Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2010

Farewell to “Farewell tours”, then?

Filed under: Britain,Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:05

The Pogues appear to have a bit of dissent going on:

The Pogues have announced a “farewell tour” for the UK, much to the consternation of their guitarist. Phil Chevron has blasted notices for the goodbye tour, calling it “a marketing ploy” by others in the band. “This claim does not come from me,” he wrote on the group’s website, “and I will neither be supporting it nor discussing it.”

The seven-date tour begins in Glasgow and ends on 21 December in Brixton, with reported Irish gigs earlier in the month. These concerts will close the band’s 28th year, and their ninth since frontman Shane MacGowan re-formed the folk-punk rabble-rousers. But despite the flier’s unequivocal “Farewell Christmas Tour” tag-line, the Pogues don’t exactly seem ready to say farewell.

Not long after Chevron’s grumpy post to the official message-board, bandmate Spider Stacy popped in with a clarification. “This is the last Christmas tour for the foreseeable future,” he wrote. “That’s not to say we won’t be showing up at festivals here and there or maybe even the odd gig around the UK and Ireland and certainly in Europe. But we’re tired of dragging our weary, freezing carcasses around these drowning islands every December, so we’re going to give it a rest before you get tired of it, too. Go and see the Libertines. They’re the best.”

Shows how much attention I’d been paying . . . I thought 1996′s “Pogue Mahone” was the last album they’d recorded, and that they’d pretty much stopped performing. Off to Wikipedia . . .

The Pogues is a band of mixed Irish and English background, playing traditional Irish music with influences from punk rock and folk, formed in 1982 and fronted by Shane MacGowan. The band reached international prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. MacGowan left the band in 1991 due to drinking problems but the band continued first with Joe Strummer and then with Spider Stacy on vocals before breaking up in 1996. The band reformed in 2001, and has been playing regularly ever since, most notably on the US East Coast every spring (bar 2010) and around the UK and Ireland every December. The group has yet to record any new music and according to Spider Stacy on Pogues.com has no inclination to do so.

That explains it nicely.

Rival electric car manufacturers already positioning for dirty ad campaigns

Filed under: Environment,Media,Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Lewis Page rounds up the GM-versus-Tesla ad campaigns of the near future:

As US motor mammoth GM gears up for the launch of its plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt, it has applied to trademark the term “range anxiety” — meaning the fear suffered by battery-car owners regarding their ability to get home again after a given journey. Upstart battery car maker Tesla Motors has issued a panicky and unconvincing statement in response.

[. . .]

GM feels that “range anxiety” is a major reason why its original EV-1 battery car of the 1990s failed.

”We’ve been here before,” says GM marketing honcho Joel Ewanick. “We have first-hand experience with what the issues are.”

In short, the difficulty with an all-electric battery car is that there is little certainty of actually being able to complete any journey even close to the vehicle’s rated range, as battery endurance is highly variable — and manufacturers can’t publicise the worst-case (or even perhaps the likely-case) figures. If they did, nobody would ever buy their products.

[. . .]

Meanwhile, reputable Swiss boffins have lately pointed out that in fact a VW Golf powered by one of the new, super-low-emission injected turbodiesels is responsible for less carbon emissions over its lifespan than one with a li-ion battery running on typical grid power.

So, to wrap up the discussion briefly, nobody will be buying Tesla Roadsters or Government Motors Volts for their economic virtues: they’ll be buying them as expensive status-signalling devices to show off their (real or imaginary) environmental awareness.

If not the founder, at least a notable contributor

Filed under: History,Media,Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

John Pilger pays “tribute” to one of the more persuasive contributors to both militarism and commercialism of the 20th century:

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations.”

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom.” In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation.”

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events.”

Propaganda definitely existed before Bernays, but he may have been the one who codified and systematized the “science”.

September 1, 2010

“The Stig” to be unmasked

Filed under: Britain,Law,Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

As I mentioned a while back, the BBC went to court to try to prevent a book publisher from revealing the identity of Top Gear‘s mysterious race car driver “The Stig”. The court has ruled against the BBC. James May, one of the presenters on the show, had this to say:

“Obviously I’m now going to have to take some legal action of my own, because I have been the Stig for the past seven years, and I don’t know who this bloke is, who’s mincing around in the High Court pretending it’s him.”

August 31, 2010

Commercial hypocrisy, oilsands edition

Filed under: Environment,Media,USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

Ezra Levant isn’t amused by some US businesses trying to make political statements by slagging Alberta’s oilsands while being less than clean themselves:

Walgreens is the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.

It’s also corrupt.

For years, they secretly altered their customers’ prescriptions, without their doctor’s knowledge, in a giant insurance scam across 42 states. They targeted Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans. So they were stealing from taxpayers and the poor at the same time. That kind of big thinking is why Walgreens is number one.

Walgreens replaced inexpensive drugs with drugs that were up to four times more costly. Only when an honest pharmacist finally blew the whistle on them were they stopped — and fined a whopping $35 million.

Are you ready to take moral lessons from Walgreens? Because they’ve just announced that they’re switching their trucks to fuel that doesn’t come from Canada’s oilsands — as an ethical statement.

Taking ethical guidance from Walgreens is sort of like taking abstinence lessons from Hugh Hefner.

I’d call for a boycott of Walgreens, but they don’t have any stores in Canada (and, despite their name, they are no relation to Walmart).

But Walgreens isn’t the only moral hypocrite to come out against Canada. So did The Gap, which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy.

Do yourself a favour: Don’t buy their clothes.

The “trust problem” in government

Filed under: Economics,Media,Politics,USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Charles Johnson rebuts an article by E.J. Dionne which pushed the notion that Obama’s policies are significantly different from those of the Bush administration:

There is one point where I can unequivocally agree with E.J. Dionne’s column “Can We Reverse the Tide on Government Distrust” (Washington Post, May 6, 2010) — when he tells us that “So far, the Obama administration has missed the opportunity to demonstrate . . . how it is changing the way government works. How is its approach to . . . regulations different from what was done before? . . . How are its priorities different?”

How indeed?

Two years in, if there’s any noticeable difference between Bush’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, and Obama’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, I’d like to know where to find it. The difference between me and E.J. Dionne is that Dionne is apparently surprised by this outcome — why hasn’t Obama done better? At issue is what used to be called “Good Government” – the problem of ensuring that a centralized managerial State, with expansive powers to intervene in all matters economic, social, or hygienic, will be run cleanly, and competently, by qualified experts. Dionne insists that financial market meltdowns, oil spills, and coal-mine disasters reveal the catastrophic results of a few years of Bush-era government neglect. Those of us who remember the Bush administration may have a hard time accepting the claim that it was an era in which government was not doing enough; and we see these headline-grabbing catastrophes as only the tail end of a decades-long crisis — a bipartisan, politically created crisis of institutional incentives and industry “best practice-ism,” created, nurtured, and protected by government itself.

So when Dionne reviews a few headlines — the financial-market meltdown, the Gulf oil spill, the coal-mine explosion at Upper Big Branch — he suggests that “It’s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful ‘big’ government.”

Really? Let’s try.

August 25, 2010

Bans on texting while driving have not measurably improved highway safety

Filed under: Bureaucracy,Law,Media,Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:34

This report should come as no real surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention:

The two biggest highway-safety issues right now, as far as Washington is concerned, are runaway Toyotas and distracted driving. But what if these aren’t the most important factors driving the nation’s annual highway death toll, which averages about 100 fatalities a day?

That’s the view of Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who says the U.S. Transportation Department, Congress and the media have gotten sidetracked by issues like texting while driving.

“There’s nothing rational about the way we set highway safety priorities,” Mr. Lund says in the Insurance Institute’s Aug. 21 “Status Report” newsletter.

Mr. Lund’s organization is the safety research and advocacy arm of the insurance industry. The IIHS has been critical of the government’s highway safety policies over the past few years, usually arguing that the government wasn’t moving fast enough to require better crash-prevention technology from auto makers.

Mr. Lund and the Insurance Institute also say recent laws banning motorists from using mobile phones behind the wheel don’t correlate with a significant reduction in accidents.

“You’d think from the media coverage, congressional hearings, and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s focus in recent months that separating drivers from their phones would all but solve the public-health problem of crash deaths and injuries,” he wrote. “It won’t.”

August 24, 2010

Silent Star Wars

Filed under: Media,Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:32

H/T to Marc Campbell.

August 23, 2010

Unmasking “The Stig”

Filed under: Britain,Law,Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

A court case will decide whether HarperCollins can publish a book that reveals the identity of Top Gear‘s anonymous driver:

Publisher HarperCollins is in a legal dispute with the BBC over a book that reveals the identity of Top Gear‘s The Stig, BBC News understands.

Both sides appeared in London’s High Court on Monday after the BBC confirmed it was trying to halt its publication.

The Stig regularly takes to the track on the BBC Two show, but never removes his helmet on screen.

The BBC says the publication of the book breaches contractual and confidentiality obligations.

HarperCollins declined to give any official comment.

The dispute comes amid suggestions from several newspapers speculating that the character’s true identity is former Formula Three driver Ben Collins, based on the financial reports of his company.

How to become an instant expert on Afghanistan

Filed under: Humour,Media,Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

P.J. O’Rourke had a few days to visit Afghanistan and managed to become an expert on the nation, its people, and the problems they face:

Women cover themselves in public but not more than my grandmother did at Mass. An occasional down-to-the-ground burka is seen but not as often as in London. In the malls, clothing shops predominate. Men’s and women’s clothes are shinier and more vividly colored than those seen in a traditional society such as New Hampshire.

Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.

The Pashtun tribal leader was one of a number of people that Amin arranged for me to interview. Tribalism is another thing that makes Afghanistan hard to understand. We Americans are probably too tribal to grasp the subtlety of Afghan tribal concepts.

The Pashtun tribal leader was joined by a Turkmen tribal leader who has a Ph.D. in sociology. I asked the Turkmen tribal leader about the socioeconomic, class, and status aspects of Afghan tribalism.

“No tribe is resented for wealth,” he said. So, right off the bat, Afghans show greater tribal sophistication than Americans. There is no Wall Street Tribe upon which the Afghan government can blame everything.

Even the worst of Afghan governments never acquired the special knack of pitting tribe against tribe that is vital to American politics — the Squishy Liberal Tribe vs. the Kick-Butt Tribe; the Indignantly Entitled Tribe vs. the Fed-Up Taxpayer Tribe; the Smug Tribe vs. the Wipe-That-Smirk-Off-Your-Face Tribe.

There you have it: the reason we all find Afghan politics so hard to unravel!

August 16, 2010

Cory Doctorow on the new Robert Heinlein biography

Filed under: History,Media,Military,USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

I finished reading the first volume last night, and I can’t wait for volume two. Cory Doctorow summarizes John Clute’s review with his own observations (Clute compared Heinlein’s work to Doctorow’s):

Heinlein was notoriously recalcitrant about his early life and the two wives he was married to before his epic marriage to Virginia Heinlein. He repeatedly burned correspondence and other writings that related to that period. Clute suggests that this is partly driven by Heinlein’s desire to be Robert A Heinlein, titan of the field, without having to cope with his youthful embarrassments. It’s a good bet — lots of the stuff that drives young people to write science fiction also makes them a pain in the ass to be around until they work some of the kinks out of their system (I wholeheartedly include myself in this generalization).

It’s interesting to see his own growth, from his early priggishness (he was nicknamed “the boy general” as a plebe at the Naval Academy) which undoubtedly was not helped by his health issues and tendency to stammer. He was in the shadow of his older brother Rex Ivar for most of his youth, even following him to the Academy three two years later. Rex Ivar was the favourite child in the family and Robert never seemed to be able to do as well in his parents’ eyes as the older boy.

Robert Heinlein was probably a pretty toxic individual as a teenager, based on the evidence Patterson presents — it’s pretty clear even after most of the information was sanitized by Heinlein’s third wife Virginia. Patterson never met Heinlein, and by the time he took on the biography, most of the people who knew Heinlein were fading from the scene. I think he did a very good job with the information available to him, but the biography definitely improves after the Academy years.

Patterson also puts forward a pretty comprehensive case for the idea that Heinlein’s fiction generally conveys Heinlein’s own political beliefs. This is widely acknowledged among Heinlein fans, save for a few who seem distressed by the idea that the blatant racism and sexism (especially in the earlier works) are the true beliefs of the writer at the time of writing and would prefer to believe that Heinlein didn’t write himself into his works. I got into a pretty heated debate with one such person at the Heinlein panel at the 2007 Comicon, who maintained the absurd position that Heinlein’s views could never be divined by reading his fiction — after all, his characters espouse all manner of contradictory beliefs! (To which I replied: “Yes, but the convincing arguments are always for the same set of beliefs, and the characters who challenge those beliefs are beaten in the argument.”) Not that I fault Heinlein for this — it’s an honorable tradition in SF and the mainstream of literature, and I find Heinlein’s beliefs to be nuanced and complex, anything but the reactionary caricature with which he is often dismissed.

It should be no surprise to anyone over 30 that Robert Heinlein’s political and philosophical views changed over his lifetime. This is discussed in some depth in the book, frequently from Heinlein’s own letters to friends at various points. He lost his religious views very early on (if he ever really had them, other than for conforming to familial expectations), and after leaving the Navy he was deeply involved in Upton Sinclair’s EPIC movement.

His belief in world government must have been hard to sustain, given that he had a great deal of experience of the political process, both in Kansas City during the Pendergast years, and in California with EPIC. Corruption, dirty dealing, and backroom bargaining were the way things got done, and it would be hard to believe that things would be better with a single world-wide government.

What seems to have gotten him involved in EPIC was his first-hand experience of poverty and seeing the plight of the “Okies” who’d come to California after the dust bowl wiped out so many farms in the central states. There were not enough jobs for them, even displacing the Mexican migrant labourers, and they were ineligible for state assistance until after they’d been in California for a year. Sinclair appeared to be the only politician with any plan other than oppressing the Okies enough to force them to move on.

August 13, 2010

Weekend reading material

Filed under: History,Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:47

When I got back from lunch today, the UPS truck had delivered my weekend reading material:

Update: The first fifty pages have been excellent. It’s interesting how many characters in his fiction are recognizably people from his early life in Missouri.

Raise your kid in the Rand-approved manner

Filed under: Economics,Humour,Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Eric Hague would like to assure you that today’s little contretemps was inevitable:

I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place — a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles — and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

H/T to The Tiger who said “The shove was uncalled for . . . but I’m otherwise with the girl.”

Maybe I should try to find a copy of Eric’s “illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged“. It sounds like great bedtime reading for the kiddies, “glossing over all the hardcore sex parts”.

August 11, 2010

Felicia Day talks about making The Guild

Filed under: Economics,Gaming,Media,Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:19

More at Fast Company.

iPhone girls are easy

Filed under: Humour,Media,Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:47

Colby Cosh links to a dating website that actually provides useful photography information:

oh, also — iPhone users have more sex.

File this under “icebreakers, MacWorld ’11″. Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself; I’ll just say that the numbers for all three brands are for 30 year-olds, so it’s not a matter of older, more experienced people preferring one phone to another. We found this data as part of our general camera-efficacy analysis: we crossed all kinds of user behaviors with the camera models and found we had data on the number of sexual partners for 9,785 people with smart phones.

Okay, I’ve posted the funny bit. The rest of the article actually does have useful photography tips, especially if you’re a user of dating websites.

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