Quotulatiousness

November 21, 2018

The wisdom of Zim Tzu, post-Bear-mauling edition

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After every game, even a putrid excuse for a game like the Sunday night contest in Chicago, the NFL requires that all head coaches make the time to talk with the local (and sometimes national) sports media about what the hell just happened. Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer is rumoured not to enjoy this particular part of his job, and as a result tends to carefully craft his words to cloak their real importance from the smelly, small-minded hoi-polloi he has to face from the rostrum. Fortunately, the Daily Norseman employs the world’s top expert in Zimspeak, Herr Doktor Professor Theodore “Ted” Glover, BA, MA, Ph.D, etc. Every week, Herr Glover works tirelessly to decipher, decode, decrypt, and de-everything-else required to dig down to the primal essence of coach Zimmer’s koans for we weak-armed, weak-willed, and weak-minded normies.

The Vikings warrior poet coach dispenses his words of wisdom

ED NOTE: This has bad words. Most of the other things we write on here usually don’t, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles—Ted

When you’re a warrior poet, you have to be on the lookout for self-fulfilling prophecies from your troops. Self fulfilling prophecies tell you that you can’t do X because of Y, based on past history. You can’t invade Russia in the late summer because of the Russian winter, or that you can’t masturbate without arms, for example. And as much as you tell your troops there is zero correlation between X and Y, because you have a cousin without any arms and he says he did just fine in that department thank you very goddamn much, once your troops believe weird shit happens in Chicago and that you’ll lose, when weird shit does happen in Chicago and you do lose, your troops are almost relieved. But you can’t let them walk around thinking they’re a bunch of no arms whacking reverse Nostradamus fap gods though, because then everything you’ve worked for is lost, and you’re on the street looking for work in someplace other than Cleveland. Yeah, fuck The Land, which is quite possibly the dumbest nickname for any city I’ve ever heard. Except for Green Bay, which is known as the toilet paper capital of the world, and that’s the most accurate nickname for any city ever.

Because you are Zim Tzu, The King In The North, Emperor of the Motor City Feline Tribe, Grounder of Airplanes, Defrocker of Cardinals, Subduer of Equestrian Excrement Consumers, Nightmare of Clan Fromage, Breaker Of Gold Fever, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.

And when the Great Unwashed want to know how to keep their fears from becoming a real life Ouroboros, you must speak, to calm them and make them throw up their own ass, so you can get things back on track. And that is where we come in, your friends at The Daily Norseman.* We take what is said in the day after a game press conference, regurgitate what is really inferred,** and then everyone can walk away happy with an understanding of what’s to come.***

*I have no friends.

**We do nothing of the kind. The law firm of Franklin, Bash, and Bateman gently reminds you that this is a work of satire, and any and all interpretations are just mindless bullshit that have no inference on actual words of Mike Zimmer, spoken or otherwise, and they can sue you and take Ted for all his money in exorbitant lawyer fees if you try to sue him.

***If you understand any of this, seek professional medical help.

Allied War Economy During World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Britain, Economics, France, History, Italy, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 19 Nov 2018

Check Out Supremacy 1914: https://www.supremacy1914.com/index.p…

Financing and supplying the First World War was a huge economic undertaking that influenced the British, French, American and Italian economies profoundly and shaped the global balance of power.

Statistics Canada’s instrumentalist philosophy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Financial Post, Bruce Pardy discusses the motivation behind Statistics Canada’s recently revealed demand for the private financial records of half a million Canadians:

Recently it was revealed that Statistics Canada sought to obtain the private banking information of half a million Canadians without their knowledge or consent. Jennifer Robson, professor of political management at Carleton University, in an interview with the CBC, justified the data sweep on the grounds that governments need this information to make good policy. But don’t be concerned, she said, it is not for ideological purposes, since Statistics Canada is ideologically neutral. That made me laugh. The very idea of policy based on data reflects an instrumentalist belief that governments should solve social problems by political means. That requires an ideological confidence in the administrative state, to which the agency is a handmaiden.

Ideology is not a dirty word. An ideology is merely a worldview, a lens through which to perceive society. Political parties, by definition, each have one (and sometimes extra ones for special occasions). But it is another thing for a public agency to act independently in furtherance of its own ideology while pretending to be neutral.

Statistics Canada’s deep dive into banking records — presently on hold while federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien investigates its legality — appears not to have been directed by government officials but was undertaken on its own initiative. The agency’s decision is consistent with a conviction that the more personal data available to government, the better off we will be; that governments are benevolent; that private financial matters call for public policy management; and that a bigger government is a better government. A commitment to social policy, wrote Milton Friedman “involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scare resources to alternative uses.”

Testing The Worst Tools On AMAZON

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

Wranglerstar
Published on 24 Aug 2017

Testing The Worst and Most Ridiculous Tools On AMAZON.

QotD: Occupations and sex differences

Filed under: Business, Economics, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sex differences are a distribution, not a hard, bright line. For example, the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash is slower than the U.S. high school boys’ record. Men on average are faster than women. But the women at the top of the distribution — those Olympians — are still faster than most men. It would be absurd to say that a woman can’t run the hundred meter in 11 seconds, just because most women can’t. It would be equally absurd to say that men are not, on average, faster than women.

So it’s possible that the distribution of nurturing traits is skewed enough that fewer men will be good at the difficult and emotionally taxing job of providing intimate care for sick and needy people. While there are plenty of health care jobs that don’t require so much direct human interaction, they tend to require more training. And the ability to sit in a classroom and absorb material from a textbook is also a human trait that is unevenly and unfairly distributed. It’s not that no men can succeed in transitioning from old-style “manly” jobs to the pink-collar professions, but that fewer men may be able to do so than we’d like to think.

Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.

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