Quotulatiousness

November 16, 2014

Breaking: Stephen Harper installed in quiet coup by CIA!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:58

It was such a quiet coup that even the media failed to see it! Mark Taliano screams to us Canuckian sheeple that it’s time to wake up!

The biggest threat to Canada’s national security is internal. It is the offshoot of an extraordinarily successful quiet coup that imposed itself on the country with the federal election of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) in 2006, and solidified its impacts with the election of a Conservative majority in 2011.

Author, poet, academic, and former Canadian diplomat Prof. Peter Dale Scott recently disclosed a WikiLeaks cable indicating that the International Republican Institute (IRI), an off-shoot of the CIA, and a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), helped install Stephen Harper as Canada’s Prime Minister. This was the coup.

Point 12 of the cable explains that “In addition to the campaign schools, IRI will be bringing in consultants who specialize in party renovation to discuss case studies of political parties in Germany, Spain, and Canada which successfully carried out the process”

My GOD! Canadian political parties bringing in American advisors? This must be resisted! We won’t stand for filthy imperialistic Yankee scum polluting our pristine and uncorrupted political sphere!! Oh, wait … Justin has American advisors too? Oh. Move along: nothing to see here. Move along.

Dr. Anthony James Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, explains the genesis of the Harper Conservative assault on the “Red Tory” traditions of Canada’s indigenous conservative party in Flanagan’s Last Stand?:

    The assault by the Harper-Flanagan juggernaut on the generally friendly orientation of Canadian conservatism towards the state, towards Indigenous peoples, and towards the institutions of Crown sovereignty helped clear aside obstacles to the importation from United States of the Republican Party’s jihad on managed capitalism. Flanagan and Harper took charge of the Canadian version of the Reagan Revolution aimed at transforming the social welfare state into the stock market state.

I’d love to say this was just a parody, but I think at least some people on the left really do believe all of this.

Where does your dog rank?

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:15

An infographic in Slate slices and dices doggy data to provide you with a quick way to alienate half of dog owners (whose beloved mutts fall into the “Inexplicably overrated” or “Rightly ignored” quadrants:

Top dog infographic

As a dog owner myself, I am pleased to note that Brittany (Xander) and Corgi (Kaylee, although she’s a Corgi mix) both fall into the “Hot dog!” quadrant (and our late-and-still-lamented Shi-Tzu would also be in that quadrant). This clearly must indicate that the chart is 100% accurate.

Update: Forgot to H/T Megan McArdle for the link.

Germany discovers new way to depress church membership

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:59

They really do things differently in Germany, as Megan McArdle reports:

The German Catholic Church is contemplating denying communion to Catholics who have … wait for it … declined to register as Catholics with the government. The reason? Those Catholics don’t want to pay their “church tax.” That’s right: Germany taxes registered religious believers of major denominations, distributing that money to the country’s churches, temples and the like. And it recently changed the rules for calculating the tax to include capital gains, prompting an exodus of presumably well-heeled Catholics from the official rolls. So the German church is threatening to cut them off. Lots of tax rules seem to be written on a pay-to-play basis, but I’ve never before heard of one that was “pay to pray.” I don’t recall Christ saying anything about an admission fee to hear him preach.

To American ears, this is positively shocking. The American Catholic Church certainly doesn’t want you to take communion if you haven’t been baptized by the church or confessed any mortal sins. But no one checks to see whether you made a deposit in the offering plate. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is a phenomenon that conservative-leaning analysts call “crowding out”: when government provision of a service destroys the voluntary institutions that used to do so. This phenomenon often gets exaggerated, but there’s no doubt that it’s real enough — and in the actions of Germany’s Catholic bishops, I think we are seeing an extreme example of where it can lead.

Without the need to support itself with voluntary offerings, the Catholic Church in Germany has become dependent on government support. And government support has some big drawbacks compared to voluntary contributions. To be sure, government money is nice and steady, but it’s also fixed at the amount of the tax.

In Civilization games, Gandhi is the most likely leader to use nukes

Filed under: Gaming, India — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

In Kotaku, Luke Plunkett explains why of all the AI leaders in the game, none are more likely to espouse the philosophy “nuke ’em ’till they glow, then shoot ’em in the dark” than India’s Gandhi:

Civilization V - Gandhi

In the original Civilization, it was because of a bug. Each leader in the game had an “aggression” rating, and Gandhi – to best reflect his real-world persona – was given the lowest score possible, a 1, so low that he’d rarely if ever go out of his way to declare war on someone.

Only, there was a problem. When a player adopted democracy in Civilization, their aggression would be automatically reduced by 2. Code being code, if Gandhi went democratic his aggression wouldn’t go to -1, it looped back around to the ludicrously high figure of 255, making him as aggressive as a civilization could possibly be.

In later games this bug was obviously not an issue, but as a tribute/easter egg of sorts, parts of his white-hot rage have been kept around. In Civilization V, for example, while Gandhi’s regular diplomatic approach is more peaceful than other leaders, he’s also the most likely to go dropping a-bombs when pushed, with a nuke “rating” of 12 putting him well ahead of the competition (the next three most likely to go nuclear have a rating of 8, with most leaders around the 4-6 region).

Update, 16 November: Fixed the broken link.

The Vikings are always snakebit in Chicago … any hope of this changing soon?

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

The Minnesota Vikings don’t win too often in Chicago — their last win at Soldier Field was back in 2007 and they’ve only beaten the Bears at home three times since 2000 (despite the Vikings leading the all-time series 54-50-2). Sunday’s game may finally change Minnesota’s luck in Chicago, as the Vikings (4-5) are riding a rare two-game winning streak while the Bears (3-6) are in danger of melting down altogether.

In spite of the potential signs of a Vikings win, talk of any kind of playoff push is very premature … and despite that the Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover dares to hope:

@Chicago: We’ve laid out what the Vikings need to do to beat Chicago, and this is their best opportunity to escape the Windy City with a win since 2009…and they couldn’t get it done then. And let’s face it, the Vikings have to beat the Bears to keep any chance at the post season alive. A loss puts them at 4-6, and no realistic shot.

Green Bay: The Vikings have been on the short end of the stick more often than not against Green Bay and Chicago in recent seasons, but I don’t know if I was ever more dis-spirited than after the Thursday night debacle in Lambeau. In the wake of that disaster, the Vikings defense actually played a decent game, until the three and outs piled up by the offense just got to be too much. This is going to be one of the two toughest remaining opponents the Vikings face, and a win here would be huge. Can they do it? With Teddy Bridgewater, at home, I think they can.

I can’t emphasize how big two division wins would be for the Vikings here. Not only for playoff positioning, but as a ‘stand up and take notice that we’re here to stay for awhile’ kind of statement. We all want to beat the Packers, but if the Vikings are going to start their climb to the top of the NFC North and stay there, they have to start beating them. Starting that climb here would be fantastic.

After that, the Vikings should beat Carolina and the Jets, then they face the Lions in Detroit which is likely a loss, then two winnable games against the Dolphins and the Bears (who might be playing for an interim coach if Trestman can’t turn the Bears around). A 10-6 finish would be fantastic for the Vikings after their horrific start to the 2014 season (and it’d be two games better than I expected … and I didn’t foresee Adrian Peterson being out for most of the year when I made that guess).

QotD: James Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan

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

The 11th Light Dragoons at this time were newly back from India, where they had been serving since before I was born. They were a fighting regiment, and — I say it without regimental pride, for I never had any, but as a plain matter of fact — probably the finest mounted troops in England, if not in the world. Yet they had been losing officers, since coming home, hand over fist. The reason was James Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan.

You have heard all about him, no doubt. The regimental scandals, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the vanity, stupidity, and extravagance of the man — these things are history. Like most history, they have a fair basis of fact. But I knew him, probably as few other officers knew him, and in turn I found him amusing, frightening, vindictive, charming, and downright dangerous. He was God’s own original fool, there’s no doubt of that — although he was not to blame for the fiasco at Balaclava; that was Raglan and Airey between them. And he was arrogant as no other man I’ve ever met, and as sure of his own unshakeable rightness as any man could be — even when his wrongheadedness was there for all to see. That was his great point, the key to his character: he could never be wrong.

They say that at least he was brave. He was not. He was just stupid, too stupid ever to be afraid. Fear is an emotion, and his emotions were all between his knees and his breastbone; they never touched his reason, and he had little enough of that.

For all that, he could never be called a bad soldier. Some human faults are military virtues, like stupidity, and arrogance, and narrow-mindedness. Cardigan blended all three with a passion for detail and accuracy; he was a perfectionist, and the manual of cavalry drill was his Bible. Whatever rested between the covers of that book he could perform, or cause to be performed, with marvellous efficiency, and God help anyone who marred that performance. He would have made a first-class drill sergeant — only a man with a mind capable of such depths of folly could have led six regiments into the Valley at Balaclava.

However, I devote some space to him because he played a not unimportant part in the career of Harry Flashman, and since it is my purpose to show how the Flashman of Tom Brown became the glorious Flashman with four inches in Who’s Who and grew markedly worse in the process, I must say that he was a good friend to me. He never understood me, of course, which is not surprising. I took good care not to let him.

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman, 1969.

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