Quotulatiousness

December 31, 2018

Vikings’ playoff hopes end in dismal performance at US Bank Stadium

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a life-long Vikings fan, I had little faith in the “win-and-in” situation the Vikings found themselves in coming into Sunday afternoon’s game against the Chicago Bears … I’ve seen it happen all too often, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to have it happen yet again. The Vikings came into the game looking less-than-convinced, and the peformance on the field was less-than-convincing. The final score of 24-10 was just about right, although shading to flatter the Vikings a tiny bit more than they deserved. Even had they somehow managed to pull out a win late against Chicago’s backups, they didn’t look like they’d be more than one-and-done in the wildcard round anyway.

Lessons learned? Better offensive line players are required to get any significant benefit out of an $84 million quarterback, and you can never have too many good cornerbacks (but that’s always true in today’s NFL). Despite the disappointing finish, I don’t expect any significant changes in the front office, but I do expect a renewed emphasis on the offensive line during free agency and the draft. Despite Sunday’s underwhelming effort, this is still a team that can go deep in the playoffs if they fix the OL, and maintain the depth on defence.

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7 Things You Should Know About Free Speech in Schools: Free Speech Rules (Episode 1)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018

Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law. The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools, from black armbands to ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’

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Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law that’s written by Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, and the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.

The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools:

1) Political and religious speech is mostly protected.
Students, from first grade to twelfth, can’t be punished based on their political or religious speech. As the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”

2) Disruptive speech is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that “materially disrupts schoolwork” — for instance, because it prompts fights.

3) Vulgar or sexual speech is not protected.
Schools can also punish students for using vulgarities or sexual innuendos.

4) Praising drugs is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that seems to praise drug use, and probably also alcohol use and other crimes, at least when the speech doesn’t seem political.

5) Official school newspapers are the school’s own speech.
Courts see the newspaper as the school’s own speech, even if students are the ones who write it.

6) This only applies to public schools.
Under the so-called “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment doesn’t limit private schools, even those that get tax breaks or government funds.

7) California is different. Some states, like California, have passed laws that provide more protection to students.

Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not. This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.

QotD: Political convictions induce a distorted perception of reality

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.

December 30, 2018

Stalin’s Unexpected Bedfellows – WW2 – 018 – 29 December 1939

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 29 Dec 2018

The Chinese Nationalists under command of Chiang Kai Shek is desperately looking to make new or restore old, allies to aid them in their fight against the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Soviets are still struggling to turn the Winter War against the Finnish in their favor.

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From the comments:

IMPORTANT POST SCRIPT NOTE: YouTube age restricted this video, which we find appalling — they also turned off monetisation (but that happens all the time). One of our most important tasks is to reach younger people with deep knowledge about history. While we are aware that some people might find war stories and images of the dead offensive, we cannot bow to that sentiment as it is of utmost important that any story of WW2 also displays the horrors of war. While we are fascinated by military history it is never or goal to glorify armed conflicts, to the contrary. Please help us get this resolved by voicing your opinion in a reply to this comment — we will forward your comments to YouTube.

This is the last World War Two video of 2018! We are looking forward to 2019/1940, which will be filled with many improvements, lots and lots of new content, the start of multiple new series within this channel and maybe even our first roadtrips to the real-life battlegrounds of World War Two. We’re very grateful to have you all onboard and even more so to have over 2000 of you supporting us on Patreon and timeghost.tv. What we do would not be possible without you!

Have a happy and safe New Years Eve and we’ll see you in 2019!

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Note: Indy refers to a ‘Christmas cribs episode’ on the TimeGhost channel at the end of this video, but at the time of shooting this we didn’t realize that we were going to do a livestream instead. You can check that out on the TimeGhost channel.

The US federal government “shutdown”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of the things you quickly notice when there’s a public service cutback is that the cutbacks are always directed to the parts of that organization that interact with the public. The idea being that if the public are seriously inconvenienced by lack of service — I mean more than they ordinarily are, anyway — they’ll raise an outcry and the politicians will be forced to rollback the cuts. This is standard practice because, as a rule, it works fairly well. The current US federal government “shutdown” is a bit of an outlier here, because very few members of the public interact with federal employees between Christmas and New Year, and the ones that they do encounter are (mostly) still on the job. Even those who are not on the job due to the shutdown will eventually be paid for the time they didn’t work, so there are few monetary savings happening: probably the reverse, as the government will be racking up charges for services they’ve contracted for but won’t use during the disruption, and there may well be penalty clauses written into the contracts.

Colby Cosh discusses the oddity of American government shutdown kabuki theatre:

As occasionally happens, the U.S. government is now “shut down” as a consequence of a conflict over budget appropriations between the president and the Congress. Except, of course, it isn’t anything of the sort. Otherwise we Canadians would be meeting with other functioning states to decide what pieces of the United States to break off for ourselves, the way European powers used to do with Poland from time to time. (Newspaper ethics forbid me from publishing a web address for my $29.95 “Make Maine Canada Again” hats.)

The “essential” parts of the U.S. federal government, including the bits that guarantee the territorial integrity of the country, always keep on trucking through these “shutdowns.” (The National Guard is sometimes affected, but on this occasion the Guard has been taken care of by a spending bill that passed in October.) Social Security and Medicare roll on unimpeded. The functions of government that get held up are the ones whose delay or abandonment cause inconvenience — albeit serious, economically harmful inconvenience — rather than anarchy.

If you grow curious about these American “shutdowns,” perhaps because they did not happen before 1981 and do not really happen anywhere else, you discover that this kabuki-like feature is not really a coincidence. As much as Congress and the president may fight very earnestly over things like border walls, they have a common interest in the overall health of the state.

The U.S. Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is a shared element of America’s legal DNA and the British Empire’s: U.S. government shutdowns are, in a weird way, a distant echo of early-modern money struggles betwixt King and Parliament. Westminster-style governments, however, have evolved so as to minimize the possibility of ugly standoffs between the executive and the legislature. The U.S., not so much.

The Long-Run Aggregate Supply Curve

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

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 25 Apr 2017

The long-run aggregate supply curve is actually pretty simple: it’s a vertical line showing an economy’s potential growth rates. Combining the long-run aggregate supply curve with the aggregate demand curve can help us understand business fluctuations.

For example, while the U.S. economy grows at about 3% per year on average, it does tend to fluctuate quite a bit. What causes these fluctuations? One cause is “real shocks” that affect the fundamental factors of production. Droughts, changes to the oil supply, hurricanes, wars, technological changes, etc. can all have big and potentially far-reaching consequences.

Next week, we’ll dig into why wages are considered “sticky,” or slow to change.

QotD: The national honour

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

The Greek historian Thucydides argued that countries go to war for three reasons: honor, fear and interest. He put honor first, and yet that is probably the least appreciated aspect of foreign policy today. Historian Donald Kagan, in his essay “Honor, Interest, Nation-State,” recounts how since antiquity, nations have put honor ahead of interest. “For the last 2,500 years, at least, states have usually conducted their affairs and have often gone to war for reasons that would not pass the test of ‘vital national interests’ posed by modern students of politics.”

“On countless occasions,” he continues, “states have acted to defend or foster a collection of beliefs and feelings that ran counter to their practical interests and have placed their security at risk, persisting in their course even when the costs were high and the danger was evident.”

Americans instinctively understand this when our own honor is at stake. The rallying cry during the Barbary Wars, “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” has almost become part of the national creed. I am no fan of Karl Marx, but he was surely right when he observed that “shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.”

Both the first and second world wars cannot be properly understood without taking the role national honor plays in foreign affairs. Similarly, Vladimir Putin’s constant testing of the West only makes sense when you take into account the despot’s core conviction that the fall of the Soviet Union was a blow to Russian prestige and honor.

Jonah Goldberg, “Humiliating Mexico Over Border Wall Would Be a Big Mistake”, TownHall.com, 2017-01-27.

December 29, 2018

English public health officials angling to ban most restaurant meals due to excess calorie counts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The bureaucrats at Public Health England (PHE) apparently want the English to go back to those gloriously hungry days of rationing during and after the Second World War, at least based on their diktats on the allowable limits for calories in purchased meals:

The idea of the government controlling the number of calories in meals is so outlandish that few people have taken it seriously, despite PHE explicitly stating that this is what they are working on. They have been busy setting calorie limits for almost every food product available in shops, cafés, pubs and restaurants. The plan was to publish them in the spring but Laura Donnelly at the Telegraph has got hold of them and has leaked them today.

They are astonishing, not only because they are so low but because they are so comically precise. Sandwiches and main meal salads will be capped at 550 calories, ready meals will be capped at 544 calories and main courses in restaurants will be capped at 951 calories. Vol-au-vents or onion bhajis will be capped at 134 calories and salad dressing capped at 145 calories. The spurious precision of these numbers is presumably meant to imply that they have been worked out scientifically. They haven’t, of course (why is OK to have a 900 calorie lunch in a restaurant but not OK to have a 600 calorie microwave dinner?). There is no way of working out how much energy a single meal should contain. The concept is ludicrous.

But the detailed proposals have infuriated manufacturers – who say they are far too complex and confusing to be workable.

No kidding.

These are not legal limits. Not yet. The plan is for the bureaucrats at PHE to ‘work with’ the food industry to magically remove calories from their products without destroying flavour. PHE have no knowledge to bring to the table so their part in the ‘partnership’ amounts to setting targets, issuing threats and naming and shaming businesses.

Some of the companies will attempt to play along, mainly by reducing portion sizes, but it is a doomed enterprise. The government initially planed to use the threat of advertising restrictions to make the companies play ball, but it has already capitulated to the ‘public health’ lobby on this, so the only thing left is to threaten them with mandatory calorie limits.

If that happens, it will mean an effective prohibition on many of Britain’s best loved dishes. Steak and kidney pudding far exceeds the 951 calorie limit for out-of-home food, as does ham, egg and chips, the all day breakfast, fish and chips, and beer and ale pie (based on Wetherspoons’ nutritional information). So does a normal Christmas dinner.

As for foreign cuisine, you can kiss goodbye to kebabs, curries, pizzas and Chinese food. But it’s a treat, you say! Tough luck. No exceptions.

Helping Africa become less poor

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

In the Washington Examiner, Tim Worstall explains how and why Africans will benefit from adopting western agricultural methods:

No doubt much to the annoyance of the real farming types, Africa is starting to adopt American industrial farming practices. Thankfully, this is going to make Africa and its residents vastly richer. Tyson (that enemy of everything the organic and slow-food movements hold dear) is working and investing to bring the U.S. system of broiler chicken production to the world’s poorest continent, thereby making it less poor.

[…]

To an economist, everything is a technology. A supermarket is a technology, a mobile phone system, medieval peasantry is a technology, and so is battery farming of broiler hens. A technology is a method of doing something and battery farming is a more advanced, because it’s more productive, technology than the medieval techniques. Most of Africa would be overjoyed to have something as productive as that peasantry our own forefathers suffered through.

Places and people are poor because they use older and less productive technologies. As Paul Krugman’s possibly finest essay points out (and his finest is very good indeed), when a place is using technologies as productive as a richer place, then those users are as rich. That’s just the definition: We’re richer if we get more output from our input of labor. Adopt technologies that are more productive, and we become richer.

The reason places like Africa are poor is not because of capitalism, exploitation, the residues of colonialization, or even the long, dark shadow of the slave trade. Nor is it poor even because of idiotic socialism or the propensity of politicians to run off with the national treasury. You can blame any selection of those as you wish, and with some of them you’d even be right, but they are all proximate causes. The ultimate reason is simply that poor places are using less productive technologies, richer ones more productive. All of those varied things can be blamed for reducing the use of more advanced technologies, but it is the lack of technological advance itself that causes the poverty.

Tank Chats #39 Sherman M4A1 “Michael” | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published on 16 Jun 2017

In the 39th Tank Chat, David Fletcher looks at one of the very first Shermans produced – ‘Michael’ an M4A1.

The tank was named MICHAEL in honour of Michael Dewar and when it arrived in London it was displayed on Horse Guards Parade as the first Sherman tank to be delivered under the Lend-Lease scheme. In Britain the tank was christened the Sherman and this is almost certainly the oldest example of a Sherman tank to survive.

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QotD: Booze, smokes, and heroin

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

It is now impolite to refer to habitual drunkards. They are “alcoholics,” supposedly suffering from a complaint that is not their fault. The curious variable ambiguity of Alcoholics Anonymous on this point has added to the confusion. AA, to begin with, asked its adherents to admit they had no control over themselves, as a preliminary to giving that power to God. Somehow I suspect that God plays less of a part in modern AA doctrine, but the idea of powerlessness remains. Members of the organization quietly moved from calling alcoholism an “illness” or a “malady” to describing it as a “disease,” round about the time that the medical profession began to do the same thing.

We are ceaselessly told that cigarettes are “addictive.” Most powerfully, most of us believe that the abusers of the illegal drug heroin are “addicted” to it. Once again, the public, the government, and the legal and medical systems are more or less ordered to believe that users of these things are involuntary sufferers. A British celebrity and alleged comedian, Russell Brand, wrote recently, “The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless [my emphasis] over their addiction and, unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”

Brand is a former heroin abuser who has by now rather famously given up the drug. But how can that be, if what he says about addiction is true? The phrase “wholly irrational” simply cannot withstand the facts of Brand’s own life. It will have to be replaced by something much less emphatic — let us say, “partly irrational.” The same thing happens to the phrase “completely powerless.” Neither the adverb nor the adjective can survive. Nor can the word “addiction” itself, which is visibly evaporating. We have to say “they struggle over their compulsion.”

Peter Hitchens, “The Fantasy of Addiction”, First Things, 2017-02.

December 28, 2018

“Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves” strikes again

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the latest use of the ridiculous “lone wolves” excuse for terrorism:

A week before Christmas two young ladies from Scandinavia vacationing in Morocco – Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway – were brutally stabbed and decapitated and then had the final moments of their lives uploaded as triumphal snuff videos to Facebook, Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse.

Fortunately, if you were thinking of getting a little nervous about your next holiday in the Maghreb, this bloody double-murder was the work of merely another “lone wolf”:

    In a press conference in Rabat yesterday, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sabik labelled the suspects “lone wolves”…

Wait a minute: “lone wolves” plural? You mean, the wolf wasn’t lone? No, indeed:

    What ‘lone wolf’ gang did before Scandinavian tourist beheadings

There’s a whole gang of lone wolves?

    A motley crew of “lone wolves”, including two street vendors, a plumber and a carpenter, hunted backpackers to kill in the Moroccan mountains.

At last count, nineteen “lone wolves” have been arrested for the double-murder. That’s a rugby team plus bridge four of lone wolves. They’re the least lonesome lone wolves in town.

And are they really that “motley”? (See photo above for representative three-nineteenths of the lone wolf pack.)

For almost a decade, I have made mocking reference to Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. But there’s no point to jokes, is there? Because, as absurd as they are, you wait a year or two and everybody’s doing them entirely straight-faced. The phrase “lone wolf” was created by the Pansy Media to ward off the suggestion that all these lone wolves might have something in common. Just as “all politics is local”, all jihad is lone. And, if you use the phrase often enough, it has such a pleasing anesthetizing effect you don’t even notice that you’re sitting there typing, perfectly seriously, about a gang of nineteen lone wolves.

Same number as the 9/11 hijackers, by coincidence. But we hadn’t yet taken refuge in such halfwit evasions.

Needless to say, the decapitation video went “viral”. Among those who were “spammed” with pictures of the severed heads were the mums of the girls, whose first Christmas without their beloved daughters was further enlivened by social-media enthusiasts posting snaps of the decapitated women to their mothers’ Facebook pages. But Big Social Brother knows its priorities: It was too busy banning Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch website is one of the few remaining outlets that doesn’t take refuge in platitudinous drivel about “lone wolves”.

Who are the best jungle troops?

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published on 5 Dec 2018

The answer may seem weird at first, but there is an historical reason for it.

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QotD: Celtic nationalism

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

Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. — but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection.

George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.

December 27, 2018

The 1914 Christmas Truce

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

Mark Felton Productions
Published on 25 Dec 2018

As we celebrate Christmas today, perhaps its worth recalling the Christmas Truce of 1914, when, for a few days 104 years ago, the terrible slaughter of World War I stopped and the ordinary officers and men of both sides met in No Man’s Land to sing carols, exchange gifts and play soccer.

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