ReasonTV
Published on 20 Mar 2019When quality of life improved, doctors discover a new affliction.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
A parody of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” written by Remy.
Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom
Video produced by Austin Bragg.LYRICS
There’s a non-foregone phenomenon in any prosperous nation
When primal fears all disappear the brain then gets a sensation
The medical name we gave this pain is affluenflammationOl’ Bill Tub is chugging a jug of cold bovine lactation
When his eyes then realize that carton side’s got information
And since his life contains no strife it’s affluenflammationFor the better part of history diseases all were raging
Measles, mumps up on your junk like they were Kevin Spacey
Then came Jonas Salk
Makes you wonder what all for…Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammationOl’ Chip Black is cracking the back of twelve live-steamed crustaceans
For the perks and glee of living free he starts to lose appreciation
And if you probe his frontal lobe — yep — affluenflammationThrough the course of human history each day we faced starvation
Rats and pox and chamber pots, streets filled with defecation
Free markets changed the norm
Makes you wonder what all for…Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
March 21, 2019
Remy: “Affluenflammation”
Theodore Dalrymple reviews a new Jeremy Corbyn biography
It certainly doesn’t paint a pleasant picture of the man:
Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party speaking at a Rally in Hayfield, Peak District, UK on 25th July 2018 in support of Ruth George MP.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.
In normal circumstances, no one would dream of writing a biography of so dreary a man as Jeremy Corbyn; but political correctness has so eviscerated the exercise of wit that dreariness is no obstacle to political advancement and may even be of advantage to it. The dreary, alas, are inheriting the earth.
Tom Bower is a biographer of eminent living persons whose books tend to emphasise the discreditable — of which he usually finds more than enough to satisfy most people’s taste for salacity. His books are not well-written but they are readable; one sometimes dislikes oneself for enjoying them. So Bower’s latest book Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power, is a bit of a surprise.
Jeremy Corbyn is not a natural subject for Bower because he, Corbyn, is not at all flamboyant and has even managed to make his private life, which has been far from straightforward, uninteresting. Corbyn, indeed, could make murder dull; his voice is flat and his diction poor, he possesses no eloquence, he dresses badly, he has no wit or even humour, he cannot think on his feet, and in general has negative charisma. His main assets are his tolerable good looks, attractiveness to women, and an ability to hold his temper, though he seems to be growing somewhat more irritable with age.
Bower has written a book that is very much a case for the prosecution. If he has discovered in Corbyn no great propensity to vice as it is normally understood, neither has he discovered any great propensity to virtue as it is normally understood, for example personal kindness. His concern for others has a strongly, even chillingly abstract or ideological flavour to it; he is the Mrs. Jellyby de nos jours, but with the granite hardness of the ideologue added to Mrs. Jellyby’s insouciance and incompetence.
[…]
His probity, cruelty or stupidity, might appeal to monomaniacs, but it presages terrible suffering for millions if ever he were to achieve real power: for no merely empirical evidence, no quantity of suffering, would ever be able to persuade him that a policy was wrong or misguided if it were in accord with his abstract principle. This explains his continued loyalty to the memory of Hugo Chavez and to his successor. What happens to Venezuelans in practice is of no interest to him whatsoever, any more than the fate of Mrs. Jellyby’s children were of no interest to her. For Corbyn, the purity of his ideals are all-in-all and their consequences of no consequence.
From a relatively privileged background, he formed his opinions early and has never allowed any personal experience or historical reading to affect them. On any case, according to Bower, he reads not at all: in this respect, he is a kind of Trump of the left. He has remained what he was from an early age, a late 1960s and 70s student radical of the third rank.
His outlook on life is narrow, joyless and dreary. He is the kind of man who looks at beauty and sees injustice. He has no interests other than politics: not in art, literature, science, music, the theatre, cinema — not even in food or drink. For him, indeed, food is but fuel: the fuel necessary to keep him going while he endlessly attends Cuban, Venezuelan, or Palestinian solidarity meetings. He is one of those who thinks that, because he is virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale.
How to PREPARE HINGES for Installation
Matt Estlea
Published on 15 Mar 2019In this video, I show you how to prepare a hinge so that it is easier to fit, is neater when fitted, and looks absolutely incredible!
This is not a video on how to fit a hinge. However this will be covered in my next video so make sure to watch that after!
_________________________________________________________________Support what I do by becoming a Patron! This will help fund new tools, equipment and cover my overheads. Meaning I can continue to bring you regular, high quality, free content. Thank you so much for your support! https://www.patreon.com/mattestlea
_________________________________________________________________See what tools I use here: https://kit.com/MattEstlea
My Website: www.mattestlea.com
_________________________________________________________________My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 23 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.
I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre and 4 years experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I still currently work on weekends. During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best.
I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.
Lets go make a mess.
“It’s back to normal, basically. The emperor is naked. Votes are for sale. Caveat emptor“
Chris Selley somehow seems, I dunno, a bit … cynical about Prime Minister Trudeau and Finance Minister Morneau’s 2019 federal (election) budget:
Ahoy there, relatively young and middle-class Canadian! Did you vote Liberal in 2015? And are you, shall we say, somewhat less enthused about that prospect four years later, for various reasons we needn’t go into here?
Now, what if Justin Trudeau were to offer you a down payment on a shiny new condominium?
Well, that’s just the kind of guy he is. Starting this year, so long as your household income is below $120,000, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation will pitch in 5 per cent of the price of your first home — 10 per cent if it’s a new home, the construction of which the government hopes to incentivize.
That’s Item One in the 460-page federal budget tabled Tuesday in Ottawa.
On a new $400,000 condo, you could put down your own $20,000; CMHC would chip in another $40,000; and your monthly mortgage payment, on a 25-year term at 3.25 per cent, would drop by a not inconsiderable 12 per cent. You would reimburse CMHC, interest-free, if and when you sell. Cost to the taxpayer: $121 million over six years.
If you’re worried giving home-seekers free money might just push the price of a $400,000 condominium nearer to $440,000, Finance Minister Bill Morneau would first of all like you to stop. (“You’re wrong,” he admonished a reporter who dared suggest it during a press conference in the budget lockup Tuesday.) But if all else fails and you’re forced to rent, the feds also found $10 billion extra over nine years to throw at the Rental Construction Financing Initiative, a CMHC program that offers low-interest loans to qualified builders. The goal is 42,500 new rental units in a decade.
Can’t even think of home ownership until you pay off your student loans? Again, the government is here to help: From now on you’ll pay the Bank of Canada’s prime interest rate, instead of prime plus 2.5 points. And for the first six months after you graduate, you’ll pay nothing. The budget document introduces us to Angela, a recent psychology grad carrying $13,500 in student debt who landed a job at “a medium-sized consumer goods company.” (It doesn’t matter where she works. The writers just wanted to add some colour.) Angela will save something like $2,000 in interest over 10 years.
There’s also the new Canada Training Benefit, which the government intends to help Canadians with “the evolving nature of work.” (Maybe your parents were right, Angela. Maybe that psych degree wasn’t the best idea, Angela.) Starting in 2020, the feds will chip in $250 a year, and you can use the accumulated credit to pay up to half the cost of courses or training. And you can draw on up to four weeks of EI to complete it.
Tank Chats #44 T14 and A33 (Excelsior) Assault Tanks | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 13 Jan 2018The Second World War American T14 and British A33 (Excelsior) Assault tanks were made to the same specification as one another, neither ever went in to service and only one of each were made. They both survive at The Tank Museum.
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QotD: Pie language
Even in their early days, pies served different purposes for the rich and poor: as show-off delicacies for the former and portable food for the latter. So while wealthy feasts might include pies containing anything from game birds to mussels, the less well-off used simpler pies as a way to have food while doing outdoor work or travelling – the crust both carried and preserved the tasty filling.
Take, for example, the Bedfordshire Clanger: a British classic which cleverly combines main course and dessert, with savoury ingredients like pork at one end and sweet ingredients like pear at the other. The name comes from a local slang word, “clang”, which means to eat voraciously. However, cramming two courses into a pie makes a clanger rather unwieldy – and all too easy to drop, inspiring the English phrase “dropping a clanger” for a careless mistake.
Pies have been adding rich flavour to the English language for centuries. Even Shakespeare got in on the act, writing in his 1613 play Henry VIII that “No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger”, giving English the phrase “a finger in every pie”.
Meanwhile, the description of a drunken state as “pie-eyed” likely takes its cue from someone who, thanks to having over-imbibed, has eyes as wide and blank as the top of a pie. “As easy as pie” – first recorded as “like eating pie” in the horse-racing newspaper Sporting Life in 1886 – springs from pies’ historical role as convenience food.
“Eating humble pie”, meanwhile, comes from medieval deer hunting, when meat from a successful hunt was shared out on the basis of social status. While the finest cuts of venison went to the rich and powerful, the lower orders made do with the “nombles“: a Norman French word for deer offal. Anglicisation saw “nombles” pie become “humble” pie.
Norman Miller, “How a pocket-sized snack changed the English language”, BBC Travel, 2017-03-29.
