Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2020

J.K. Rowling receives an apology

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his first Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan reports on the retraction and apology by The Day to J.K. Rowling:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been pivotal for many Millennials in encouraging them to move away from traditional religious beliefs.

We’re used to public apologies by now, but this one is a little different. It comes from a magazine for schoolchildren in England, called The Day. It reads:

    We accept that our article implied that … JK Rowling … had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour … We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong … We unreservedly apologise to JK Rowling for the offence caused, and are happy to retract these false allegations and to set the record straight.

The Day had been referring to JK Rowling’s open letter on trans issues, which you can read in its entirety here and judge for yourself.

I have to say it’s good to see this apology in print. It remains simply amazing to me that the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture.” It is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people. Her now infamous letter is elegant, calm, reasonable and open-hearted. Among other things, Rowling wrote: “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.”

She became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.

This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.

[…]

It pains me to see where this debate has gone. There’s so much common ground. And I do not doubt that taking into account the lived experiences of trans people is important. But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as JK Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.

Gewehr 98: The German WWI Standard Rifle

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Jun 2016

Sold at auction for $1,840 (w/ 5 other rifles).

The Gewehr 1898 was the product of a decade of bolt action repeating rifle improvements by the Mauser company, and would be the standard German infantry rifle through both World Wars. Today we are looking at a pre-WWI example (1905 production) that shows all the features of what a German soldier would have taken to war in 1914.

QotD: Bureaucracy at its heart

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb summed up in a simple aphorism what most of us instinctively know about bureaucracies:

    Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.

When something goes wrong, the bureaucrats play the blame-shifting game. Musical chairs will begin, and some poor fool will be stuck without a chair. When something goes right, of course, executive management will take credit. Your job as a bureaucrat is to be an implicitly political creature; to make your boss look good and, for yourself, to evade blame.

Bureaucracies become much worse when they are divorced from the profit motive. At least a large corporation must theoretically serve its customers in some positive manner, or they won’t remain in business for long. So while the internal politics of a large corporation are likely to suck like a Hoover, the external face of the company is often still somewhat pleasant for the customer.

With government bureaucracy, even that small consolation is lost. Go to the DMV, or any large government bureau. Long lines, smelly “customers”, and agents with extremely unpleasant attitudes abound. The motive is not to serve citizens well, or even to serve them quickly, but rather to meet the bare minimum necessary to avoid blame — and sometimes not even that.

Thales, “Bureacracy is Designed to Suck”, The Declination, 2018-05-02.

July 25, 2020

Did Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont invent the steam engine a century before Newcomen?

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes investigates Spanish claims that Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont beat Newcomen by a hundred years in the quest to harness steam power:

Screenshot from “Savery’s Miners Friend – 1698”, a YouTube video by Guy Janssen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5VvrEIj8w)

The Spanish claimant in question is one Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont, a late-sixteenth-century aristocrat and military engineer from Navarre, who from 1597 served as the administrator of the royal mines, and who invented a whole host of devices, from diving equipment and mine ventilation systems, to various improvements to mills, pumps, and furnaces. Thanks to the work of historian and engineer Nicolás García Tapia, whose biography of Ayanz came out in 2010, we now know quite a bit about this interesting inventor. The work was published in Spanish, and quite understandably was widely covered in the Spanish press. So although Ayanz has not quite become a household name in Spain just yet, he does now seem to be fairly well-known by the local “well actually” brigade (a shadowy international movement of which I am, to most people’s annoyance, a long-serving member). “Thomas Newcomen/Thomas Savery invented the steam engine you say? Well actually, I think you’ll find it was Ayanz a century earlier” — I had a quick google and discovered there were hundreds of comments to this effect.

But, actually, the story is a bit more complicated than that. The devil, as always, is in the detail, and unfortunately the press claims about the technology have become widely and erroneously repeated, apparently ignoring Tapia’s careful historical work. I even spotted a recently-published encyclopaedia of inventions that repeated the errors.

So what, exactly, did Ayanz invent? The key fact is that in 1606 he obtained a 20-year monopoly from the king of Spain for the use of over fifty different inventions, including two steam-related devices. One of these was related to getting rid of deadly mine gases, which had killed one of his friends and collaborators, and had almost killed Ayanz too. His solution was a steam injector — essentially, a steam boiler with a narrowing pipe sticking out of it, which would inject the steam into a larger air pipe. The pressurised steam, upon flowing up into the air pipe, created a powerful sucking effect behind it, thus rapidly drawing deadly gases out of the mine. (A bit like at the start of this video).

It was the second steam-powered device, however, that has become famous as Ayanz’s steam engine. Just like the inventions of Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen about a century later, it was designed to pump the water out of mines. Ayanz formed a partnership in 1608-11 to reopen the silver mines of Guadalcanal in Spain, which had been abandoned due to flooding, and seems to have tried to implement the engine there: he obtained rights to cut down nearby trees for firewood, for example, and exploited nearby copper, which would have been essential for making boilers and pipes. As for whether he actually got it to work, we don’t know for sure. Sadly, he died only a few years after starting the project.

But the devilish detail is in how his engine worked. Specifically, all the multiplying errors seem to have arisen from a misinterpretation, by the press, of Tapia’s statement that the engine was “very similar” to that of Thomas Savery. There are, certainly, some important similarities. Both engines, for example, exploited the expansionary force of steam. In both, steam from a boiler was piped into a water tank, forcing that water up a narrow pipe — what we might call a pushing effect. And both engines used two tanks, which alternated so that the engine would pump continuously. While one tank and was being refilled with mine water, the other would be have the steam pushing the water out, and then vice versa. So far so good. Indeed, due to the two water tanks, drawings of Ayanz’s and Savery’s devices look very similar side by side.

“The Ballad of Bull” Pt.2 – Combat Medics – Sabaton History 077 [Official]

Filed under: Australia, Germany, History, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 24 Jul 2020

Sometimes war is killing, sometimes war is saving lives.

In the first episode we have seen Leslie “Bull” Allen become a hero, not through the death of his enemies, but by saving his comrades’ lives. And there were others like him. Soldiers and medics, whose first duty it was to preserve lives during war, even when it meant endangering their own safety. Here are three short stories of men and women, who served as medics at the front line of the Second World War, and became heroes to their country.

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Colorizations:
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Sources:
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– Arkiv i Nordland
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From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 days ago
The medical staff in war — combat medics, field surgeons and nurses, ambulance drivers and medevac crews — are often the unsung heroes of war, literally and figuratively.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve to be remembered and their sacrifices honored. There are undoubtedly many instances of exceptional bravery among the medical staff of wars throughout history — for which they rightly should be praised. But they should also be remembered for their everyday work in trenches or field hospitals, in jungles and deserts, at sea or in mid-air. Treating a seemingly endless stream of incoming wounded, trying to give relief to those in pain, comfort to those in agony, and hope to to those who have lost theirs — day in and day out, for as long as the war will last.

If you missed part one of “The Ballad of Bull” you can see it right here.

Walter Duranty, Stalin’s tame “journalist”

Filed under: History, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Francis X. Maier makes the case that the Holodomor — the Soviet Union’s deliberate starvation of millions of its own people in Ukraine and surrounding regions — killed even more than the better-known Nazi Holocaust, then identifies one of the key apologists who lied serially and deliberately to hide the genocide:

A page from the Chicago Herald and Examiner from 3 March, 1935.
Wikimedia Commons.

[S.J.] Taylor’s 1990 article was timed to the release of Stalin’s Apologist, her withering biography of journalist Walter Duranty. A Pulitzer Prize winner, celebrated political analyst, and Moscow correspondent for the New York Times during the 1930s, Duranty interviewed Stalin twice. He also played a significant role in securing American diplomatic recognition for the Soviet regime. Less publicly, he was a prodigious womanizer, longtime opium buddy of Satanist Aleister Crowley, compulsive exploiter of friends, a spendthrift, occasional drunk, and an inventive, always-reliable flack for the Soviet regime.

One of Duranty’s lifelong memories involved his religious grandmother who, after catching the adolescent Duranty in a lie, had warned him that “liars go to hell.” He never forgot or forgave the correction. As an adult, he simply erased all family ties and falsely claimed in his autobiography that he’d been orphaned at age ten. Massaging the truth became one of his core skills. Brilliant, engaging, and widely respected at the time, he was, in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who also reported from Moscow and saw Duranty in action, “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”

Committed to protecting his own influence and to a future “greater good” promised by the Soviet regime, Duranty at first dismissed rumors of the Ukrainian Famine. Then he downplayed them. Then he claimed that Ukraine’s “food shortages” were the result of local mismanagement and the work of “wreckers” and “spoilers” intent on undermining Soviet progress. He repeatedly denied the mass starvation in his reporting. But he did suggest that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” … especially when the omelet is the task of modernization, and the cooks are tough-minded Bolsheviks intent on a better tomorrow.

As Taylor notes in her book, Western powers struggling with the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in Germany had little interest in rumors from Ukraine that might antagonize Stalin as a potential ally. Muggeridge had arrived in Russia in 1932 to string for the Manchester Guardian. A convinced socialist at the time, he intended to stay in Russia and renounce his British passport for Soviet citizenship. Reality interfered. By March 1933, he was reporting on Ukraine’s famine as “one of the most monstrous crimes in history,” and his disillusionment with the Soviet paradise was complete. But back in England, thanks in part to Duranty’s counter-reporting and Soviet propaganda, Muggeridge’s work was dismissed as “a hysterical tirade.” Muggeridge himself was slandered, vilified, and unable to find employment. And that might have buried the Holodomor story successfully, except for one man.

Welshman Gareth Jones was a young Russian Studies graduate of Cambridge and a former secretary to British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Stringing for the same Manchester Guardian as Muggeridge, he eluded Soviet press controls and spent three weeks on his own, walking through the hellish conditions of a starvation-ravaged Ukraine. Then he wrote about it in the spring of 1933, confirming and compounding the impact of Muggeridge’s recent work. Walter Duranty led the ferocious, Soviet-prodded attack on Jones’s credibility. He also bullied most other Moscow-based Western journalists — to their enduring disgrace — into doing the same, lest they lose their visas. Jones, however, had a spine. He did not back off. He continued writing and speaking about the famine in Ukraine with lasting effect, until his death under suspicious circumstances two years later.

Shakespeare Summarized: The Tempest

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 May 2014

At last! It’s not a tragedy!

It may have been Shakespeare’s final play, but that doesn’t mean it’s my final summary! Hopefully, you lucky folks will get to hear my melodious rambling for a while yet.

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QotD: The real life implications of “positive” rights

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

… these same people want the government to provide them with free health care, and if they got their full way, other “positive liberties” (to quote Obama) including free college, free housing, free food, guaranteed income, guaranteed jobs.

[…] the moment all your necessities are furnished by someone else, someone else gets to make all the decisions for you. I mean, if your health is paid for by the taxes of your fellow citizens, and the government aka the nation looks after your every need: should they pay for your health if you insist on smoking or drinking? Or should those resources be husbanded for people who take better care of themselves? Okay, Sarah, but isn’t there a point to individual responsibility? Why shouldn’t you be required to take minimal care of yourself, so you get the benefits of the government’s care, which as you say someone else pays for.

Ah, but there’s the rub. See, ultimately, there’s always something some of us say or do that can be used to justify denying care or giving only palliative care. For instance, I’m overweight, which seems to be one of the remaining sins in the current lexicon. Sure, I gained tons of weight over 20 years of untreated hypothyroidism, even though I was starving myself for a long portion of those. But hey, I allowed myself to be overweight. So my prognosis is poor. Why spend money on me, when someone else could have better results?

Hell, even when it comes to my autoimmune. I’m a poor prospect, so why give me top of the line care?

If the government controlled other things, it would be exactly the same. Food? Sure, I break out in eczema all over when I eat a diet rich in carbs. But hey, flour and rice are cheap, and why should I get a specialized diet, since I’m only a writer who isn’t even a leftist or a supporter of the state, and besides my prospects of survival are poor?

College? Sure you want to be an economist, but your teachers say you’re cheeky and talk back, and the state doesn’t need that. What we need right now are pipe fitters. Here, you can take this six week course.

When the state is paying the bill, the state gets to decide what is better for you. The European constitution gives you the right to “death with dignity” because death with dignity is much cheaper than expensive treatments with a low chance of survival. After all this money is for everyone, you know?

And like the NHS, in Britain, they won’t even let you seek treatment outside their tender mercies. Why should they? They pay for you. That means in the end they decide what to spend on you. They own you. And if you went outside their system and your kid got cured? It would look pretty bad for them, wouldn’t it? Why should they allow you to do that? And besides, peasant, you have a bad attitude.

Sarah Hoyt, “Slouching Into Shackles”, According to Hoyt, 2018-04-27.

July 24, 2020

Winston Churchill and the 1943 Bengal famine

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, India, Japan, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Howarth on a recent BBC production that threw facts out the window in a rush to condemn British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for the famine in Bengal during 1943:

A 1945 map of Bengali districts as of 1943.
Famine Inquiry Commission (1945): Report on Bengal via Wikimedia Commons.

This argument was put forward by the BBC’s own Yogita Limaye, an Indian engineer and reporter on Women’s safety, based on the book Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor, who was interviewed to give his opinion that Churchill was an “odious figure of reprehensible views and racist attitudes.”

No doubt the narrative of British evil and oppression is believed in India and elsewhere, but that does not make it true or worthy of the BBC reporting it as fact without any semblance of balance. The BBC failed its licence fee paying audience in two main regards, namely, conceptually and factually.

The British ruled India, one of the largest populations on earth, for well over two centuries. Good and bad things happened, just like everywhere else ever. You can join the dots to create whatever picture you like – Dr Tharoor chose the picture he wished to create. Why is the Bengal famine uniquely interesting to a BBC audience in 2020 over say a mini-series on British Railways and development in India? BBC presenters are demonstrably more interested in the first narrative: this is a major conceptual failing on their part. Being equal mixtures primitivism and solipsism. Always the borderline racist Western assumption is that “we” did things to “them”: we had agency, they were passive brutes. They are boring, we are endlessly interesting. Let’s talk about us. However even the slightest knowledge of the British-in-India teaches one that “we” did nothing without them. How on earth could we? There were famously few of us.

Yet it’s the second great BBC failing – over accuracy – which is so especially galling. On the actual allegation the BBC is plain wrong. Churchill was not responsible for the Bengal famine as any actual delving into the facts would have shown. Note well that they didn’t even try.

In 1943 Britain was at war with Japan, who were at the gates of India having occupied Burma, a major supplier of grain to Bengal. Important facts. Bengal was in the grips of a famine, nobody disputes that. But Churchill was not responsible, neither for the weather nor the agriculture nor the Japanese aggression.

Even the BBC did not allege that Churchill instigated the famine, the charge sheet is that he refused to help when he could. There were “stockpiles [of food] in the UK” and shipping which was retained in the northern hemisphere, prioritised for use there. Stockpiles of food in the UK in 1943? Even if there was the food and shipping, transporting US corned beef to Bengal would have been ludicrous. If there was shipping and protection from Japanese naval assault the food would have come from the rest of India. So why was food not transported from other parts of India to Bengal?

Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.

War Diplomats, Japanese/Soviet Neutrality, and why not Sweden? – WW2 – OOTF 015

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

World War Two
Published 23 Jul 2020

What happened to Allied ambassadors? And how did Hitler react to the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact? And why didn’t he invade Sweden? Once again, Indy is in the Chair of Infinite Knowledge answering all your exciting questions about World War Two!

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Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man), https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
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Daniel Weiss

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Portrait of Charles Howard Smith, courtesy National Portrait Gallery

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Orchestras encouraged to ditch blind auditions for reasons of diversity

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tal Bachman responds to a recent New York Times article by Tony Tommasini demanding that musical organizations ignore the relative quality of a potential musician’s play in order to ensure more visible minority players get hired:

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, detail from a group portrait in 2018.
Photo from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra website.

Tommasini begins his piece, entitled “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions”, by decrying the racism and sexism which, he claims, kept the orchestras of yesteryear predominantly white and male. He then pays tribute to the simple practice that helped erase that racism and sexism from orchestra hiring procedures: the blind audition. Starting in the late 1960s, orchestras began ditching traditional face-to-face auditions in favour of auditions that took place behind screens. With orchestra administrators no longer able to see the race or sex of the orchestra applicant, conscious and unconscious bias in hiring choices became impossible. Musical skill became the sole criterion for winning one of those prized professional playing positions.

This meritocratic turn, Tommasini argues, proved especially beneficial to female players. Whereas in 1970, women made up only 6% of orchestras, they now make up somewhere between a third and half of an average orchestra.

I add that audiences also benefited from meritocratic hiring processes as orchestras played increasingly brilliant renditions of the classics. Those improved performances also showed greater reverence for the original composers themselves. In short, the blind audition was a big win for all lovers of musical excellence – players, living composers, and fans alike.

So why on earth would anyone now call for their abolition?

Tommasini answers this way:

    Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras. But not enough. American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to black and Latino artists … Ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

In other words, the low number of black and Latino classical musicians means orchestras need to re-institute the old-time racial discrimination Tommasini began his article by decrying. Orchestras need to know which applicants are white and Asian precisely so they can refuse to hire them on that basis, no matter how skilled they are. Blind auditions make racial discrimination impossible, so they must be scrapped. American orchestras, writes Tommasini, should stop “passively waiting for representation to emerge from behind the audition screen”. Instead, they must realize that “removing the screen is a crucial step”.

To summarize: For Tommasini, it’s not just that justice requires injustice. It’s that justice is injustice (injustice in the form of racial discrimination). And if that reminds you of the official slogan of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984 – war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – you’re not alone.

10 Quick Woodworking Tips 02 | Paul Sellers

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

Paul Sellers
Published 26 Mar 2020

Paul is back again bringing you another lot of 10 Quick Woodworking Tips!

Every Tuesday Paul uploads a quick 15 second “Tuesday Tip” to his Instagram stories. You can join Paul on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/paul.a.j.se…

Let us know your favourite tip in the comments!
——————–

Want to learn more about woodworking?

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QotD: A death in the Roman Empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The women who came to tend the tomb in the garden had no doubt that their Lord was dead. They had personally arrayed his body in shining white vestments, and then, when all was ready, laid his physical remains to rest. Rejected as he had been by his own people, legally condemned as an enemy of Rome, brought to a squalid and ignominious end, his defeat had seemed total. What victory could there possibly be in the wake of such a death?

Yet then something miraculous happened. Spreading from east to west across the Mediterranean, travelling along the great network of roads and shipping lanes that constituted the arteries of the Roman Empire, news began to spread that this man whose mortal remains supposedly lay entombed in the grave had been seen alive. Most people, of course, scoffed at such reports — but there were some, small communities of believers, who did not. These, even as the decades passed, kept the faith: the conviction that their saviour would come again, that he would reign, in the words of a widely circulated prophecy, as “the king of Jerusalem”, that he would bring to groaning humanity a universal peace.

In the event, Nero did not come again. Despite the various imposters who appeared in the wake of his death in AD 68, and the fact that, centuries later, there were cities in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire that still honoured his memory, his fate was to be commemorated, not as a saviour, but as a monster. And so, in numerous ways, he was. His readiness to have members of his own family — mother, brother, wife — put to death ensured that when he himself died the dynasty of the Caesars perished with him.

His sex games were notorious. He was darkly rumoured to have set fire to Rome. By the time that Suetonius, half a century after his death, came to write his biography, the details of his life could be structured almost entirely as a catalogue of deviancies and crimes. “Insolence, an uninhibited sexual appetite, dissipation, greed, cruelty: these were the vices which, to begin with — because he gave expression to them only secretly and incrementally — might well have been chalked up as the excesses of youth, had it not been manifest to everyone even at the time that they were failings, not of age, but of character.”

Nero’s rule had become one protracted blasphemy against the customs of the Roman state. These, hallowed by the centuries, enabled the people of a city that had conquered most of the known world to feel a sense of communion still with the mos maiorum: the customs of their distant ancestors. To no class of society was this more important than the Senate, which still, despite the collapse of Rome’s venerable republican order and its replacement by the autocracy of the Caesars, cherished its time-honoured role as the guardians of tradition.

Tom Holland, “When Christ conquered Caesar”, UnHerd, 2020-04-10.

July 23, 2020

Every Stanley Bench Plane Explained (Once and for all!)

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Rex Krueger
Published 22 Jul 2020

Understand the whole line of Stanley bench planes; all ELEVEN of them.

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Justin Trudeau and the Overton Window

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

Ted Campbell explains how Canada’s mainstream media work so hard to move the Overton Window to benefit Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party:

… this explanation from Politico might help:

    The concept of the “Overton window,” the range of ideas outside which lie political exile or pariahdom, was first batted around in a series of conversations by the late free-market advocate Joseph Overton in the 1990s. After Overton’s untimely death in a plane crash in 2003, his friend and colleague at the libertarian Mackinac Center, Joseph Lehman, formalized and named the idea in a presentation meant to educate fellow think-tank warriors on the power of consistent advocacy. Ring the bell loudly for your idea, no matter how unpopular, and back it up with plenty of research and evidence, so the thinking went. Today’s fringe theory can become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom by the shifting of the finely tuned gears that move popular opinion; to Overton and Lehman the role of the think tank was to at least familiarize voters with these ideas, giving them an institutional home when public opinion finally moved their way.

Or, and even more brief visual explanation is:

Anyway, I believe that the Liberal Party of Canada and its allies in e.g. the CBC, The Star, and amongst the others who speak for the Laurentian Elites are working very hard, right now, to move the Overton Window frame of one idea from “Unthinkable” to at least barely “Acceptable.” That idea is that Justin Trudeau’s personal corruption (I believe that’s the right word) is acceptable because the alternative is a Conservative government that is, by Liberal/Laurentian Elite definition, authoritarian (fascist), homophobic, militaristic, racist, and sexist.

That’s right, the Liberal/Laurentian Elites admit that Justin Trudeau is dishonest, that he, unthinkingly, breaks the rules, over and over again ~ because, you see, he’s a really nice person but, sadly, he’s just not very smart. I have even made that case for them. I suggested, almost a year ago, that Justin Trudeau is an intellectual lightweight who is in no way qualified to hold high office … but he has the “second hand” celebrity of a famous name and he’s photogenic, too, and so, in 21st-century Canada he’s electable.

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