This Canada Day, We Are Totally Over War Of 1812”, Duffelblog, 2015-07-01.

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