Quotulatiousness

September 13, 2011

New Kate Bush album to be released November 21

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:22

By way of a Twitter update from Stephen Fry, the news of a new Kate Bush album later this year:

We are extremely pleased to announce that Kate will be releasing a brand new album: “50 Words For Snow” on 21 November 2011

The album will be the second release from Kate’s own label Fish People and comprises all new material that was recorded during the same period that Kate worked on her album “Director’s Cut”.

[. . .]

“50 Words For Snow” will feature seven brand new tracks set against a background of falling snow. The total running time is 65 minutes and the track listing is:

SNOWFLAKE
LAKE TAHOE
MISTY
WILDMAN
SNOWED IN AT WHEELER STREET
50 WORDS FOR SNOW
AMONG ANGELS

NFL week 1 results

Filed under: Football — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:14

Here were my picks for last weekend’s games. The late games help me recover to an even keel.

Favourites listed first, home team marked with “@”.

  • ∅ @Green Bay – New Orleans Thu 8:00pm
  • ∅ Atlanta – @Chicago Sun 1:00pm
  • ∅ @Cleveland – Cincinnati Sun 1:00pm
  • ∅ @Kansas City – Buffalo Sun 1:00pm
  • √ Philadelphia – @St. Louis Sun 1:00pm
  • ∅ @Tampa Bay – Detroit Sun 1:00pm
  • ∅ @Jacksonville – Tennessee Sun 1:00pm
  • √ @Baltimore – Pittsburgh Sun 1:00pm
  • √ @Houston – Indianapolis Sun 1:00pm
  • √ @Arizona – Carolina Sun 4:15pm
  • ∅ @San Diego – Minnesota Sun 4:15pm
  • √ @San Francisco – Seattle Sun 4:15pm
  • ∅ New York (NYG) – @Washington Sun 4:15pm
  • √ @New York (NYJ) – Dallas Sun 8:20pm
  • √ New England – @Miami Mon 7:00pm
  • √ @Denver – Oakland – Mon 10:15pm

Week 1: 8-8
Season: 8-8

September 12, 2011

9/11 aftermath: “No matter how long I looked, some part of my brain never stopped waiting for the credits to roll”

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:06

Megan McArdle tries to put into words what it felt like to be in New York in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks:

At ground level, there was the tangible reminder — that multistory shard jutting out of the smoking rubble that became one of the iconic images of 9/11. But somehow, that didn’t make the absence any more real. I worked down at Ground Zero for a year, from shortly after the attack, to just after the first annual memorial. I stood right next to that monumental fragment when the ground was still smoking and firefighters were spraying it with hoses to keep the smoke and ash at bay. I smelled the odor that pervaded Ground Zero for weeks, maybe months — burning office fixtures and damp embers. And yet in my deepest mind I never connected any of it with the buildings where I had worked on and off throughout the 1990s — even though I stood looking at it from the very familiar streets where I’d eaten lunch so many times. It didn’t look like a building, or even the ruins of a building. It looked like a scene from a movie about the destruction of the World Trade Center. No matter how long I looked, some part of my brain never stopped waiting for the credits to roll.

As the rubble was cleared away, and all that was left was two concrete-lined holes in the ground, I spent a lot of time walking around the site trying to come to grips with what happened. I was waiting for that moment that always happens in the movies — the one where the music swells and the main character, silhouetted against a rolling sky, finally grasps everything that has been lost.

It never happened, maybe because I was not the main character. I am one of, I think, a relative few — the perhaps tens of thousands of Americans who can plausibly claim that 9/11 utterly changed their life. Without 9/11, I would not have worked at the World Trade Center’s disaster recovery effort; I would not have started blogging; I would not now be a journalist. I would not have had most of the relationships I had in the past ten years, be married to my current husband, or live in the city I now call home. I would be in all visible ways a completely different person if those towers had not come down. But in the story of 9/11, I am not even a bit player. I’m maybe an extra.

The increasing militarization of the police

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Radley Balko shows how the tools given to the authorities to fight the war on terror have instead been used to further expand the war on drugs:

New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants — also known as “sneak-and-peek” warrants — have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.

It’s a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America’s police departments.

The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs.” Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America’s drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.

[. . .]

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

Update: Also from Radley, a look inside the SWAT team leader’s world.

[. . .] note the complete disregard for the rights of the people being raided in the excerpt above. The author is actually suggesting SWAT commanders lobby to have their teams deployed in situations for which they normally wouldn’t be to ensure they’re in good practice. Put another way, he suggests they practice their door smashing, room-clearing, flash-grenade deploying, and other paramilitary tactics on less-than-violent people, so they’re in better form when a real threat arises. Never mind that there are going to be living, breathing, probably bleeding people on the receiving end of these “practice” raids. There’s officer safety and “SWAT team profile” to think about. It’s just an appalling mindset.

What is “the biggest European policy mistake since Britain and France let Hitler have the Sudetenland”?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:09

For the record, I don’t actually think Europe would be better off with a single federal government, but Walter Russell Mead thinks the big mistake was attempting an economic union without a political union to match:

What is worrying investors worldwide is the evident intellectual and political bankruptcy of Europe. The Europeans are not stupider than other people, but they face deep structural economic and political problems that their institutions are hopelessly inadequate to solve. Creating a monetary union without a true federal government is looking more and more like the biggest European policy mistake since Britain and France let Hitler have the Sudetenland.

The current crisis is the result of a decade of policy failure. Greece should never have been allowed into the euro; prudent leaders would have checked its statistics, discovered the blatant frauds with which the Greeks sought to conceal the true state of their affairs, and told the country politely but firmly to come back when it was ready. Following that initial blunder, Europe failed to take note in any serious way of the serious distortions that were caused by suddenly reducing interest rates in Greece and other peripherals to near-German levels. Beyond that, alarm bells should have been ringing as it became clear that Greece and a number of other countries were treating their suddenly lower interest costs as found money. They were spending the windfall rather than taking advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity to reform their economies in preparation for life under a monetary union with countries like Germany. If Europe’s institutions were up to the job, the warning signs would have been noticed and corrective steps taken years ago.

Is the People’s Liberation Army a paper tiger?

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

An interesting article at Strategy Page looks at the myth and reality of China’s army and navy:

You don’t see much in the media about the poor training of Chinese military personnel. You don’t hear much about the poor leadership and low readiness for combat. But all of this is common knowledge in China. There, the military is not walled off from everyone else. Cell phone cameras and the Internet make it easy to pass around evidence (often in the form of “hey, this one is hilarious”). The government tries to play up how modern and efficient the military is, but most Chinese know better, and don’t really care. China is winning victories on the economic front, and that what really counts to the average Chinese.

Meanwhile, U.S. military leaders and defense industries are looking for a sufficiently impressive foe to help scare more money out of Congress. The Chinese Navy (or, more correctly, the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy) is now the favorite candidate, for navy and defense industry analysts, to become the new Big Bad. Just how dangerous are these Chinese sailors and their ships? It turns out that, on closer inspection, not very.

This is the sort of thing that what went on during the Cold War. Russian military prowess was hyped by the American military, and their defense suppliers, to justify further increases in defense spending. When the Cold War ended, it was revealed how the Russian military, and defense manufacturers, played the same game. It also revealed that Russian military capabilities were far less than the hype indicated.

The basic weapon for this sort of thing is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Works every time, although it is difficult to pitch the Chinese navy as a crack force. Most of their ships are elderly, poorly designed and rarely used. Their nuclear subs are worse than the first generation of Russian nukes back in the 1960s. The most modern Chinese ships are Russian made, Cold War era models. Chinese ships don’t go to sea much, not just because it’s expensive, but because Chinese ships tend to get involved in nasty incidents. Like the submarine that killed its crew when the boat submerged (and the diesel engines did not shut down when the batteries kicked in, thus using up all the oxygen.) Breakdowns are more common, as well as a lot of accidents you don’t hear about (weapons and equipment malfunctions that kill and maim.) Nevertheless, the Chinese are working to change this. Ships are going to sea more each year, and troops are getting more training. But unless the corruption is curbed, this could all be wasted.

Of course, if China isn’t the big military threat to the rest of the world, how will the Pentagon get Congress to go along with its perpetual demands for more funding?

The easy way to be come a celebrity scientist

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Deevybee has the steps you need to take to become a TV science celebrity:

Maybe you’re tired of grotting away at the lab bench. Or finding it hard to get a tenured job. Perhaps your last paper was rejected and you haven’t the spirit to fight back. Do not despair. There is an alternative. The media are always on the look-out for a scientist who will fearlessly speak out and generate newsworthy stories. You can gain kudos as an expert, even if if you haven’t got much of a track record in the subject, by following a few simple rules.

Rule #1. Establish your credentials. You need to have lots of letters after your name. It doesn’t really matter what they mean, so long as they sound impressive. It’s also good to be a fellow of some kind of Royal Society. Some of these are rather snooty and appoint fellows by an exclusive election process, but it’s a little known fact that others require little more than a minimal indication of academic standing and will admit you to the fellowship provided you fill in a form and agree to pay an annual subscription.

Vikings drop season opener to Chargers, 24-17

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:20

Aside from an electrifying start, as Percy Harvin ran the opening kickoff all the way back for a TD, this game was forgettable for both teams.

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September 11, 2011

The Canada Pension Plan and moral hazard

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

An interesting post at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative looks at the overlooked failure in pension markets. I found this bit of information to be quite interesting, as it addresses a conversation I had with Dark Water Muse a few months ago:

Governments provide pensions in one of two ways. Pay As You Go (PAYG) plans use current contributions to fund current benefits. The Canada and Quebec Pension Plan were, when they were first introduced, PAYG plans. The moral hazard risk a worker faces with these plans is political: a politician will design the plan so as to maximize his or her chances of re-election.

The design of Canada and Quebec Pension Plan has created large benefits for the first generation of recipients (current voters) and a much lower rate of return for future recipients (future voters). Now those gainers were the generation that entered the labour market in the Great Depression and fought in World War II, so one could argue that the windfall gain they experienced was merited on equity grounds. The point here is merely that the design of PAYG pension plans reflects the interests of the designers (for re-election) as well as the interests of the contributors and recipients.

The Canada and Quebec Pension Plans are now transitioning into fully-funded plans. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board was, as of June 30th 2011, managing $153 billion in assets. Some is managed directly by the board, the rest is managed by “partners” ranging from Istanbul-based Actera Group to New York-based Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. I suspect that the CPP, roaming the world with billions to invest, is able to negotiate low management fees, and there must be savings associated with economies of scale in investing. But the possibility of moral hazard — someone getting rich by diverting away a tiny percentage of the return on $153 billion, or a politician exerting pressure on the CPP investment board to make electorally-sound investments — remains.

In sum, while private pension markets suffer from moral hazard, it’s not clear that governments can solve the problem.

In my discussion with DWM, I claimed that the CPP was a PAYG system (in extreme examples, like the US social security system, this can be compared to a Ponzi Scheme), while DWM — claimed that the system was fully funded from investments. As the quoted section above shows, we each had part of the answer.

It’s hard to believe that the CPPIB (the organization that handles the investments of the CPP) can remain immune to government meddling — buy this company’s stock, invest in that company’s risky-but-located-in-a-marginal-riding new venture, etc. As long at the CPPIB can remain independent of political pressure, the system might work.

QotD: Comparing September 11, 2001 to December 7, 1941

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:52

On Dec. 8, 1951, the day after the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, The New York Times‘ front page made a one-paragraph mention of commemorations the day before, when the paper’s page had not mentioned the anniversary. The Dec. 8 Washington Post‘s front page noted no commemorations the previous day. On Dec. 7, the page had featured a familiar 10-year old photograph of the burning battleships. It seems to have been published because a new process made possible printing it for the first time in color. At the bottom of the page, a six-paragraph story began: “Greater Washington today will mark the tenth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack by testing its air raid defenses.” The story explained that “the sirens are part of a ‘paper bombing’ of Washington” that would include “mock attacks by atom bombs and high explosives.”

The most interesting question is not how America in 2011 is unlike America in 2001, but how it is unlike it was in 1951. The intensity of today’s focus on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 testifies to more than the multiplication of media ravenous for content, and to more than today’s unhistorical and self-dramatizing tendency to think that eruptions of evil are violations of a natural entitlement to happiness. It also represents the search for refuge from a decade defined by unsatisfactory responses to 9/11.

George F. Will, “Commemorating the past to forget the present”, National Post, 2011-09-11

September 10, 2011

Debunking the notion of “unspoiled nature”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Food, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:00

ESR has a glowing review of 1493 by Charles C. Mann (a book I’ve been meaning to pick up myself), which includes a wonderful bit of debunking:

According to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature”, there is a natural equilibrium state of any given ecology (or the biosphere as a whole) which changes only on timescales of a kiloyear or longer. This pristine state is what the ecology tends to return to after major shocks such as volcanic eruptions. Humans are not part of this pristine state. Fortunately, pre-industrial humans have neither the power nor the desire to greatly alter it, and walk lightly on the land. Nevertheless, human presence degrades the pristine state into something that is inevitably less complex, valuable, and natural.

This romantic view has dominated Western popular culture since the early 1800s and underpins a great deal of the silliness and anti-human hostility evident in the modern environmental movement. It motivates, as one very current example, hostility to “unnatural” GM crops and intensive agriculture in general.

Without ever announcing the intention to do so, Mann takes a poleaxe to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature” and dispatches it without mercy. First, he shows how pervasive ecoforming is as a cultural practice. Then, he shows how ecoforming or its sudden cessation can lead to rapid, profound transformation of ecosystems on a continental scale. Then he proposes a not-too-implausible coupling between large-scale ecoforming by neolithic-level savages and the entire planetary climate!

In reality, there is no almost “pristine” nature anywhere on Earth humans can survive with pre-industrial technology. When we look at almost any “wilderness”, part of what we are seeing is the results of millenia of ecoforming by the humans that came before us. And, while attempts at ecoforming sometimes have destructive consequences (salinized soils in the Middle East; rabbits in Australia), as often or more often they lead to a net increase in ecological complexity and resource richness. Mann is not afraid to show us that the world is a better place because, for example, capsaicin peppers native to the New World are now naturalized all over Eurasia and have become important to dozens of Old World cuisines.

Opposing the EDL as a way of expressing class hatred?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

The English Defence League (EDL) has come in for a lot of criticism for its provocative approach to expressing their concerns about issues like immigration. The critics, however, are not all pure in their opposition, however:

This video, currently causing a stink on Twitter, rather confirms what draws many young middle-class liberals towards anti-English Defence League campaigning: it provides them with a semi-legit cover for expressing their fear and loathing of the white working classes.

In the video, two well-bred kids say things about working-class EDL supporters that could have been lifted straight from the pages of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, that exposé of early twentieth-century snobs’ disdain for vulgar little people. The anti-EDL campaigners describe a female supporter of the EDL as “the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman” they have ever seen and then laugh as they talk about how she was “kicked up the arse” by a left-wing protester. It’s not normally okay to hit women, they admit, but you can make an exception when it comes to female EDL supporters because “they aren’t women — they’re dogs”.

The video has proved enormously embarrassing for Left-wing campaigners against the EDL, who are desperately trying to distance themselves from the naked class hatred expressed by these two twits. Yet the fact is that a great deal of anti-EDL protesting is driven by a barely disguised hatred for that apparently ugly, uncouth, un-PC blob of white flesh that inhabits inner-city council estates. The two guys in the video have only stated it in a more explicit fashion.

How much damage to personal liberty will the new US/Canadian security deal inflict?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

An article in the Globe and Mail discusses — in very general terms — the new security deal negotiated between the US and Canadian governments:

U.S. and Canadian negotiators have successfully concluded talks on a new deal to integrate continental security and erase obstacles to cross-border trade.

Negotiators have reached agreement on almost all of the three dozen separate initiatives in the Beyond the Border action plan, said sources who cannot be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The few remaining items mostly involve questions of wording and should be settled in time for an announcement in late September.

[. . .]

Opponents have raised alarms that an agreement would cost Canadians both sovereignty and personal privacy. But failure to implement the agreements could further impair the world’s most extensive trading relationship, and put manufacturing jobs across the country at risk.

Details of the agreement are closely held. But goals outlined earlier include specific proposals to co-ordinate and align such things as biometrics on passports, watch lists, inspection of containers at overseas ports and other security measures.

[. . .]

Canadians who believe that the United States has sold its liberty because of fears for its security, or who resist any further economic integration with the troubled economic giant, are likely to oppose the Beyond the Border proposals.

I don’t oppose trade with the US — far from it — but I do feel very strongly that the US has reduced the liberties of its citizens in pursuit of security (check the topic SecurityTheatre for lots of examples). I don’t want to see that trend exported to Canada in exchange for better economic access to their markets.

NFL quote of the day

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

At the Daily Norseman, Eric J. Thompson puts the awful situation for both Ohio NFL teams in perfect perspective:

BROWNS over Bengals: Can we just have Ohio State replace one of these two teams already? Or would the Buckeyes’ salary put them over the cap?

I’m not a great prognosticator (I’m already 0-1 on the season — the Saints let me down against the hated Packers), so you can take these picks for exactly what they’re worth (i.e., very little):

  • Atlanta – @Chicago Sun 1:00pm
  • @Cleveland – Cincinnati Sun 1:00pm
  • @Kansas City – Buffalo Sun 1:00pm
  • Philadelphia – @St. Louis Sun 1:00pm
  • @Tampa Bay – Detroit Sun 1:00pm
  • @Jacksonville – Tennessee Sun 1:00pm
  • @Baltimore – Pittsburgh Sun 1:00pm
  • @Houston – Indianapolis Sun 1:00pm
  • @Arizona – Carolina Sun 4:15pm
  • @San Diego – Minnesota Sun 4:15pm
  • @San Francisco – Seattle Sun 4:15pm
  • New York (NYG) – @Washington Sun 4:15pm
  • @New York (NYJ) – Dallas Sun 8:20pm
  • New England – @Miami Mon 7:00pm
  • @Denver – Oakland – Mon 10:15pm

Favourites listed first, home team marked with “@”.

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

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

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

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