His Majesty the King can generate all kinds of euphemisms about how and why we’re running up our nation’s debt: “investing in the future”, “borrowing from ourselves”, “betting on the American worker”. What we’re really doing is stealing from our children and generations yet unborn. It might be different if we were actually building a better world for them to live in, but we’re not: we’re squandering the money like a drunken sailor on a three-day liberty. We’ve pissed all our own money away, and now we’re pissing theirs away too, and on trifles. Vacations, new cars, fancy dinners, retirement living that we didn’t save enough money for. It’s child abuse of the rankest and worst sort. We’re selling our own children and grand-children into debtor’s prison. They’re going to hate us for it, and they have a right to.
We’re spending our children’s money without giving them any say or vote in the process. We are promising their future labor, their future wealth, their future lives, to back up our own foolish debts. We are making their future lives meaner and smaller and more constrained because we could not govern ourselves properly. It makes me angry. It makes me furious. It makes me want to apologize to everyone under the age of twenty or so for what we are doing to them. We would do well to think about this: the young people will not simply obligingly labor forever as beasts of burden, content to pay the debts run up by their foolish elders. Sooner or later they’ll grow wise, and tell the greybeards to go pound sand. There’ll be a reckoning, and the geezers aren’t going to like it one bit.
Monty, “The Sportsman’s Guide to DOOM”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2013-02-18
February 18, 2013
Did you know … that Wikipedia has an obsession over Gibraltar?
I’d noticed one or two of these “Did you know…” entries on the Wikipedia site, but I didn’t realize just how much of a fixation the online encyclopedia has for “The Rock”:
Last October Wikipedia‘s supreme leader Jimmy Wales called for a “strong moratorium” on the online project’s strange obsession with promoting Gibraltar — even suggesting a five-year ban on Gibraltar-loving Did You Know… posts on Wikipedia‘s front page.
“I think it is clear that there should be a strong moratorium on any Gibraltar-related DYKs on the front page of Wikipedia. I would recommend a total ban on them for five years, but that might be too extreme. I support that we get wider community attention on the issue,” he wrote in October last year.
The moratorium was opposed by Wiki editors but they did agree on certain guidelines. Every Gibraltar DYK has to be reviewed by two reviewers to check for conflict-of-interest issues or promotionalism, and no more than one Gibraltarpedia hook is allowed in one a day. Also, Bamkin (user name Victuallers) is not allowed to create or nominate Gibraltar-related articles to DYK.
Jimmy Wales speaks, and Wikipedia leaps into action. In December, they restricted themselves to a mere nine Gibraltar DYK entries. January saw 12 Gibraltarpedia links. As of today, there have been six Gibraltar-related posts in February.
Opening the food testing can of worms: “We don’t test for hedgehog either”
Tim Worstall on some of the issues with demands that all British beef for human consumption be tested for horsemeat:
Now let’s turn to that meat problem. We’re going to test something to make sure that it is indeed what it says. Most of the time, usually, we’d go looking for beef DNA and on finding it say, yup, that’s beef.
But now we’re talking about trace amounts of other species. Some of this horse contamination is someone deliberately substituting, yes. But a lot of it, those trace amounts, is someone not cleaning the pipes between species being processed. Or the knives even. Which leads us to something of a problem.
How many species do we test for? Some minced beef… or pink slime perhaps. Do we test for beef and horse? For beef, horse, mutton, pork, chicken, duck, goose? What about rat and mouse? For I’ll guarantee you that however much people try there will often be the odd molecule of either one of those in there. Sparrow? That’s more of a problem with grain processing but still.
For example, one lovely story about vegetarianism. Those (umm, OK, some) who have moved from the sub-continent to the UK. They carry on eating the (possibly Hindu caste based) vegetarian diet they are used to. And they start falling prey to all sorts of dietary deficiencies. Anaemia, there have even been reports of kwashikor (a protein deficiency). The grains and the pulses of the sub-continent have rather more insect and other residue in them than our more modern processing and storage systems provide.
People don’t test for hedgehog DNA in meat supplies, no. But how many species should they test for?
Chelyabinsk meteor provides impetus for enhanced detection network
Along with all the jokes about the meteor that streaked over Siberia last week, there has been some useful re-orientation of thought about the demonstrated need for better detection tools:
For decades, scientists have been on the lookout for killer objects from outer space that could devastate the planet. But warnings that they lacked the tools to detect the most serious threats were largely ignored, even as skeptics mocked the worriers as Chicken Littles.
No more. The meteor that rattled Siberia on Friday, injuring hundreds of people and traumatizing thousands, has suddenly brought new life to efforts to deploy adequate detection tools, in particular a space telescope that would scan the solar system for dangers.
A group of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who helped build thriving companies like eBay, Google and Facebook has already put millions of dollars into the effort and saw Friday’s shock wave as a turning point in raising hundreds of millions more.
“Wouldn’t it be silly if we got wiped out because we weren’t looking?” said Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive who leads the detection effort. “This is a wake-up call from space. We’ve got to pay attention to what’s out there.”
Astronomers know of no asteroids or comets that pose a major threat to the planet. But NASA estimates that fewer than 10 percent of the big dangers have been discovered.
February 17, 2013
A shocking, lurid tale of depravity that transfixed Victorian London
In History Today, Richard Canning reviews a new book on the trial of Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka Mrs Fanny Graham and Miss Stella Boulton in 1871:
McKenna provides what is certainly the definitive account of the Boulton/Park story, drawn not only from contemporary journalism but also from the full legal transcript, a miraculous survivor housed in Kew’s National Archives. It is a miserable tale, if leavened both by McKenna’s dramatic verve and, during the show trial held in Westminster Hall, by Fanny and Stella’s black humour. The establishment account – that the pair’s persistent cross-dressing importuning was a scandal to public morals that must be stopped – soon breaks down. McKenna shows clearly how the men were effectively set up and, to some degree, even entrapped.
Police confidence in pressing the serious charge of ‘conspiracy to solicit, induce, procure and endeavour to persuade persons unknown to commit buggery’ (as opposed to the minor offence of outraging public decency) was nonetheless misplaced. Buggery had until lately incurred the death penalty and still carried a lifelong penal sentence. No such charge had been brought for 240 years. The problem which attended the endless, farcical medical examinations of Boulton and Park reflected sodomy’s millennial history as the nameless or invisible crime. Few Victorian doctors could claim to have seen evidence of the extreme anal dilation which purportedly occurred after the ‘insertion of a foreign body’. Of the half dozen who inspected the pair – both inveterate sodomites, as McKenna concedes – only one remained certain that the corporeal evidence supported conviction. They were acquitted and the notion that ‘the impurities of Continental cities’ had reached London was rooted in legal terms for a quarter-century – if paradoxically seeming somehow to be affirmed.
McKenna lays bare a fascinating tapestry of interrelated personal histories, only partially capable of reconstruction. Frederick’s elder brother Harry, already twice disgraced, was hiding in Scotland under an assumed name. Their father, a judge, was urgently shipped off to South Africa during the trial of his younger son. Impressively, Frederick’s mother – amusingly a literal ‘Mary Ann’ – took to the stand to defend his moral character. So successful was she that the identification of Frederick/’Fanny’ as a theatrical mother’s boy exonerated him entirely from the imputation of vice.
It turns out it actually was the Burmese equivalent of Al Capone’s vault
Back in early January, the archaeological dig for buried WW2 Spitfires was announced:
This could be cool. Or it could be the Burmese equivalent of Al Capone’s vault: buried “pristine” WW2 Spitfires is.gd/WkI5NC
— Nicholas Russon (@nrusson) January 4, 2013
Then, the doubts began to grow:
Uh oh: starting look like we _do_ have a Burmese version of Al Capone’s vault… no buried Spitfires discovered yet. is.gd/u3krnU
— Nicholas Russon (@nrusson) January 18, 2013
And now, even the sponsoring organization says there are no buried Spitfires after all:
A global video gaming company that funded a high-profile hunt for dozens of World War II-era British fighters in Myanmar has some bad news for aviation enthusiasts: It says none of the legendary planes are buried in the Southeast Asian country.
Excavation teams carrying out surveys on the ground, however, said Saturday that they would not give up the search.
The hunt for the lost planes was launched amid hope that as many as 140 rare Spitfires were hidden in crates in pristine condition in three locations in Myanmar.
But the Belarusian video gaming company Wargaming.net, which had backed the venture, said in a statement late Friday that the planes were never even delivered to the country by Allied forces as the war drew to a close nearly 70 years ago.
“The Wargaming team now believes, based on clear documentary evidence, as well as the evidence from the fieldwork, that no Spitfires were delivered in crates and buried” in Myanmar between 1945 and 1946, the statement said.
I’d been rather doubtful of the story from the start — even though it would have been awesomely cool to find a stash of Spitfires.
Money talks, fading historical memories edition
The British army’s officer training college at Sandhurst (think “West Point” in the American context) has invited a lot of criticism for this decision:
Britain’s top military academy, Sandhurst, has come under fire for renaming a sports hall commemorating a First World War battle after the King of Bahrain.
The Mons Hall — named after the 1914 battle where thousands died — will have its name changed to honour the Bahraini monarch who has given millions in funding to the Army’s officer training college.
The building will now be called King Hamad Hall and will reopen next month after being refurbished thanks to a £3 million donation from the king, who is the patron of the Sandhurst Foundation but is known for brutally repressing demonstrators at home.
Sandhurst has also accepted a £15 million donation from the United Arab Emirates to build a new accommodation block, raising questions about the college’s links with authoritarian Gulf states accused of human rights abuses.
Critics say the Army is betraying the soldiers who gave their lives and that Bahrain and the UAE are trying to avert criticism of their regimes by buying silence with donations.
The 1914 Battle of Mons was the first major battle of the war. Against overwhelming odds, the British Army inflicted 5,000 casualties on the Germans. At least 1,600 British troops were killed.
The case of the over-extended copyright
In this story, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson encounter a true mystery: why the heirs of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are still able to pressure publishers for licensing fees long after the original stories should have been fully in the public domain:
It isn’t often one gets a ringside seat at a legal-literary battle royal, but it would seem that we’re about to bear witness to some activity in that particular area.
Of course, you’ll recall that recent legal battles in England have revolved around Undershaw, Conan Doyle’s home for about a decade that included when he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles. [. . .] But this is wholly different.
The noted Sherlockian scholar, Baker Street Irregular and prominent attorney Leslie Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library and The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship, to name a few, has filed a civil lawsuit against the Conan Doyle Estate to determine that the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are in fact in the public domain.
Currently, the so-called estate undertakes high-handed legal action to levy royalties and other payments from authors who use the characters in their own works. This is despite the fact that there are only 10 stories in the entire Canon that are still under copyright protection (in the United States). Klinger, for one, will not stand for this bullying, and has formally filed suit and issued a press release.
H/T to Tim Harford (and Cory Doctorow) for the link.
February 16, 2013
Scott Feschuk challenges your detection skills
In his Maclean’s column, Scott Feschuk wants to see how perceptive you are:
Looking for a fun getaway? Here are five theme cruises. Four of them you can book right now. The other? I made it up. Try to guess which one. (For the answer, scroll down past the end of the column.)
The Wizard Cruise. “Imagine!” the website says. “Imagine 600 Harry Potter fanatics, dressed in their finest wizard robes and brandishing magic wands, descending upon a modern luxury liner.” Do you have that image in your head? Now imagine all of the other passengers pointing and laughing. Imagine the three female “wizards” on board getting tired of hearing the same pickup line: “Wanna pet my hippogriff?” Imagine quidditch being a letdown because the snitch is a beach ball and a muggle keeps deflating your water wings.
Listen: I’m not saying this cruise is likely to attract a homely group of passengers, but before the voyage there will be a brief pause as the ship is christened the Self-Love Boat.
Nova Scotia Islands
I got a press release to let me know that “Nova Scotia Islands” will be shown on CBC this Sunday. It looks interesting:
Nova Scotia Islands will have its world broadcast premiere on Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 12 Noon on CBC TV’s Land & Sea.
Islands are part of the geography and history of the Maritimes, nowhere more so than Nova Scotia. Jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, there are more than 3,800 islands that lie scattered along nearly 5,000 miles of coastline.
Nova Scotia Islands is a half hour documentary that explores some of the most interesting islands in the province, their little known histories, and in some cases their uncertain futures.
February 15, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. We got a bit more information on what will be in the February patch, including a new PvP map and some intriguing new guild missions. All that plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
