Quotulatiousness

June 17, 2012

“For the weekend, I’ll have to be a turncoat”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

For some obscure reason (hint: because they didn’t win) American re-enactors are much less fond of War of 1812 re-enactments than Canadians:

When the first big battle of the War of 1812 is re-enacted this fall, the U.S. 1st Artillery regiment will mount an ear-splitting barrage. The Yanks will point their cannons at British redcoats across the Niagara River in Canada. They will wear blue. They will curse King George.

Unlike 200 years ago, they will all be Canadians.

Many Americans aren’t that into the War of 1812 — not like Canadians, anyway — so the latter often play the former in re-enactments along the international border here.

“For the weekend, I’ll have to be a turncoat,” says John Sek, 60, an English-born Canadian who will play a U.S. Army gunnery captain in the Battle of Queenston Heights. “There isn’t the same interest in the war on your side.”

To grossly generalize: Canadians, whose forebears helped repulse several U.S. invasions in 1812, regard the war that began 200 years ago Monday as a crucible of national identity. For them, its bicentennial is a big deal.

Royal Navy submarine wreck discovered in the Dardanelles

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

What appears to be the wreck of the E14 has been located just 800 feet offshore in the Straits of the Dardanelles:

Its precise location in the eastern Mediterranean remained a mystery until this month when a Turkish marine engineer and a diver detected it on the seabed off the town of Kumkale – just 800ft from the beach.

The wreck was discovered by marine expert Selçuk Kolay and film-making diver Savas Karakas, who had spent three years trying to find it.

After studying documents at the national Archives in Kew, west London, and surveying Turkish defences, they scanned an unusual object from a boat on the surface.

But they could not establish what it was because it was near the mouth of the straits — a sensitive military area where diving was forbidden.

It took two years to get permission from the military before their team were able to dive to the wreck and confirm it was the E14 earlier this month.

Narrow specialization, but very wide assumed knowledge

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Worstall on the problem when specialists in one area pretend deep understanding of radically different areas:

Regular readers will know that I’m perfectly happy to take what the climate scientists tell me about climate science. Where I start to stray from the path of green orthodoxy is those same scientists then tell us the economics of what we ought to do about it all. Something they are not competent to comment upon as they really don’t understand the economics. I do accept the economics of climate change as laid out by the economists who have studied the economics of climate change. William Nordhaus, Nick Stern and so on, tell us that if the climate science is right then a simple revenue neutral carbon tax will be the solution.

That’s fine by me. But it does still puzzle me as to why the not economists feel competent to pronounce on the economics of climate change. Are they intellectual supermen who can master two widely different subjects? Simply succumbing to politics: something must be done, this is something, do this? [. . .]

Which leads us to our conclusion. The reason the scientists are so in conflict with what the economists of climate change are saying about the economics of climate change is simply that the scientists are entirely ignorant of what the economists are saying. And I’m afraid that, despite the popularity of the stance among politicians, ignorance is not a notably successful form of governance.

The only justifications for armed intervention

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:12

George Jonas on the arguments being trotted out for military intervention in Syria and other hotspots:

Repeating for the record what I’ve written many times before, I think only three things justify resorting to arms: (A) self-defence, (B) treaty obligations, and (C) defending vital national interests, defined as interests that properly mandated governments on reasonable grounds honestly believe cannot be safeguarded or secured in other ways.

As far as I can see, nothing compels or even excuses belligerency except national defence obligations. Humanitarian components are icing on the cake. “Responsibility to protect” strikes me a slogan of liberal imperialism; the battle cry of post-modern civilization’s missionaries, the casus belli of self-appointed knights errant with an unquenchable thirst for running the world. Disguised as academics, adventurers, mercenaries, bureaucrats, bien-pensants and do-gooders, these 21st-century Don Quixotes consider themselves the new global aristocracy. They’re the enlightened ones, expecting to become the anointed ones before long, and rule as functionaries of various supranational bodies — governmental, non-governmental, or merely mental — in what no doubt many believe is humanity’s best interest.

[. . .]

Anyway, my main point was that the West’s moment of going off the rails in foreign policy didn’t come in the turbulent and error-prone 1960s, but in the seemingly level-headed 1950s, under the presidency of the popular wartime commander “Ike” Eisenhower. Instead of letting America’s allies, Britain, France and Israel, finish the job Egypt’s military dictator, Colonel Nasser, started when he arbitrarily nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Eisenhower’s America, aided by Lester B. Pearson’s Canada, rescued the aggressive nationalist. As Westerners, Eisenhower and Pearson may have expected credit; what they got was contempt.

“Weren’t they allies? Westerners are people whose enmity is preferable to their friendship,” was how a Libyan I interviewed commented some years later. I don’t think we learned much since.

Imaginary “planetary boundaries”

Filed under: Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Matt Ridley on the shift in emphasis for the Rio+20 conference:

The Riocrats now have a new tack, which will dominate next week’s discussion: planetary boundaries. An influential paper in 2009 written by Johan Rockstrom of Stockholm University and 28 colleagues argued that there are nine thresholds, crossing any of which will trigger collapse of the Earth’s life support systems: land-use change, loss of biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus levels, water use, ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The trouble with this approach, according to a new report by Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in San Francisco, is that, for six of these measures, “there are no global tipping points beyond which these ecological processes will begin to function in fundamentally different ways. Hence the setting of boundaries for these mechanisms is an arbitrary exercise.”

A good example is land-use change. The Rockstrom paper suggested that if human beings convert 15% of the land surface of the Earth to cropland, the world will pass a tipping point, because as marginal land gets exhausted, a small increment in food demand would produce an accelerating increase in cultivation. Currently we cultivate about 11.7% of the land. Yet there is no evidence that anything special happens at 15%. In the words of Steve Bass of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, “If anything, the opposite has probably been more true: Converting land for farming and for industry has clearly delivered a great deal of well-being.”

[. . .]

The “boundaries” approach needs to incorporate the possibility that, thanks to technology, fossil fuels and minerals, people are already living more lightly on the land than we did in the past.

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