Like all people with bad habits, politicians and bureaucrats are infinitely inventive when it comes to rationalizing the European Project, though they’re inventive in nothing else. Without the Union, they say, there would be no peace; when it’s pointed out that the Union is the consequence of peace, not its cause, they say that no small country can survive on its own. When it is pointed out that Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway seem to have no difficulties in that regard, they say that pan-European regulations create economies of scale that promote productive efficiency. When it is pointed out that European productivity lags behind the rest of the world’s, they say that European social protections are more generous than anywhere else. If it is then noted that long-term unemployment rates in Europe are higher than elsewhere, another apology follows. The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats, the European Project is like God — good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.
[. . .]
The personal interests of European politicians and bureaucrats, with their grossly inflated, tax-free salaries, are perfectly obvious. For politicians who have fallen out of favor at home, or grown bored with the political process, Brussels acts as a vast and luxurious retirement home, with the additional gratification of the retention of power. The name of a man such as European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, whose charisma makes Hillary Clinton look like Mata Hari, would, without the existence of the European Union, have reached most of the continent’s newspapers only if he had paid for a classified advertisement in them. Instead of which, he bestrides the European stage if not like a colossus exactly, at least like the spread of fungus on a damp wall.
Corporate interests, ever anxious to suppress competition, approve of European Union regulations because they render next to impossible the entry of competitors into any market in which they already enjoy a dominant position, while also allowing them to extend their domination into new markets. That is why the CAC40 of today (the index of the largest 40 companies on the French stock exchange) will have more or less the same names 100 years hence.
More interestingly, perhaps, Hannan explains the European Union’s corruption of so-called civil society. Suppose you have an association for the protection of hedgehogs because you love hedgehogs. The European Union then offers your association money to expand its activities, which of course it accepts. The Union then proposes a measure allegedly for the protection of hedgehogs, but actually intended to promote a large agrarian or industrial interest over a small one, first asking the association’s opinion about the proposed measure. Naturally, your association supports the Union because it has become dependent on the Union’s subsidy. The Union then claims that it enjoys the support of those who want to protect hedgehogs. The best description of this process is fascist corporatism, which so far (and it is of course a crucial difference) lacks the paramilitary and repressive paraphernalia of real fascism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Rejecting the European Project”, City Journal, 2012-09-07
September 8, 2012
QotD: The European Project
Rush wins “Album of the Year” at first Progressive Music Awards
In a “how is this possibly the first time” event, Rush won the Album of the Year award for Clockwork Angels.
Clockwork Angels picked up "Album of the Year" at last night's Prog Awards. Here's BBC's wrap up of the event: http://t.co/u8ZsUfrS
— Rush (@rushtheband) September 7, 2012
Veteran rock band Genesis have been honoured at the first Progressive Music Awards, alongside other bands including Pink Floyd and Rush.
Genesis members Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks picked up the lifetime achievement award at a ceremony at Kew Gardens on Wednesday.
Keyboard legend and ex-Yes member Rick Wakeman was given the Prog God Award.
The awards, created by Prog Magazine, were hosted by BBC Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler.
Prog rock, which grew out of 1960s psychedelia, was originally associated with 70s bands including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and King Crimson.
[. . .]
Canadian rock band Rush’s latest concept album, Clockwork Angels, was named Album Of The Year.
With its dystopian steampunk theme, the three-piece’s 19th studio album has earned rapturous reviews, even in the mainstream press.
Describing it as Rush’s “most solid and compelling set of songs in years”, The Guardian went on to say: “Those who worship at the temple of Rush will be in raptures; for those who remain agnostic, there may well be enough here to justify a leap of faith.”
It was also a handy reminder to me that I hadn’t actually bought the album yet: it was on sale in the Canadian iTunes store for $6.99. Sold.
Gamers are not superstitious (all the time) about their “lucky dice”
Many gamers are highly protective of the “lucky D20” they use for certain die rolls. In some cases, that’s not superstition at all, it’s taking advantage of a manufacturing flaw in polyhedral dice:
One of the biggest manufacturers of RPG dice is a company called Chessex. They make a huge variety of dice, in all kinds of different colors and styles. These dice are put through rock tumblers that give them smooth edges and a shiny finish, so they look great. Like many RPG fans, I own a bunch of them.
I also own a set of GameScience dice. They’re not polished, painted or smoothed, so they’re supposed to roll better than Chessex dice, producing results closer to true random. I like them, but mostly because they don’t roll too far, and their sharp edges look cool. I couldn’t tell you if they truly produce more random results.
But the good folks over at the Awesome Dice Blog can. They recently completed a massive test between a Chessex d20 and a GameScience d20, rolling each over 10,000 times, by hand, to determine which rolls closer to true.
In a video from a few years back, Lou Zocchi explains why his dice are the best quality in the business:
Split decision from the two Scotts
Scott Reid and Scott Feschuk are doing their weekly NFL picks again this season. To my surprise/shock/horror, they have the Minnesota-Jacksonville game as the “Sure Thing”. Fortunately, they disagree on which “sure thing” is really the “sure thing”:
Jacksonville (plus 3.5) at Minnesota
Reid: You ever notice that Christian Ponder’s Christian name is Christian? Imagine if his surname was Sur. That would totally rock! But here’s my point: Christian Ponder always conjures to my mind the image of a pilgrim. You know, the kind with belt buckles on their hats who casually persecute Indians and run around drowning hysterical teenage girls. They’re better known these days as Republicans. You know what doesn’t come to mind when you’re thinking about Minnesota’s Cotton Mather? Touchdown completions.
Fact is that Ponder is just no damn good. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever been a truly successful Puritan quarterback in the NFL. (Kurt Warner doesn’t count because everyone knows he made a deal with Satan to destroy Trent Green’s career.) But I’ll guarantee you this much: That belt-buckling Christian Ponder is a damn sight better than the Blaine Gabbert Project that’s inexplicably still underway in Jacksonville. MJD may be back but the Jags are going to set the standard for awfulloosity this year in the NFL. Eat the points and don’t worry. Minnesota will win this game by a wide margin. Pick: Minnesota.
Feschuk: Wow, I had no idea Minnesota was going to lose this game until you picked them as your inaugural Sure Thing. Makes sense though: Adrian Peterson is rushing back too quickly from yet another major injury and should be good for maybe five or six carries before he blows out his Achilles or falls down a well. Pick: Jacksonville.
September 7, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. It’s not quite as long as last week’s monstrosity, but there’s more than enough in the way of articles, videos and podcasts to keep you busy for a while.
“When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake.”
John Kay suggests you always ask how a statistic was created before you consider what the presenter wants you to think:
Always ask yourself the question: “where does that data come from?”. “Long distance rail travel in Britain is expected to increase by 96 per cent by 2043.” Note how the passive voice “is expected” avoids personal responsibility for this statement. Who expects this? And what is the basis of their expectation? For all I know, we might be using flying platforms in 2043, or be stranded at home by oil shortages: where did the authors of the prediction acquire their insight?
“On average, men think about sex every seven seconds.” How did the researchers find this out? Did they ask men how often they thought about sex, or when they last thought about sex (3½ seconds ago, on average)? Did they give their subjects a buzzer to press every time they thought about sex? How did they confirm the validity of the responses? Is it possible that someone just made this statement up, and that it has been repeated frequently and without attribution ever since? Many of the numbers I hear at business conferences have that provenance.
[. . .]
Be careful of data defined by reference to other documents that you are expected not to have read. “These accounts have been compiled in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles”, or “these estimates are prepared in line with guidance given by HM Treasury and the Department of Transport”. Such statements are intended to give a false impression of authoritative endorsement. A data set compiled by a national statistics organisation or a respected international institution such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or Eurostat will have been compiled conscientiously. That does not, however, imply that the numbers mean what the person using them thinks or asserts they mean.
Jesse Kline: Consumers the biggest losers in Apple-Samsung battle
In the National Post, Jesse Kline points out that the grubby legal dispute between Apple and Samsung may end up hurting the consumer much more than either of the combatants:
Software is unique because it is covered under both copyright and patent law. Computer software is written in a human-readable language, called source code, that is then translated by the computer into something the machine can understand. Much like writing a book, or newspaper article, source code is automatically covered under copyright law.
But no one is alleging that Samsung copied Apple’s code. What Samsung was sued for was achieving the same outcome as Apple, even though it was done in a different way. In this literary world, this would be akin to someone being sued for violating the copyright on Harry Potter, just because they wrote their own story about a boy wizard.
Intellectual property laws are supposed to encourage innovation by allowing companies and individuals to profit off works that may have cost a significant amount of money to develop. Apple says it was undercut in price because its competitor simply copied its design. In actual fact, Android was cheaper to produce because it is based on the open source Linux operating system, which saved money compared to Apple proprietary system.
For its part, Samsung accuses Apple of resorting “to litigation over market competition in an effort to limit consumer choice.” It’s one thing for the legal system to protect new inventions and original works, but this is quite clearly a case of a company engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.
The debut of energy weapons in the real military world
The Economist looks at the long-anticipated introduction of energy weapons. They’re still a long way from matching the fictional capabilities of phasers, blasters, disruptors, or photon torpedoes:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the idea was revived when American strategists began thinking in earnest about the technologies they would need to shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Among the more fanciful ideas taken up by Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (more commonly known as Star Wars) was the X-ray laser, which aimed to harness the energy of an atomic explosion to generate powerful laser beams. The hassle of having to explode a nuclear bomb every time a beam was needed meant the idea never went anywhere, though it did spur research into high-powered chemical lasers and the sophisticated optics needed to aim and control them.
The main appeal of using an energy beam to shoot things is that it travels at the speed of light, which means, in practice, that it will hit whatever it is aimed at. Trying to shoot down an incoming missile or warhead with a physical projectile, by contrast, is much more difficult. The guidance challenges of trying to “hit a bullet with a bullet” are enormous and are only gradually being solved using complex radars and missiles equipped with expensive sensors. A second attraction of lasers and other energy weapons is that in most cases they cannot run out of ammunition, and can keep firing for as long as they are plugged into a power source. The initial costs may be quite high, but each shot may then cost only a few dollars, compared with a price-tag of $3m or more for the latest missiles used to shoot down aircraft or other missiles.
[. . .]
The big trend now is to try to scale up three other sorts of laser that are far more compact than chemical lasers and can fire away merrily as long as they have power and don’t get too hot. The first sort is the fibre laser, in which the beam is generated within an optical fibre. Because this is already used in industry for welding and cutting, prices are falling, power output is increasing and reliability has been steadily improving. Industrial lasers can be turned into weapons pretty easily, simply by strapping them to a weapons mount.
But they are not very powerful. The Tactical Laser System being developed for the American navy by BAE Systems, a British firm, has an output of just 10kW, enough to run a few household kettles. Even so, it might be useful for frightening off (or burning holes in) small boats that look threatening but wouldn’t warrant a hail of machinegun fire. A slightly bigger version puts out about 33kW of power and fits neatly on existing turrets that house the rotary cannons used to shoot down incoming anti-ship missiles. It could blind optical or heat-seeking sensors on enemy missiles, or puncture small boats.
Gender-identity: how (many) adolescents cope with the “what am I” problem
This is from a discussion that took place on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list the other day (list info here) that explored some interesting notions. I emailed Ms. Bujold to ask her permission to use a quote from one of her posts, and she asked me to provide a bit more context as she wasn’t sure the portion I’d asked to use was sufficiently informative. The topic of discussion was the anima/animus mental model of what is “right” about the opposite sex many (most? all?) young people use to determine what it is to be male or female. A subtopic of that was the use or misuse of that mental model to judge potential dates/mates and the problems that that might entail.
It seems to tie in with my own notions of gender-identity formation in adolescence being principally accomplished by heatedly deleting everything seen to be associated with the opposite gender, and maturity being the slower process of regaining or recovering same to once again become a complete human being.
[. . .]
I might direct your attention to the large preponderance of “alpha males” as romance novel heroes. Very much the embodiment of those very assertive or practical qualities that adolescent women delete (or repress, if you prefer) in themselves, much to their later sorrow when they have to cope with real life, alas.
Your typical bad-boy alpha-jerk high-achieving rich hero is pretty much a grocery list of survival qualities discouraged in women, in fact.
Granted, women need to be socialized as sharers to a high degree, or their infants would never survive un-murdered. It’s a near thing as-is. (Says the experienced mom.)
September 6, 2012
Switzerland to buy Swedish warplanes
Switzerland is planning to replace their aging fleet of F-5 fighter jets with a smaller number of modern Swedish aircraft:
Switzerland has decided to buy 22 Swedish JAS-39E Gripen fighters to replace their elderly F-5s. The 16 ton JAS-39E is roughly comparable with the latest versions of the F-16 and is a substantial upgrade of the current JAS-39C model. The Gripen is also used by Sweden, Thailand, South Africa, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The 39E is still in development and will eventually replace the 14 ton JAS-39C.
[. . .]
Often regarded as an also-ran in the current crop of “modern jet fighters,” the Swedish Gripen is proving to be more competition than the major players (the F-16, F-18, F-35, Eurofighter, Rafale, MiG-29, and Su-27) expected. Put simply, Gripen does a lot of little but important things right and costs about half as much (at about $35 million each) as its major competitors. In effect, Gripen provides the ruggedness and low cost of Russian aircraft with the high quality and reliability of Western aircraft. For many nations this is an appealing combination. The Gripen is easy to use (both for pilots and ground crews) and capable of doing all jet fighter jobs (air defense, ground support, and reconnaissance) well enough.
The Gripen is small but can carry up to 3.6 tons of weapons. With the increasing use of smart bombs, this is adequate. The aircraft entered active service in 1997 and has had an uphill battle getting export sales. Sweden does not have the diplomatic clout of its major competitors, so they have to push quality and service. Swedish warplanes and products in general have an excellent reputation in both categories. Nevertheless, the Gripen is still expected to lose out on a lot of sales simply because politics took precedence over performance.
Update: Yes, I caught the mis-attribution in the headline about a minute after I posted this. Sorry for the error, etc., etc., etc.
Esperanto: the easiest way to introduce a second language to children
I got interested in learning Esperanto in my early 20’s … and even though I never needed to speak the language in ordinary life, it was a very positive experience and I would recommend it to anyone as an easy way to limber up the brain for other learning tasks. It’s easy to learn, and success in learning helps to make the next learning experience a bit easier and more enjoyable.
It’s time to retire the pop-sci term “Junk DNA”
In the Wall Street Journal, Gautam Naik and Robert Lee Hotz report on the most recent discoveries about the human genome:
The new insight is the product of Encode, or Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, a vast, multiyear project that aims to pin down the workings of the human genome in unprecedented detail.
Encode succeeded the Human Genome Project, which identified the 20,000 genes that underpin the blueprint of human biology. But scientists discovered that those 20,000 genes constituted less than 2% of the human genome. The task of Encode was to explore the remaining 98% — the so-called junk DNA — that lies between those genes and was thought to be a biological desert.
That desert, it turns out, is teeming with action. Almost 80% of the genome is biochemically active, a finding that surprised scientists.
In addition, large stretches of DNA that appeared to serve no functional purpose in fact contain about 400,000 regulators, known as enhancers, that help activate or silence genes, even though they sit far from the genes themselves.
The discovery “is like a huge set of floodlights being switched on” to illuminate the darkest reaches of the genetic code, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in the U.K., lead analysis coordinator for the Encode results.
Gentrification of Brixton
The Economist looks at the demographic and social changes underway in Brixton:
A good deal has changed in Brixton, a south London district, since Eta Rodney bought her Victorian terraced house in 1980. Then many of her neighbours were, like her, Jamaican. West Indians had settled in Brixton since 1948, when some arrived on the Empire Windrush. Today many of Mrs Rodney’s black neighbours are selling up and moving out of the area, making way for predominantly white newcomers. Britain’s historic black centre is being transformed — but in an odd way.
The Afro-Caribbean population of Lambeth, the borough where Brixton is located, is estimated to have fallen by 8% since 2001 even as the borough’s overall population has risen by 9%. Interracial mixing explains only part of this: the main reason is black flight. Afro-Caribbeans have dispersed from other parts of central London too, such as Hackney and Hammersmith and Fulham. They move to escape crime, buy bigger houses and get their children into better schools — the familiar reasons people of all races head for suburbia. In the South East outside London, Afro-Caribbean numbers have jumped, albeit from a low base.
[. . .]
Mrs Rodney feels both pressures. Her husband would like to retire to Jamaica. She prefers Streatham, further south in London, where she could buy a palace for the money gentrifiers are keen to pay for her house, with its original cornicing and marble fireplaces. The former council house she bought under the Conservative Party’s right-to-buy scheme—“I love Mrs Thatcher, God bless her soul”—would today fetch at least 20 times what she paid.
Of course, for many of us, the name Brixton has a very Clash-y context:
September 5, 2012
The positive side to rising food prices
Tim Worstall responds to an article by Michael Hanlon:
The storm is coming. One of the great dependables of modern life — cheap food — may be about to disappear. If a growing number of economists and scientists are to be believed, we are witnessing a historic transition: from an era when the basics of life have been getting ever more affordable, to a new period when they are ever more expensive.
Ah, no, I’m afraid you’ve not understood the projections. Yes, food is expected to become more expensive. But also more affordable at the same time.
For the driving force of the rise in food prices is expected to be that people are getting richer. Thus able to afford three squares a day, some of them even containing meat. The rise in incomes is expected to be greater than the rise in food prices: thus food becoming both more expensive and more affordable as a portion of incomes.
BTW, if you think that’s not how the word affordable is used in such contexts then do speak to the booze puritans. They say exactly this: booze has become more expensive but cheaper as a portion of incomes: more affordable.
And if incomes do not rise as predicted we don’t expect to see the food price rises. For it is not the idea of 10 billion people that is predicted to raise the prices. It’s the idea of billions currently on $2 a day becoming billions on $20 that is.
Also, as I’ve mentioned before, a significant part of the rise in global food prices is driven by particularly stupid government policies on ethanol production.
