exurb1a
Published on 23 Jul 2019Apologies for the resolution in some places. Apologies for the words in all places.
Books I enjoyed while I was in creative pinches ►
Zen in the Art of Writing – Ray Bradbury
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1…What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2…The Elements of Style – William Strunk Jr.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3…On Writing – Sol Stein
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1…The Book of Five Rings – Miyamoto Musashi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8…Why I Write – George Orwell
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiwMy stuff –
The Fifth Science Paperback ► https://tinyurl.com/y5zj33s5 (you may need to change your region accordingly: .co.uk, etc)
I also make horrendous music ► https://soundcloud.com/exurbia-1
Help me to do this full-time, if you’re deranged enough ► https://www.patreon.com/exurb1r?ty=h
The rest of my books ► https://tinyurl.com/ycnl5bo3
July 24, 2019
thoughts about writing
Summer Stupidity: COPENHAGEN (City Review!)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 23 Jul 2019It’s Copenhagen time! Hop on your bike and ride around one of Europe’s fanciest cities.
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Wait, you mean there might be a downside to cannabis legalization?
As a libertarian of long standing, I’m on the record as being in favour of legalizing cannabis since long before it was cool (geeky and perpetually uncool libertarians probably helped keep it from being cool for at least a few years longer). I’m not enthused to hear that we may have been undersold on the risks of cannabis use … not that the government didn’t try telling is it was deadly, deadly poison (they did, repeatedly, and at great length), but they institutionalized the role of the boy who cried wolf, and every illegal narcotic got basically the same description. I’m actually not kidding here: the first health class I got in middle school included a lecture and a pamphlet on the dangers of pot; the second class covered the dangers of cocaine; the third warned against LSD; and so on … but they used a copy/paste to discuss the physical and mental risks of the different drugs, and they all read the same way. All those evil drugs are evil, bad, and rot your brain. Knowing that the pothead (“Hi, Gary!”) at the back of the class hadn’t suddenly had a psychotic break and tried to fly off the top of the school was the first hint that we were being oversold on the real world risks of (some) illegal drug use. The declared fact that some illegal narcotics actually are deadly, deadly poison ran up against the observed fact that a significant majority of people over the age of fifteen had tried cannabis and found it somewhat less scary than advertised.
Along with the beginnings of doubt that the government was being honest with us, and the clear understanding that even if using drugs wasn’t as dangerous as we were told, we shared a growing awareness that being caught with drugs by the police was significantly more dangerous and possibly deadly. Officer Friendly would shoot you down like a mad dog if he thought you were one’o’them drug-crazed hippies. It certainly changed the social dynamics of any interaction with Officer Friendly’s fellow heavily armed co-workers…
In the National Post, Barbara Kay suggests that not all the dangers of cannabis use were mere government propaganda:
Some years ago, in conversation with his wife, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in mentally ill criminals, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson observed that the perpetrator of a recent violent crime had been high at the time, and had smoked pot regularly all his life. Her response — “Yeah, they all do” — jolted him. The result was his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.
Much of the referenced material in Berenson’s book had not yet been published a decade ago. But more recent studies only confirm what a few intrepid researchers were already warning about then.
Indeed, as I noted in a 2008 column, the head of the Medical research Council in the U.K., Professor Colin Blakemore, who in 1997 had been the moral authority behind a pot-legalization campaign, unequivocally reversed his pot-friendly stance in 2007, stating: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”
If you haven’t energy for a whole book, but would invest in 16 pages on the subject, you will be well rewarded by Steven Malanga’s in-depth article, “The Marijuana Delusion,” in City Journal‘s June issue. Here you will find debunked the blithe claim, still received as gospel by progressives and libertarians, that pot is virtually harmless and even therapeutic.
Unlike marijuana, real medications are deeply researched before coming on the market, and may attest to proven benefits, but are obligated to admit potential harms. Is pot a medicinal drug or a placebo? Nobody really knows. One may argue “who cares, as long as it works” (anecdotally I hear that pot works, and also that it doesn’t work), but that isn’t the point, since the legalization movement made medical claims for pot in order to bring the public onside politically. There was no will on the movement’s side to discover even radically fortified pot’s downsides.
The knowledge was out there for those interested. In 1987 a study of nearly 50,000 Swedish military conscripts followed for drug use over 15 years found that frequent pot use in teenhood was linked to a six-fold risk of schizophrenia as compared with non-usage. A 2004 meta-analysis of studies on pot use came to a similar conclusion. These studies, and others, are suggestive that heavy marijuana consumption, particularly in youth, may cause serious mental health problems. Yes, it is possible that the link isn’t entirely causal; people with mental health issues may be more likely to use marijuana heavily. But at the very least, this ought to be an issue of ongoing concern, particularly now that marijuana is legal in Canada and in an increasing number of U.S. states.
“[T]he debt ‘ceiling’ is about as sturdy and solid as those featured on those DIY home reno disaster shows”
Mark Steyn notes that yesterday’s the “big victory” over the debt ceiling (in President Trump’s words) could be almost the same as the “big victory” he wrote about eight years earlier:
The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
That thoughtful observer of the passing parade, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the “debt ceiling” negotiations the other day: “What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”
It’s always good to have things explained in terms we simpletons can understand. After a while, all the stuff about debt-to-GDP ratio and CBO alternative baseline scenarios starts to give you a bit of a headache, so we should be grateful to the House Minority Leader for putting it in layman’s terms: What’s at stake is “life on this planet as we know it today.” So, if right now you’re living anywhere in the general vicinity of this planet, it’s good to know Nancy’s in there pitching for you.
What about life on this planet tomorrow? How’s that look if Nancy gets her way? The Democrat model of governance is to spend four trillion dollars while only collecting two trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of “printing money,” we’re printing credit cards and preapproving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: “baseline budgeting,” under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze – that’s to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same – the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no “savings,” and there’s certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn’t one thin dime. But nevertheless that’s how it would be measured at the CBO.
Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.
So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to reacquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What’s holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. Whatever comparisons one might make with Europe’s soi-disant “PIIGS” re debt per capita or deficit-to-GDP ratio, the sheer hard numbers involved represent a threat to the planet that Portugal or Ireland does not. It also represents a threat to Americans. Three years ago, the first developed nation to hit the skids was Iceland. But, unless you’re Icelandic, who cares? And, if you are Icelandic, you hunker down, readjust to straitened circumstances, and a few years down the line Iceland will still be Iceland and, if that’s your bag, relatively pleasant.
That’s not an option for the U.S. We are chugging a highly toxic cocktail: 21st-century spendaholic government with mid-20th-century assumptions about American power. After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith replied to a pal despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said a sanguine Smith.
Sinking Ship Simulator: The Royal Navy’s Damage Repair Instructional Unit
Tom Scott
Published on Sep 7, 2015http://tomscott.com – with many, many thanks to the Royal Navy and everyone at HMS Excellent! http://royalnavy.mod.uk
How do you train sailors to save a sinking ship? Sure, you can teach them the theory, but there’s no replacement for having to hammer softwood wedges into deck and bulkhead splits that are spraying cold, high-pressure water in your face.
At HMS Excellent in Portsmouth sits Hazard, a Royal Navy Damage Repair Instructional Unit (DRIU). Every Navy recruit who’s going out to sea will have to go through something like this — and on a much harder level than we did! But then, they’ll have had months of training and teamwork beforehand…
DIRECTED BY Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk – @unnamedculprit – see behind-the-scenes video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwlnb…
WITH:
Paul Curry – @cr3
Melinda Seckington – http://missgeeky.com – @mseckingtonAnd again, with many thanks to all the Navy team who were so generous with their time and effort: http://royalnavy.mod.uk – http://twitter.com/royalnavy
QotD: The failure of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run — it is important to remember that it is only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.
One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say: “One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral”. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.
George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”, New Road, 1943 (republished in England, Your England and Other Essays, 1953).
