Quotulatiousness

January 13, 2024

It’s not lying lying

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Homewood on how Brits are propagandized through slanted reporting on the weather (which has always been a topic of interest in the British Isles):

Storm Gerrit arrived the day after Boxing Day, accompanied by the usual headlines: “85mph gales barrelled down on Britain”, screamed the Daily Mail.

As usual the public were being deliberately deceived. The 85mph claim was based on one site in North East Scotland, at the top of a 400ft cliff overlooking the North Sea, marked in red below.

Inverbervie, Kincardineshire

A few miles away at sea level average wind speeds never got above 30mph. The Met Office never reports any of this, preferring to publish its favourite sites on clifftops or halfway up mountains.

It was the same story a week later, when another system of low pressure came along to be given yet another silly name, “Henk”.

“94mph winds pummel the UK”, shrieked the Mirror. This time the wind speeds were measured on the Met Office’s go-to weather station, the Needles, off the Isle of Wight. As this column has discussed before, the Needles sit at the end of a long, narrow peninsula, and the station is on top of a 260ft cliff. Winds there are routinely 30mph higher than even exposed sites nearby, such as St Catherine’s Point. Meanwhile average winds inland were typically around 30mph.

It rained as well last week! During the two days of Storm Henk, about an inch fell in parts of southern and central England. There is nothing at all unusual about this amount; it is the sort of thing which happens every year. Because the ground was already saturated, following wet weather last month, there was inevitably some flooding. But, for the most part, this was little more than flooded fields, overflowing river banks and localised flooding. Again, normal scenes in England. And as Patrick Benham-Crosswell pointed out in TCW this week, many houses built on flood plains were once again flooded. There was certainly none of the major river flooding which has hit the country many times in the past.

According to the Environment Agency, about 2,000 properties were flooded, a tragedy for everybody involved. But in overall terms, this is a tiny number. For instance, 55,000 were flooded in 2007.

Inevitably, the media jumped to blame it all on climate change. According to ITV: “Henk is the eighth named storm to have hit the country this winter and the pattern is likely to continue due to the effects of climate change. ‘This is climate change and the impacts we are seeing,’ the Environment Agency’s Tom Paget added. ‘We are seeing these increasingly wet and blustery winters. We are seeing storm upon storm which is exacerbating the issues’.”

Claims like this explain why the Met Office decided to start giving every low-pressure system a silly name back in 2015. But as it admitted in its State of the UK Climate last year, storms used to be much stronger:

    The most recent two decades have seen fewer occurrences of max gust speeds above these thresholds [40, 50, 60 kts] than during the previous decades, particularly comparing the period before and after 2000.

    This earlier period [before 2000] also included among the most severe storms experienced in the UK in the observational records including the “Burns Day Storm” of 25 January 1990, the “Boxing Day Storm” of 26 December 1998 and the “Great Storm” of 16 October 1987. Storm Eunice in 2022 was the most severe storm to affect England and Wales since February 2014, but even so, these storms of the 1980s and 1990s were very much more severe.

Nor is there any evidence that December or the autumn last year were unusually wet.

We look like getting a few weeks of cold, dry weather from now on – so expect drought warnings soon!

December 19, 2023

Christmas Message from the Museum – MERRY TANKMAS 2023

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ontario Regiment Museum
Published Dec 17, 2023

Merry Christmas from the volunteers and staff of the Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum and our friends at World of Tanks. Please enjoy this festive message and get a look into Santa’s Tank Workshop!

This segment originally aired in the TANKMAS 2023 – LIVE Stream on 8 December 2023. Hosted by The Tank Museum (Bovington), and sponsored by our friends at World of Tanks.
https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/live…

Full video and stream can be found on The Tank Museum YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/_5cMsW5Z…

Meet our hosts from World of Tanks and Wargaming.net:
Nicholas “The Chieftain” Moran and Cmdr_AF

Meet our Executive Director: Jeremy N Blowers AKA Tank_Museum_Guy

Wishing you and yours a Very Merry Christmas, and a safe and Happy Holiday season.

PLAY NOW at www.worldoftanks.com
FREE to play and build your own “Tank Museum” garage.

Thank you to Wargaming.net for the video production and sponsorship of this museum centered Christmas streaming event.

December 16, 2023

Do Droughts Make Floods Worse?

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 5 Sept 2023

The answer isn’t as simple as you might think!

One statistician famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. And even something as simple as the flow of water into the soil has so many complexities to keep track of. Like most answers to simple questions in engineering and in life: the answer is that it’s complicated.
(more…)

November 28, 2023

“This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture”

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest addition to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, John Psmith reviews The Man Who Rode the Thunder, by William H. Rankin:

Like many little boys, I loved learning lists of things. One day it was clouds. How could I not love them? The names were fluffy and Latinate, delicate little words like “cumulus” and “cirrus” that sounded like they might float away on a puff of wind. But there was also a structure to the words, intimations and hints of taxonomy. Was the relationship of an altocumulus to an altostratus the same as that of a cirrocumulus to a cirrostratus? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely! So here I had not just a heap of words, but something more like a map to making sense of a new part of the world.

So I learned the names of all the clouds, but I quickly got bored of most of them. Only one of them held my attention, but it made up for the rest by becoming an obsession. Yes, it was the mighty cumulonimbus, the towering, violent monster that heralds the approach of a thunderstorm. By then I had already met plenty of them — one of my earliest memories is of huddling with my mother in the room of our house that was farthest from any exterior walls, while lightning struck again and again and again, the echoes of the previous thunderclap still reverberating off the landscape when the next one began. What, I wondered, would it be like to be inside one?

There’s one man who knows. His name is Colonel William H. Rankin, and he fell through a thunderstorm and lived to tell the tale. After his ordeal Rankin published a memoir that was a bestseller in the early ’60s, but is out of print today. If you click the Amazon link at the top of this page, you will see that secondhand copies of the paperback edition go for about $150. If that’s too steep for you, I’m told that Good Samaritans communists have uploaded high-quality scans of the book to various nefarious and America-hating websites, but this is a patriotic Substack and we would never condone that sort of behavior. Be warned!

I sought out and read Rankin’s memoir for the part where he falls through a cloud, so I was planning on skimming and/or skipping the hundred or so pages where he narrates his life and career up to that point. When I actually cracked open the pdf legally-purchased paperback, though, I found that I couldn’t. Somehow an artifact from an alien world had fallen into my hands. This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture.

They say you should read books to broaden yourself, to learn about foreign peoples and about cultures not your own. I was unprepared for late 1950s America being as foreign as it turned out to be. There’s a whole genre comprised of parodying the supposed mid-century American combo of sunny faith in scientific progress, squeaky-clean public morality, and blithe indifference to the horrors of industrial warfare. In my own reading and watching, I had only ever encountered the parodies, never the genuine article, until I read this book. Rankin’s memoir exudes gee-whiz enthusiasm from every pore. He is patriotic without a trace of irony, giddy as a schoolboy about advances in jet propulsion, and then uses a totally unchanged tone of giddiness and enthusiasm to describe melting hundreds of Korean peasants with napalm.

Reading this stuff fills me with the same feeling of vertigo that I get reading about Bronze Age Greek warriors — here is a human being just like me, but inhabiting a cultural, spiritual, and memetic universe so different from mine. Are we the same species? If we were to meet each other would we even be able to communicate? Or perhaps every age has had people like him and people like me, and all that’s changed is that the dominant mode of social interaction shifted from favoring one of us to the other. After all, I know people today who are incapable of irony or reflection. For instance, TSA agents. Was 1950s America an entire society of TSA agents? And if so, what am I to make of the fact that in so many ways it seems to have been more functional than America today?

November 8, 2023

QotD: Climate change, sorcerism and magical thinking

Many primitive societies believe that maleficient spirits cause all sorts of human misfortune that in the modern West we have learned to attribute to natural causes – cattle dying, crops failing, disease, drought, that sort of thing. A few societies have developed a more peculiar form of supernaturalism, in which evil spirits recede into the background and all misfortune is caused by the action of maleficient human sorcerers who must be found and rooted out to end the harm.

A society like that may be a grim, paranoid place with everyone constantly on the hunt for sorcerers – but a sorcerer can be punished or killed more easily than a spirit or a blind force of nature. Therein lies the perverse appeal of this sort of belief system, what I’ll call “sorcerism” – you may not be able to stop your cattle from dying, but at least you can find the bastard who did it and hurt him until you feel better. Maybe you can even prevent the next cattle-death. You are not powerless.

[…]

The most puzzling thing about the whole exchange was his insistence on interpreting my talk about the weather as a political move. I report the Central Valley superstorm of 1861-62 and R’s response is “When did you turn into Rush Limbaugh?” Uh, WTF, over?

It took me a while to model the frame of mind that produced this, but when I managed to I had an insight. Which is why I’m writing this essay. I think, now, what I actually threatened was R’s belief that he, or somebody, could do something emotionally satisfying about the bad weather. Fix it, or prevent it from recurring, or at least punish the bastards who did it.

Supernaturalizing the causes of large-scale misfortunes has become a difficult strategy to sustain for anyone with more exposure to modern scientific knowledge than a cinderblock. Politicizing them into someone’s bad juju, however … that’s easy. And, perhaps, more attractive than ever before – because the alternative is to feel powerless, and that is painful.

Science and the increase in our control over our immediate environment at the small scale may, in fact, be driving us back towards a sort of sorcerism by making the feeling of powerlessness more painful. We are children of humanism and the Enlightenment; terror of the storm and dark is something we associate with the bad old days of angry gods. We should be beyond that now … shouldn’t we?

Thus, the politicization of every bad thing that happens. And people like R, for whom “When did you turn into Rush Limbaugh?” becomes a sort of aversive charm to ward off fear of the Central Valley superstorm and its like.

Yes, we need a word for this, too. Not “sorcerism”; “politicism”, perhaps. The insistence on locating for every large-scale problem a human cause that can be addressed through politics and a set of serviceable villains to punish. Also, the insistence that anyone who rejects the politically fashionable explanation must be in league with the evil sorcerers.

Unfortunately, reality isn’t like that. If a supernova goes off within eight parsecs of us and strips off the Earth’s ozone layer it won’t have been Halliburton or the International Communist Conspiracy that did it. And if the Central Valley superstorm does repeat on us – well, statistically that looked pretty likely at a mean interval of about 150 years; welcome to your new normal, and hunting for the evil carbon-or-whatever emitters that did it is highly unlikely to do any more than supplying you with a scapegoat to ease your hurt feelings.

Finally … feeling powerless may suck, but on the whole it’s preferable to sorcerer hunts. People get killed in sorcerer hunts, almost always people who are innocent. One reason I’m not a politicist is that I don’t want to be any part of a howling mob. It’s a form of self-restraint I recommend to others.

Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03.

October 3, 2023

QotD: The meteorologically mild 20th century

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

English needs, I think, a word for “beliefs which are motivated by the terror of being powerless against large threats”. I think I tripped over this in an odd place today, and it makes me wonder if our society may be talking itself into a belief system not essentially different from sorcerism.

[…] I read a lot of history and thus know a fair bit about how weather impact has been perceived by humans over time. It is a fact that the 20th century was an abnormally lucky hundred years, meteorologically speaking. The facts I managed to jam into tweets included (a) the superstorm that flooded 300 square miles of the Central Valley in California in the 1860s, (b) rainfall levels we’d consider drought conditions were normal in the U.S. Midwest before about 1905, and (c) storms of a violence we’d find hard to believe were commonly reported in the 1800s. I had specifically in mind something I learned from the book Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, which relays eyewitness accounts of thunderstorms so intense that travelers had to steeple their hands over their noses in order to breathe air instead of water; but a sense that storms of really theatrical violence were once common comes through in many other histories.

We had a quiet century geophysically as well – no earthquakes even nearly as bad as the New Madrid event of 1812, which broke windows as far north as Montreal. And no solar storms to compare with the Carrington Event of 1859, which seriously damaged the then-nascent telegraph infrastructure and if it recurred today would knock out power and telecomms so badly that we’d be years recovering and casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly the millions.

(I’m concentrating on 19th-century reports because those tended to be well-documented, but earlier records tell us it was the 20th century calm that was unusual, not the 19th-century violence.)

The awkward truth is that there are very large forces in play in the biosphere, and when they wander out of the ranges we’re adapted to, we suffer and die a lot and there really isn’t a great deal we can do about it; we don’t operate at the required energy scales. For that matter, I can think of several astronomical catastrophes that could be lurking just outside our light-cone only to wipe out all multicellular life on Earth next week. Reality is like that.

But none of this would fit in a tweet, so what I said in summary was that this may be the new normal – or, rather, the old normal returning. Humans didn’t do it.

Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03.

August 31, 2023

Disaster response plans? I’m sure they’ve established terms of reference for the to-be-appointed blue-ribbon committees to look into that … eventually

In The Line Jen Gerson discovers once again that our federal government is much more interested in making dramatic announcements — usually repeated many, many times — than in actually doing anything. Their response to her inquiry about federal disaster response planning is anything but comforting to worriers among the citizenry:

Front page of the Calgary Sun after major flooding hit downtown Calgary in June, 2013.

The clever and devoted readers of The Line will have already surmised that I am a touch neurotic, prone to catastrophize, and gifted with one of those imaginations that is perfectly capable of picturing in vivid detail every worst-case scenario playing out simultaneously.

And so, dear devotee, you will have no trouble picturing my mental state in recent months, in what will come be known as the Summer of Fire. Until next summer, anyway. Until then, it’s always fun to watch two cities burn (or come close to burning) over the course of a single weekend, eh?

Watching the long lines of cars fleeing Yellowknife, or the beachcombers lining the shores of Lake Okanagan as swathes of West Kelowna disappeared, I have to admit that my mind wandered into its darker wings.

Yellowknife and Kelowna are cities, yes, but relatively small ones: Yellowknife is remote and served by only one road, making it a particular logistical challenge to evacuate. But it’s still only a town of 20,000 people. This ought to be well within the capacity of a wealthy, organized G7 country.

What if wildfires threatened, say, Edmonton? A city of a million. How would we get everyone out? Where would they go? What would they eat?

And this line of internal paranoia brought me to the media landing page of the minister of Public Safety Canada. I have questions — to my mind, basic questions — about this country’s capacity to handle major catastrophes. They were as follows:

  • What are the transportation resources typically available to facilitate an evacuation: in an emergency, how many people could we move by air or land, and how quickly?
  • Does the federal government maintain stores of food or other basic goods? How much? How many people could we feed?
  • Do we have the capacity to establish temporary housing for evacuees displaced by an emergency situation? If so, how many people could it hold, and for how long?

I also had a few more general queries. I am aware that they may not have been fully answerable by the federal government, but I was curious about what the response would be. Specifically:

  • Are we going to rebuild everything that burns down, or do we have to accept that climate change will make some previously inhabited sections of Canada unlivable?
  • What kind of resources will the federal government marshal toward hardening infrastructure to prepare for more serious floods and fires in the future? Is this a priority?

To be clear, none of these questions are “gotchas”. I was not out to catch the federal government by surprise, nor to embarrass it in any way. I don’t think any of these questions is unreasonable; in fact, I expected some fairly stock answers. That is, I expected that a federal government would keep at least a basic running inventory of things like temporary housing or food supplies. Further, I would have been perfectly content with very general answers. Perhaps some of my questions were misguided, and I would have been happy to understand that as well.

What I got was, well, I’m going to show you exactly what I got, offer a little of my own running commentary, and allow you to come to your own conclusions.

August 8, 2023

Holding the BBC to account for their climate change alarmism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Homewood‘s updated accounting of the BBC’s coverage — and blatant falsehoods — of climate change news over the last twelve months:

The BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues, such as energy policy, has long been of serious and widespread concern. There have been numerous instances of factual errors, bias and omission of alternative views to the BBC’s narrative. Our 2022 paper, Institutional Alarmism, provided many examples. Some led to formal complaints, later upheld by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit. However, many programmes and articles escaped such attention, though they were equally biased and misleading.

The purpose of this paper is to update that previous analysis with further instances of factual errors, misinformation, half truths, omissions and sheer bias. These either post-date the original report or were not included previously. However, the list is still by no means complete.

The case for the prosecution

The third most active hurricane season
In December 2021, BBC News reported that “The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season has now officially ended, and it’s been the third most active on record”. It was nothing of the sort. There were seven Atlantic hurricanes in 2021, and since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count. The article also made great play of the fact that all of the pre-determined names had been used up, implying that hurricanes are becoming more common. They failed to explain, however, that with satellite technology we are now able to spot hurricanes in mid-ocean that would have been missed before.

Hurricanes: are they getting more violent?
Shortly after Hurricane Ian in September 2022, a BBC “Reality Check” claimed that “Hurricanes are among the most violent storms on Earth and there’s evidence they’re getting more powerful”. The video offered absolutely no data or evidence to back up this claim, which contradicted the official agencies. For instance, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) state in their latest review:

    There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for observing capabilities), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.

The IPCC came to a similar conclusion about hurricanes globally in their latest Assessment Review. However, the BBC article failed to mention any of this.

July 31, 2023

The grim plight of the UK as global BOILING advances

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alexander McKibbin reports on the UK’s latest set of climate-related warnings from the Met Office:

No one who has read and digested this authoritative and comprehensive report can fail to be apprehensive about the future. Harnessing the technological power of its powerful computer modelling system, the Met Office can produce a highly accurate forecast of how the changing climate will affect the UK. It is a truly dystopian projection and one which should ring alarm bells in the top echelons of Whitehall.

Below is a selection of areas highlighted as being at risk if we do not achieve Net Zero by 2030.

Berwick-upon-Tweed

This charming border town with castle ruins and cobbled streets will disappear in the next five years, according to the Met Office. The picturesque Royal Border, Berwick and Union Suspension bridges will all be drowned by an unstoppable and ever-rising River Tweed. Displaced residents will need to find alternative accommodation and it is likely that looting and scavenging will become commonplace.

Kent

Known for centuries as “The Garden of England”, this delightful county currently plays host to gentle hills, fertile farmland and fruit-filled orchards. Country estates such as Penshurst Place, Sissinghurst Castle and Hall Place Gardens are all well known for the scenic views they offer.

Sadly, this will all shortly vanish under burning heat exceeding 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers Stour, Medway, Darent and Dour will slow to a trickle and finally dry up completely. Dust storms and dust bowls will be part and parcel of daily living, as will camels and occasional prickly pear cacti dotted across a barren and arid wasteland. Dartford, the Met Office confidently asserts, will be a never-ending vista of shape changing sand dunes.

Yorkshire

Known to inhabitants as “God’s Own County”, no one can deny the many charms of England’s largest county with a population twice the size of Wales.

Horse-racing is a major attraction and with nine courses to choose from including Thirsk, Wetherby, Redcar and Catterick, no wonder Yorkshire is a popular tourist destination. What a pity that all of these temples to equestrian prowess will be lost to an all-consuming glacier that will blanket the land. The report is not sure whether at 104ft high the scenic Ribblehead Viaduct will avoid being trapped in this icy embrace. It is suggested that refugees should make their way south to seek food and shelter.

February 17, 2023

QotD: Risk mitigation in pre-modern farming communities

Let’s start with the first sort of risk mitigation: reducing the risk of failure. We can actually detect a lot of these strategies by looking for deviations in farming patterns from obvious efficiency. Modern farms are built for efficiency – they typically focus on a single major crop (whatever brings the best returns for the land and market situation) because focusing on a single crop lets you maximize the value of equipment and minimize other costs. They rely on other businesses to provide everything else. Such farms tend to be geographically concentrated – all the fields together – to minimize transit time.

Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the “best” one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley – wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.

Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.

January 9, 2023

QotD: Property is theft

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The French socialist philosopher who was much ridiculed by Marx as a sentimental petit-bourgeois moralist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, is now remembered mainly for his aphorism, so good that he repeated it many times, “Property is theft”. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the reverse of this celebrated but preposterous dictum has actually become true: Theft is property.

Pictures of the looting that followed the devastation in New Orleans have been flashed around the world. Everyone is, or at least pretends to be, shocked and horrified, as if the breakdown of law and order couldn’t happen here, wherever here happens to be. Smugness is, after all, one of the most pleasant of feelings; but for myself, I have very little doubt that it could, and would, happen where I live, in Britain, under the same or similar conditions. New Orleans shows us in the starkest possible way the reality of the thin blue line that protects us from barbarism and mob rule.

Of course, an unknown proportion of the looting must have arisen from genuine need and desperation. Who among us would not help himself to food and water if he and his family were hungry and thirsty, and there were no other source of such essentials to hand?

But the pictures that have been printed in the world’s newspapers are not those of people maddened by hunger and thirst, but those of people wading through water clutching boxes of goods that are clearly not for immediate consumption. There are pictures of people standing outside stores, apparently discussing what to take and how to transport it, and of men loading the trunks of cars with a dozen cartons of nonessentials. They are thinking ahead, to when the normal economy reestablishes itself, and the goods that they have stolen will have a monetary value once more.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Veneer of Civilization”, Manhattan Institute, 2005-09-26.

January 5, 2023

QotD: The Broken Window Fallacy

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The broken window fallacy is a classic hurricane-season misstep. “Hurricanes may do damage”, the reasoning goes, “but look on the bright side. Think of how many jobs will be created because of the destruction. Think about all the demand that will be stimulated. Things may look bleak, but this is actually good for the economy.”

Bastiat debunked this reasoning in his 1848 essay “That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen“, and countless economists since have echoed his remarks. In the essay, he tells the parable of a shopkeeper whose careless son breaks a window, and he asks the reader whether this is good for the economy. At first glance, it’s tempting to say yes. But as Bastiat shows in the story, this conclusion ignores the unseen effects of the broken window.

“If … you come to the conclusion,” he writes, “as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, ‘Stop there! your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.'”

What is not seen, briefly, is the lost opportunities, the things that could have been done with our resources had they not been needed to replace the broken window. Taking those into account, it becomes clear that the broken window is harmful to the economy. After all, there is now one less window in our stockpile of goods.

The same reasoning applies on a larger scale. There may be plenty of jobs and demand when a hurricane destroys a town, but saying this is “good” for the economy is simply wrong. If this logic were true, the more destruction we experience the better off we’d be! But economic reasoning — and plain common sense — tells us this can’t be right.

Patrick Carroll, “3 Economic Fallacies to Watch Out for during Hurrican Season”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2022-09-30.

October 29, 2022

The Canadian government, despite committing billions to replace old equipment, is still not serious about the Canadian Armed Forces

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why — despite big-ticket items getting a few headlines — the Canadian Armed Forces need far more than what any government has been willing to provide since the start of the Cold War:

Objectively speaking, there has been progress. Canada has committed billions to replacing the CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s — 88 of them. (That’s still way too small an air fleet for a country our literal size — it’s not a lot of planes for such a big place, folks — but it’s something.) Billions more have been committed to modernizing NORAD’s early warning systems. And, miracle of miracles, we finally got around to replacing the goddamned Second World War-era pistols!

These are real, tangible things. These things matter. They will leave the Canadian Armed Forces better off, our soldiers better protected and our continent more secure. This is good news.

It’s also the bare minimum.

Even these big spending announcements, and even the itty bitty pistol one, don’t actually add capabilities to the Canadian military. They replace existing ones. They maintain our capabilities. Sure, we can quibble about “maintain” or “replace” — the F-35 will give Canada a stealth capacity it has never had before, and all that jazz. Fine. Fair. But it isn’t really adding to the overall list of missions we are capable of conducting. It’s fleshing out capabilities that, due to advanced age and wear-and-tear for our critical equipment, were starting to exist only on paper. The government deserves credit for this, but only a really small amount of credit. Getting the urgently necessary basics done, many years after they should have been handled, is good, but it’s not worth a pat on the back. It is the bare minimum the country deserved and that the military needed to function, so that’s how far I’ll go in my praise: congratulations, Liberals, on responding to a massive change in our geopolitical order by accomplishing the bare minimum that was already overdue.

If that sounds scathing, here’s the worst part: that’s me being sincere. Thanks for the bare minimum! I wasn’t sure we’d get even that

So yeah. Good, but … you see the problem here, no? In a new era of global instability and geopolitical turmoil, the Canadian response, thus far, has been to get caught up to where we should have been 10 years ago. At the latest. And it’s far from clear that, if not for Russia kicking off the largest conflict we’ve seen in Europe since 1945, we’d have even bothered to do these necessary, long-overdue things.

And this is all shaping up to be just the latest iteration of a little game both Liberals and Conservatives like to play with the Canadian Armed Forces (and, come to think of it, most policy files). They’ll point to specific investments or particular accomplishments when defending their record. And the investment and accomplishment may well be excellent indeed! But they won’t speak to the full, broader picture. And the full, broader picture of the Canadian Armed Forces is grim, and some new F-35s and 9mm pistols isn’t going to change that.

There was a little story last month you might have seen. After Hurricane Fiona wrecked big parts of several Atlantic provinces, the feds sent in the military. This is right and proper. The troops would have made a welcome sight in those communities, of course. What you might not have noticed, though, was that Nova Scotia had to go public with its desire for more troops. It asked for a thousand. It got 500. It kept asking for more. It got the 500. And most of those 500 were troops already stationed in Nova Scotia; only about 200 were actually sent in from elsewhere. The government never really commented on this, but it’s not hard to suss out the problem: the military couldn’t scrape together any more troops.

July 18, 2022

Russian Invasion of Finland – The Winter War 1939-40

Mark Felton Productions
Published 24 Mar 2022

Find out why Russia invaded neutral Finland in late 1939, and how the outnumbered and outgunned Finns managed to defend their country for 3 months until making peace with Stalin.
(more…)

June 17, 2022

Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow – Why He Failed in Russia

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

Real Time History
Published 16 Jun 2022

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Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and from Russia as a whole is one of the most dramatic scenes in history. Starving and freezing, the French Grande Armée is desperately trying to reach the Berezina River. The revitalized Russian Army is on their heels and almost catches their prey in the 2nd Battle of Krasny. But it wasn’t just “General Winter” that defeated Napoleon in Russia.

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» SOURCES
Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812 (2021).
Chandler, David. The Campaigns of Napoleon, Volume 1 (New York 1966).
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon (2010).
Mikaberidze A. The Battle of the Berezina: Napoleon’s Great Escape (Pen&Sword Military, 2010)
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. (2012).
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. (2005).
Отечественная война 1812 года. Энциклопедия (Москва: РОССПЭН, 2004)
Безотосный В. М. Россия в наполеоновских войнах 1805–1815 гг. (Москва: Политическая энциклопедия, 2014)
Троицкий Н.А. 1812. Великий год России (Москва: Омега, 2007)
(Прибавление к «Санкт-Петербургским ведомостям» №87 от 29 октября 1812 / http://www.museum.ru/museum/1812/War/…)

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Written by: Jesse Alexander
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