Quotulatiousness

March 8, 2013

Kim Jong-un tells North Korean troops to be ready “to annihilate the enemy”

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

North Korea continues to rattle the sabre:

North Korea has dissolved the agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953, as it simultaneously ramps up its military presence along the border with South Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appeared before military troops positioned near the border and told them to that they should be ready “to annihilate the enemy,” reports The Telegraph.

This latest rallying cry comes after Kim threatened missile attacks on Washington the previous day, saying the American capital city would become a “sea of fire.”

The move towards brinkmanship is in response to a decision by the United Nations Security Council to impose further sanctions on North Korea after it conducted a third nuclear test in February. The UN resolution was unanimously approved by all 15 member countries siting on the council. The sanctions are financial and will also increase efforts to prevent North Korea from shipping banned goods into the country.

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:19

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. Teaser for the March update went up the other day, and there’s lots of discussion of the new content released in last week’s patch. Plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Jack Layton biopic provokes outrage … because there isn’t a French version

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

I’ll let Paul Wells explain this one:

EU politicians perform modern day King Canute act

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

Yup. They’re standing up for equality on the internet by calling for a ban on online porn:

MEPs are being urged to back a non-binding resolution that calls on the European Parliament to, in effect, ban pornography from the internet. A group of Euro politicos hope the web filth block will bring about a “genuine culture of equality” online.

A motion was tabled this week by the EU’s committee on women’s rights and gender equality. A report titled Eliminating Gender Stereotypes in the EU urged all members of the European Parliament to support the draft resolution.

The panel stated that a policy to put an end to stereotypes portrayed in the media would “of necessity involve action in the digital field”. The committee added that the EU would be required to coordinate action to develop a “genuine culture of equality on the internet”.

March 7, 2013

This is why I recently stopped linking to the National Post

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:18

Michael Geist explains:

… if someone wants to post a quote from Selley or anything else written by the National Post, they are now presented with pop-up box seeking a licence that starts at $150 for the Internet posting of 100 words with an extra fee of 50 cents for each additional word (the price is cut in half for non-profits).

[. . .]

None of this requires a licence or payment. In fact, the amount of copying is often so insubstantial that a fair dealing analysis is not even needed. Last year, the Federal Court of Canada ruled that several paragraphs from a National Post column by Jonathan Kay posted to an Internet chat site did not constitute copying a substantial part of the work. If there was a fair dealing analysis, there is no doubt that copying a hundred words out of an article would easily meet the fair dealing standard. In fact, the Supreme Court of Canada has indicated that copying full articles in some circumstances may be permitted.

I make no money from my blogging … in fact I pay money to maintain the web site. The idea of spending $150 per quotation from any source is pretty much a guarantee that I won’t be linking to that source very much at all. At about the same time the National Post brought in their pay-to-quote policy, they also launched a reader rewards program. The idea seemed to be that you log in to their site, it tracks everything you read and then you get a pony at the end of the day, or week, or month, or Baktun, or something. Or maybe not … I really didn’t pay too much attention.

Rand Paul’s filibuster and the Obama administration’s drone strike policies

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Nick Gillespie has three important points to take away from Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster yesterday:

For all of the late-night punch-drunkiness that eventually ensued on Twitter (well, at least on my feed), yesterday’s 12-hours-plus filibuster led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is among the most electrifying and insipiring events in recent political memory. The point of the filibuster — which derailed a confirmation vote on John Brennan as Barack Obama’s CIA head — was to call attention to the president’s insufficient answers to questions about his policy of targeted killings via drones and, one assumes, other methods.

Here are three takeaways from yesterday’s epic event:

1. It shows what one man can do to call attention to a hugely important issue that nonetheless is largley ignored by the mainstream media and the political establishment.

Elected in 2010, Rand Paul has rarely been the Republican — or the Democrat’s — media favorite. He’s been heckled big time from his own side (which initially worked against his election) and across the aisle as an irresponsible ideologue (he’s a dirty tea-bagger don’t you know!). Among a good chunk of his father’s most devoted followers, he’s been assailed as a neo-con war hawk who was willing to trim his libertarian bona fides to win favor with the D.C. party crowd. His sad-sack opponent in the general election the GOP primary, Jack Conway, set new lows with the infamous “Aqua Buddha” ad that accused Paul of everything short of devil worship; his general election opponent in the GOP primary, Trey Grayson, had already trotted out many of the same pathetic lines.

[. . .]

2. It shows the power of transpartisan thought and action. Make no mistake: Despite the presence of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), yesterday’s filibuster was a GOP-conducted orchestra. But what was most bracing and ultimately powerful thing about the filibuster was that none of the speakers exempted the Republican Party or former President George W. Bush, whose aggrandized view of executive power still roils the sleep of the Founding Fathers, from withering criticism and scrutiny. How else to explain that hard-left groups such as Code Pink were proud to #standwithrand yesterday on Twitter? The same with reliable Rand and GOP critic Eugene Robinson and many others who up until yesterday thought little of Rand Paul.

[. . .]

3. It ties a direct line between the abuses of power and the growth of the state.

Despite using various self-identifiers over the years (he’s called himself a libertarian, a conservative, a constitutional conservative, etc.) Rand Paul has always been rightly understood as an advocate of sharply limited and small government. During his Senate race, for instance, he said questions about drug legalization should be pushed back towards the states, where different models could be tried in accordance with the wishes of the people most directly affected. He presented a budget that was heavy on spending cuts that would have balanced the budget in five years. He has called for either actually declaring war on countries such as Iraq and Libya or getting the hell out. What unites his positions is a default setting against giving the federal government a free hand to do whatever it wants irrespective of constitutional limits.

US Department of Defence to change standards for awarding the Purple Heart

Filed under: Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

A recognition of the importance of maintaining service members’ self-esteem in the face of harsh and unyielding forces beyond their control:

Purple Heart medalIn the wake of the newly unveiled Distinguished Warfare Medal, the Department of Defense intends to relax standards on the nation’s oldest military decoration — the Purple Heart. Under the expanded interpretation, the award will now be available to any disgruntled service member suffering from disillusionment and shattered expectations.

“Acute Rectal Inflammation, colloquially known as ‘butthurt,’ is a serious and grossly underrated epidemic plaguing our military,” Lieutenant Jimmy Chang, Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, told The Duffel Blog. “Essentially, psychological or emotional trauma, stemming from either internal or external stimuli, manifests itself and eventually begets anal trauma. In severe cases, butt cells can become so hurt that they become malignant. In fact, butthurt is the leading cause of colon cancer among service members.”

Food safety “churnalists” strike again: processed meat will kill you!

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

In sp!ked, Rob Lyons explains why the most recent food flap in Britain is no more worth paying attention to than the last couple of dozen:

‘Processed meat blamed for one in 30 early deaths’, declares the Daily Telegraph. ‘Processed meat “is to blame for one in 30 deaths”: scientists say a rasher of cheap bacon a day is harmful’, says the Daily Mail in the true spirit of ‘churnalism’, while the addition of ‘cheap’ to the headline is surely designed to confirm the prejudices of its snobbier readers.

The BBC, which has made a veritable full English breakfast of this story this morning, summed it up as follows: ‘Sausages, ham, bacon and other processed meats appear to increase the risk of dying young, a study of half-a-million people across Europe suggests. It concluded diets high in processed meats were linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer and early deaths.’

However, the reality is that the methods used in such studies are so crude that drawing sweeping conclusions from this evidence is fraught with difficulties.

As so many times before, the actual link between the reported data and the eye-catching headlines is not particularly strong or likely to be a cause of worry for most people.

There is a lot of guesstimating going on here. Even after all this, the size of the effect is small. Previous claims about processed meat have focused on cancer, but here the increased risk of cancer was just 11 per cent. The bigger, all-cause mortality figure of 44 per cent was mostly due to cardiovascular disease, a risk which even the researchers suggest may be overstated.

Claiming that such a small effect can therefore be the basis of sound dietary advice is just nonsense — but it is nonsense that is repeated all too frequently. The result is to create unnecessary fear about perfectly good food and confirm the prejudices of those who think that processed food is only fit for the masses.

North Korea rhetorically re-starts the not-officially-ended Korean War

Filed under: China, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

The Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that North Korea wants to scrap the armistice that brought the Korean War to a halt in 1953:

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has vowed to nullify an armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War from March 11, and warned of more and stronger countermeasures if the United States and South Korea continued joint military drills.

The announcement, made by DPRK’s top Army Supreme Command on a rare appearance on the state TV, came when the UN Security Council is ironing out penalties against Pyongyang over its third nuclear test on Feb. 12. Diplomats said that a Council resolution condemning the test and toughening sanctions on DPRK will be put to a vote as early as this week.

March 11 marks the start of the annual joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises, which will involve 10,000 South Korean and 3,500 U.S. troops. The drill, dubbed Key Resolve, was denounced by DPRK’s official KCNA news agency as a prelude to an invasion.

Experts said the DPRK’s latest move aims to defy the possible new UN sanctions and seeks to replace the armistice agreement with a peace treaty that guarantees Pyongyang’s security, as requested by DPRK at the six-party talks.

QotD: When bureaucrats have to cut back

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?

The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

The example was deliberately extreme as an illustration. But, in the real world, the same general pattern can be seen in local, state and national government responses to budget cuts.

At the local level, the first response to budget cuts is often to cut the police department and the fire department. There may be all sorts of wasteful boondoggles that could have been cut instead, but that would not produce the public alarm that reducing police protection and fire protection can produce. And public alarm is what can get budget cuts restored.

Thomas Sowell, “Will Obama turn the United States into the world’s largest banana republic?”, Washington Examiner, 2013-03-04

March 6, 2013

Colby Cosh: “One sees what fine jokes result when the state tries to make one plus one equal fried chicken”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:25

In Maclean’s, staff optimist and all-around-softy Colby Cosh tries to make lemonade out of the sour Whatcott ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada:

The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt “hate speech.” The court specifically insists that true statements arranged in certain ways can be officially “hateful,” conceding a total lack of interest in truth and basically handing its banner over to the commissions’ targets. For liberals who share the goals of these commissions, this is a moral disaster that can only multiply Bill Whatcotts ad infinitum. People of the Whatcott type already believe themselves to be in special possession of suppressed facts, and now the court has said explicitly that spreading falsehoods is no part of their offence.

But since we columnists are in the business of telling truth, whatever a court thinks, it ought to be admitted that, dead or alive, free speech in Canada was never in such good shape. The Supreme Court’s decision is an elaborate partial rescue of standing precedent; the constitutionality of hate policing by provincial commissions was established many years ago, and the unpleasant surprise is only that it wasn’t killed on this occasion.

[. . .]

For those of us who make a living in creative or intellectual expression, it is worth something to have the laws limiting it defined as clearly as possible while being compacted into a minimum volume. The Supreme Court has made the rules clearer, and this is not to be sneered at, even if its logic sometimes is — especially since the overall authority of human rights commissions has undergone net diminution in the process. It is just possible the chief justice wasn’t entirely asleep at the switch.

ACLU to investigate the militarization of US police forces

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

At the Huffington Post, Radley Balko reports on a new ACLU campaign:

The militarization of America’s police forces has been going on for about a generation now. Former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates first conceived the idea of the SWAT team in the late 1960s, in response to the Watts riots and a few mass shooting incidents for which he thought the police were unprepared. Gates wanted an elite team of specialized cops similar to groups like the Army Rangers or Navy SEALs that could respond to riots, barricades, shootouts, or hostage-takings with more skill and precision than everyday patrol officers.

The concept caught on, particularly after a couple of high-profile, televised confrontations between Gates’ SWAT team and a Black Panther holdout in 1969, and then with the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973. Given the rioting, protests, and general social unrest of the time, Gates’ idea quickly grew popular in law enforcement circles, particularly in cities worried about rioting and domestic terrorism.

[. . .]

Kraska estimates that total number of SWAT raids in America jumped from just a few hundred per year in the 1970s, to a few thousand by the early 1980s, to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s.

The vast majority of those raids are to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes. Police forces were no longer reserving SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics for events that presented an immediate threat to the public. They were now using them mostly as an investigative tool in drug cases, creating violent confrontations with people suspected of nonviolent, consensual crimes.

New initiative to encourage scientists to show their work (not just the mediagenic results)

Filed under: Books, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Ed Yong on the opening of a new lab in Virginia:

The field of psychology is going through a period of introspective turmoil. One the one hand, it has never been more popular. Its results lead to attention-grabbing headlines, and fill books that sit happily on bestseller lists. Conversely, some of its own practitioners are starting to ask themselves a difficult question: What proportion of the field’s findings are genuine and reliable insights into the human mind, and what proportion are red herrings produced by questionable research practices and, in rare cases, outright fraud?

This line of questioning comes from: cases of classic results that cannot be easily reproduced; studies that have documented widespread dodgy practices that lead to false results; the publication of papers that claim the impossible, like evidence for precognition; and the outing of several fraudulent scientists (with a new case emerging literally as I write this paragraph). To some, these signs augur a looming crisis of confidence for psychology. To others, these problems are unrepresentative, and being used to damn a field that generally produces solid, reliable results.

The debates can get quite energetic, but one of the more calm-headed voices in them is Brian Nosek’s. A psychologist from the University of Virginia, Nosek has been quietly trying to turn the problems into solutions. “There hasn’t been anything new in all this recent hubbub,” he says. “We’ve been talking about these problems since the 60s, but where it stopped was people complaining. There have been a lot of people who have been frustrated at how science is operating but had no outlet for making it better.”

Nosek’s solution launches today — the Center for Open Science, a new laboratory at Charlottesville, Virginia. Unlike many new research centres, this one is less about doing great science than about making science greater. It will try to foster a new approach to research that will produce more reliable results.

Show your working

The Center’s values are epitomised in its signature project — the Open Science Framework. It’s a website that lets scientists store and share every aspect of their work, including facets that are often hidden from each other, let alone from the public. Failed experiments, the minutiae of methods, the genesis of ideas… these are often omitted from published papers or left to languish in personal file drawers. That creates strong biases in the literature, and makes it harder for people to check and reproduce each other’s work.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

QotD: Canada Syndrome

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

It’s one of the marvels of the Canadian electorate. Show Canadians a special interest group that uses its government-granted privileges to fleece consumers, and they’ll embrace it as a “national champion,” a “uniquely Canadian way of life” or some equally vapid catch-phrase.

This is from the Wikipedia entry for Stockholm Syndrome:

    Stockholm syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

What we suffer from is the economic policy equivalent. Call it “Canada Syndrome”: a tendency for consumers to identify with the producer interests that are holding them hostage.

Stephen F. Gordon, “Our Stockholm Syndrome about supply management”, Maclean’s, 2013-03-05

Magnificent Machines – The Golden Age of the British Sports Car

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

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