Extra Credits
Published on 9 Oct 2018Alfred Bester is known for bridging the gap between science fiction and detective comics, creating villains like Solomon Grundy in the Green Lantern and Superman stories and for his long-form stories The Demolished Man (which won the first Hugo award) and The Stars My Destination which influenced later writers.
October 13, 2018
The True Frontier – Alfred Bester – Extra Sci Fi
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It’s always TEOTWAWKI, and the demands are always the same
Sean Gabb on the message and tactics of the alarmists — whose chosen fixation shifts over time, but whose demands are always the same:
Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:
- Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,
- Give us a lot of money.
When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate demand curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.
By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.
Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.
What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.
A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:
- That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;
- That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;
- That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;
- That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.
His conclusion:
The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.
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Why Governments Create Inflation
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 14 Feb 2017Inflation can carry with it quite a few costs. But some governments, like Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe in the early 2000s, will go out of their to way to create inflation. Why?
Well, in the Zimbabwe example, the government printed the money and used it to buy goods and services. The ensuing hyperinflation acted as a tax that transferred wealth from the citizens to the government.
However, this is a fairly uncommon reason. Inflation doesn’t make for a good tax and it’s a last resort for desperate governments that are otherwise unable to raise funds.
There are other benefits to inflation that would make governments want to create it. In the short run, inflation can actually boost economic output. However, as we’ve previously covered, an increase in the money supply leads to an equal increase in prices in the long run.
If there’s a recession, governments might create inflation to spur productivity and ease the economic downturn. However, this type of inflationary boosting can be abused. Long-term boosting causes people to simply expect and prepare for it.
Reducing inflation is also costly. If the process is reversed and the growth in the money supply decreases, we get disinflation. Unemployment will likely increase in the short run and an economy can go through a recession. But in the long run, prices will adjust as well.
Inflation can be a neat trick for governments to boost productivity in an economy. But it can easily get out of hand and has even been likened to a drug. Once you start, you need more and more. And stopping is awfully painful as the economy shrinks.
This concludes our section on Inflation and the Quantity Theory of Money. Up next in Principles of Macroeconomics, we’ll be digging into Business Fluctuations.
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QotD: Evolution
Look… Just because H. habilis was several branches back on the family bush doesn’t mean we’re supposed to stop being handy.
I get not carrying a pistol. It’s not for everybody and, if done with any level of seriousness, demands certain commitments and obligations that not everyone wants to undertake, and that’s cool. It’s still (mostly) a free country.
But how do you go through life without a flashlight and some kind of knife? Our most primitive ancestors carried sharp rocks around with them. Hell, carrying a sharpened rock around in case of future need is basically how we tell where the apes stop and the people start in our fossil family album. If they could have carried a light around without it burning their fingers or going out all the time, you bet they would have.
They make flashlights and knives small enough to accommodate any code, dress or legal, up with which you have to put.
Tamara Keel, “Look…”, View from the Porch, 2016-05-26.
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October 12, 2018
Carbon taxes may be efficient, but let’s not rush into it quite yet…
Terence Corcoran says we shouldn’t jump at the chance to kill our economy just because carbon taxes are efficient:
It didn’t take long for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel committee supported the government of Canada’s carbon-price scheme. The Montreal-based carbon-taxing NGO, the Ecofiscal Commission, hailed Nordhaus for having “demonstrated” that a universal price on carbon was the most “efficient” way to curb climate change.
Before jumping aboard the Nordhaus bandwagon, however, carbon-taxing politicians and all Canadians might want to take a closer look at what they are being led into.
[…]
Nordhaus and his co-winner of this year’s Nobel in economics, former Stanford economist Paul Romer, are great believers in “incentives.” As Romer said in a post-Nobel interview (tweeted by McKenna, naturally): “I believe, and I think Bill (Nordhaus) believes, that if we start encouraging people to find ways to produce lower carbon energy, everybody’s going to be surprised at the progress we’ll make as we go down that path. All we need to do is create some incentives that get people going in that direction, and that we don’t know exactly what solution will come out of it — but we’ll make big progress.”
But why a tax? If all we need to do is deploy the price mechanism, why impose a tax? Let’s ignore for a moment the dubious assumption that the science and economics of climate change are sound and settled. Would it still not be better to have the government set the carbon price, require the energy companies to charge it, but allow the revenue to flow not to government but through to energy companies and their shareholders, and others in the supply chain? That’s where market forces and the above-mentioned miracle price mechanisms — rather than government planners — would determine where to invest and what energy alternatives are best. (No gas retailer could possibly eat the cost of a 90-cent-per-litre carbon tax, so they’d have no choice but to pass at least most of it along to the customer).
One of the ironies of carbon taxation is the enthusiasm for “market mechanisms” and “prices” among politicians who otherwise abhor and resist market pricing of everything from roads to health care to rental housing to public transit to education to broadcasting and telecom and the internet and the price of cannabis, not to mention the Canadian price of milk and chickens. With carbon, market pricing is suddenly a great idea, no matter how fanciful the analyses and speculative the projections.
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The Hindenburg Line Breaks – The Lost Battalion Returns I THE GREAT WAR Week 220
The Great War
Published on 11 Oct 2018The Hindenburg Line or Siegfriedstellung is the backbone of the German defenses on the Western Front and this week 100 years ago, the Allies break through during the Battle of St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, the political fallout within Germany continues and the Allied Army of the Orient continues its offensive on the Macedonian Front.
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Stephen Harper, premature populist?
Andrew Coyne reads the new book by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, so you don’t have to:
Throughout his time as prime minister, theories abounded as to what philosophy of government, if any, could explain Stephen Harper’s apparently rudderless course. A few die-hards on the left persisted in describing his government as ideological or hard-right, even as it was borrowing billions, adding new regional development agencies and nationalizing the auto industry.
Others insisted he was a libertarian at heart who was either forced or tempted, by reality or expediency, to alter his approach once in power. A couple of loyalists essayed a reconstruction after the fact, in which the Harper government’s many disparate and contradictory policies were somehow made to fit into a single philosophical template called “ordered liberty.”Well now we have it from the proverbial horse’s mouth. The young firebrand who famously deserted Preston Manning for being too populist and not enough of a conservative now claims the mantle of populism for himself: if not as a whole-hearted adherent, then as the statesman who understands where others only condemn. His new book Right Here, Right Now, is indeed in large part an attempt to portray his own government, not as the cynical power-seeking machine it appeared to be, but as populist before its time. In defending populism, he defends himself.
And yet the mind it reveals is not that of the subtle, sometimes rueful voice of experience he clearly wishes the reader to imagine. It is, rather, all too conventional, even banal. What are presented as iconoclastic insights, in which the rise of populism is explained in terms of the failings of conservatism — former Conservative prime minister breaks with decades of conservative orthodoxy! — are a mix of received wisdom and undergraduate shibboleths, many of them long debunked.
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How Underwater Explosions damage Ships and Subs #Military101
Military History Visualized
Published on 15 Sep 2017This video looks at how underwater explosions damage ships and submarines. Script was proof-read by a physicist and is based on US Navy/Army and/or academic sources.
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» patreon – https://www.patreon.com/mhvMilitary History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.
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QotD: More words we need in English
There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.
The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく. Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.
Jonathan Crow, “‘Tsundoku,’ the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language”, Open Culture, 2014-07-24.
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October 11, 2018
The wisdom of Zim Tzu, post-Eagles edition
After every Vikings game, win or lose, NFL rules require the head coach to meet with local (and sometimes national) media to discuss the most recent game and any other issues the team may be facing. It’s well known among the cognoscenti that Minnesota’s head coach Mike Zimmer considers this somewhere between distasteful and actual torture, but he forces himself to meet the ravening horde of unwashed media types … because he doesn’t want to get fined.
As a result, although Zimmer is known to be a straight-talker, what he says in these gatherings might not be exactly what he really means. Fortunately for those of us in the Vikings fanbase, the Daily Norseman employs the world’s leading Zimmerologist, the only man who can reliably listen to the words spoken to the masses and successfully decode the real meanings. Let’s hear it for Herr Doktor Professor Theodore “Ted” Glover:
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Prometheus – Origins – Extra Mythology – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 8 Oct 2018Let’s start at the primordial beginning. The first “peoples” on the earth were Cyclops and Titans. Prometheus was one of these titans, and in fact just one of two remaining after an unfortunate conflict with, you guessed it, Zeus…
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It’s all in the spin – “Another ‘human trafficking operation’ that wasn’t”
Elizabeth Nolan Brown on how to pitch a “human trafficking” police sweep that doesn’t actually uncover any human trafficking at all:
One hundred and twenty-three missing Michigan minors were found during a one-day “sex trafficking operation,” the New York Post reported yesterday. Similar statements showed up in other news headlines across national and international news. What the associated articles fail to mention for multiple paragraphs is that only three of the minors are even suspected of having been involved in prostitution.
Officials said the operation — a joint effort of the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, Michigan State Police, and multiple local Michigan police departments — identified three “possible sex-trafficking cases” among the 123 minors that were located on September 26, according to a press release.
What’s more, all but four of the “missing children” were not actually missing. In the remaining cases, minors were listed in a police database as missing but had since been found or returned home on their own. “Many were (homeschooled),” Lt. Michael Shaw told The Detroit News. “Some were runaways as well.”
The one-day “rescue” sweep was a long-time in the making, with police beforehand “investigating their whereabouts by visiting last known addresses, friend’s homes and schools.”
Nothing in the U.S. Marshals report on the operation makes mention of any arrested kidnappers, “traffickers,” or other adults involved in endangering or exploiting any of the missing minors that were identified. Which makes sense — very few missing children are actually abducted. And when runaway teens do engage in sex for money, the vast majority do not have “pimps.”
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Steyr StG 77, aka the AUG
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 21 Sep 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Today’s rifle is not quite an Austrian military StG-77, but it is virtually identical. This is one of the commemorative rifles sold by Steyr, which has been rebuilt with military parts and is a registered dealer sample machine gun (which is why I can show you the complete full-auto functionality in the trigger group.
The AUG (Armee Universal Gewehr) was one of the wave of bullpup-style military rifles developed and adopted in the 1970s, along with the British SA80 and French FAMAS F1. The AUG embodied a number of very forward-looking elements in its design, including extensive use of polymers (including the entire fire control group), a completely modular barrel, and standard integrated optical sight (albeit one considered obsolete today). Mechanically, the rifle’s operating mechanism is a derivative of the Armalite AR-18, as are many other service rifles from this period.
Special thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale, AZ for providing this rifle for video!
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
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QotD: The radical, right wing US Supreme Court
We don’t have a “radical right-wing Supreme Court,” despite lots of mewing on the left to the contrary. Here are some things that would be at the top of the list for a radical right-wing Court: (1) ban abortion nationwide as a violation of the right to life protected by the due process clause; (2) rule that publicly-provided (but not funded) education is unconstitutional because it inherently involves viewpoint discrimination by the government, or at least require vouchers for those who object to the public school curriculum; (3) overrule an 1898 precedent and completely abolish birthright citizenship; (4) Use the First Amendment as a sword to require “fairness” in the left-dominated media. Not only is the Supreme Court not about to do any of things, I don’t think any of these things would even get one vote on the current Court. Moreover, merely bringing the scope of Congress’s constitutional back to where it was, say, in 1935, which was already much broader than the original meaning of the Commerce power, probably wouldn’t get more than one or two votes. What you are looking at right now is a conservative Court that will only affect society on the margins, not a “radical right-wing” Court.
David Bernstein, “WE DON’T HAVE A ‘RADICAL RIGHT-WING SUPREME COURT'”, Instapundit, 2018-10-09.
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October 10, 2018
Coming to a foxhole near you: Between 2 Wars, Q&A, and WW2 day by day
World War Two
Published on 9 Oct 2018Six Weeks of WW2 and 112,450 Subscribers later and thanks to your support there will be more.
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