Quotulatiousness

March 6, 2015

Djinn accused of murder … by victim’s boyfriend

Filed under: Law, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While we’re on the topic of odd beliefs in the middle east, here’s a fascinating court case:

If the East ever perfects its own version of the courtroom drama — Piri Mason, say — it will surely consist of dramatic moments like this: Koksal Sahin, a Turkish man accused of murdering his girlfriend, stealing her valuables, and fleeing from Istanbul to Izmir, pleaded not guilty this week and offered the court revelatory testimony of what actually happened. “As far as I understood,” Mr. Sahin told the court, “a genie attacked her.”

According to the defendant, when this genie saw an Islamic amulet that was hanging from Mr. Sahin’s neck, the malevolent entity went berserk. Mr. Sahin realized what was happening because his late girlfriend was “saying something in Arabic” while attacking herself. The genie not only caused Mr. Sahin’s girlfriend to stab herself in the stomach and cut her own throat, he testified, but it also grabbed Mr. Sahin himself and flew him off to Izmir, where he found himself registered as a guest in a hostel, apparently in possession of the girlfriend’s valuables.

But Mr. Sahin’s story is not as ironclad as it may seem. While several aspects of the story are consistent with the behavior of genies — or djinn — according to traditional lore and even some judicial precedent, others are previously unrecorded. Djinn are certainly believed to be able to possess human beings and to influence their behavior, and they have a long mischievous history of flying people about and depositing them in distant places, especially when the humans are asleep. And while cases of djinn killing people may exist in the lore, instances of djinn murdering their own human hosts unprovoked are highly unusual.

ISIS takes sledgehammers and drills to ancient artifacts

Filed under: History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

This makes me sick to my stomach:

ISIS destroys archaeological works 1

ISIS destroys archaeological works 2

ISIS destroys archaeological works 3

ISIS destroys archaeological works 4

These images and many more are screencapped from a propaganda video released by ISIS, reported by Conflict Antiquities:

It is notable that the Islamic State released this propaganda, to assert their religious purity through their commitment to cultural destruction, immediately after the were exposed for making a deal with Turkey and not destroying Suleyman Shah’s tomb.

Last June, it was rumoured and mistakenly reported that the Islamic State had ‘destroyed ancient masterpieces, including the rare Assyrian winged bull’ at Nineveh Museum. This time, they’ve done it — at Mosul Museum and the Nergal Gate to Nineveh [the Nergal Gate Museum at Nineveh]. You can stream or download the mp4 (or watch it on YouTube/YouTube archive).

But if, like other sensible people, you don’t want to boost the web traffic to their pornography of violence — which they try to advertise as Islamic although they also preserve “heretical”, “idolatrous” things as long as they profit from them — I’ve taken screenshots from the video for verification and analysis. Christopher Jones, at the Gates of Nineveh, has ongoing, historically-informed coverage of this and other destruction, including Assessing the Damage at the Mosul Museum, Part 1: the Assyrian Artifacts.

Politicians spend your money and hope some of the glamour attaches to them

Filed under: Business, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer wonders why so many states and cities are so eager to throw taxpayer money at movie and TV productions:

I am always amazed that the media will credulously run stories against “corporate welfare” for oil companies (which usually mostly includes things like LIFO accounting and investment tax credits that are not oil industry specific) but then beg and plead for us taxpayers to subsidize movie producers.

I wish I understood the reason for the proliferation of government subsidies for film production. Is it as simple as politicians wanting to hobnob with Hollywood types? Our local papers often go into full sales mode for sports team subsidies, but that is understandable from a bottom-line perspective — sports are about the only thing that sells dead-tree papers any more, and so more local sports has a direct benefit on local newspapers. Is it the same reasoning for proposed subsidies for Hollywood moguls?

Whatever the reason, our local paper made yet another pitch for throwing tax dollars at movie producers

    Notwithstanding a recent flurry of Super Bowl-related documentaries and commercials that got 2015 off to a good start, Arizona appears to be falling behind in a competitive and lucrative business. The entertainment industry pays well, supports considerable indirect employment and offers the chance for cities and states to shine on a global stage.

Seriously? I am sure setting up the craft table pays better than catering a party at my home, but it is a job that lasts 2 months and is then gone. Ditto everything else on the production. And I am sick of the “shines on the world stage thing.” Who cares? And is this really even true? The movie Chicago was filmed in Toronto — did everyone who watched Chicago suddenly want to go to Toronto? The TV animated series Archer gets a big subsidy from the state of Georgia. Have they even mentioned Georgia in the series? Given the tone of the show, would they even want to be mentioned?

When government subsidizes an industry, it is explicitly saying that resources are better and more productively invested in the subsidized industry than in other industries in which the money would have been spent in a free market. Does the author really have evidence that the money I would have spent to improve the campgrounds we operate in Arizona is better taken from me and spent to get a Hollywood movie shot here instead? Which investment will still be here 6 months from now?

Las Vegas, home to “the country’s most developed surveillance state”

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Megan McArdle recently visited Las Vegas and her reactions were recorded pretty much everywhere she went:

So this weekend, I went to Las Vegas for the first time. I’m not much of a gambler — I quit playing when they raise the minimums past $5 — but there’s enough of a theme-park aspect to the place that a few friends and I managed to have a terrific time. Two things immediately stand out to the libertarian visitor: In some ways, it has the most liberty of any place in the U.S. — and it also has the country’s most developed surveillance state.

First, the libertarian aspects: All sorts of things that aren’t allowed in normal cities are positively encouraged on the Vegas strip — gambling, obviously, but also things such as drinking and smoking in public. The casinos still allow smoking, and every bar is happy to give you a to-go cup if you don’t want to linger. I’m a little old for all-day drinking, but I did wander around an arcade with a frozen margarita, reveling in my newfound freedom.

[…]

Now for the creepy aspects: There are cameras everywhere. In the casinos, obviously, but also on the streetlights, the walls and every overhang. When I asked the cab driver whether there was much crime on the Strip, he laughed and pointed to the cameras. “No crime,” he said. “No point. Cameras everywhere.”

So I left Vegas with a question: Is the friendly police state the price of the freedom to drink and gamble with abandon? Whatever your position on vice industries, they are heavily associated with crime, even where they are legal. Drinking makes people both violent and vulnerable; gambling presents an almost irresistible temptation to cheating and theft. Las Vegas has Disneyfied libertinism. But to do so, it employs armies of security guards and acres of surveillance cameras that are always and everywhere recording your every move.

This is a question I’ve asked myself before, funnily enough, when arguing with anarcho-capitalists. For those who do not follow the ins and outs of libertarian sectarianism, anarcho-capitalists want to replace the state with private institutions, with insurance companies and private security forces substituting for most current government functions. But when I’ve probed into the actual mechanics of this, I’ve often found that anarcho-capitalists end up describing something unpleasantly like a police state, only not called “the government” — like giving insurance companies and private police forces the ability to perform warrantless at-will searches in order to prosecute crimes. One way or another, society is going to protect itself against theft and violence, rape and murder, and putting those tools in the hands of private parties causes much the same trouble as they do in the hands of the police.

QotD: Persecuting political heretics

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

It seems to be forgotten that the current American theory that political heresy should be put down by force, that a man who disputes whatever is official has no rights in law or equity, that he is lucky if he fares no worse than to lose his constitutional benefits of free speech, free assemblage and the use of the mails it seems to be forgotten that this theory was invented, not by Dr. Wilson, but by Roosevelt. Most Liberals, I suppose, would credit it, if asked, to Wilson. He has carried it to extravagant lengths; he is the father superior of all the present advocates of it; he will probably go down into American history as its greatest prophet. But it was first clearly stated, not in any Wilsonian bull to the right-thinkers of all lands, but in Roosevelt’s proceedings against the so-called Paterson anarchists. You will find it set forth at length in an opinion prepared for him by his Attorney-General, Charles J. Bonaparte, another curious and almost fabulous character, also an absolutist wearing the false whiskers of a democrat. Bonaparte furnished the law, and Roosevelt furnished the blood and iron. It was an almost ideal combination; Bonaparte had precisely the touch of Italian finesse that the Rough Rider always lacked. Roosevelt believed in the Paterson doctrine in brief, that the Constitution does not throw its cloak around heretics to the end of his days. In the face of what he conceived to be contumacy to revelation his fury took on a sort of lyrical grandeur. There was nothing too awful for the culprit in the dock. Upon his head were poured denunciations as violent as the wildest interdicts of a mediaeval pope.

The appearance of such men, of course, is inevitable under a democracy. Consummate showmen, they arrest the wonder of the mob, and so put its suspicions to sleep. What they actually believe is of secondary consequence; the main thing is what they say; even more, the way they say it. Obviously, their activity does a great deal of damage to the democratic theory, for they are standing refutations of the primary doctrine that the common folk choose their leaders wisely. They damage it again in another and more subtle way. That is to say, their ineradicable contempt for the. minds they must heat up and bamboozle leads them into a fatalism that shows itself in a cynical and opportunistic politics, a deliberate avoidance of fundamentals. The policy of a democracy thus becomes an eternal improvisation, changing with the private ambitions of its leaders and the transient and often unintelligible emotions of its rank and file.

H.L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”, Prejudices, Second Series, 1920

March 5, 2015

John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (Full album, 1964)

Filed under: Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The album that made me start paying attention to jazz…

Published on 9 Dec 2013

JOHN COLTRANE
“A LOVE SUPREME”
1964
(Impulse)

Genre: Modal Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz

Tracklist:
1. A Love Supreme, Part 1: Acknowledgement
2. A Love Supreme, Part 2: Resolution
3. A Love Supreme, Part 3: Pursuance/Part 4: Psalm

Personnel:
John Coltrane, tenor sax
McCoy Tyner, piano
Jimmy Garrison, bass
Elvin Jones, drums

H/T to Josh Jones at Open Culture for the link.

What can I add to the chorus of voices in praise of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme? Recorded in December of 1964 and released fifty years ago this month, the album has gone on to achieve cult status — literally inspiring a church founded in Coltrane’s name — as one of the finest works of jazz or any other form of music. It cemented Coltrane’s name in the pantheon of great composers, and re-invented religious music for a secular age. Composed as a hymn of praise and gratitude, “the bizarre suite of four movements,” wrote NPR’s Arun Rath last year, “communicated a profound spiritual and philosophical message.” That message is articulated explicitly by Coltrane in the album’s liner notes as “a humble offering to Him,” the deity he experienced in a 1957 “spiritual awakening” that “lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.”

Reason.tv – Montana’s Yoga Pants Ban is a Joke (or is it?) Nanny of the Month (Feb ‘15)

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 4 Mar 2015

They’re busting backyard archery in Minnesota, and massage shops in California, but you’ll find the Nanny of the Month in the Big Sky state where one lawmaker got his undies in a bunch over the Bare as You Dare bike ride and decided to crack down on indecent exposure, including yoga pants! (Especially the extra-naughty beige colored ones.)

But wait, is the whole ban one big joke or is the state representative who proposed it backpedaling in the face of ridicule?

In search of healthy eating

Filed under: Food, Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum talks about all the things we’ve been told about healthy eating … that just ain’t so:

For several years now I’ve been following the controversy over whether the dietary guidelines that have developed over the the past 70 years might be all wrong. And I’ve become tentatively convinced that, in fact, they are wrong. For most people — not all! — salt isn’t a big killer; cholesterol isn’t harmful; and red meat and saturated fat are perfectly OK. Healthy, even. Sugar, on the other hand, really needs to be watched.

Before I go on, a great big caveat: I’m not even an educated amateur on this subject. I’ve read a fair amount about it, but I’ve never dived into it systematically. And the plain truth is that firm proof is hard to come by when it comes to diet. It’s really, really hard to conduct the kinds of experiments that would give us concrete proof that one diet is better than another, and the studies that have been done almost all have defects of some kind.

Emphasis mine.

Randomized trials are the gold standard of dietary studies, but as I said above, they’re really, really hard to conduct properly. You have to find a stable population of people. You have to pick half of them randomly and get them to change their diets. You have to trust them to actually do it. You have to follow them for years, not months. Virtually no trial can ever truly meet this standard.

Nonetheless, as Carroll says, the randomized trials we do have suggest that red meat and saturated fat have little effect on cardiovascular health — and might actually have a positive effect on cancer outcomes.

At the same time, increased consumption of sugars and carbohydrates might be actively bad for us. At the very least they contribute to obesity and diabetes, and there’s some evidence that they aren’t so great for your heart either.

So where does this leave us? As Carroll says, the literature as a whole suggests that we simply don’t know. We’ve been convinced of a lot of things for a long time, and it’s turned out that a lot of what we believed was never really backed by solid evidence in the first place. So now the dietary ship is turning. Slowly, but it’s turning.

His primary take-away from all this: moderation is probably your safest bet, unless you have a condition that requires you to avoid certain foods or types of foods. Oh, and avoid over-indulging in packaged food that uses lots of preservatives. This is certainly one area where the science sure didn’t turn out to be settled, after all.

Tax Free Savings Accounts

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

At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Livio Di Matteo talks about tax free savings accounts (TFSAs), registered retirement savings plans (RRSPs), and why some people are getting upset that some Canadians benefit more from these financial tools than others do:

A major theme running under most of these arguments goes something like this — Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs) at least leave “a legacy of tax revenue to future governments” whereas TFSAs may generate “supernormal” returns that will escape taxation and on top of it will accrue primarily to the well-off.

However, when I think of RRSPs and TFSAs, I see them both as essentially the same. They are both “tax expenditures” that are designed to encourage saving by promising some type of tax incentive. The broader debate should really be about how we want to encourage more saving and then about “tax expenditures” in general rather than how much we should allow as limits to either RRSP or TFSA contributions.

However, if we are going to argue about RRSPs and TFSAs, to my mind what differs is the timing of the break. For an RRSP, you are getting the tax incentive upfront and deferring the taxes until you withdraw the money. For a TFSA, you are making the contribution with after tax dollars and allowing the contribution to accumulate tax free — the tax benefit comes down the road as the money grows.

[…]

Young households with children who face more cash constraints might find the RRSP more attractive while older households would probably find the TFSA more attractive. All other things given, both vehicles are of greater advantage to higher rather than low income earners because higher incomes are more likely to be able to save — period. If you are going to make the argument that TFSAs are somehow favouring the wealthy or higher income earners, you need to acknowledge that the same argument applies to RRSPs.

Update, 7 March: It kinda helps when I remember to include the correct link to an article…

QotD: Shalamar and the Khalsa

Filed under: Books, History, India, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Between the Sutlej and Lahore lie fifty of the hottest, flattest, scrubbiest miles on earth, and I supposed we’d cover them in a long day’s ride, but Sardul said we should lie overnight at a serai a few miles from the city: there was something he wanted me to see. So we did, and after supper he took me through a copse to the loveliest place I ever saw in India — there, all unexpected after the heat and dust of the plain, was a great garden, with little palaces and pavilions among the trees, all hung with coloured lanterns in the warm dusk: streams meandered among the lawns and flower-beds, the air was fragrant with night-blooms, soft music sounded from some hidden place, and everywhere couples were strolling hand in hand or deep in lovers’ talk under the boughs. The Chinese Summer Palace, where I walked years later, was altogether grander, I suppose, but there was a magic about that Indian garden that I can’t describe — you could call it perfect peace, with its gentle airs rustling the leaves and the lights winking in the twilight; it was the kind of spot where Scheherazade might have told her unending stories; even its name sounds like a caress: Shalamar.

But this wasn’t the sight that Sardul wanted me to see — that was something unimaginably different, and we viewed it next morning. We left the serai at dawn, but instead of riding towards Lahore, which was in full view in the distance, we went a couple of miles out of our way towards the great plain of Maian Mir where, Sardul assured me mysteriously, the true wonder of the Punjab would be shown to me; knowing the Oriental mind. I could guess it was something designed strike awe in the visiting foreigner — well, it did all of that. We heard it long before we saw it, the flat crash of artillery at first, and then a great confused rumble of sound which resolved itself into the squealing of elephants, the high bray of trumpets, the rhythm of drums and martial music and the thunder of a thousand hooves making the ground tremble beneath us. I knew what it was before we rode out of the trees and halted on a bund to view it in breathtaking panorama: the pride of the Punjab and the dread of peaceful India: the famous Khalsa.

Now, I’ve taken note of a few heathen armies in my time. The Heavenly Host of Tai’ping was bigger, the black tide of Cetewayo’s legions sweeping into Little Hand was surely more terrifying, and there’s a special place in my nightmares for that vast forest of tipis, five miles wide, that I looked down on from the bluffs over Little Bighorn but for pure military might I’ve seen nothing outside Europe (and damned little inside) to match that great disciplined array of men and beasts and metal on Maian Mir. As far as you could see among the endless lines of tents and waving standards, the broad maidan was alive with foot battalions at drill, horse regiments at field exercise, and guns at practice — and they were all uniformed and in perfect order, that was the shocking thing. Black, brown, and yellow armies in those days, you see. might be as brave as any, but they didn’t have centuries of drill and tactical movement drummed into em, not even the Zulus, or Ranavalona’s Hova guardsmen. That was the thing about the Khalsa: it was Aldershot in turbans. It was an army.

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, 1990.

March 4, 2015

The FCC is merely a symptom

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Taxicab Depressions, Taxi Hack offers a few thoughts on current events:

If you have read my post The Pig Trap, you know of my absolute bewilderment at the current state of our country. Our government is utterly lawless, just making shit up as they go along, creating regulations and executive edicts to bypass the Congress and the Constitution, committing crimes in the furtherance of those goals, and nobody ever gets in trouble, unless he screwing someone he shouldn’t be, and nobody ever loses their job or goes before a judge, and most importantly, nobody seems to give a fuck. Everything is just fucking dandy, as long as we can binge-watch Girls and Entourage on HBO GO and Katy Perry’s next single doesn’t suck and that hot chick from Club Plush texts me next week…

I wake up every day around two or three in the afternoon, make a cup of coffee and turn on the news, just waiting for the day when it finally happens, the day that something finally snaps, and I am listening to Sheppard Smith breathlessly trying to describe shaky video of a mob of 500,000 or 800,000 pissed off taxpayers that has invaded Washington and are lining every street in D.C., armed to the teeth, and erecting scaffolding on the National Mall.

Actually, that’s not how I think it is going to go, but I promise you… what can not go on, will NOT go on.

A couple days ago, a five member panel of unelected bureaucrats called the FCC voted 3 to 2 to seize control of the internet for the Federal government, without so much as a “by your leave” to the Congress. It’s not like your Congressman or Senator did this, these were three UNELECTED political appointees, all DEMOCRATS, which I think is worthy of mention, and they just decided that they have the power to regulate what you say and what you view on the internet, without asking you what YOU think about that. They came up with a big fat Rule Book For The Internet that they would not show to the public before the vote, and now that they have deemed they have the authority to do this and voted to institute their new Rule Book For The Internet, they STILL won’t show the public their new Rule Book For The Internet.

How is that not a Joe Biden-sized Big Fucking Deal for you? THREE PEOPLE you never heard of and certainly never voted for just took over control of the internet for the government, and they are not showing the public what the new rules will be. Does that mean websites will have to get a government “license”, like radio stations? And will they have a list of bad things they can’t say, or they will be fined and maybe even LOSE their license? Nobody knows, because they will not show the public the rules they are creating.

Free speech on campus

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 2 Mar 2015

Time to stop indulging privileged militant “progressive” puritan student bigots.

How many colours do you see?

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

How many colours do you see

On LinkedIn, Professor Diana Derval posted this image with an explanation why different people will see significantly different numbers of colours:

You see less than 20 color nuances: you are a dichromats, like dogs, which means you have 2 types of cones only. You are likely to wear black, beige, and blue. 25% of the population is dichromat.

You see between 20 and 32 color nuances: you are a trichromat, you have 3 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green and red area). You enjoy different colors as you can appreciate them. 50% of the population is trichromat.

You see between 33 and 39 colors: you are a tetrachromat, like bees, and have 4 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green, red plus yellow area). You are irritated by yellow, so this color will be nowhere to be found in your wardrobe. 25% of the population is tetrachromat.

You see more than 39 color nuances: come on, you are making up things! there are only 39 different colors in the test and probably only 35 are properly translated by your computer screen anyway 🙂

It is highly probable that people who have an additional 4th cone do not get tricked by blue/black or white/gold dresses, no matter the background light 😉

H/T to ESR for the link.

The odd secular religion of Corporation Theology

Filed under: Business, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Megan McArdle on the weird things some people can believe:

I got a lot of responses to my post last week on Wal-Mart’s decision to raise the minimum wage many of its employees earn to $10 an hour next year. One variety of response stood out: the folks who said “Wal-Mart is doing this because it’s good for its business.”

It stood out because it is almost right, but not quite. The correct statement is that “Wal-Mart is doing this because it thinks it’s good for its business.” Never ignore the possibility that Wal-Mart could be completely wrong.

I remark on this because some of the arguments I saw verged upon what I’ve come to think of as “corporation theology”: the belief that if a corporation is doing something, that thing must be incredibly profitable. This is no less of a faith-based statement than the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Yet it is surprisingly popular among commentators, not just on the right, but also on the left.

[…]

This left-wing writer was evincing considerably more faith than I have in the American corporation. Corporations do dumb stuff all the time — for decades, even. Moreover, advertising has multiple purposes. It can of course induce you to consume more of a product, but frankly, no matter how much Pepperidge Farm advertises, it’s probably not going to dramatically increase America’s consumption of prepackaged cookies. So why does it advertise? Because it wants you to choose a Milano instead of an Oreo or one of them newfangled biscotti.

This is corporation theology. Of course, you also see it on the right — arguments that if some product were good or desirable, a corporation would already have provided it. The entire history of human progress argues against this theory.

As these two examples suggest, corporation theology gets trimmed to personal and ideological convenience, as all theologies often are: A liberal is capable of simultaneously believing that market failures abound in industries he or she would like to regulate, and also that Costco knows how to run Wal-Mart’s labor policy better than Wal-Mart does; a conservative, the inverse. Both are wrong. Corporations, like all human institutions, are great engines for making mistakes. The only reason they seem so competent is that companies who make too many mistakes go out of business, and we don’t have them around for comparison.

QotD: The macroeconomic insights of MMO gaming

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Video game communities, social economies, give us something that we never had as economists before. That’s something of an opportunity, a chance to experiment with a macroeconomy. We can experiment in economics with individuals. We can put someone behind a screen and experiment on the subject, and ask him or her to make choices and see how they behave.

That has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics requires a different scenario. You conduct controlled experiments with a large economy. We are not allowed to do this in the real world. But in the video game world, we economists have a smidgen of an opportunity to conduct controlled experiments on a real, functioning macroeconomy. And that may be a scientific window into economic reality that we’ve never had access to before.

Yanis Varoufakis, talking to Peter Suderman, “A Multiplayer Game Environment Is Actually a Dream Come True for an Economist”, Reason, 2014-05-30.

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