My regular Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week features the last of the Halloween special event coverage and some speculation on what next week’s Lost Shores content release will bring us, plus all the usual blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.
November 9, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Tomb discoveries cast light on Thracian culture
A recent discovery in Bulgaria promises to tell us more about the culture of the Getae, a powerful tribe in Thrace:
Archaeologists in Bulgaria are chuffed today to announce that golden treasures and artifacts produced by the ancient Thracians have been discovered in a subterranean tomb complex in the north of the country.
The treasures include snake-headed bracelets, a golden crown or tiara type affair, a golden horse head and piles of smaller solid gold items including rings, statuettes and buttons. They’re thought to date from the third century BC and to have been produced by the Getae, a tribe among the ancient Thracians.
[. . .]
Thracian warriors played prominent parts in many of the wars of antiquity. The peltast javelineer style of fighting was said to have originated in Thrace, gradually superseding the armoured hoplite warrior: an entire phalanx of the formidable Spartans was crushed by peltasts fighting for Athens during the Peloponnesian War, and the lightly armoured Greek/Thracian warriors are also said to have inflicted severe damage on heavy Persian cavalry.
Alexander the Great — from the neighbouring area of Macedonia — is also said to have used Thracian mercenaries in his world-spanning campaigns, and later on Thracian warriors were prominent in the armies of Rome and then the Eastern empire. In particular, the famous gladiator and rebel Spartacus had originally been a Roman auxiliary soldier from Thrace. Later on — after the fall of Rome, when the Empire was ruled from Constantinople — both the emperor Justinian and the great general Belisarius are said to have been Thracians.
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Deception and counter-deception
Deception in war reached a crescendo in the latter stages of World War 2, with the allies’ use of General George S. Patton’s imaginary First US Army Group (FUSAG) to pin German attention on the Pas de Calais for more than a month after the real D-Day landings in Normandy. In addition to direct propaganda and an extensive radio network generating fake messages to show the size of FUSAG, the allies also created entire dummy airfields and flotillas of fake landing craft to show up on German air recon photos. The fake planes, aircraft, and buildings were a key part of maintaining the fictitious threat of another, bigger invasion — which successfully kept a large German force away from the real landings.
Less well-known is that the Germans also indulged in this kind of deception:
In what could easily be the finest and boldest example of death-defying and cheeky nose-thumbing during the Second World War or any conflict for that matter, bomber and intruder crews of the Royal Air Force and USAAF are reputed to have bombed the Luftwaffe’s decoy airfields and dummy aircraft, not with high explosives or incendiaries, but with nothing more than dummy bombs made of wood, and painted with the smug remark “Wood for Wood”… all just to make a point.
Throughout all theatres of war, during the Second World War, from China to Holland to Kent, air forces, phsy-ops units and logistics people constructed dummy targets such as airfields, factories, truck parks, convoys and even ships, out of wood, canvas, burlap, or inflatable rubber. The decoy airfields were often populated with dummy aircraft and vehicles of such high quality, that even low flying recce aircraft with photographic equipment would have hard time telling the difference between the dummies and the real thing. The decoy airfields and dummy aircraft served several purposes simultaneously. They confused snooping enemy aircraft and hence planners as to the number of aircraft available to the opposing forces as well as to their displacement. They provided decoy targets for enemy bombers which, if attacked would prevent real aircraft from being destroyed. Often, these airfields were built near real airports in the path of attacking aircraft in the hopes that they would then drop their bombs and strafe the dummies, thereby saving the real aircraft.
H/T to Roger Henry for the original link.
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November 8, 2012
Bless their hearts
I used to work for a company that had offices in Tallahassee, Florida. Over several years, both on the phone and during on-site visits, I think I heard at least half of these phrases used in earnest.
H/T to Radley Balko for the link.
Has Stephen Harper begun “starving the beast”?
In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon says that Republicans should carefully observe the way Stephen Harper has gone about his goal of reducing the size of the government:
The “starve the beast” strategy works like this:
- Cut taxes.
- Wait until the resulting budgetary deficit becomes a problem important enough to solve.
- Cut spending in order to deal with the budget crisis.
- Go to 1.
The goal of this exercise is to steadily reduce the size of government. The idea has its origins in the US conservative movement, but US conservatives haven’t had much success in implementing it. Steps 1 and 2 work as advertised, but politicians can never get the hang of the third part.
[. . .]
Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is quietly implementing a Canadian “starve the beast” strategy, and not without success. Unlike the Republicans, the Conservatives have actually reached stage 3. Step 1 was the reduction to the GST, which created a structural deficit. After a certain period of denial, step 3 was reached in the austerity measures announced in the 2012 budget.
Federal revenues have been held below 15 per cent of GDP for four years in a row, well below the levels we’ve seen in the last fifty years. And the outlook is for more of the same.
Republicans are entering a rebuilding phase. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them start paying close attention to how the Canadian Conservatives have managed to pull off the “starve the beast” trick that always seems to elude U.S. conservatives.
QotD: The English Gentleman
The idea of a gentleman was a more inclusive one than it sounds to modern ears. One of its greatest advantages was that you could define it so as to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman, without possessing any of the social attributes which a gentleman might have: there was no need to possess a coat of arms, or a country estate, or engage in field sports, or wear evening dress. At least since Chaucer’s time, there had been a distinction between the social meaning of the word, and the moral. It was evident that well-born people, who ought to know how to behave like gentlemen, did not always do so, while others sometimes did.
Philip Mason, whose perceptive study, The English Gentleman, was published in 1982, argues that “the desire to be a gentleman” runs through and illuminates English history from the time of Chaucer until the early 20th century. He suggests that “for most of the 19th century and until the Second World War” the idea of the gentleman “provided the English with a second religion, one less demanding than Christianity. It influenced their politics. It influenced their system of education; it made them endow new public schools and raise the status of old grammar schools. It inspired the lesser landed gentry as well as the professional and middle classes to give their children an upbringing of which the object was to make them ladies and gentlemen, even if only a few of them also became scholars.”
Andrew Gimson, “Strange Death of the English Gentleman”, Standpoint, 2012-09
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The Swiss children of Malthus
In sp!ked, Patrick Hayes points out the odd way that Malthusians and xenophobic far-right political groups converge:
For greens, the ends will always justify the means when it comes to saving the planet. In the UK, they have opportunistically latched themselves on to left-wing movements to try to gain purchase with a broader public. But, as Swiss campaign group Ecology and Population (EcoPop) has demonstrated, in an attempt to pursue their Malthusian goals, greens can be equally happy tapping into the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far right.
In a stunt last week, members of EcoPop carried dozens of cardboard boxes into the Swiss chancellery which contained 120,700 certified signatures calling for immigration into Switzerland to be capped at 0.2 per cent of the resident population. Under Swiss law, this means that a referendum will now be held on the proposal. Such a move trumps even the efforts of the far-right Swiss People’s Party, which has long lobbied for greater immigration controls.
But these greens aren’t mobilising for an immigration clampdown with banners claiming ‘keep the darkies out’ as right-wing groups have done in the past. Nor are they using dodgy, discredited scientific arguments to justify racial superiority, wielding books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of The Great Race for evidence.
No, instead EcoPop delivers its demands for immigration curbs carrying a banner asking: ‘How many people can the Earth tolerate?’ The group’s members use the (equally dodgy and discredited) Malthusian science of population growth and babble on about our ‘finite planet’. And they have reportedly been strongly influenced by the theories of US Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.
EcoPop bends over backwards to claim that it is not singling out particular races when advocating its policies. According to the BBC, it claims to be ‘opposed to all forms of xenophobia and racism’. But, the group says, ‘Switzerland must limit immigration to avoid urbanisation and to preserve agricultural land’.
You could almost believe that EcoPop is just a bunch of backward-thinking NIMBYish Luddites wanting to stop a flood of immigrants from destroying what it sees as a rural idyll — until you see what the group has tacked on to its proposed referendum for immigration caps. EcoPop slipped an additional clause into the referendum calling for a tenth of all foreign aid to be used ‘for birth-control measures abroad’. (It’s highly questionable how many people would have signed a petition for that alone.)
So it’s not enough to keep foreigners out of Switzerland, then, it’s also necessary to keep them from breeding too much in their own countries as well. And the fact that most of the aid will go towards stopping poor black and brown families from breeding too much suggests that if they’re not intentionally being racist, then EcoPop’s members should really think very hard about how they come across.
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November 7, 2012
Scotland: sing an offensive song, go to prison
Kevin Rooney looks at the sad state of free speech (or should that be free singing?) in Scotland:
Imagine the scene: a young man is led away in handcuffs to begin a prison sentence as his mother is left crying in the courtroom. He is 19 years old, has a good job, has no previous convictions, and has never been in trouble before. These facts cut no ice with the judge, however, as the crime is judged so heinous that only a custodial sentence is deemed appropriate. The young man in question was found guilty of singing a song that mocked and ridiculed a religious leader and his followers.
So where might this shocking story originate? Was it Iran? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Perhaps it was Russia, a variation of the Pussy Riot saga, without the worldwide publicity? No, the country in question is Scotland and the young man is a Rangers fan. He joined in with hundreds of his fellow football fans in singing ‘offensive songs’ which referred to the pope and the Vatican and called Celtic fans ‘Fenian bastards’.
Such songs are part and parcel of the time-honoured tradition of Rangers supporters. And I have yet to meet a Celtic fan who has been caused any harm or suffering by such colourful lyrics. Yet in sentencing Connor McGhie to three months in a young offenders’ institution, the judge stated that ‘the extent of the hatred [McGhie] showed took my breath away’. He went on: ‘Anybody who participates in this disgusting language must be stopped.’
Several things strike me about this court case. For a start, if Rangers fans singing rude songs about their arch rivals Celtic shocks this judge to the core, I can only assume he does not get out very much or knows little of life in Scotland. Not that his ignorance of football culture is a surprise — the chattering classes have always viewed football-related banter with contempt. But what is new about the current climate is that in Scotland, the middle-class distaste for the behaviour of football fans has become enshrined in law.
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Reason.tv: The Wildly Unpopular Status Quo Is Ratified!
“After four years of a crappy economy, bipartisan dissatisfaction with bailout economics, and populous revolts on the right and the left, we are seeing basically the exact same government we had on November 6th,” says Reason magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch. “The status quo, which has never been less popular, has just been ratified.”
And yet, says Welch, big wins on marijuana legalization and gay marriage give limited government types a lot to be happy about.
Update: Jacob Sullum on the victories for both same-sex marriage and marijuana normalization:
Tonight was a good night for gay marriage as well as marijuana. Voters approved ballot measures legalizing same-sex marriage in three states by similar margins: 53 to 47 in Maine, 52 to 48 in Maryland and Washington. In Minnesota an initiative that would amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage
is tied right now, with 75 percent of precincts reporting[was defeated 51-48].This is the first time gay marriage has been legalized by popular vote. In the six other states where it is legal (Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont), the policy was enacted by the legislature or compelled by a court decision. By contrast, most of the state laws allowing medical use of marijuana — another one of which passed tonight in Massachusetts — have been enacted by voters. (Colorado and Washington both had such laws before broadening the policy to include recreational use.)
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Rand Paul: Republicans gave up 150 electoral college votes before the campaign started
Published on Sep 15, 2012 by VitacoreVision
Rand Paul suggests if the GOP wants to win over places like California, they will need to support more freedom in social issues and embrace a more Libertarian stance.
H/T to Peter Jaworski (retweeting original Moose of Reason tweet) for the link.
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No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in
L. Neil Smith explains one of the most significant reasons that the most recent US election didn’t seem to offer much in the way of choice between the two major party candidates:
No matter how hard Productive Class folks may work at trying to put good people into office, people who respect the Bill of Rights, as well as our dignity as individuals, every single time, we end up with a non-choice between two sets of rapacious gangsters, government parasites and their corporate lookalikes who, differing only in the excuses they use to justify it, see us only as cattle, to be herded, branded, milked, and slaughtered. On the rare occasion that someone decent pokes his head up — Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul — it’s cut off by the socialist mass media, pack animals who give prostitution a bad name.
Beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, the game is rigged, with people who actually work for a living assigned the role of perpetual losers, expected to bow down to Authority no matter how ludicrous its demands, required to observe the letter and the spirit of the law no matter how often, or how outrageously it’s flouted by the insatiably power-hungry. Those who object — especially if they get together to air their grievances — are labeled rednecks, racists, or terrorists by the socialist mass media, depending on what’s in fashion at the time. The truth has no place in this process, only the virtual reality created by the socialist mass media at the behest of their thuggish clientele.
To make things even worse, members of the Productive Class find themselves in the role of shuttlecock in a game of political badminton that has been going on for two centuries. Fed up with the failures and excesses of, say, the Republicans, voters will replace them with Democrats, only to be reminded, in short order, that Democrats suffer failures and commit excesses of their own. Four years after that, experiencing political amnesia again, they put Republicans back in power, when what they ought to do is dump “both” major parties (which are really only one entity, the party of endless lies and coercion) altogether.
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November 6, 2012
US election news
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/265935840763604993
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/265935968345944064
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/265936054031351809
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China’s economic statistics
If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been rather skeptical about the official statistics reported by Chinese government and media sources. I’ve been rather more skeptical about western media outlets that depend on these statistics as if they were issued by the US, Canadian, or British governments — China does not have a stable and transparent way of gathering or compiling economic data, but even more to the point they have significant political reasons for using the reported statistics for political reasons.
In Forbes, Tim Worstall looks at retail car sales in China’s luxury market for a recent example:
For China is a large enough place, and different enough, that you can spin the same statistics any way that you want to. For example, take a couple from today’s new about car sales in the country. Apparently you can now buy the top of the line Bentley on same day service, no wait for delivery […]
The jump in sales was 30% for China. So are car sales slowing down? Or not? Is BMW’s stonkingly good quarter just because they have been filling the dealers’ lots? Is Bentley’s bad one because they did that last quarter? Are BMW counting deliveries to dealers, as the official statistics do, or are they counting true sales?
This is one of the problems with looking at Chinese economic statistics. The place doesn’t necessarily compile all the numbers the same way we do: nor does it necessarily compile them in a consistent manner across the country.
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It’s official: Morris Dancers are “offensive”
Well, they’re “offensive” to a couple of Police Constables in Surrey, anyway:
A group of Morris Dancers were ordered to stop performing in the middle of a routine after police received a complaint that their dancing was ‘offensive’.
The 15-strong group of English folk dancers from the respected Wild Hunt Bedlam Morris troupe were told to ‘stop making a din’ during a performance outside The White Lion pub in Warlingham, Surrey.
The folk dancers were performing in spooky costumes for a free Halloween show outside the 15th century pub to an audience of around 30 customers, but were cut short after just six dances.
The group had planned at least 10 other dances, but were interrupted by two police officers who told them to ‘down’ their handkerchiefs and sticks and ‘move on’ as they were causing a noise nuisance.
Despite pleading with the officers to continue their routine – which includes songs like Thor’s Hammer, Maiden Castle and Half a Farthing Candle, they were told to leave in the ‘interest of community relations’ last Tuesday.
Apparently the campaign against the evil Morris Dancers has been going on for a while:
In August last year a group of Morris dancers from the Slubbing Billys troupe were booted out of the Swan and Three Cygnets pub in Durham after a barmaid said the bells on their shoes broke the bar’s music ban.
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
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Encouraging and exhorting didn’t work, so now they’re trying to shame you into voting
At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports on the latest attempt to get out the vote:
It’s election day. While your actual ballot is (supposed to be) secret, a lot of people don’t know that whether or not you voted at all is public information. A few weeks back, On the Media covered some ways that campaigns try to get out the vote and looked at some research suggesting that letters to people with a “voter report card” showing when they’ve voted in the past was a somewhat effective way of shaming people into voting. An even more extreme example was given as well: a letter that specifically shows how often your neighbors have voted. In the piece, OTM producer Chris Neary noted that while such things were effective in the lab, people shouldn’t be expecting such letters for real, because, while they may be effective in getting out the vote, they also freak people out on privacy grounds, and no campaign wants to risk freaking people out:
And, by the way Brooke, you’ll never get that last letter. Campaigns hate to send out anything that prompts virulent hate mail in return, and one of those researchers got some of that mail.
Except… Neary has now posted an apology blog post after some OTM listeners reached out to share exactly the kinds of mailers discussed. While campaigns might shy away from such tactics, apparently third party organizations read the exact same research and took it to heart — as they’re a lot less worried about hate mail
All of the various political parties, pressure groups, “public interest” organizations and the rest are desperate to ramp up voter participation in the election. It’s frequenly pointed out that voters are apathetic and the reduced percentage of voters over the last thirty-plus years is trotted out as evidence of that. However, as Katherine Mangu-Ward points out in this month’s issue of Reason, for the vast majority of Americans Your Vote Doesn’t Count:
Let’s start with the basics: Your vote will almost certainly not determine the outcome of any public election. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories regarding rigged elections or malfunctioning voting machines — although both of those things have happened and will happen again. I’m not talking about swing states or Supreme Court power grabs or the weirdness of the Electoral College. I’m talking about pure, raw math.
In all of American history, a single vote has never determined the outcome of a presidential election. And there are precious few examples of any other elections decided by a single vote. A 2001 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter looked at 56,613 contested congressional and state legislative races dating back to 1898. Of the 40,000 state legislative elections they examined, encompassing about 1 billion votes cast, only seven were decided by a single vote (two were tied). A 1910 Buffalo contest was the lone single-vote victory in a century’s worth of congressional races. In four of the 10 ultra-close campaigns flagged in the paper, further research by the authors turned up evidence that subsequent recounts unearthed margins larger than the official record initially suggested.
The numbers just get more ridiculous from there. In a 2012 Economic Inquiry article, Columbia University political scientist Andrew Gelman, statistician Nate Silver, and University of California, Berkeley, economist Aaron Edlin use poll results from the 2008 election cycle to calculate that the chance of a randomly selected vote determining the outcome of a presidential election is about one in 60 million. In a couple of key states, the chance that a random vote will be decisive creeps closer to one in 10 million, which drags voters into the dubious company of people gunning for the Mega-Lotto jackpot. The authors optimistically suggest that even with those terrible odds, you may still choose to vote because “the payoff is the chance to change national policy and improve (one hopes) the lives of hundreds of millions, compared to the alternative if the other candidate were to win.” But how big does that payoff have to be to make voting worthwhile?
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