Quotulatiousness

October 3, 2014

Tour the only surviving WW2 Royal Navy destroyer with Google Maps

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

This is rather cool:

HMS Cavalier virtual tour (via Google Maps)

HMS Cavalier virtual tour (via Google Maps)

CInsideMedia has done it again with exclusive access to the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Cavalier at the Historic Dockyard, Chatham.

The class C/A destroyer celebrated her 70th anniversary on 5th April 2014, having served during World War II and then subsequently being refitted in 1957 to remove the mid-ship torpedoes and replacing them with anti-submarine squid mortars.

Following on from the massive success of CInsideMedia’s Google Maps Business View tour of HMS Ocelot, The Historic Dockyard Chatham is making it possible for anyone in the world to ‘virtually visit’ this National Destroyer Memorial and last surviving Royal Navy Second World War Destroyer.

Over two days of exclusive access, the CInsideMedia team were guided around the destroyer by the Dockyard’s Scott Belcher (Duty Manager: Visitor Operations, Security and Health and Safety) and Chris Tutt (Marketing).

The team captured over 350 panoramas meticulously capturing almost every deck of the 363 ft, 1.7 ton former Arctic Convoy vessel, including the gear room and engine room which are normally only accessible on special request due to Health & Safety and limited accessibility.

QotD: Marketing

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Among those currently imagining our possible futures, one of the most persuasive is the novelist William Gibson, who, having evolved quite a bit past the man who wrote Neuromancer in 1984, can hardly be said to be imagining futures at all, with his most recent novels constituting, in his words, “speculative fiction of the very recent past,” more oriented toward social situations than technological situations. With the possible exception of David Foster Wallace, no novelist of whom I am aware has ever written with such freshness and imagination on the subject of advertising and marketing, which is a big part of what Wallace called “the texture of the world I live in.” Nor has any novelist quite so precisely identified what is sinister in our world of ubiquitous sales pitches: that something whose entire purpose is to be at the center of our attention still manages to be somehow covert. The marketing mentality is an invasive species; earnest young people now speak entirely seriously about their “personal brands” at the same time they complain about the commodification of this or that. Gibson understands the strangeness of our times, and my own mental shorthand for the odd little details one sometimes encounters, particularly in urban life, when one identifies something that is entirely ordinary and yet feels as if it were not in its right time and place, is “Feeling like I’m living in a William Gibson novel.”

Kevin D. Williamson, “Futures Trading: We are no longer thinking about the future because we believe we are there”, National Review, 2014-10-01.

October 2, 2014

On national defence, don’t listen to Harper’s words – watch his actions

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

At The 3Ds Blog, Jack Granatstein explains why the Canadian Forces are once again being starved of funding:

A few years ago I wrote that no government since that of Louis St Laurent in the 1950s had done more to improve the defence of Canada than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. The St Laurent Liberals built up the armed forces to deal with the war in Korea and with the defence of North America and western Europe in the face of Soviet expansionism. At its peak, the defence budget took more than seven percent of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product, and the army, navy, and air force had as many as 120,000 men and women in the regular forces.

No one could expect any government in this century to spend on that scale, but the Conservative government did treat defence well in its first years in power. The commitment to the Afghan War, never very popular, was handled capably, and the troops received everything they needed — helicopters, new artillery, upgraded armoured personnel carriers, and tanks, not to mention new transport aircraft. The number of regulars rose slowly and slightly toward 65,000, and the government presented a schematic Canada First Defence Policy in 2008 that listed a range of objectives and equipment acquisitions. The budget projections were colossal, almost $500 billions to be spent over the next 20 years.

But that was then, this is now:

The result was that the defence budget was cut, in substantial part because deficit reduction and a budget surplus were more important than “toys for the boys.” From a peak of $21 billion in 2009-10, the defence budget in this fiscal year is $18.2 billion, about a 13 percent reduction in dollars made worse by inflation. The percentage of GDP spent on defence is now hovering at one percent, the lowest since the 1930s. In 2009, it was 1.3 percent. Making matters even worse, the Department of National Defence somehow cannot spend all the money it gets, returning almost $10 billion to the Treasury since 2006.

Despite Harper’s tough talk on the international stage, his government’s active neglect of the needs of the armed forces means we can’t back up his pugnacious rhetoric with any serious military effort: a frigate in the Black Sea, four CF-18s in the Baltic, a couple of transport aircraft shuttling supplies into Erbil, and a small special forces contingent helping the Kurds … and that’s about our current limit for overseas deployment. The Royal Canadian Air Force is still waiting for new helicopters (after more than 20 years of stop-go-stop procurement disasters) and a decision on replacing the CF-18. The Royal Canadian Navy just announced the immediate retirement of four ships, with no replacements available for years (if ever), and the Canadian Army is struggling to maintain equipment and keep up training schedules due to budget constraints.

And, as Granatstein points out, if the Liberals or NDP win the next federal election, the situation will get worse, not better, as neither party sees the military as any kind of priority — quite the opposite.

Update: Speaking of cheeseparing “economies”, here’s the Department of National Defence’s most recent “saving”.

National Defence slashed its annual order of ammunition this year to save money — a revelation that raised fresh questions Wednesday about just how prepared Canada is to do battle with militants in the Middle East, Murray Brewster of the Canadian Press writes.

More from his article:

The 38 per cent cut was large enough to cause other government departments, Public Works and Industry Canada in particular, to sit up and take stock of the impact, internal documents obtained by The Canadian Press show.

One such document, a memo to Public Works Minister Diane Finley dated Feb. 5, 2014, indicates her department tried to convince defence officials to either abandon the cut or at least spread it out over a couple of years.

Defence officials said that would be impossible, because “they would not allow the department to meet its financial targets.”

As a result, the 2014 ammunition budget was reduced to $94 million from $153 million.

During the early phases of the Afghan war, National Defence was caught similarly flat-footed and had to rush an order through General Dynamic Ordnance, particularly for artillery shells.

The memo surfaced on the same day Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons that the cost of deploying special forces to northern Iraq is being taken out of the department’s current budget.

The Aral Sea, Uzbek cotton, forced labour, and the clothing industry

Filed under: Asia, Environment, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

As reported the other day, what was once the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea, has almost completely dried up due to Soviet water diversion projects of the late 1950s and early 1960s:

In the early 1960s, the Soviet government decided the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the east, would be diverted to irrigate the desert, in an attempt to grow rice, melons, cereals, and cotton.

This was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or “white gold”, to become a major export. This temporarily succeeded, and in 1988, Uzbekistan was the world’s largest exporter of cotton.

The Soviet government made a deliberate choice to sacrifice the Aral Sea to create a vast new cotton-growing region in Uzbekistan. It was clearly quite successful, depending on how you choose to measure success.

The disappearance of the lake was no surprise to the Soviets; they expected it to happen long before. As early as 1964, Aleksandr Asarin at the Hydroproject Institute pointed out that the lake was doomed, explaining, “It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo. Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans, even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea.”

The reaction to the predictions varied. Some Soviet experts apparently considered the Aral to be “nature’s error”, and a Soviet engineer said in 1968, “it is obvious to everyone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable.”

The drying-out of the Aral was not just bad news for the fishermen of the region: it was a full-blown environmental disaster, as the former lake bottom was heavily polluted:

The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals – the results of weapons testing, industrial projects, and pesticides and fertilizer runoff – which are picked up and carried away by the wind as toxic dust and spread to the surrounding area. The land around the Aral Sea is heavily polluted, and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water and health problems, including high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases. Respiratory illnesses, including tuberculosis (most of which is drug resistant) and cancer, digestive disorders, anaemia, and infectious diseases are common ailments in the region. Liver, kidney, and eye problems can also be attributed to the toxic dust storms. Health concerns associated with the region are a cause for an unusually high fatality rate amongst vulnerable parts of the population. The child mortality rate is 75 in every 1,000 newborns and maternity death is 12 in every 1,000 women. Crops in the region are destroyed by salt being deposited onto the land. Vast salt plains exposed by the shrinking Aral have produced dust storms, making regional winters colder and summers hotter.

The Aral Sea fishing industry, which in its heyday had employed some 40,000 and reportedly produced one-sixth of the Soviet Union’s entire fish catch, has been devastated, and former fishing towns along the original shores have become ship graveyards. The town of Moynaq in Uzbekistan had a thriving harbor and fishing industry that employed about 30,000 people; now it lies miles from the shore. Fishing boats lie scattered on the dry land that was once covered by water; many have been there for 20 years.

"Waterfront" of Aralsk, Kazakhstan, formerly on the banks of the Aral Sea. Photo taken Spring 2003 by Staecker. (Via Wikipedia)

“Waterfront” of Aralsk, Kazakhstan, formerly on the banks of the Aral Sea. Photo taken Spring 2003 by Staecker. (Via Wikipedia)

So, tragic as all this is, what does it have to do with the clothing industry? The Guardian‘s Tansy Hoskins points out that due to the murky supply chains, it’s almost impossible to find out where the cotton used by many international clothing firms actually originates, and the Uzbek cotton fields are worked by forced labour:

The harvest of Uzbek cotton is taking place right now — it started on the 5 September and is expected to last until the end of October. The harvest itself is also a horror story, on top of the environmental devastation, this is cotton picked using forced labour. Every year hundreds of thousands of people are systematically sent to work in the fields by the government.

Under pressure from campaigners, in 2012, Uzbek authorities banned the use of child labour in the cotton harvest, but it is a ban that is routinely flouted. In 2013 there were 11 deaths during the harvest (pdf), including a six year old child, Amirbek Rakhmatov, who accompanied his mother to the fields and suffocated after falling asleep on a cotton truck.

Campaigners have also managed to get 153 fashion brands to sign a pledge to never knowingly use Uzbek cotton. Anti-Slavery International have worked on this fashion campaign but acknowledge that despite successes there is still a long way to go.

“Not knowingly using Uzbek cotton and actually ensuring that you don’t use Uzbek cotton are two completely different things,” explains Jakub Sobik, press officer at Anti-Slavery International.

One major problem that Sobik points out is that much of the Uzbek cotton crop now ends up in Bangladesh and China — key suppliers for European brands. “Whilst it is very hard to trace the cotton back to where it comes from because the supply chain is so subcontracted and deregulated, brands have a responsibility to ensure that slave picked cotton is not polluting their own supply chain.”

Russian TV claims Hong Kong protests are US/UK plot against … Russia

Filed under: China, Media, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

We’re used to Russian talking points being a bit off-centre, but as Karoun Demirjian reports, the Russians are now seeing things like the Hong Kong student protests as “really” being directed against Russian interests by shadowy American and British puppetmasters:

Here in Russia, the umbrella-wielding demonstrators of Hong Kong are being presented as pawns in a Western plot to foment instability in yet another one of Moscow’s allies — and Russia wonders if it could be the ultimate target.

“Was the student protest organized by Great Britain and the USA?” state television station Russia 24 asked Tuesday, citing reports in the Chinese media that “the leaders of the movement received special training from the American intelligence services.”

[…]

“The tactics of the protesters are exactly the same as at the beginning of all ‘orange’ revolutions, which in fact were state coups,” a Russia 24 news presenter said Tuesday, referring to the signature color of Ukraine’s 2004 protests. “Besides, the White House officially confirmed through its spokesman that Washington supports the intentions of the citizens of Hong Kong to protect their basic rights and freedoms.”

Russian state media have also suggested that Britain supports the protests as a way of safeguarding its business interests in Hong Kong, especially as Beijing is “gradually abolishing benefits” for British companies located there.

Yet there is one thing missing in the Russian analysis: Any specific advice as to how China’s government should proceed. Russia’s leaders have neither cautioned China’s leaders to show restraint nor urged them toward a crackdown.

American craft beer fans owe Jimmy Carter a hearty “Cheers!”

Filed under: USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

If you like your beer — that is beer for the taste rather than for the numbing effect of the alcohol — you probably prefer craft beer (or imports). You should probably thank the man who finally made it legal to brew your own and to sell your beer to the public. The craft beer revolution broke out very quickly after that:

There has never been a better time to love beer. Duck into any local sudshouse in any half-horse town, and one is likely to find behind the bar a distinctive tap dispensing Fat Tire Amber Ale, or Shiner Bock, or — at the very least—Samuel Adams Boston Lager. At fashionable metropolitan lounges, the menu is more dizzying: porter and stout, hefeweizen and lambic, ales brown and blonde and pale.

’Twas not always so. Shortly after the repeal of Prohibition, the number of American breweries spiked to more than 800, but thereafter consolidation marked the industry for decades. By the late 1970s, that figure had fallen to fewer than 100. These were the Dark Ages, when selection was nigh nonexistent and “lite” was a selling point. Miller went so far as to brag in the tagline of its commercials: “Everything you always wanted in a beer — and less.”

The best anecdote I have found to help explain these dismal times comes from “Confessions of a Beer Snob,” a 1976 article I stumbled across in the archives of The American Spectator, the magazine where I work. There’s a bit midway through the piece in which the author, a former Nixon speechwriter named Aram Bakshian Jr, describes a beer newly available on the East Coast that had taken Washington, DC, by storm. That beer? Coors.

“What transports of delight the availability of Coors threw certain White House colleagues of mine into. I always suspected that they were more excited by the idea of its being specially flown in from Colorado than by what little taste it — or, for that matter, they — had,” Bakshian wrote. “Today the Coors cult still thrives, its devotees buying it even at the most ridiculous prices, and liquor store windows across the country proudly displaying banners blazoned with the inspiring motto, ‘Coors is here!’”

This was the state of affairs until near the end of the decade, when everything changed, not quite suddenly, but faster than could have been reasonably foreseen. In 1978, Congress and Jimmy Carter officially legalized home brewing, previously a federal crime punishable by prison time, bringing tinkerers and hobbyists aboveboard. The first brewpub since Prohibition opened in Yakima, Washington, in 1982. It was a mad dash to the fermenting tanks from there. Today, somewhere around 3,000 breweries of various sizes operate from sea to shining sea, churning out all manner of hoppy, malty, citrusy concoctions.

The Coors mania was felt as far away as the suburbs of Toronto: driving down to Buffalo to visit their incredibly wide variety of beer and liquor stores (one of my friends always referred to them as “boozaterias”) was eye-opening (and wallet-emptying at the punitive exchange rates of the day) for Ontarians in the late days of the LCBO’s Soviet store era and the grimy Brewers Retail outlets of the 1970s. And Coors, for a while, was the Holy Grail of American beer. Shudder.

QotD: How not to educate the young

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I’m on the road this week, giving talks on my new book about learning to fail better: that is, first, to give ourselves the permission to take on challenges where we might very well fail; second, to pick ourselves up as quickly as possible and move on when things don’t work out. This is, I argue, vital on a personal level, as well as vital for the economy, because that’s where innovation and growth come from.

The other day, after one of my talks, a 10th-grade girl came up and shyly asked if I had a minute. I always have a minute to talk to shy high school sophomores, having been one myself.

And this is what she asked me:

“I understand what you’re saying about trying new things, and hard things, but I’m in an International Baccalaureate program and only about five percent of us will get 4.0, so how can I try a subject where I might not get an A?”

I was floored. All I could think as I talked to this poor girl is “America, you’re doing it wrong.”

I was 15 in 10th grade. If you can’t try something new in 10th grade, when can you? If you can’t afford to risk anything less than perfection at the age of 15, then for heaven’s sake, when is going to be the right time? When you’re ready to splash out on an edgy assisted-living facility?

Now is when this kid should be learning to dream big dreams and dare greatly. Now is when she should be making mistakes and figuring out how to recover from them. Instead, we’re telling one of our best and brightest to focus all her talent on coloring within the lines. This is not the first time I’ve heard this from kids and teachers and parents. But I’ve never heard it phrased quite so starkly.

Megan McArdle, “Go Ahead, Let Your Kids Fail”, Bloomberg View, 2014-02-20.

October 1, 2014

The CRTC tries bully boy tactics to stay vaguely relevant in the 21st century

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Richard Anderson perfectly captures the scene as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) attempts to browbeat Netflix into “voluntary” compliance with its (possibly extra-legal) demands:

Caudilho Jean-Pierre Blais of the CRTC actually ordered Netflix to hand over their confidential information. Acting as if he was a judge in a criminal trial instead of a busybody interfering with a successful business that is violating no one’s rights. It’s questionable as to whether the CRTC even has the legal power to make such a request. Netflix is not a broadcaster in any traditional sense of the word. The story behind the story is that a Trudeau-era regulatory framework is running smack up against the modern world.

With technology speeding past the CRTC Mandarins they are confronted with three options: 1) Acquiesce and watch as time turns them into a medieval guild during the industrial revolution. 2) Lobby the government to explicitly expand their powers over the internet. 3) Say to hell with the rule of law and see what they can get away with.

Option 1 ain’t happening because too many cushy jobs are at stake. Option 2 ain’t happening because the Tories may not understand capitalism but they don’t actively hate it. This leave us with option 3. As you can tell it is by far and away the worst option. This isn’t just a bad for consumers story it’s a bad for freedom story as well.

At the moment much of the media is focused on the pick and pay cable model debate. But the debate is little more than a statist three card monte trick, the government’s crude attempt to legislate business into behaving like what they think a free market should look like. The future, however, is being decided in the Netflix case.

The Aral Sea almost completely dried out in August

Filed under: Asia, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Enjoli Liston reports on the former body of water in the Guardian:

The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA

The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA

A large section of the Aral Sea has completely dried up for the first time in modern history, according to Nasa.

Images from the US space agency’s Terra satellite released last week show that the eastern basin of the Central Asian inland sea — which stretched across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and was once the fourth largest in the world — was totally parched in August. Images taken in 2000 show an extensive body of water covering the same area.

“This is the first time the eastern basin has completely dried in modern times,” Philip Micklin, a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University told Nasa. “And it is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since Medieval desiccation associated with diversion of Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea.”

Note that this isn’t primarily due to climate change, although it is a man-made environmental disaster:

In the 1950s, two of the region’s major rivers — the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya — were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 metres between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago.

Wikimedia has a dramatic illustration of the diminishing border of the Aral Sea between 1960 and 2008:

Animated map of the shrinking of the Aral Sea between 1960 and 2008 (via Wikipedia)

Animated map of the shrinking of the Aral Sea between 1960 and 2008 (via Wikipedia)

German Air Force pushed “to the very limits of its capacities”

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

German magazine Der Spiegel reports on the sad state of readiness in the German military:

Last week, a single person pushed Germany’s air force to the very limits of its capacities: Ursula von der Leyen, the country’s defense minister. Von der Leyen requested that two Transall military transport aircraft with missile defense systems be transferred to Amman, the Jordanian capital. The defense minister and a pool of reporters then flew for eight hours on Thursday morning in one of the aircraft to Erbil in Iraq’s Kurdish region. Back in Germany, the military had but a single additional Transall at its disposal.

After her arrival in Erbil, von der Leyen proceeded to the palace of the Kurdish regional government’s president. Her visit was to be concurrent with the delivery of German weapons, intended to aid the Kurds in their fight against Islamic State jihadists. Unfortunately, the machine guns and bazookas got stuck in Germany and the trainers in Bulgaria because of a dearth of available aircraft. One had been grounded because of a massive fuel leak. What could have been a shining moment for the minister instead turned into an embarrassing failure underscoring the miserable state of many of the Bundeswehr‘s most important weapons systems.

[…]

Against that backdrop and pressure from the international community, the ramshackle state of the Bundeswehr is no laughing matter in Berlin. At the moment, if Germany’s allies were to ask it to step up its participation in deployments in the Baltic states or Iraq, for example, Chancellor Merkel would likely have to politely pass, creating a highly embarrassing situation for the country. For the moment, though, most pressure related to the Bundeswehr‘s ailments has been directed at von der Leyen. Her critics argue that she has pursued a foreign and security policy vision that goes beyond the Bundeswehr‘s actual capabilities. Now she faces additional criticism that she tried to play down the military’s problems to members of parliament even though senior officials in her ministry were well aware of major shortcomings in the armed forces.

“Contrary to her own list of needed equipment, she created the impression in parliament that anything that could drive, fly or float was capable of full deployment,” said Rainer Arnold, the defense policy spokesman for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). “But we members of parliament will not be taken for idiots.”

The defense minister hasn’t exactly been blind-sided by the criticism either — she’s known about the problems since before entering office almost a year ago. On Friday, she summoned the heads of the German army, navy and air force as well as the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr to her office for five hours of questioning, much of it centering on events in parliament last Wednesday.

H/T to Mark Collins for the link.

Camille Paglia on universities’ inability to comprehend evil

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In Time, Camille Paglia says that universities are unable to understand the real risks to young women on campus:

The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.

There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.

QotD: Primitive belief systems and “sorcerism”

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Many primitive societies believe that maleficent spirits cause all sorts of human misfortune that in the modern West we have learned to attribute to natural causes — cattle dying, crops failing, disease, drought, that sort of thing. A few societies have developed a more peculiar form of supernaturalism, in which evil spirits recede into the background and all misfortune is caused by the action of maleficent human sorcerers who must be found and rooted out to end the harm.

A society like that may be a grim, paranoid place with everyone constantly on the hunt for sorcerers — but a sorcerer can be punished or killed more easily than a spirit or a blind force of nature. Therein lies the perverse appeal of this sort of belief system, what I’ll call “sorcerism” — you may not be able to stop your cattle from dying, but at least you can find the bastard who did it and hurt him until you feel better. Maybe you can even prevent the next cattle-death. You are not powerless.

English needs, I think, a word for “beliefs which are motivated by the terror of being powerless against large threats”. I think I tripped over this in an odd place today, and it makes me wonder if our society may be talking itself into a belief system not essentially different from sorcerism.

Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03.

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