Quotulatiousness

July 21, 2018

John Coltrane: My Favourite Things – Sachal Jazz and Wynton Marsalis

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

Hassan Khan
Published on Apr 30, 2015

The original was regarded to have transcended from the West to the East and this tribute absolutely manages to do so! What a tribute and proof that when the East and West compliment rather than compete, there is no limit to what we can achieve! #Makejazznotwar! Sachal Includes Baqir Abbas (flute, bansuri), Nijat Ali (conductor), Ustad Ballu Khan (tabla), Nafees Ahmed (sitar), Asad Ali (guitar), Najaf Ali (dholak), Rafiq Ahmed (dholak)

H/T to Open Culture for the link.

QotD: Epicurus and Plato

Filed under: Greece, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Epicurus had reacted against the Platonic concepts of Reason with a capital R, the Good, the Beautiful, Duty, and other absolute concepts existing in themselves in some supernatural world. For Epicurus, what is moral is what brings pleasures to individuals in a context where there is no social strife. The Epicurean wise man will keep the covenant and not harm others not because he wishes to comply with some moral injunction being imposed from above, but simply because that’s the best way to pursue his happiness and keep his tranquility of mind.

Martin Masse, “The Epicurean roots of some classical liberal and Misesian concepts“, speaking at the Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn Alabama, 2005-03-18.

July 20, 2018

No end in sight for our national fake poutine crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few key posts from the Twitters to illustrate the problem:







“Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle:

So much has changed, culminating — for now — with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and François Legault. Certainly that’s the way to bet it. Even normally sunshiny New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI are refusing to file carbon reduction plans in line with what Catherine McKenna expects.

So the cabinet Trudeau shuffled on Wednesday isn’t a pre-election cabinet, in the sense of one that’s sweet and shiny to attract distracted voters, so much as it’s a survive-until-the-election cabinet. If this cabinet were a movie, it’d be Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors. A bunch of street fighters, just trying to make it from the Bronx to Brooklyn in one piece. Doug Ford calling to them from an abandoned car, clinking empty bottles together. Or to use another, perhaps less obscure, movie analogy, it’s farewell to Hope and Hard Work, hello to Horse’s Head/ In Your Bed.

The stars of this partially-refurbished cabinet are two bad cops, in one case quite literally: Bill Blair and Dominic LeBlanc. Blair’s job on the border-crossing file isn’t only to get up Doug Ford’s nose, though that’s a handy bonus. It’s to do more or less what he did as the Liberals’ back-bench pilot of cannabis legalization: to steward a controversial file as humourlessly as humanly possible, to convey with every flinty word and steely grimace that the government is not even remotely interested in messing around.

It’s interesting that Ahmed Hussen, a personable and diligent minister who was also obviously appointed so he could incarnate Liberal branding of openness and diversity, keeps every part of the immigration file except those elements that scare some voters: the people walking across the border. Those parts have been assigned to Sgt. Rock over here.

LeBlanc, an irrepressible rogue whose dad was Pierre Trudeau’s fisheries minister and who has known Justin Trudeau all his life, is not by nature a political bone-crusher, although that’s certainly within his vocabulary. He doesn’t even like when people like me emphasize that part of his personality. He will prefer to get along. But he has the job Trudeau had because Trudeau noticed that, even though his intergovernmental minister was Justin Trudeau, the intergovernmental mood out there was getting noticeably chippy. So Trudeau stripped Trudeau of that portfolio and handed it to someone who could concentrate on it. It’s traditional to view a smaller ministerial portfolio as evidence of a demotion. Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself.

2nd Battle Of The Marne – Turning Point On The Western Front I THE GREAT WAR Week 208

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 19 Jul 2018

The German Army launches an diversionary attack from the Rheims-Soisson salient and increases the pressure on Paris. But the Allies knew about the attack and for the first time, they effectively counter the German Stormtrooper tactics and even counter-attack along the line.

Fiat currency and the impact of cryptocurrencies

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catallaxy Files, Sinclair Davidson explains some of the advantages and disadvantages of both fiat (government-issued) and private currency:

As George Selgin, Larry White and others have shown, many historical societies had systems of private money — free banking — where the institution of money was provided by the market.

But for the most part, private monies have been displaced by fiat currencies, and live on as a historical curiosity.

We can explain this with an ‘institutional possibility frontier’; a framework developed first by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and his various co-authors. Shleifer and colleagues array social institutions according to how they trade-off the risks of disorder (that is, private fraud and theft) against the risk of dictatorship (that is, government expropriation, oppression, etc.) along the frontier.

As the graph shows, for money these risks are counterfeiting (disorder) and unexpected inflation (dictatorship). The free banking era taught us that private currencies are vulnerable to counterfeiting, but due to competitive market pressure, minimise the risk of inflation.

By contrast, fiat currencies are less susceptible to counterfeiting. Governments are a trusted third party that aggressively prosecutes currency fraud. The tradeoff though is that governments get the power of inflating the currency.

The fact that fiat currencies seem to be widely preferred in the world isn’t only because of fiat currency laws. It’s that citizens seem to be relatively happy with this tradeoff. They would prefer to take the risk of inflation over the risk of counterfeiting.

One reason why this might be the case is because they can both diversify and hedge against the likelihood of inflation by holding assets such as gold, or foreign currency.

The dictatorship costs of fiat currency are apparently not as high as ‘hard money’ theorists imagine.

Introducing cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies significantly change this dynamic.

Cryptocurrencies are a form of private money that substantially, if not entirely, eliminate the risk of counterfeiting. Blockchains underpin cryptocurrency tokens as a secure, decentralised digital asset.

They’re not just an asset to diversify away from inflationary fiat currency, or a hedge to protect against unwanted dictatorship. Cryptocurrencies are a (near — and increasing) substitute for fiat currency.

This means that the disorder costs of private money drop dramatically.

In fact, the counterfeiting risk for mature cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is currently less than fiat currency. Fiat currency can still be counterfeited. A stable and secure blockchain eliminates the risk of counterfeiting entirely.

Tank Chats #33 Panzer III | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 11 Mar 2017

The thirty-third Tank Chat, this time presented by Curator David Willey. Including a fascinating insight into pre-Second World War German tank production and how the Panzer III worked alongside its fellow Panzers.

To find out more, buy the new Haynes Panzer III tank manual. https://www.myonlinebooking.co.uk/tan…

The Panzer III was conceived in 1934 as the principle combat tank of the Panzer divisions. The Museum’s Panzer III went into action in the North African theatre of war and is believed to have been captured at the Battle of Alam Halfa.

Support the work of The Tank Museum on Patreon: ► https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
Or donate http://tankmuseum.org/support-us/donate

QotD: The modern mission of the university

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

God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense; to adapt their brains as a useful putty — a kind of “semtex” or plastic explosive to press into the folds and corners of the society the progressive must destroy to rule.

David Warren, “Halls of memory”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-10-01.

July 19, 2018

Mucking around with Stonehenge

Filed under: Britain, History, Religion, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Many people are still under the impression that Stonehenge was built by the Druids (debunked in this video by Siobhan Thompson). At least as many people think that the modern day stone circle is an undisturbed historical relic, and that the stones are standing today as and where they have for thousands of years. All the way back in 2001, Emma Young did a quick debunking of that theory in New Scientist:

An early photograph of Stonehenge taken in July 1877 by Philip Rupert Acott
Via Wikimedia Commons


Photo from a similar angle in 2008 showing the extent of reconstruction.
Via Wikimedia Commons

Most of the one million visitors who visit Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain every year believe they are looking at untouched 4,000-year-old remains. But virtually every stone was re-erected, straightened or embedded in concrete between 1901 and 1964, says a British doctoral student.

“What we have been looking at is a 20th-century landscape, reminiscent of what Stonehenge might have looked like thousands of years ago,” says Brian Edwards, a student at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

Stonehenge isn’t the only ancient site to have been transformed in recent years, he says. “Even many of the local people in Avebury weren’t aware that a lot of the stones were put up in the 1930s,” he told New Scientist.

[…]

English Heritage says it is now considering covering the Stonehenge alteration programme in detail in the next edition of its official guidebook to the site. A decision not to include the work in official guides was taken in the 1960s, says Dave Batchelor, English Heritage’s senior archaeologist.

The first restoration project took place in 1901. A leaning stone was straightened and set in concrete, to prevent it falling.

More drastic renovations were carried out in the 1920s. Under the direction of Colonel William Hawley, a member of the Stonehenge Society, six stones were moved and re-erected.

Cranes were used to reposition three more stones in 1958. One giant fallen lintel, or cross stone, was replaced. Then in 1964, four stones were repositioned to prevent them falling.

The 1920s ‘restoration’ was the most “vigorous”, says Christopher Chippindale of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “The work in the 1920s under Colonel William Crawley is a sad story,” he says.

As I commented on a post back in 2010:

I imagine, given how many times Stonehenge has been mucked about with by earlier enthusiasts, there must be much misleading data has to be sifted and re-sifted before any definite discoveries can be announced. Stonehenge has been fascinating people for centuries and there are probably lots of amateur investigations that may well have made the situation more confusing (think of a sixteenth century equivalent of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft with a nose for treasure).

Atlas Obscura recently had a set of photos of Stonehenge taken in 1867 likely featuring the family of Colonel Sir Henry James, of the Ordnance Survey. There’s also a watercolour by John Constable from around 1835 showing a very different, more ruin-y monument:

Crony capitalists of the military-industrial complex

Matthew D. Mitchell comments on some of the problems with government contractors and their all-too-cosy relationship with the government officials who hand out the public’s funds:

… as economist Luigi Zingales explains in his book, A Capitalism for the People, governments contracting with private interests has its own set of risks:

    The problem with many public-private partnerships is best captured by a comment that George Bernard Shaw once made to a beautiful ballerina. She had proposed that they have a child together so that the child could possess his brain and her beauty; Shaw replied that he feared the child would have her brain and his beauty. Similarly, public-private partnerships often wind up with the social goals of the private sector and the efficiency of the public one. In these partnerships, Republican and Democratic politicians and businesspeople frequently cooperate toward just one goal: their own profit.

When President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” he was concerned that certain firms selling to the government might obtain untoward privilege, twisting public resources to serve private ends. It is telling that one of those contractors, Lockheed Aircraft, would become the first company to be bailed out by Congress in 1971.

For many observers, the George W. Bush administration’s “no-bid” contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater appeared to exemplify the sort of deals that Eisenhower had warned of. It is true that federal regulations explicitly permit contracts without open bidding in certain circumstances, such as when only one firm is capable of providing a certain service or when there is an unusual or compelling emergency. In any case, a report issued by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in 2011 estimated that contractor fraud and abuse during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost taxpayers an estimated $31 to $60 billion. This includes, but is not limited to:

    requirements that were excessive when established and/or not adjusted in a timely fashion; poor performance by contractors that required costly rework; ill-conceived projects that did not fit the cultural, political, and economic mores of the society they were meant to serve; security and other costs that were not anticipated due to lack of proper planning; questionable and unsupported payments to contractors that take years to reconcile; ineffective government oversight; and losses through lack of competition.

Governments may also award contracts to perform a service that has more to do with serving a parochial interest than with providing a benefit to the paying public. For example, Congress may order the Pentagon to procure more tanks even though the Pentagon itself says the tanks aren’t needed. Paying General Dynamics hundreds of millions of dollars to produce unneeded tanks in order to protect jobs in particular congressional districts may be an abuse even if the underlying process by which the contract was awarded is legitimate.

“Sustainability”

Filed under: Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer explains why it makes little sense to push for higher and higher levels of recycling when the costs of recycling are greater than ordinary disposal:

Sustainability is about using resources in a way that can be reasonably maintained into the future. This is pretty much impossible to really model, but that is not necessary for a decision at the margin such as recycling in Washington DC. When people say “sustainable” at the margin, they generally mean that fewer scarce resources are used, whether those resources be petroleum or landfill space.

Gosh, if only we had some sort of simple metric that summarized the value of the time and resources that go into a service like recycling or garbage disposal. Wait, we do! This metric is called “price”. Now, we could have a nice long conversation about pricing theory and whether or not prices always mirror costs. But in a free competitive market, most prices will be a good proxy for the relative scarcity (or projected scarcity) of resources. Now, I am going to assume the numbers for DC are correct and are worked out intelligently (ie the cost of recycling should be net of the value of materials recovered, and the cost of burning the trash should be net of the value of the electricity generated). Given this, recycling at $75 a ton HAS to be less “sustainable” than burning trash at $46 since it either consumes more resources or it consumes resources with a higher relative scarcity or both.

The problem with using a common-sense metric like actual real-world prices is that we’ve had two generations of westerners raised to “believe” in recycling the way their forebears used to believe in the Holy Ghost. It’s not a matter of economic efficiency, it’s a moral and quasi-religious belief inculcated from the time they first started kindergarten. Explaining that it’s worse for Mother Gaia to try to recycle 100% of the waste our society produces is — if you’ll pardon the expression — a waste of time, because they were never argued into believing the virtue of recycling, so you’ll never argue them out of it.

How to Make Trestles Episode 2 | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published on 29 Jun 2018

Paul assembles the legs of the trestle. Then the posts are marked out and fixed in place to make a sturdy reliable trestle, using gussets for additional strength and rigidity.

Cutting list, drawings and tool and hardware lists can be downloaded here:
https://paulsellers.com/trestles-drawings-and-cutting-list-download/

Music credit:
Henry Horrell (https://soundcloud.com/henry-horrell)

For more information on these topics, see https://paulsellers.com or https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com

QotD: Ladies first

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

You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.

“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view.

David Thompson, “Reheated (48)”, DavidThompson, 2016-09-27.

July 18, 2018

A great World Cup?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, Soccer — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

At Spiked, Mick Hume looks back at what we were told to expect from the hosting nation of the 2018 World Cup:

FIFA 2018 World Cup opening ceremony
Via Wikimedia Commons

Everybody agrees that the 2018 World Cup has been a roaring success. Yet remember how recently we were being warned that it would be the equivalent of a humanitarian disaster?

Before a ball was kicked we were assured that English and other international fans would all be beaten up, if not eaten alive, by armies of ‘neo-Nazi’ Russian hooligans, and that President Vladimir Putin would cynically exploit the World Cup ‘like Hitler did the 1936 Olympics’, as a tool in his plot for global domination and world war.

British government ministers and officials boycotted the tournament after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal (the expense-account restaurants of Moscow might have missed their presence, but it’s unlikely anybody else did). And England squad member Danny Rose reportedly told his family ‘don’t come to Russia’, because of ‘fears that they would be racially abused’.

Questions were asked about why there were relatively few England fans at the team’s opening games in Russia. In the face of such sustained scaremongering, it might rather seem a wonder that anyone braved the journey.

Yet once the actual football kicked off, what happened? None of the above. Instead the World Cup immediately became a glorious, thrilling spectacle, capturing the imagination of fans worldwide amid a rolling party atmosphere across Russia.

This follows the similar reality gaps between political scaremongering and sporting success around other recent World Cups and Olympic games, notably London 2012. It should surely be a reminder to us all to ignore the agenda-driving doom-mongers in future and remember that, in the end, the game’s the thing. There is no chance of keeping politics out of sport, but we might at least try to keep sport out of politics and reject attempts to use our great sporting occasions as political footballs. (Rider: the idea of staging the next World Cup in Qatar still seems bonkers, but…)

Isaac Asimov – Master of Science – Extra Sci Fi – #1

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 17 Jul 2018

Isaac Asimov didn’t have a birthday. Nobody knew the exact date of his birth, so he picked one for himself at a young age — and that choice, quite possibly, was what gave us one of his best creative periods.

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