Quotulatiousness

June 15, 2012

The Never Seconds flap reveals highly selective anti-authoritarian reactions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Food, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Brendan O’Neill is happy that the petty authoritarians at the Argyll and Bute council have rescinded their ban on young Martha Payne’s school lunch blog, but points out that the Twitstorm that helped publicize her plight is remarkably selective in which kinds of official bullying they will oppose:

But what a shame that these decent folks’ opposition to council heavy-handedness in relation to school lunches is so spectacularly partial. What a shame, for example, that they haven’t offered solidarity to those millions of children who have been banned from bringing sweets and crisps into schools, which, as I once reported for the BBC, has given rise to a black market in junk food in school playgrounds. What a shame they didn’t speak out when councils, behaving like a Tuckshop Taliban, stormed into schools and shut down tuckshops and vending machines that sold chocolate or Coke. What a shame they didn’t have anything to say when mothers in Yorkshire who passed chips through the schoolgates to their children were slated in the media and depicted as Viz-style “Fat Slags” in The Sun. What a shame they didn’t complain when it was revealed that some schools are taking it upon themselves to raid children’s lunchboxes — made for them by their parents! — in order to confiscate anything “unhealthy”.

What a shame, in other words, that only one kind of authoritarianism in relation to school dinners is criticised — namely that which censors people from revealing how crap such dinners are — while other forms of authoritarianism, which control both what children can eat and even what their parents can provide them with, are tolerated. Like stern headmasters, it seems concerned hacks will only give their nod of approval to nice, polite, healthy schoolchildren, while withholding it from the rabble, from kids who eat chips and cake with the blessing of their stupid parents. Those kids, it seems, can be censored and censured and controlled as much as is necessary.

The horrific environmental scourge of the plastic bag

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Terence Corcoran on Toronto City Council’s most recent brainfart — banning plastic bags — and the actual environmental impact of same:

Meantime, most Canadians, through the media, would be relying on green activists and demagogic politicians who have been promoting plastic bags as a local and national environmental scourge for more than a decade. There’s not enough space here to review the mindset of politicians, including the inhabitants of Toronto city council, who last week voted 27-17 to ban plastic bags by 2013. Most of the bylaw’s backers would be getting their information from professionals, including Dr. Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense.

[. . .]

Canadians who answer polls should know that Mr. Smith holds a PhD in green bull. He said Canadians know at a “gut level” that plastic bags are a “not terribly complicated environmental issue.” Well, here are three complications:

Litter The last city of Toronto audit of litter across the city, in 2006, found six plastic bags out of 4,341 items. That’s 0.14% by item. By weight, the percentage would be less.

Waste The 450 million plastic bags Mr. Smith mentions is a 2008 number. The city says the current number of bags is now estimated at about 215 million (the science of calculating this is something else). But even the 450 million-bag total, at about six grams per bag, works out to 2,600 tonnes. As a percentage of the city’s estimated 800,000 tonnes of waste, plastic bags would account for 0.3%. If all plastic bags were eliminated — an impossibility given their necessity as garbage-bin liners and other uses — Toronto’s waste stream would be essentially unchanged. Not a penny will be saved, and costs would likely go up under complications brought on by the ban.

Environment Numerous comprehensive studies by people who are as green or greener than Mr. Smith suggest plastic bags are better than the alternatives — whether paper or cloth. Plastic is less polluting and toxic than paper and cotton, according to a 2011 U.K. Environment Agency report. As for global warming, a cloth bag would have to be reused 327 times, and a paper bag nine times, to match the low warming impact of a high-density polyethylene bag that’s reused as a garbage-bin liner.

Perhaps “Dad” is not superfluous after all

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:24

In the National Post, Misty Harris reports that — contrary to certain assertions from the gender war front — fathers actually do have a positive role to play in the lives of their children:

Though the prevailing Father’s Day question is what to get Dad, a new study suggests the more pressing issue is what dads can give in return.

In a long-term analysis of 36 international studies of nearly 11,000 parents and children, researchers have found that a father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child’s development as that of a mother, while perceived rejection creates a larger ripple on personality than any other type of experience.

The power of paternal rejection or acceptance is especially strong in cases where the father is seen by his child as having heightened prestige in the family, as this tends to boost his influence.

“In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent an effect on personality as does the experience of rejection — especially by parents in childhood,” says co-author Ronald Rohner, whose study appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

My relationship with my father was less than positive, and I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it by calling it “rejection”. However, he did provide me with a useful parenting template: I could usually figure out what to do as a parent by remembering what my own father did … then not doing that.

The Canadian War Museum’s 1812 exhibit

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

Maclean’s finds the Canadian War Museum’s War of 1812 exhibit lacking in the triumphal chest-beating one might expect:

“If you’re a Canadian, the Americans invaded, and we pushed them back, and we evolved into an independent country. So as far as we’re concerned, it’s hardly worth saying that Canada won,” says exhibition curator Peter MacLeod, the museum’s pre-Confederation historian. “But the Americans have their own take on it. They went to war with the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world. And they fought them to a draw. They forced them to respect American independence and American sovereignty. So as far as the Americans are concerned, it’s just as obvious that they won.”

To the British, says MacLeod, the conflict in North America was a sideshow to the more important war against Napoleon in Europe. They invested the weapons and men they could spare, and the Royal Navy blockaded American ports, but defending Canada was of secondary importance.

For Native Americans, it was an existential fight. “Here is a chance presented to us,” the Shawnee leader Tecumseh said, “a chance such as will never occur again, for us Indians of North America to form ourselves into a great combination and cast our lot with the British in this war.”

Tecumseh’s coalition of Native American tribes believed that by aligning themselves with the British, they might stop American expansionism. “This is the last war where they have a serious chance to roll back the American frontier,” says MacLeod. “And it’s the last war where they have a European ally on their side. After this they’re facing the United States on their own, and the Americans basically roll straight to the Pacific.”

June 14, 2012

Thirty years after

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:08

A ceremony in Port Stanley today, marking the 30th anniversary of the end of occupation during the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina:

The anniversary of the liberation of the islands after 74 days of Argentine occupation was marked at a service of thanksgiving at Christ Church Cathedral in the Falklands capital.

Veterans of the 1982 war then led a military parade to the Liberation Monument for an act of remembrance.

The names of the 255 UK servicemen and three Falklands civilians who died in the war were recited at Liberation Monument. An estimated 650 Argentines were also killed during the conflict.

Wreaths were laid at the monument and the national anthem was played.

The BBC’s defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt, in Port Stanley, said it was a day of high emotion for veterans who had come back to see the battlefields where many of their friends and comrades laid down their lives.

For islanders, it was a vital ceremony to mark their liberation and to express the undying gratitude they felt for the servicemen and women who came 8,000 miles to help them.

In his statement, Mr Cameron said the anniversary was “an opportunity to remember all those who lost their lives in the conflict and to look forward to what the future holds for the Falklands”.

The “victim” mindset among Quebec protestors

Filed under: Cancon, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

Dan Delmar on some of the long-standing grievances being channelled by Quebec’s most recent protestors:

“White Niggers of America:” That’s how author Pierre Vallières famously described the Québécois people in his 1968 book, which the former Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) terrorist leader wrote from his prison cell.

Vallières argued that the struggles of French settlers in British North America were similar to those of pre-segregation era blacks in America, and the lingering effects of English repression were reason enough to issue a call to arms in the late 1960s. FLQ members then kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte, who was Quebec’s deputy premier, and sparked a national crisis that ended in martial law.

Vallières and the FLQ may be dead, but the notion that Quebecers are an oppressed people lives on.

[. . .]

Although the “N Word” hasn’t made a noticeable comeback just yet, it’s only a matter of time before fringe elements search for new and more shocking tactics to attract attention to their cause which, at least legislatively, has hit a dead end.

Upon seeing the salute images, many jumped to the conclusion that protesters were racists or that Neo-Nazism was on the rise in Montreal; neither is true. They aren’t racist – at least not intentionally. There is a genuine belief, as Vallière expressed, that Quebecers are in the midst of an epic battle to save democracy and break away from the shackles imposed on them by their Anglo overlords.

[. . .]

In many ways, he [Amir Khadir] embodies the Quebecois victim mentality. At a press conference last week, he compared his struggle with those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. He turned to a CTV News reporter, a black woman, and said that “Law 78 is as unacceptable as segregation of blacks was in the 60s.” And he said that in all sincerity, with a straight face.

The culture of victimization runs deep. Some Quebec laws are based on the concept that Francophone culture is under attack, and restricting the use of other languages, as is the case with Bill 101, is an important weapon in the war against Americanization. And make no mistake: This is a war, ideologically speaking. Political elites, particularly within the separatist movement and the opposition Parti Québécois, believe the mere existence of the English language in this province is an assault on French.

To go where no DIY project has gone before

Filed under: Europe, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

In Wired, Dave Mosher has a profile of a fascinating little group with a sky-high goal:

Co-founders von Bengtson, an aerospace scientist and former NASA contractor, and Madsen, an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer, have a lot to be proud of since they founded their non-profit space program four years ago. In June 2011, for example, Copenhagen Suborbital’s army of volunteers successfully built, launched and recovered a 31-foot-tall rocket — the largest “amateur” launcher ever built — with a crash-test dummy tucked inside.

That first prototype ended its flight two miles up, and the organization has yet to check off their ultimate goal: sending a person more than 60 miles above the Earth, a height widely considered the boundary of outer space. But now they are creating a bigger, better and badder space vehicle to get there.

“We have gone from having a crazy idea on a submarine to a smoothly run organization that builds rockets and spacecraft, and has experience with big launches,” said von Bengtson, who also blogs about the project for Wired at Rocket Shop. “It feels like we have become a part of a new era in space. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. Not for millions of dollars.”

The Commerce Clause: how it evolved to empower government control of everything

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, the entire law “must be declared void.” Judge Vinson cites this Reason.tv video on page 47 of his decision.

Winnipeg is not a hellhole

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

I’ve spent a few weeks in Winnipeg, and while it was a pleasant place to stay in June, others perhaps didn’t have as much fun:


And Scott Feschuk rounded up the reactions very well:
https://twitter.com/scottfeschuk/statuses/213209975537942529
Colby Cosh is late to the scene:

If you’re a journalist, sometimes it’s more interesting to come to a story later rather than sooner. (It’s also way easier!) When I first heard that Winnipeg was ablaze with mob fury about a Rob Lowe tweet that described the city as a “hellhole”, I sort of chuckled to myself and thought “Welp, right or wrong, he is definitely talking about the ‘Winnipeg’ that’s in Manitoba.” [. . .]

Lowe indicated later that he was referring to the bar, and not Winnipeg as a city, when he joked about being in a “hellhole”. And, in fact, if you look at what he wrote, he never did say that Winnipeg was a hellhole. (Parts of it are not remotely like hell at all during several months of the year!) But for some reason, an awful lot of Winnipeggers immediately assumed that that’s what he meant. Am I wrong, or does this say more about what they think of their city than it does about what Rob Lowe thinks of it?

What is at stake in the amendment process to the omnibus bill

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

As Andrew Coyne points out, if nothing else the stack of amendments the opposition have proposed does accomplish something (even if none of the amendments are accepted):

The House of Commons was to begin voting Wednesday night on several hundred amendments to Bill C-38, the 425-page monster known as the omnibus budget implementation bill. The voting was expected to go on all night and all day Thursday.

Viewed one way, the whole thing is quite silly. Given the government’s majority, none of the amendments is likely to pass, nor is the bill itself in any danger of defeat. Viewed another way, however, this is an important moment. For the first time since the last election, the opposition is putting up a serious fight against the abuses this government has visited upon Parliament: not only the omnibus bill, which repeals, amends or introduces more than 60 different pieces of legislation, but the repeated, almost routine curtailing of debate by means of “time allocation”; the failures of oversight, misstating of costs, and abdication of responsibility in the F-35 purchase; and the refusal to provide basic information on spending to Parliament or the Parliamentary Budget Officer — to say nothing of the stonewalling, prorogations and other indignities of the minority years.

What’s the point? Once, as in the famous “bell-ringing” episode of 1982, the point would have been to hold up parliamentary business until the government relented: not on the substance of the bill, which a duly elected government is entitled to pass, but on the principle that the bill should be split, that Parliament is entitled to vote on each of its several major parts separately, and to give each the kind of informed scrutiny and debate it warrants. Again, that is not only in the opposition’s interests, or even Parliament’s, but the nation’s: it makes for better legislation.

June 13, 2012

“… there simply aren’t enough lifeboats!”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Greece, Italy — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

Nigel Farage speaking in the European Parliament:

Another one bites the dust. Country number four, Spain, gets bailed out and we all of course know that it won’t be the last. Though I wondered over the weekend whether perhaps I was missing something, because when the Spanish prime minister Mr Rajoy got up, he said that this bailout shows what a success the eurozone has been.

And I thought, well, having listened to him over the previous couple of weeks telling us that there would not be a bailout, I got the feeling after all his twists and turns he’s just about the most incompetent leader in the whole of Europe, and that’s saying something, because there is pretty stiff competition.

Indeed, every single prediction of yours, Mr Barroso, has been wrong, and dear old Herman Van Rompuy, well he’s done a runner hasn’t he. Because the last time he was here, he told us we had turned the corner, that the euro crisis was over and he hasn’t bothered to come back and see us.

I remember being here ten years ago, hearing the launch of the Lisbon Agenda. We were told that with the euro, by 2010 we would have full employment and indeed that Europe would be the competitive and dynamic powerhouse of the world. By any objective criteria the Euro has failed, and in fact there is a looming, impending disaster.

You know, this deal makes things worse not better. A hundred billion [euro] is put up for the Spanish banking system, and 20 per cent of that money has to come from Italy. And under the deal the Italians have to lend to the Spanish banks at 3 per cent but to get that money they have to borrow on the markets at 7 per cent. It’s genius isn’t it. It really is brilliant.

So what we are doing with this package is we are actually driving countries like Italy towards needing to be bailed out themselves.

In addition to that, we put a further 10 per cent on Spanish national debt and I tell you, any banking analyst will tell you, 100 billion does not solve the Spanish banking problem, it would need to be more like 400 billion.

And with Greece teetering on the edge of Euro withdrawal, the real elephant in the room is that once Greece leaves, the ECB, the European Central Bank is bust. It’s gone.

It has 444 billion euros worth of exposure to the bailed-out countries and to rectify that you’ll need to have a cash call from Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. You couldn’t make it up could you! It is total and utter failure. This ship, the euro Titanic has now hit the iceberg and sadly there simply aren’t enough life boats.

When is a bribe appropriate?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

The British government is trying to crack down on bribery, which on the surface seems like a good thing to do: but will it cripple British businesses in third world countries?

We used to draw a distinct line between what was acceptable business conduct here at home and what we did abroad with Johnny Foreigner.

Inviting Bertie from your major customer to Henley or the Derby, or waving Cup Final and Olympic tickets in his face was entirely acceptable. Slipping him £500 for an order was bribery and both illegal and immoral.

But what you did abroad was an entirely different matter: bribery was until very recently tax deductible.

[. . .]

This is of course very different from the system of old. Which was, essentially, that soft soaping someone with experiences and days out was just absolutely fine while any mention at all of cash was not just legally but also socially verboten.

At home, in Britain, that was. Having worked in some pretty odd and even rough places I’ve done my share of bribing people, but even so I would be profoundly shocked if I was asked for a bung in Blighty. But the system also most definitely facilitated the payment of bribes to Johnny Foreigner.

At one point, working in Russia, I needed to get cheap railway prices out of the Russian railroads to make the numbers on a metals shipment add up. The only way known to do this was to make a deal with the North Koreans who had special state-set prices on said railways. Which is how I found myself inside the N. Korean embassy in Moscow handing over $10,000 in crisp notes to their KGB-style guy after the successful conclusion of the shipment.

Yes, of course, it’s terribly naughty subverting the employees of a communist dictatorship, but the reaction here at home was the most interesting. When I made gentle enquiries to the taxman as to how I might account for this transaction, hinting gently at first, he finally pointed out that since I’d paid the bribe in a foreign currency to a foreign chap that was just fine. Just list it as a business expense and it was tax deductible.

Wine: drink what tastes best to you, not what the experts tell you to

Filed under: Europe, France, Randomness, USA, Wine — Nicholas @ 09:30

Yet another blind taste test that didn’t come out the way it was “supposed” to:

At the Princeton tasting, led by George Taber, 9 wine judges from France, Belgium and the U.S. tasted French against New Jersey [TC: that’s the New Jersey] wines. The French wines selected were from the same producers as in 1976 including names such as Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Haut Brion, priced up to $650/bottle. New Jersey wines for the competition were submitted to an informal panel of judges, who then selected the wines for the competition. These judges were not eligible to taste wines at the final competition The results were similarly surprising. Although, the winner in each category was a French wine (Clos de Mouches for the whites and Mouton-Rothschild for the reds) NJ wines are at eye level. Three of the top four whites were from New Jersey. The best NJ red was ranked place 3. An amazing result given that the prices for NJ average at only 5% of the top French wines.

A statistical evaluation of the tasting, conducted by Princeton Professor Richard Quandt, further shows that the rank order of the wines was mostly insignificant. That is, if the wine judges repeated the tasting, the results would most likely be different. From a statistically viewpoint, most wines were undistinguishable. Only the best white and the lowest ranked red were significantly different from the others wines.

There are good wines and bad wines. There are good wines and better wines. But my experience has always been that there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which you’re paying more money for no appreciable improvement in the quality of the wine. In other words, beyond that point, you’re paying for the prestige of the label or the mystique of the brand not for anything intrinsic to the liquid in the glass. As I wrote last year:

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.

If you’re buying wine to have with a nice dinner, find your point of diminishing returns and don’t go beyond it: you’ll save yourself a lot of money over time and still enjoy your wine. If, on the other hand, you’re buying wine specifically to impress then go as expensive as you like.

QotD: “California is becoming Detroit”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

The liberal model — borrowing huge sums, rigging interest and the currency to enable state profligacy, turning large swaths of the population into less productive unionized government workers or dependents on the dole who vote in thanks to political hacks — simply does not work. How could beautiful blue-state California lose almost a million refugees to arid Texas? I like Texas, but Dallas had far less of nature to work with than did San Francisco. (It takes a lot of human failure for thousands to give up verdant California to move to Utah or the Nevada desert.) What we are witnessing is nothing short of surreal: in the manner that Tijuana was a different universe from San Diego, so too the entire state of California is becoming a different world from its neighbors. Whether one examines its near dead-last schools, its oppressive income and sales taxes, its decaying roads and infrastructure, its absurd prison system, its dysfunctional state offices (try the DMV), or its priestly public employee caste, California is becoming Detroit.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Liberal Super Nova”, PJ Media, 2012-06-11

John Kay on the Finnish frontier

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Finland had a very chancy time over the last hundred years. John Kay is visiting now, and reflects on how Finland survived to today:

The Finnish border is an anomaly. In 1918 the Finns won independence for a state that extended to the gates of St Petersburg. Russia captured territory in the 1939-40 Winter War. Finland then fought on the losing side in the second world war and did not remain neutral in the cold war. So the once thriving Finnish industrial city of Viipuri is today the depressed Russian outpost of Vyborg.

A cynical commentator on 20th-century history might observe that the political ineptitude of Kaiser Wilhelm and subsequently of Adolf Hitler brought America in on the opposite side of Germany’s quarrel with Russia in 1917 and 1941. Only when the democratic politicians of modern Germany made the rational alliance did Finland achieve the favourable political and economic outcomes it now enjoys. To pass the watchtowers and barbed-wire fences on the Finnish-Russian border is to be reminded of how fragile, and how recent, are the stability and security we take for granted today.

[. . .]

That observation is evident on the Finnish-Russian border. The razor wire kept Russian citizens in when the living standards of planned societies and market economies diverged. But now the border is easy to cross and the gap in per capita income has narrowed, though not by much. The very different income distributions of egalitarian Finland and inegalitarian Russia can be seen in the car parks and designer shops of Lappeenranta.

In the Soviet era, Finland produced Marimekko; Russia made no clothes any fashion-conscious woman would want to buy. Post-Communist but still autocratic Russia made surveillance equipment; democratic Finland led the world in mobile phones. Today Russia’s geeks hack into your bank account, while those of Finland develop Angry Birds.

The pristine countryside of Finland contrasts with the degraded physical state of much of Russia: a demonstration of the unexpected finding that regulated democratic capitalism preserves the environment more successfully than any other system of government.

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