Quotulatiousness

September 16, 2019

The Inca Empire – Andean Apocalypse – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Americas, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 14 Sep 2019

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Disease — likely, smallpox or measles — had arrived in the Inca empire, and it was ruthless. Two of the (now dead) Emperor Huayna Capac’s sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, decided that a civil war over who should be Sapa Inca was perfect to do right now — nevermind the fact that Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadores had just showed up.

Election 2019 – “Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie’s take on the first week of the Canadian federal election campaign:

Dock Currie (not related) apparently posted something to the internet several years ago which was offensive. So he felt he had to resign as an NDP candidate. [Anyone who sees Dock on Twitter has to wonder if he has ever posted something which is not offensive, but there is is.] Several conservatives have, at various times been in the same crowd of several hundred or thousand people as Canada’s answer to Tokyo Rose, Faith Goldy. The shock, the horror.

I realize that a race between Trudeau, Scheer, Singh and May is not very inspiring. (It would have been so much more interesting had the Conservatives actually run a conservative like Max Bernier rather than whatever the hell Scheer is, but them’s the breaks.) But piling on to candidates for ancient statements or mau-mauing them for distant association with a cartoon fascist simply sets the bar even lower.

Having accomplished nothing of substance in their years in government – they even screwed up the pot file which took real ingenuity – the Libs are reduced to going negative from the outset. Their war room knows that Canadians are unimpressed with “climate change needs higher taxes” as a campaign theme. They also know that Trudeau’s legal and ethics problems offset what charisma he has as a campaigner.

So now it is time for “Project Fear”. Scheer = Harper = Trump. Scheer is going to take away abortion rights, Scheer is not an ally of the gay community because he does not jet all over the country to march in pride parades. The Conservatives hate immigrants, and so on.

Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness. Conventionally, a party will save the negative stuff for the last couple of weeks of the campaign when it is the most damaging and the hardest to refute. I suspect the Libs have realized that with their own leader either under RCMP investigation or credibly accused of impeding that investigation, they need to distract and terrify the under 30’s, newer immigrants and the ladies if they are going to win.

History-Makers: Herodotus

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 13 Sep 2019

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There is much to do, and many unknowns on our horizon! — One of those unknowns is “How did Herodotus become the Father of History” and why is his book so confusingly organized? All that and more on this installment of History-Makers!

Let me know which History writer you’d like me to discuss next in the comments below!

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Vikings at Green Bay – a terrible first quarter dooms the Vikings, 21-16

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

The Minnesota Vikings visited Green Bay for the first “Border Battle” of the 2019 season. Both teams had won their opening games, so the winner of this match would have the early lead in the NFC North division.

Among the inactives for the game were Vikings cornerbacks Mackensie Alexander and Mike Hughes along with starting left guard Pat Elflein and starting linebacker Ben Gedeon. I didn’t recognize any of the names on the Packers’ inactive list, so I assumed they returned all their starters from week one.

The game could hardly have started better for the hometown Packers, as they scored touchdowns on their first three possessions and looked unstoppable. Minnesota’s defence appeared to have been replaced by tackling dummies, as they could neither cover Pack receivers or stop Pack running backs. Dalvin Cook finally got the Vikings on the scoreboard with a 75-yard touchdown run to pull the Vikings back into the game. The Vikings defence finally got their act together after that, and kept the Packers out of the end zone for the rest of the game.

As several people pointed out on Twitter, it always seems as though the Vikings manage to be the first team to get screwed by new rule changes, as the decision to make pass interference a reviewable call turned into a touchdown taken off the scoreboard as review officials in New York decreed that OPI had taken place on the play and overturned the ruling on the field. Instead of seven points, the Vikings had to settle for a field goal from Dan Bailey. The next official ruling that took points away indirectly was an unsportsmanlike conduct call against Stefon Diggs for removing his helmet after scoring a touchdown. The fifteen yard penalty pushed the extra point attempt back and Green Bay was able to deflect the kick.

The Vikings’ last chance to win the game ended on a Kirk Cousins interception in the end zone. The Vikings defence held the Packers to a three-and-out, but Cousins and the Vikings offence did the same, and the Vikings only got the ball back after that with bare seconds left on the game clock, too far out for even a Hail Mary attempt.

Matthew Coller correctly says the Vikings wasted every comeback chance they had (and they had several):

Through sixteen minutes of football at Lambeau Field on Sunday afternoon, the Green Bay Packers looked like a juggernaut. Over the final 44 minutes, the Packers played only slightly better than one of the teams hoping to draft No. 1 overall. And — to paraphrase Denny Green — the Minnesota Vikings let them off the hook.

Aaron Rodgers and the Packers received the opening kickoff immediately hit Davante Adams for a 39-yard pass. Seconds later they were in the end zone, going 75 yards for a touchdown in just 2:10. Following a Vikings missed field goal, they did it again, driving 63 yards for another TD pass by Rodgers, this time picking on the Vikings’ depth at defensive back, tossing the ball easily over recently-elevated safety Nate Meadors.

Quarterback Kirk Cousins then fumbled twice on the same drive, setting up Rodgers and the Packers at the Minnesota 33-yard line. That drive ended as quickly as the first and with the same result.

Before Packers fans were even inside the building from their morning tailgating efforts, it was a three-score game.

[…]

The Vikings’ loss in Green Bay had a little bit of everything — bad calls, missed kicks, turnovers, big plays and inexplicable decisions. Ultimately Cousins and the offense were given every chance to overcome the bad start and pull off a remarkable comeback. Instead another big game in the Cousins era ends with regret and missed opportunities.

This is York – British Transport Film

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

LMS4767
Published on 30 May 2019

QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?

Filed under: Education, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?

  • Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
  • Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
  • Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
  • Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
  • As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
  • As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
  • Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.

If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?

Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.

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