Quotulatiousness

October 12, 2012

McParland: How about Nobels for Canada, Switzerland, and Costa Rica!

Filed under: Americas, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

The latest Nobel Peace Prize winner follows a pattern that Kelly McParland thinks he’s identified:

I’m pretty sure the Nobel peace prize committee just bought itself a regular spot on Saturday Night Live. How could it award a peace prize to Europe – yes, all of Europe — based on the fact that it’s not at war with itself, and not become a target of satire?

[. . .]

Today, the notion of Italy invading Spain, or the Dutch royal family seizing the British throne, is unimaginable. Austria, once one of the world’s great powers, is now a small Alpine nation that’s a threat to nobody. Obviously this is a good thing; being friends is better than being enemies. But is that reason to give it a peace prize? Canada has never started a war with anyone, anywhere, so where’s our prize? Switzerland washed its hands of war a century ago and remained neutral through both world wars. Costa Rica doesn’t even have an army. How about a peace prize for that?

This whole peace prize thing is getting weirder by the year anyway. In 2009 it went to Barack Obama, for reasons even Obama couldn’t explain. Since then his administration has been picking off terrorists with drones with gay abandon. In 2007 it went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, because why? Because alternative energy is peaceful? Because you can’t stoke a nuclear weapon with solar power? Beats me. You get the feeling the committee finds itself facing a deadline, can’t make a decision, and someone says, “The hell with it, let’s just pick a name out of the hat.” This year some scamp had scribbled “European Union” on a piece of paper and slipped it in with the others, and that’s the slip they drew.

Maybe it’s more complicated than that. But you wouldn’t know it from this year’s winner.

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:24

My weekly community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. This week’s collection includes all the usual blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.

Winston Churchill’s papers now available online

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:41

Anna Leach at The Register on the newly available writings of Winston Churchill:

The man who famously stated that the British would “fight them on the beaches” in the event of a German invasion has had some of his less-often quoted words including his private letters (and his receipts for cigars) fully digitised and made available online in the Churchill archive.

Winston Churchill’s private musings, letters to Stalin, doodles and appointments diaries are now on the internet after two years of painstaking digitisation at Churchill College, Cambridge.

The haul of papers documents all areas of the great man’s life and times from the most trivial to the most important.

One for the heralds

Filed under: Education, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:46

On the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), Eric Oppen posted this in an off-topic thread about clothing trends:

Whenever someone starts waxing envious in my presence about foreign countries’ practice of wearing school uniforms, and wishes the same on American kids, I like to respond:

“That’s a wonderful idea! And I know just the sort needed! The colors would be “barry argent and sable, semee’ of pheons, countercharged.”

Most people don’t get the joke, but I said that in front of several SCA heralds once, who were all highly amused and said I was being quite multicultural.

(For those not familiar with heraldic language, what I am suggesting is uniforms featuring horizontal black-and-white stripes, scattered with “broad arrowheads” white on black and black on white. IOW, combining the features of traditional US and UK prison uniforms.)

Posted with Eric’s permission, of course.

October 11, 2012

Venezuela’s man on a white horse

Filed under: Americas, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill says that the western leftist affection for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez illustrates its intellectual disarray:

For an insight into the collapsed standards, declining intellectual rigour and desperate opportunism of the modern Western left, look no further than its fawning over Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. In the past, much of the left — both the radical sections and even some of the stuffy Stalinist crowd — was highly critical of the Bonapartist antics of populist Latin American leaders. They critiqued the way these leaders mobilised the masses to give their narrow, bourgeois, largely state-orientated policies a gloss of legitimacy or the appearance of revolutionism. But now, so isolated is the Western left, so bereft is it of a domestic constituency or anything approaching a political plan, that it sees in Chavez’s twenty-first-century Bonapartism something ‘genuinely progressive’.

This week, Chavez won a fourth term as president of Venezuela. He did not repeat his landslide victory of 2006, instead winning a safe but not-especially-astounding 54 per cent of the vote (on a turnout of 81 per cent). His supporters among Western radicals immediately went into hyperbolic hyperdrive, talking about the ‘revolution’ that Chavez has led in Venezuela and commending him for ‘challenging imperial domination’. Chavez’s posturing against US influence in Latin America and his implementation of social-assistance programmes for the Venezuelan poor are variously described as ‘radical’, ‘progressive’ and part of his broader ‘profoundly revolutionary struggle’. He is compared to Simon Bolivar, the nineteenth-century political leader who liberated much of the Latin American continent from Spanish rule, or to Che Guevara, the more recent Argentine radical beloved of t-shirt sellers in hipster communities across the West.

Yet these accolades for Chavez tell us far more about the state of mind, and deep, existential needs, of the disarrayed left than they do about any revolution taking place in Venezuela. Because in truth, Chavez has far more in common with the populist style of the nationalist leadership pioneered in Latin America by Juan Peron, whom the left castigated for his exploitation of the masses, than he does with yesteryear’s revolutionaries. Juan Peron was an Argentine military leader who, after playing a role in the army’s 1943 seizing of power from the corrupt regime of Ramon Castillo, was elected president of Argentina in 1946, 1951 and briefly again in the 1970s. His rule — which came to be known as Peronism and was influential among populist left-wing leaders in Latin America — consisted of a combination of anti-Western actions, concessions to the working classes and the poor in the form of higher wages and trade union recognition, and populist demagogy. Through this process, Peron was able to build up an impressive mass base of support for his pursuit of nationalist capitalist development in Argentina.

David Suzuki “owes economists an apology”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

In the Globe and Mail, Mike Moffatt examines Suzuki’s latest attack on the economics profession and finds it extremely unpersuasive:

Popular environmentalist David Suzuki has described conventional economics as a form of brain damage. In a documentary called Surviving Progress, he quotes a fictional economist by saying, “who cares whether you keep the forest — cut it down. Put the money somewhere else. When those forests are gone, put it in fish. When those fish are gone, put it in computers.”

Beyond tarring the economics profession, he displays a perplexing lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. First of all, none of the rules taught in undergraduate economics course advise the owner of a resource to deplete it as quickly as possible. Perhaps he was confused with the Tragedy of the Commons problem, where lack of private ownership causes a resource to be overused.

[. . .]

The idea that economists do not care about externalities is a strange one, given how prominently they are featured in economics textbooks. An externality is, simply put, a spillover effect. It is the unintended costs or benefits from a transaction or decision experienced by third parties (that is, they were external to the decision). It does not mean phenomena that are external to economic modelling or things outside the interest of economists. Since, as Dr. Suzuki points out, the world is full of externalities, the concept is crucial in economic research.

French fishing fleet dabbles in piracy, maritime intimidation

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, France — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

The BBC reports on a recent incident between British and French fishing vessels:

Fishermen are calling for Royal Navy protection after claims they were attacked by French vessels.

Kevin Lochrane, from East Sussex, said he was surrounded by seven or eights boats in international waters 15 miles off Caen in a dispute over scallops.

One Scottish fisherman, Andy Scott, said he feared for his crew’s safety during the incident.

Other crewmen said they were also surrounded by the French fishermen, who they said tried to damage their gear.

50th anniversary of the Light Emitting Diode (sort of)

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:39

Tony Smith at The Register:

The Light Emitting Diode (LED) is 50 years old. Well, kind of…

It’s certainly 50 years since Nick Holonyak, working at GEC’s Syracuse, New York facility, developed what is considered the first LED capable of generating visible light. Holonyak’s LED was also the first to be in form ready for commercial usage. He wrote up his work and sent it off to Applied Physics Letters on 17 October 1962. The journal published the work in December 1962 under the headline ‘Coherent (visible) Light Emission from GaAs xPx Junctions’.

However, Holonyak’s work followed that of Gary Pittman and Robert Baird who, in 1961, observed the emission of infrared light by Gallium Arsenide — the GaAs in Holonyak’s headline — and, on the back of it, applied for and gained a patent — US number 3,025,589 — for the infrared LED.

[. . .]

Follow the literature back and you end up in Britain in February 1907, with the work of Marconi assistant Henry Round, who first observed the emission of light from a crystal of silicon carbide when a current was applied to it, a phenomenon called electroluminescence. In that sense, the LED is more than 100 years old. Round, however, never wrote a report on his findings.

October 10, 2012

Macdonell on the Heights

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:50

One of my favourite Stan Rogers songs is “Macdonell on the Heights”. Here’s the history behind the song, courtesy of the Niagara 1812 Legacy Council:

John Macdonell was born in April 1785 in Scotland. At the age of seven he came with his family to Canada where at the age of 23 he became a lawyer. He later earned a seat in the legislature and in September 1811 he was appointed attorney-general.

Macdonell was not loved by all, especially William Baldwin who duelled with the attorney-general, but his position brought him closer to Isaac Brock, who asked Macdonell to serve as his aide. Macdonell was a lieutenant-colonel in the York Militia where he served as Brock’s aide with energy and poise.

During the Battle of Queenston Heights Macdonell was not far behind Brock, who had left in the early hours from Fort George to the site of the American invasion. It was not long after Brock’s failed advance up the heights that Macdonell led his own desperate charge to retake the redan battery. Macdonell’s small force did push the Americans back briefly, but a musket ball hit Macdonell’s horse, which reared up as a second musket ball struck Macdonell’s back. Macdonell was shot four times but it did not prevent him from attempting to stand and continue the attack. Fellow officers pulled the lieutenant-colonel from the battlefield as the attack failed to capture the redan battery.

It’s not the narrative

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:37

In this month’s Reason magazine, Peter Suderman has an interesting story about Barack Obama and his obsession with narrative:

Did Barack Obama ruin politics? Or did politics ruin Barack Obama? At this point, most Americans have made up their minds about the president one way or another. But even for people who think they know who the man in the Oval Office really is, it’s easy to forget who he once was.

Before running for political office, Barack Obama was a stubborn dreamer with a literary bent. Mostly he dreamed of living a better life story, even if that meant scrubbing away the blemishes of reality. Part of his appeal was the way he emerged from adversity unsullied. He was better than that. And with his help, we could be too.

That was Obama’s pitch to America. He would allow all of us to escape the mundane reality of politics, to live that better story with him, and erase the messiness of the past and present — just as he had done for himself. In Dreams from My Father, Obama’s 1995 book about his itinerant childhood and work as a community organizer in Chicago, the pre-presidential candidate recalls his grandfather’s habit of rewriting uncomfortable truths about his own history in order to produce a better future. Obama, who as a child lived with his grandparents for many years, admits to picking up the habit himself: “It was this desire of his to obliterate the past,” he writes, “this confidence in the possibility of remaking the world from whole cloth, that proved to be his most lasting patrimony.”

Obama applied that very American tradition to politics. His campaigns would be about making the world a better place — more personable, less racially charged, more united in goals and respectful in temperament — more true, in other words, to the story we all wanted to believe about America. The ugliness of politics past would lose its grip on the reimagined future.

But the power to imagine is not the power to accomplish. Vague, high-minded goals get sullied when translated into specific, practical policies. Nearly a full term of a moribund economy has turned the words hope and change into bitter punch lines. As time passes, the suspicion grows that the same narrative gift that made Obama so interesting and fresh in the mid-1990s contained the seeds of his failure as a president. Storytelling, it turns out, is no substitute for governance, and nothing ruins a promising writer faster than the practice of wielding power. As the allure of Obama’s dreams wears off, so has the allure of his presidency. Obama promised to change politics; instead, politics changed him.

Defending the rights of the accused (even when the accused are “clearly guilty”)

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Ken White doesn’t like the way the criminal justice system is criticized on the basis of “feelings”, rather than the facts. In a recent case that the media has reported on as a travesty of justice, he defends the process by which the decision was reached.

Blogger “Gideon” writes at A Public Defender and is, in fact, a public defender. That is to say, Gideon works every day under lousy conditions, inadequate funding, and impossible odds to provide a vigorous defense to people accused of crimes who can’t afford a lawyer — people who, absent vigorous representation, will be ground up by the system, guilty or innocent. God bless Gideon for that. Gideon has been waging a lonely battle to explain what Fourtin v. Connecticut actually means.

As Gideon explains at length […], prosecutors made the strange and probably incompetent tactical decision to charge Fourtin under an infrequently used subsection of the Connecticut rape statute, a subsection that only applies to sexual assault of someone who is “physically helpless.” What the Supreme Court of Connecticut found was not that “if a severely handicapped person could resist but doesn’t, its not rape.” What the Court found was that this victim — who, though severely handicapped, could move and resist — was not “physically helpless” within the meaning of the statute, which is narrowly confined to people who are “unconscious or for some other reason physically unable to communicate lack of consent.” The Court found that the evidence showed that the victim could communicate lack of consent, and thus wasn’t “physically helpless” under the statute. The Court also repeatedly criticized the prosecutor’s decision to charge the case under this particular statute (rather than, for instance, under another subsection that could have applied because the victim was so mentally impaired that she was “unable to consent to such sexual intercourse”), and failure to offer evidence of state’s latecoming theories under this statute.

I’m outraged that the prosecution made a lousy and seemingly inexplicable call. I’m outraged that someone who sexually assaulted a profoundly handicapped woman goes free because of incompetence. But I’m not outraged that the state has to prove that you’re guilty of the specific crime you’re charged with to put you in prison. That’s fundamental to due process. “Well, hell, he didn’t do what he’s charged with, but he did something else awful” is tyrannical. I’m more afraid of the state’s ability to make it up as they go along in a criminal case than I am of criminals going free. As a criminal defense attorney, I know that it would be impossible to defend clients if the government could throw on their case and then ask the judge to find a statute that fits, instead of charging defendants with a specific crime and then proving that crime. As Gideon points out, the Sixth Amendment gives you the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” against you. “You’re a criminal, we’ll figure out what statute you violated after we see how the evidence turns out at trial” is not due process.

Mark Steyn “loathes” Sesame Street

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In the National Post, Mark Steyn cuts loose on the sacred-to-American-childhood TV show (and associated toys, games, books, clothing, etc.) Sesame Street:

That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off — and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself — in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy’s performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt’s assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made.

“WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird alone,” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the President mocked Romney for “finally getting tough on Big Bird” — not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally, and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood — the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s special envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes.” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary … well, actually I am.

Is “national security” just another term for “protectionism”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

Daniel Ikenson at the Cato@Liberty blog:

Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE long have been in the crosshairs of U.S. policymakers. Rumors that the telecoms are or could become conduits for Chinese government-sponsored cyber espionage or cyber attacks on so-called critical infrastructure in the United States have been swirling around Washington for a few years. Concerns about Huawei’s alleged ties to the People’s Liberation Army were plausible enough to cause the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to recommend that President Bush block a proposed acquisition by Huawei of 3Com in 2008. Subsequent attempts by Huawei to expand in the United States have also failed for similar reasons, and because of Huawei’s ham-fisted, amateurish public relations efforts.

So it’s not at all surprising that yesterday the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, yesterday, following a nearly year-long investigation, issued its “Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE,” along with recommendations that U.S. companies avoid doing business with these firms.

But there is no smoking gun in the report, only innuendo sold as something more definitive. The most damning evidence against Huawei and ZTE is that the companies were evasive or incomplete when it came to providing answers to questions that would have revealed strategic information that the companies understandably might not want to share with U.S. policymakers, who may have the interests of their own favored U.S. telecoms in mind.

It’s not just the United States, either: Canada is also getting wary of Huawei.

The Canadian government has said that it will be invoking a “national security exemption” as it hires firms to build a secure network, hinting that Chinese telco Huawei could be excluded.

The exemption allows the government to kick out of the running any companies or nations considered a security risk, which coming in the wake of the US report earlier this week labelling Huawei and ZTE as security threats, strongly indicates they’re out of the bidding.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s top media spokesman refused to say for sure whether the government had Huawei in mind when invoking the exemption.

“The government is going to be choosing carefully in the construction of this network and it has invoked the national security exception for the building of this network,” he said, according to the Calgary Herald.

October 9, 2012

Paul Wells on “AndrewSullivanammerung”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:47

In Maclean’s, Paul “Inkless” Wells has a look at Andrew Sullivan’s most recent panic attack over Barack Obama’s re-election chances and how his debate performance makes that task seem much harder now:

The extended North American/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic in the days when paper was king and who has spent the past decade blogging, in succession, for (a) himself (b) Time magazine (c) The Atlantic Monthly (d) Tina Brown. Since 2007 Sullivan has been perhaps Barack Obama’s leading gay British Republican supporter; he wrote a 2007 Atlantic cover story explaining why Obama was “necessary” to binding up the nation’s wounds and a 2012 Newsweek cover story asserting that Obama was about to become the most significant U.S. president since Reagan. (“The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure…”) About 6,000 times he has ended blog posts on Obama with the sentence-thing “Know Hope.”

But now comes Sully’s crisis of confidence.

He watched the same debate everyone else did last week; noticed, as many did, that the incumbent had a hard time of things, and then read yesterday’s surprising Pew Center poll, which essentially showed Obama’s support collapsing so rapidly he will soon owe Mitt Romney votes. [. . .]

It is, in fact, entirely possible that Obama blew the election with a single 90-minute display of I-didn’t-know-this-would-be-on-the-exam. Certainly if he does lose, all the post-mortem tick-tocks will begin in Denver on the night of Oct. 3.

Wells also linked to Ezra Levant’s most recent article at Sun News:

Now we know why Barack Obama uses a teleprompter everywhere, even taking it once to a photo-op in an elementary school.

Now we know why he hasn’t had a press conference in months, preferring to go on entertainment shows like The View (he told his fawning interviewers he is “eye candy”) and David Letterman’s show (first question: How much do you weigh?).

We know because of the shock of last week’s presidential debate with Mitt Romney. The 60 million Americans who watched that debate had been told a hundred times that Obama was the smartest president since Jefferson, the greatest orator since Churchill. And they had been told that Mitt Romney was a heartless gazillionaire.

What they saw was the opposite, for 90 excruciating minutes. When Obama didn’t have a cue card or a teleprompter, when he couldn’t simply skip questions he didn’t like, or talk out the clock, he was a disaster.

Update: Buzzfeed has eight animated GIFs that show Andrew Sullivan’s meltdown rather cleverly.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson interviewed by Premier Guitar

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Shawn Hammond talks to two-thirds of Rush in the November issue of Premier Guitar magazine:

If there’s one band on the planet that’s made it cool for musicians to be … well, uncool, it’s Rush. Because let’s face it — the intelligent, chops-heavy prog rock that Geddy Lee (vocals/bass/keyboards), Alex Lifeson (guitars), and Neil Peart (drums/lyrics) have become synonymous with over the last 30-plus years will never completely escape the stigma of being considered overwrought, stodgy, and even nerdy.

But with 1980’s “The Spirit of Radio” — a tune that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ranked as one of the top 500 most genre-defining — the dudes raked in fame and glory with brainy, multisyllabic bashing of the very industry and medium that made their careers possible, and they did it over a backdrop of swirling pull-off licks, distorted bass, and tour de force drumming that was somehow still catchy. Their encore? The next year they pilloried modern society at large with “Tom Sawyer” — a chops-laden, darkly futuristic anthem that even hardcore deriders of prog can’t help but dig.

Today, Rush is arguably the longest running, most original, and most influential progressive rock band ever. Their influence can be heard in major bands ranging from Pantera to Smashing Pumpkins, Primus, Death Cab for Cutie, the Mars Volta, Coheed and Cambria, and countless others. And yet, through innumerable musical fads they’ve remained staunchly committed to big ideas, grand arrangements, and stellar, instantly identifiable musicianship — rich, unorthodox chording, odd-meter riffing, and ethereal solos from Lifeson, and a finger-busting mix of Jack Bruce’s beef, Jaco Pastorius’ finesse, and a funk master’s groove from Lee. But they’ve also been flexible and open-minded enough to not come across as stagnant and stubborn. In the process, they’ve managed to get more radio play than just about any of their peers, scoring bona fide hits with songs like “Fly by Night,” “Closer to the Heart,” “Freewill,” “Limelight,” and the aforementioned classics. But even when their collective open-mindedness led to sonic evolutions that didn’t sit well with some longtime fans — specifically, the synth-heavy output from 1982–1989 that seemed to push Lifeson into a more atmospheric and textural approach — the band has remained unapologetically forward-looking.

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