Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2011

Finnish election still up for grabs

Filed under: Europe, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:11

Remember I mentioned the “True Finns” party in passing last week? The election is this weekend and it looks like a four-way race:

Finland votes on Sunday in its most closely watched general election in years, with the campaign hijacked by a Eurosceptic maverick riding roughshod over the consensus that has long characterised the country’s politics.

Timo Soini has alarmed the European and Finnish elites by leading his True Finns party into a neck-and-neck position with the three mainstream parties that traditionally dominate Finnish politics.

The quadrupling of support for the True Finns since the last election in 2007 puts Finland firmly in line with the cardinal trend in politics across Europe in the past year — the emergence of the populist far right combining nostalgia for disappearing values and traditions with anti-immigrant and anti-EU appeal.

An opinion poll on Friday put the True Finns at around 16% in a coalition system, soaring from 4% in 2007 albeit sliding a little from their position in surveys last week. That put True Finns neck and neck with the Centre party of the prime minister, Mari Kiviniemi, and the opposition social democrats, and a few points behind the poll leaders, the National Coalition party led by the finance minister, Jyrki Katainen.

Steve Paikin interviews Rick Mercer

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:26

How not to celebrate Anzac Day

Filed under: Australia, History, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

An elderly driver of a retired military vehicle either lost control of his vehicle or (as the article implies) took his hands off the wheel to take a photo just before the crash:

A 64-year-old man who drove his World War II truck into a group of veterans marching in Melbourne’s Anzac Day parade last year has been charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury.

Eight members of the Ceylon Ex-Serviceman’s Association were injured, two critically, when the vintage truck lurched forward into them on Saint Kilda Road.

All the veterans survived but some are still recovering from injuries ranging from broken bones to internal injuries.

A picture obtained by the ABC in May last year allegedly showed the driver using both hands to take a photograph moments before the accident.

H/T to Chris Greaves for the link, and for the explanatory material he provided to give some context on the story:

Two things you may not realize as background to this:

(1) Australia is HUGE on Anzac day; My indoctrination started as a 10-year old in Southern Cross WA. A large portion of the town’s population was drunk by the start of the dawn service at the war memorial, and it just got worse after that. Every year. I mean, every year, the DAY just got worse.

Anzac day is the day when old diggers get maudlin about their mates who fell in The Great War, even though the maudlin diggers are too young to have HAD mates in The Great War.

(2) I feel deeply about the origins of The Third Balkan War, read up on it frequently, have 6 bookcases (not bookshelves) of books on the subject, and am deeply moved by the stories. I see 19-year old kids in the elevator and think “You died for us”, for that was most probably the average age of the soldier, sailor and airman.
So I don’t resent “dwelling on the past”; I do it daily.

See also here and here.

Arousing the voters, Menorcan style

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

It’s a perennial problem: how do you manage to get the voters interested in your candidacy? How can you get them excited? Sole Sánchez Mohamed has an answer for you:

A Menorcan political candidate has caused a bit of a rumpus ahead of Spain’s forthcoming municipal elections with a seriously in-your-face advert in the local press.

Sole Sánchez Mohamed, head of the Partit Democràtic de Ciutadella (PDC), posed with an evidently willing pair of male hands to make her point, or rather, pair of points. The caption declares: “Two great arguments.”

To further her election cause, the wannabe mayoress of Ciutadella appeared in monthly magazine Més Iris Menorca dressed only in her smalls while adopting “sadomasochistic poses”, as you can see here (NSFW).

And you folks complain about “attack ads” in Canadian elections.

RAF proves Eurofighter can take out stationary, unmanned, abandoned enemy tanks

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

In a triumph of military daring and precision bombing public relations, the Royal Air Force has demonstrated the ground-attack capability of their Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft:

The RAF has blown up two apparently abandoned Libyan tanks using a Eurofighter Typhoon jet in a move which appears to have been motivated more by Whitehall infighting than by any attempt to battle the forces of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

[. . .]

The video appears to show a T-72 tank neatly parked, stationary and unmanned: the target was plainly not in use. The Telegraph reports that the location struck was “an abandoned tank park”. Many Libyan armoured vehicles are old and not serviceable due to lack of parts and servicing. RAF sources admitted to the paper that the jets making the strike had had to spend “a long time” searching before they could find a valid target to hit, and that the timing of the strike was “no coincidence”.

So why is the RAF not only conducting unnecessary air attacks on useless hunks of metal? The answer is not so much military as it is political:

This hasty effort by the RAF to get Typhoons into ground-attack action took place just ahead of the scheduled release by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee of a damning report on the Eurofighter, titled Management of the Typhoon project. This report had been expected to be highly critical of the Typhoon, and indeed it is. It says:

In 2004, the Department decided to retire the ground attack Jaguar aircraft early and to spend £119 million to install ground attack upgrades on early Typhoons to cover the resulting capability gap. These upgrades were ready for use by 2008. A year later, the Department decided to retire the air defence Tornado F3 aircraft early to save money and therefore re-prioritised Typhoon away from ground attack missions to air defence tasks. It is now not using Typhoon’s ground attack capability.

So, absent some secret plan of the Libyan army to somehow put their abandoned equipment back into immediate use, this was a PR strike to rally public opinion against parliamentary interference.

April 14, 2011

“We have engineered a massive, unstoppable Essex. We should all be in jail”

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour — Nicholas @ 16:26

In this time of abject apologies of all sorts for historic wrongs, it’s time for England — East Anglia in particular — to acknowledge the sins of their past:

As David Cameron told Pakistan that its current balls-out craziness was actually the fault of the British empire, experts pointed to the giant, stupid, disgusting country founded by some people from East Anglia.

Julian Cook, author of America: What the Fuck Were We Thinking?, said: “When Harwich-born Christopher Jones captained the Mayflower in 1620 he began a process that would lead ultimately to genocide, the Ku Klux Klan and Grey’s Anatomy.

“Thanks to him and his insane passengers, the way was paved for a nation of heavily armed toddlers led around by an ever-changing roll-call of religious maniacs, grubby conmen and dead-eyed celebrities.

“It doesn’t understand anything more than 15 minutes old — except creationism — and is littered with strip malls and heavily branded cheese pumps.

“We have engineered a massive, unstoppable Essex. We should all be in jail.”

H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.

From supercar to superscrap

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:15

This is what it looked like before the owner’s son took it for a drive:

And this is after the drive got stopped a bit early:

The good news is that the driver and passenger were able to walk away from the wreck, leaving £275,000 of scrap metal behind.

DANE to address weaknesses in internet security?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:05

The Economist looks at a possible way to address the known weaknesses of the current internet security defaults:

[A] comprehensive solution would let domain owners confirm that the names and machine numbers issued by a given CA are kosher. Under DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), a standard being developed by Mr Schultze and others at the Internet Engineering Task Force, a browser retrieves a certificate from a web server, but checks with the DNS whether the certificate is in fact the one that was issued to a given domain owner. So, though a CA will still provide a validation step, the domain owner will have had to give it the thumbs up first. To prevent malevolent fiddling the DNS infrastructure itself needs to be secured, too. A long-running effort to do this, known as DNSSEC, hit a key milestone in 2010 and may have enough pieces in place soon to be usable. This is important because DANE would be incomplete without it.

Whilst all current browsers must be updated to take advantage of DANE, the new system can coexist with the old, and a gradual transition can be made. Browser plug-ins could bridge the gap before browser makers build in DANE, too. Those that want the added robustness of the new system — whether individuals, companies, or governments — may accelerate the adoption of updated browsers as DANE becomes available.

These moves do not provide total assurance that what your browser is told about an internet site’s identity and security is true. Trust, but verify — and verify again.

Scott Feschuk is one of those “ethnic voters” for the Harper photo-op

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Scott Feschuk is delighted to have the opportunity to have his photo taken with the prime minister. He’s overjoyed:

What a moment.

I never thought that I — a regular, ordinary Canadian — would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.

But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.

Needless to say, I’m in.

As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.

Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.

I think I can speak for all of us about our deep gratitude that this blog post is not illustrated.

It’s also nice to see that the Conservatives have not yet figured out how to avoid handing their opponents such wonderful opportunities for mockery.

Original tempest-in-an-ethnic-teapot here. 680News reported yesterday that the staffer who wrote the letter is no longer working for the candidate.

British high court rules 2009 G20 “kettling” illegal

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

While I may disagree with the protesters and their messages, the police “kettling” technique has always disturbed me far more. Britain’s high court has now ruled that police broke the law while kettling G20 protesters in 2009:

In a landmark judgment on Thursday, high court judges found for protesters who had claimed police treated them unfairly. It also criticised the use of force by officers.

In the case, the court heard that officers used punches to the face, slaps and shields against demonstrators who police chiefs accept had nothing to do with violence. The judgment does not strike down the police tactic of kettling or mass detention, but it will be seen as a rebuff to the Met.

The judgment places limits on the use of kettling. It says: “The police may only take such preventive action as a last resort catering for situations about to descend into violence.”

More proof that you shouldn’t over-pay for wine

Filed under: Britain, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:58

I’ve discussed this before, but here’s another report on cheap versus expensive wine for the average person:

An expensive wine may well have a full body, a delicate nose and good legs, but the odds are your brain will never know.

A survey of hundreds of drinkers found that on average people could tell good wine from plonk no more often than if they had simply guessed.

In the blind taste test, 578 people commented on a variety of red and white wines ranging from a £3.49 bottle of Claret to a £29.99 bottle of champagne. The researchers categorised inexpensive wines as costing £5 and less, while expensive bottles were £10 and more.

The study found that people correctly distinguished between cheap and expensive white wines only 53% of the time, and only 47% of the time for red wines. The overall result suggests a 50:50 chance of identifying a wine as expensive or cheap based on taste alone — the same odds as flipping a coin.

While a more wine-oriented group of testers would probably do better, they’d do better in the sense of determining which of two similar wines was the more expensive — but not necessarily a lot better. We’re in a golden age for wine, as more and more producers of inexpensive wines adopt better techniques and equipment for even their vin extremely ordinaire.

Wine isn’t a simple product: people buy wine for lots of different reasons, and one of those reasons is to signal higher social status by buying more expensive wine. As you get above a certain price level, the quality increases more slowly but the “prestige” makes up the difference (for those interested in the social signalling, anyway).

I’ve discovered that my palate isn’t highly developed enough to detect and appreciate the additional quality that a $100 bottle of wine is supposed to display over a $40-$50 bottle. It may be that I lack the ability to discriminate sufficiently between the two . . . or it may be that the primary difference is in the “prestige” and not in the palate.

Earlier discussion of this topic here.

April 13, 2011

Surprisingly little movement in the polls

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:07

So far, based on the three-day sample Nanos works with for their daily poll release, there hasn’t been a lot of identifiable shifting support among the parties in spite of the leaked AG report:

Update: Of course, not all polls agree, but the Compas poll for the Toronto Sun has radically different numbers based on the regional breakdown:

H/T to David Akin for the image (via Twitpic).

Never seen this before

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:28

My Rogers email account appears to have a nasty case of rot-13 encoding in the address book. I’d include a screen capture, but now that I’ve told you the trick of decoding it, it’d expose folks’ email addresses, which would be a bit unethical of me. At first, I thought it was just a garble, but I noticed that a lot of the addresses ended in “.pbz” and “.pn” (that’d be “.com” and “.ca” rotated 13 characters).

It’s not crippling, as I can just copy and paste from existing email messages, but it is annoying.

Update, 14 April: It appears to be fixed now.

“Using the principle of ‘demonstrated preference,’ this music video ranks as the most popular in human history”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

Jon sent me this article by Jeffrey Tucker which re-interprets Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as a libertarian allegory:

Far more significant is the underlying celebration of liberation that the day Friday represents. The kids featured in the video are of junior-high age, a time when adulthood is beginning to dawn and, with it, the realization of the captive state that the public school represents.

From the time that children are first institutionalized in these tax-funded cement structures, they are told the rules. Show up, obey the rules, accept the grades you are given, and never even think of escaping until you hear the bell. If you do escape, even peacefully of your own choice, you will be declared “truant,” which is the intentional and unauthorized absence from compulsory school.

This prison-like environment runs from Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to late afternoon, for at least ten years of every child’s life. It’s been called the “twelve-year sentence” for good reason. At some point, every kid in public school gains consciousness of the strange reality. You can acquiesce as the civic order demands, or you can protest and be declared a bum and a loser by society.

“Friday” beautifully illustrates the sheer banality of a life spent in this prison-like system, and the prospect of liberation that the weekend means. Partying, in this case, is just another word for freedom from state authority.

The largest segment of the video then deals with what this window of liberty, the weekend, means in the life of someone otherwise ensnared in a thicket of statism. Keep in mind here that the celebration of Friday in this context means more than it would for a worker in a factory, for example: for the worker is free to come and go, to apply for a job or quit, to negotiate terms of a contract, or whatever. All of this is denied to the kid in public school.

Delaying retirement: expect to see lots of articles like this

Filed under: Britain, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

This Guardian article is a pattern for lots to follow in the next few years, as would-be retirees discover that they can’t afford to retire when they’d hoped:

Two-fifths of people who intended to retire this year will have to work for an extra six years because they cannot afford to stop working, according to a study by Prudential.

The pension provider’s Class of 2011 report found that 38% of people are delaying their retirement, and 40% of those say they will have to work until they are 70 to have a comfortable income.

It also shows that 22% of those delaying retirement are doing so because they can’t afford to stop working, up from 15% last year. They had intended, on average, to retire at 62, but now believe they will be at least 68 before they can draw a pension.

Governments in the western world are slowly moving the mandatory retirement age (where it exists), but even in some unionized environments, the benefits workers depend on start to phase out before retirement age. The expectation is that government programs would be there to cover older workers, but governments have little chance of expanding programs during tough economic times.

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