Quotulatiousness

December 23, 2020

Kido Butai: Terror of the Pacific – WW2 Special

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 22 Dec 2020

Kido Butai was the fleet that launched the surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor and followed that up with a string of victories in 1942. But how was it commanded, both as a whole and in the high and even mid level command? Today we’ll look at that.

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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Markus Linke
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man), https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
Norman Stewart, https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Mitsubishi G4M bomber graphic, courtesy Kaboldy https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Picture of Jisaku Okada, courtesy XxSuguxX https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Jo Wandrini – “Dragon King”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Yi Nantiro – “Watchman”
Philip Ayers – “The Unexplored”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Mandala Dreams – “Pacific Shores”
Phoenix Tails – “At the Front”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Our “systemically racist and patriarchal society” which oppresses “people of color, women, and LGBT”

Filed under: Economics, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

To hear some people (especially on social media in these locked-down pandemic days), there has never been a human society that more greatly benefits white heterosexual men and oppresses everyone else like the modern west. Here are some stats from Rav Arora to challenge that claim:

We are frequently told by commentators and theorists on the progressive and liberal Left that we live in a systemically racist and patriarchal society. The belief that Western societies privilege white men and oppress people of color, women, and LGBT citizens is especially popular within academic institutions, legacy media, the entertainment industry, and even sports. However, newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year — an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts. Furthermore, the income gap between both black and Latino men and Asian women is wider than it has ever been. The income gap between white and black women, meanwhile, is much narrower than the gap between their male counterparts.

These outcomes cannot exist in a society suffused with misogyny and racism. As confounding to conventional progressive wisdom as these new figures appear to be, copious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories — higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823). The report also finds substantial economic gains among minority groups. Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute reports that from 2018 to 2019, Asian and black households had the highest rate of median income growth (10.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively) of all main racial groups (although she cautions that overall disparities remain “largely unchanged”). On a longitudinal scale, Hispanics, not whites, had the highest income growth in 2019 relative to the start of the Great Recession in 2007 (although many of these gains have been reversed by the pandemic).

Rapidly rising female economic success is partly a product of higher academic representation. 2019 was the 11th consecutive year in which women earned the majority of doctoral degrees. Women accounted for 57 percent of all students across American colleges in 2018 according to the latest US Department of Education figures and earned the majority of associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. According to University of Michigan economist Mark J. Perry, “By overall enrollment in higher education men have been an under-represented minority for the last 40 years.” Sex differences in cognition can help to explain differential performance along gender lines — although men typically perform better on quantitative and visuospatial tasks, several studies have found that on average women perform better in verbal and memory tasks and on reading and writing tests.

No, Console Scalpers Aren’t Ruining Christmas

Filed under: Business, Economics, Gaming, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Foundation for Economic Education
Published 22 Dec 2020

Support Out of Frame on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OutofFrameShow

Check out our podcast, Out of Frame: Behind the Scenes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiS5…

As we enter peak holiday season, most people have their shopping done by now, but as always, many are scrambling last-minute for their purchases. And if you aren’t one of those early-birds fortunate enough to procure a PS5 or Xbox Series X, you can guarantee that you won’t be able to find one unless you’re willing to pay $1,200 to a scalper.

Many are understandably frustrated. How is it fair for people to buy up the consoles at $500 and sell for nearly double or triple the cost? “There ought to be a law” against that kind of thing — right?

Well, in short, there’s nothing wrong with scalping — and a few economic lessons will help explain why.

Scarcity is real and so is time-preference. Scalpers (and even bots) show that demand for some goods is so high that people are willing to pay several times the list price — which could provide a lot of information to Sony and Microsoft on how many consoles to produce and in what parts of the world. They could factor that information into the future, so there would be less problems with availability, but most retailers make this information exchange impossible.

______________________________
CREDITS:

Produced by Sean W. Malone
Written by Jen Maffessanti & Sean W. Malone
Edited by Paul Nelson
Asst. Edited by Jason Reinhardt

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

Gun Jesus Apocrypha: The Gospel of Browning

Filed under: History, Humour, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Dec 2016

A brief Christmas reading, as translated from the original ancient manuscripts by Fr. Frog (http://www.frfrogspad.com/jmb.htm).

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QotD: Christmas songs

Filed under: Media, Personal, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Imagine” didn’t go over wild with the parents, who mumbled along unenthusiastically. To be honest, I’d prefer John and Yoko’s peacenik dirge, “(Happy Xmas) War Is Over”, though that might be a little premature and anyway that song suffers from the disadvantage of mentioning Xmas. On the radio you can hear “Frosty” and “Rudolph” and James Taylor’s new post-9/11 version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, but anyone with young children finds themselves exposed to a strange alternative repertoire of unseasonal favourites. My friend Tammy emerged from her daughter’s kindergarten concert in a rage: not just no Christmas carols, but no “Jingle Bells”. The only song she recognized was Lionel Bart’s spectacular melisma pile-up from Oliver!, “Whe-e-e-e-ere Is Love?”, which is not designed to be sung en masse. “They sounded like they were dying,” she fumed, before going off to beard the school board, who explained that “Jingle Bells” had been given the heave-ho on the grounds that it might be insensitive to those of a non-jingly persuasion.

On balance, I prefer the approach of the London Borough of Brent, one of Britain’s sternest loony-left councils but far more sporting than the Scrooge-packed school boards across the Atlantic. Back in the Eighties, Brent decreed that it would permit municipal performances of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” as long as they were accompanied by a couple of non-heterosexist choruses of “I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus”. That’s a lot less vicious than replacing the entire seasonal repertoire with obscurantist dirges for solstice-worshippers. Anyone can St-Nix “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, the hard part is finding something to put in its place.

There are very few good Hannukah songs, never mind Kwanza or the Islamic festivals of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The reason for the dearth of Hanukkah songs is that for most of the last century the Jews were too busy cranking out Christmas songs — Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas”, Mel Torme wrote “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting on an open fire)”, Jerry Herman “We Need A Little Christmas”, Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “The Christmas Waltz”, Johnny Marks “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas”, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and a zillion others. As far as I know, the only Christian to offer to return the compliment was stiff-necked Mormon Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (whose “Come To The Manger” has been recorded by Donny Osmond). Senator Hatch confirmed to me during his short-lived presidential campaign in 1999 that he was working on a Hanukkah song. I don’t know whether he’s finished it, but I would have to say on balance that, musically speaking, the Christians got the better end of this deal.

Mark Steyn, “Imagine Christmas”, Steyn Online, 2019-12-23 (originally published in The Spectator, 2004).

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