Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2013

Vikings storm the Cassel

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:43

The Minnesota Vikings have signed former Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Matt Cassel to a two-year contract:

While you were waiting on the Vikings to sign a wide receiver like Greg Jennings, the NFL quarterback carousel just kept spinning.

Matt Cassel’s butt probably still smarts from where the door hit him on the way out of Kansas City — it hasn’t even been a full day since he was released by the Chiefs. Of course the signing of Alex Smith made Cassel expendable and expensive, which is always a bad combination. (The Chiefs also signed Chase Daniel to a three-year contract just to make sure the writing was on the Cassel wall, pun intended.)

[. . .]

Before you start screaming at me, I know that Cassel’s play has often been as consistent and odorous as an infant’s diaper since his breakout season in 2008 with the Patriots. I’m not going to argue with that. However, he’s coming to a team that just saw Joe Webb start a playoff game. I shouldn’t have to tell you that this tragedy must never happen again. Webb had his shot at backup quarterback and it didn’t work out in spectacular fashion. The Vikings needed a new backup to Christian Ponder, plain and simple.

Steve Chapman on modern-day Puritans

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

They haven’t disappeared, they’ve just changed topics:

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can’t be created and can’t be destroyed — it can only be changed from one form into another. The same holds true of the puritanical impulse.

Puritanism in the historical sense is as dead as the Salem witches. The religious group that settled in New England outlawed theater, rejected any form of sex except marital intercourse, banned celebration of Christmas and spent hours in church listening to horrifying depictions of Hell.

[. . .]

But the underlying motive is to enforce one model of acceptable behavior on everyone. Obesity is commonly regarded as a grave personal failing, an abdication of healthy restraint and abstinence. Some of the virtuous feel entitled to demand virtue of all.

Sound like anyone who landed at Plymouth Rock? Truth is, sexual puritans can make equally plausible arguments on the practical need to regulate the exercise of bedroom behavior, which has major implications for both health and government budgets.

The scare stories about increasing antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

In sp!ked, Robin Walsh debunks some of the scare factor from recent reports about antibiotic resistant diseases and the looming pandemic:

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January — a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

Toronto school board deploys police to intimidate bloggers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Arnie Lemaire, who blogs at Blazing Cat Fur is becoming a bother to the great and the good at the Toronto District School Board. After a recent comment on his blog, the TDSB sent police officers to his door:

Can writing a sarcastic but clearly tame blog comment really land two cops at your doorstep?

It happened to Blazingcatfur blogger Arnie Lemaire Wednesday for musing “OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective.”

He’s, quite rightfully, upset about it.

But, often critical of the Toronto District School Board and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Lemaire said he will not back down from efforts to “intimidate” him.

“Dear TDSB, You Can’t Silence Me,” was a headline on the blazingcatfur.blogspot in response.

But, what they clearly can do, is bring in the police to investigate.

In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany.

Update: As Mark Steyn puts it “Nobody Expects the Toronto District School Board Inquisition…“

It seems a wee bit over-sensitive for a school board that promotes murderous goons like Che Guevara and cop-killers like the Black Panthers as role models to its young charges to get its knickers in a twist over a blog post. But, of course, for leftie social engineers, the glamor of the revolutionary aesthetic is mostly a useful cover for inculcating a bovine, unquestioning statist compliance from which no deviation is permitted. There was barely any pretense by the cops that there was a legal justification for what happened yesterday; it was just a friendly warning: “Nice blog ya got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.“

One of the most disquieting trends in western Europe is the state’s increasingly open intimidation of those who dissent from the official ideology. Sad to see it on this side of the Atlantic.

Google Reader to be scrapped

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

I started using Google Reader about a year and a half ago. It quickly became an invaluable part of my online toolkit. Yesterday, Google announced that it was going to be dropping the service. Charles Stross posted this as his reaction to the awful news, and I feel very much the same way:

Reason.tv: Matt Ridley on How Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet

Filed under: Environment, Food, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and other books, dropped by Reason‘s studio in Los Angeles last month to talk about a curious global trend that is just starting to receive attention. Over the past three decades, our planet has gotten greener!

Even stranger, the greening of the planet in recent decades appears to be happening because of, not despite, our reliance on fossil fuels. While environmentalists often talk about how bad stuff like CO2 causes bad things to happen like global warming, it turns out that the plants aren’t complaining.

March 13, 2013

Garneau throws in the towel, leading to the inevitable coronation of Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:55

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells would like to welcome you all to the Justin Trudeau era, ready or not:

Marc Garneau dropped out of the Liberal leadership contest because he is not a fool. The poll numbers he released, if anywhere near accurate, would have led to futile humiliation. He would have lost badly and then been asked to rally to the new leader. He is an engineer, so he found a more elegant solution. He is rallying now to avoid losing later.

Garneau had spent several weeks trying to thread a needle he must have found annoying: remind everyone that his c.v. is superior to Trudeau’s, while not saying it so loudly that he would just get Liberals angry at him. He managed to get a fair number of Liberals angry anyway, without putting a dent in Trudeau. He must have wanted to shout it from the roofs. He earned his engineering doctorate before Trudeau turned two. He rose to high Navy rank the way one does, by putting in thousands of hours. He hurt himself in politics by doing what so many backseat drivers insist good citizens should do: put in a full life in a useful career, then move into politics when you’re ready to contribute. That almost never works. There is a reason lifers usually do better than late arrivers. Garneau first ran for Parliament in 2006, the year 13 Liberal years in power ended. His timing has not improved since.

Follow-up on the LAPD’s pickup truck shooting spree

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Remember this gem of a story from last month? At the time, Jon (my former virtual landlord) strongly suggested I park my Toyota Tacoma in the garage just to avoid being targeted by random police “marksmen”.

Pickup shooting by LAPD

Here’s the follow-up that only makes the story that much more ridiculous:

“LAPD and Galpin Ford wanted [the women] to pose for a photo opportunity and pay income tax on the truck,” the NBC report reads, citing Jonas. “The women no longer want the truck after they were told they needed to fill out a 1099 form for the donation.”

For those of you who don’t know that a 1099 form is, it’s for tax form for “miscellaneous income.”

“You tried to murder the woman, now you’re telling her she can’t have a four-wheel drive, you’re telling her she can’t sell it and you’ve got to be taxed on it?” Jonas said. “How would anyone react to that?”

“Jonas plans on filing a government claim, which is a precursor to any lawsuit filed against a government agency. He said he felt the truck was being touted as a ‘reward or prize’ instead of a sincere gesture by the LAPD,” NBC 4 News notes:

I can’t improve on the comment Jon sent along with this link: “At this rate, I am surprised that the LAPD has not tried to bill the women for the 100+ rounds of ammunition.”

North Korea welcomes the new President of South Korea with the usual polite and restrained rhetoric

Filed under: Asia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

…that is, they insulted her from the get-go:

A lengthy statement attributed to a spokesman of the Armed Forces Ministry said South Korean officials were engaging in a round of “warmongering” orchestrated by the “poisonous swish” of the president’s skirt.

The statement did not actually use Park’s name or title, referring to her only as the current “owner” of the presidential Blue House in Seoul.

“Swish of the skirt” (or “chima baram“) is a common, derogatory Korean term used to criticise women seen as overly bossy or domineering.

North Korea’s propaganda machine had slammed Park repeatedly during the presidential campaign, warning that she would adopt the dictatorial methods of her father, the late military strongman Park Chung-Hee.

The problem isn’t media bias, it’s failure at ordinary journalism

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

In the Huffington Post, Steven Greenhut discusses the old conservative hobby horse of “media bias” and suggests the problem isn’t bias at all:

In my talks to conservative bloggers and activists who want to understand and influence the media, I downplay the “liberal bias” meme. Sure, most reporters I’ve encountered in my years working for newspapers have a liberal worldview that influences their story selection and coverage. But most are reasonably fair and professional, so I encourage conservatives to try engagement before vilification as they pitch their story lines to reporters.

But my recent experience on the receiving end of a series of supposed exposes has left me rethinking my tendency to cut fellow journalists some slack. I’ve been appalled by the shoddy reporting techniques used to try to embarrass the organization where I work — frustrated by reporters who don’t get the other side of the story and who seem uninterested in investigating anything, but merely want to play a game of “gotcha.”

I’ve been saddened to watch notable publications — the Guardian and Columbia Journalism Review, in particular — republish the hyperbolic reports of left-wing activist groups without bothering to interview the subject of the investigation before publication or doing basic fact-checking or even allowing a rebuttal.

My beef isn’t with these publications’ ideology or biases — bias is an inescapable part of being human — but with their lack of standards and ethics.

Argentinian president derides Falkland Islanders as “squatters”

Filed under: Americas, Britain — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

I figured the Argentine government would brush off the overwhelming result of the Falkland Islands referendum once it became clear that the result would not flatter Argentinian egos:

In her first public comment on the referendum, the outspoken president dismissed the vote as a “parody” and thanked Argentinians for their “monolithic opposition”.

She said the referendum, where residents voted in favour of remaining a British overseas territory, was “as if a group of squatters had voted on whether to continue to occupy a building”.

Speaking at an event at the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires, she added: “We reaffirm our commitment to dialogue in accordance with the UN.

“To achieve a solution that also included the interests of those who live on our Malvinas islands.”

She quoted British Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire as saying that the referendum result didn’t change the situation “from a legal point of view”.

The vote wasn’t even close, with only three votes for the “No” option out of 1,517 total votes cast.

March 12, 2013

Vikings part company with Antoine Winfield

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:27

I’m a bit shocked by this one. Antoine Winfield has been a pillar of the Vikings defence since he arrived and still had one year to go on his current contract. He is, to put it mildly, popular with the fans. Here’s the brief report from Tom Pelissero:

Antoine Winfield is done with the Minnesota Vikings.

The veteran cornerback was informed on Monday afternoon he’ll be released, an NFL source said.

Winfield was due $7.25 million in base salary in the last year of his deal.

The Vikings wanted him to restructure his contract, but Winfield [turned] down the offer, per sources.

I understand the mathematics here … $7.25 million is too much to pay for a player who was supposed to be playing fewer snaps in the 2013 season. But it feels wrong.

In other Vikings news, wide receiver Jerome Simpson signed his offer to come back for another year after a disappointing 2012 season. That means the current receivers under contract are Simpson, Jarius Wright, Stephen Burton, Greg Childs (on IR for his rookie season), and Chris Summers (practice squad in 2012).

I’ll be updating this post with other free agent news as it trickles in:

  • Right tackle Phil Loadholt is reported to have signed a new multi-year contract. The expressed interest from divisional rivals in Chicago may have helped this deal happen.
  • Backup offensive lineman Joe Berger is also reported to have signed a veteran minimum contract for 2013.
  • A bit more information on the release of Antoine Winfield from 1500ESPN.
  • Safety Jamarca Sanford told his Twitter followers that he’s re-signed with the Vikings.

Update, 13March: After I logged off last night, the Vikings re-signed outside linebacker Erin Henderson to a two-year deal. They also re-signed fullback Jerome Felton to a three-year deal.

At the Daily Norseman, KJSegall pens a tribute to a great player:

You hear about Ray Lewis and how he would motivate a locker room, fire up teammates, blah blah blah. You hear about it because the guy is the biggest media whore since… OK, I sat here for no less than four minutes and really couldn’t come up with a good follow up. Winfield was so much like Lewis, and yet the total opposite at the same time. He was the heart and soul of the defense, an aging vet who cared far more about his teammates all along than he ever did himself. He bought into the idea that football is a team sport, and that football players are team players. Arif pointed out in the comments section that he himself watched Winfield coaching the very players who could take his job as deeply as an actual coach. Winfield was a Viking, and that was always first and foremost.

Last season, three times, Winfield put team before self as fiercely as any football player could have. First, after his younger brother died, he fought through the emotional agony that he surely must have felt and returned to play in a September game. Then, when things were looking bleak for the team, he silenced the locker room to even beyond a whisper, giving a fiery speech that spurred his team on, helping in a key way to propel the Vikings to an amazing finish and a playoff berth. And then, in the last, he suffered through a broken hand, playing in the season finale (before finally yielding to the pain halfway through) and then returning for the playoff game.

That speech, by the way- do you have any clue what was said? I don’t. No one really does. And there is the oxymoronic comparison between him and Ray Lewis. Sure, Lewis too could spark his team with a big speech. But then he wanted cameras around, he wanted reporters to know what happened and what was said. Winfield, however, had none of that. His words were for his team and his team alone. He didn’t want the glory or the adulation, he just wanted the win. That was always good enough for him.

A stunning technical achievement

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

No, not the tablet — the stunning ability to condescend to half of the human race:

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

At long last, a company has designed a tablet fit for the use of an entire gender that has, thus far, apparently gone unserved. The ePad Femme, designed and distributed by the Eurostar Group, is an eight-inch tablet that comes pre-loaded with apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking. Thank the heavens, ladies may never trouble their pretty heads with such difficulties as finding and downloading their own apps ever again.

The tablet was first announced back in October but received a marketing push in February as “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift,” noted one site. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, or as a woman might call it, “the Android screensaver.” Eurostar calls the ePad Femme “the first tablet specifically for ladies.”

Several sites highlight that the tablet “comes in light pink.” Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to find an image verifying that the actual body of the tablet is pink, so we assume this is in reference to the home screen wallpaper. Just as well, since what woman is going to figure out how to configure that, am I right? Settings, right? What even are they?

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Eurostar associate vice president of marketing Mani Nair said that the tablet comes with the preloaded womanly applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga.” He went on to state that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications and it is a quick reference.”

If consumers were 10% better off … why did they call it a “disease”?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon illustrates the classic case of burying the lede for popular economics:

    So Dutch consumers are roughly 10% better off than they would have been, but companies have been able to compete only by paring their profit margins.

    “The Dutch disease,” The Economist, November 26, 1977

Talk about burying the lede. That sentence appears at the end of the 10th paragraph of the much-referred-to but rarely read article in The Economist that coined the phrase “Dutch Disease.” In the normal course of things, a 10 per cent increase in consumers’ purchasing power would be the stuff of banner headlines, but, for some reason, The Economist chose to hide that point deep into the story and qualify it with a caveat about how hard it had become for companies to compete. (The answer to that, by the way, is: “So what if producers are struggling?” What really matters is consumer welfare.)

My take on the Dutch Disease debate can be summed up as follows: Why are we calling it a disease?

US Army to standardize on four current UAV models

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

The US Army reasonably expects their budget to be under strain for some time. Here’s at least one sensible economy move:

Faced with smaller budgets over the next decade the U.S. Army has halted evaluation of new UAVs and is standardizing on four existing models (Gray Eagle, Shadow 2000, Raven and Puma). All four of these were developed and purchased in large quantities over the last dozen years and will remain the primary army UAVs for the next 5-10 years.

The army currently has nearly 7,000 UAVs. Over 6,000 are micro-UAVs like the Raven and Puma, These tiny (under six kg/13.2 pound) reconnaissance aircraft have become very popular with the troops, anyone of which can become an operator after a few hours of training. These tiny UAVs are a radical new military aircraft technology that is took air recon to a new level. That level is low, a few hundred meters off the ground. The army has nearly 1,798 Raven and 325 Puma UAVs systems in use by ground troops. A complete system (controller, spare parts, and three UAVs) costs $250,000 for the Raven and over $400,000 for Puma. These tiny aircraft have changed how the troops fight and greatly reduced army dependence on the air force for air reconnaissance. The lightweight, hand launched Raven UAV can only stay airborne about an hour per sortie, but troops have found that this is enough time to do all sorts of useful work, even when there’s no fighting going on. This is most of the time. The heavier Puma can stay up for 120 minutes.

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