Quotulatiousness

January 28, 2023

QotD: Allied anti-semitism in WW2

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The following leaflet (printed) was passed to an acquaintance of mine in a pub:

LONG LIVE THE IRISH!

The first American soldier to kill a Jap was Mike Murphy.
The first American pilot to sink a Jap battleship was Colin Kelly.
The first American family to lose five sons in one action and have a naval vessel named after them were the Sullivans.
The first American to shoot a Jap plane was Dutch O’Hara.
The first coastguardsman to spot a German spy was John Conlan.
The first American soldier to be decorated by the President was Pat Powers.
The first American admiral to be killed leading his ship into battle was Dan Callahan.
The first American son-of-a-bitch to get four new tyres from the Ration Board was Abie Goldstein.

The origin of this thing might just possibly be Irish, but it is much likelier to be American. There is nothing to indicate where it was printed, but it probably comes from the printing-shop of some American organization in this country. If any further manifestos of the same kind turn up, I shall be interested to hear of them.

George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1944-12-08.

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

January 27, 2023

The return of the revenge of the bride of the Doomsday Clock

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s amazing how much free publicity you can get by pulling out the hoary old Cold War propaganda tools, as Andrew Potter explains with the re-re-re-introduction of the Doomsday Clock bullshit:

Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock ahead by ten seconds, to 90 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the clock has ever been to midnight, and, according to the press release announcing the move: “Never in the Doomsday Clock’s 76-year history have we been so close to global catastrophe.”

If you’re under, say, 40 years of age or so, that paragraph is probably pure gobbledygook, the written equivalent of the squawk of a 2400 baud modem going through its handshaking protocols. But for those of us in the ever-dwindling cohorts of Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers, hearing about the movement of the Doomsday Clock is to be jerked back into a time marked by both profound moral clarity and deep existential anxiety.

A bit of background on the Doomsday Clock might help. It was a creature of the Cold War, founded in 1947 by some of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project to raise public awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons. As the Bulletin puts it, the clock uses “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet”. The decision to move or leave the minute hand of the Clock in place is made each year by the various trustees of the Bulletin, based on their evaluation of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe.

The clock was initially set at a nice and relaxed seven minutes to midnight, and over the following few decades it was moved closer in response to clear nuclear threats, things like ramped-up testing of new bombs, nuclear proliferation, or rising Cold War tensions. During periods of detente or after the signing of arms reductions treaties, the minute hand would retreat. In 1991, it was moved back to 17 minutes to midnight after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Doomsday Clock was a healthy reminder of the most salient geopolitical fact of the era, which is that two superpowers were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at one another.

But like many Cold War relics, the demise of the U.S.S.R. left it scrambling for a raison d’etre. In a bit of clever PR entrepreneurialism, the executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned the clock into a more generalized warning against war, climate change and other ecological or technological threats. The nadir of this shift in mission came on January 23rd 2020, when the Bulletin moved the clock’s hands to 100 seconds to midnight.

As the press release accompanying the ticking of the clock noted at the time, this put humanity “closer than ever” to catastrophe. Given that the clock had kept watch over our drive for self-destruction through the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sabre-rattling Reagan administration, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it makes one wonder just what happened in early 2020 to merit such a fearful move.

Canada’s worsening refugee problem

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Paul Wells discusses some of the frustrations being aired on the French-language Radio-Canada news channel about the increasing, possibly record-breaking flow of asylum seekers entering Canada at the Roxham Road pedestrian border crossing from Champlain, New York:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

The issue at hand is Roxham Road, a pedestrian border crossing between small-town Quebec and upstate New York, 45 minutes’ drive from Montreal City Hall. Thousands of people walk into Canada there every month and demand asylum. Caring for them and processing their claims takes money and work. Along comes [former Parti Québécois leader Jean-François] Lisée with a suggestion.

If Justin Trudeau can’t get changes to the bilateral Safe Third Country Agreement to slow this human traffic — and colleagues report that he can’t — then, Lisée says, Quebec should make the newcomers the rest of Canada’s problem.

Within 24 hours after somebody walks across Roxham Road, Lisée says, “We’ll sort them, we’ll keep all the francophones and those who have immediate family in Quebec. And the others, we’ll put them in a nice air-conditioned bus and we’ll take them to Immigration Canada in Ottawa.”

I should emphasize a few things here, to salvage any hope of a civil discussion.

(1) What Lisée is suggesting won’t happen. In particular, it won’t happen because the party he used to lead has three seats out of 125 in Quebec’s National Assembly.

(2) The very suggestion made the other panelists uncomfortable. They took turns criticizing Lisée.

(3) The panel show’s host, Sébastien Bovet, immediately drew the obvious parallel: This is what governors in the U.S. south do. “Ron DeSantis charters flights and buses to send migrants north”, Bovet said, and indeed it is true. We shall see whether there are legal repercussions for DeSantis’ lurid stunt.

(4) Finally, I don’t think asylum seekers should be sorted by language ability and sent packing if they fail either. What’s going on at Roxham Road is a policy crisis, but it’s also a human drama. Lisée spoke during the same week as the funeral for a Haitian man who died trying to cross back into the US after his claims in Canada got hung up in procedural limbo.

Having said all of that, perhaps we can notice the scale of what’s happening at Roxham Road, and ponder how it fits into a generalized sense of Canadian bewilderment.

If you’re wondering why so many in Quebec are freaking out about a single pedestrian border crossing, it may be because the numbers are a bit breathtaking. This chart shows that 39,171 asylum claimants were intercepted by the RCMP between regular ports of entry in Quebec in 2022, compared to 369 in the entire rest of the country combined. So if asylum claims are a problem — and whatever else they are, they’re at least an administrative challenge — then 99.1% of the challenge is in Quebec.

That figure of 39,171, or 107 people a day, is more than twice as many as in any previous year in the last decade and, I’d guess without having statistics dating back further, the most in any province in any year in Canada’s history. (Much of this statistical background was covered in a column by the Toronto Sun‘s Brian Lilley earlier this week.)

Post-pandemic travelling on the TTC: ride the Red Rocket … cautiously

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

Matt Gurney posted a series of tweets about his recent subway experiences in Toronto:

I rode the TTC three times today. Once to downtown from my home in midtown. Once within downtown to a different place. And then home from downtown.

On two of those three rides, there was someone having a very obvious mental-health crisis on the vehicle with us.

The first one was a young man who clapped his hands over his ears and shrieked incoherently at random intervals. And then he got off.

The second, an older man sat in a chair and screamed nonsense constantly for ten stops. Maybe more. That’s just when I got off.

I’m working on a bigger piece for later so I’ll save any complex thoughts and big conclusions for then. But there was something interesting I noticed today. I’m a regular TTC rider. Not daily but frequent. And for the first time today, I’m noticing gallows humour and planning.

“Good luck to everyone,” cracked one guy. There was laughter. Everyone knew what he meant.

But I’m also seeing little groups of strangers agreeing to each keep watch on one direction or another. Sometimes also joking about it.

None of this is funny, but my gut tells me that if Torotonians are now so thoroughly convinced that riding the TTC is so risky that it’s worth a dark joke, any politician who reacts to the next unprovoked attack or murder with a proposal for a national summit is gonna get smoked.

I like the TTC. I have great access to it. It’s super convenient and affordable. It’s a huge asset for me. I have token cufflinks. I’m a fan, is what I’m saying.

I’m now at the point where I’d think twice before taking my kids on it. And we used to ride it just to kill the time.

My son used to stand on the couch in our living room looking out the window counting buses as they went by, loudly shouting to announce each one. Getting to go on a bus or subway or a streetcar was an event for him. My daughter, maybe a bit less excited. Still loved it.

Ah man.

Anyway. I hope tomorrow is better.

Update: You might think the increased concern over using the TTC might be merely a bit of confirmation bias informed by recent reporting, but apparently the situation is serious enough that Toronto Police will be stepping up their presence on the system.

“House of the Rising Sun” – Hildegard von Blingin’ & Algal the Bard (Bardcore | Medieval Style)

Filed under: France, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Hildegard von Blingin’
Published 11 Jun 2022

We’re pleased to present you with not one, but two Bardcore covers! Algal played every instrument you hear, and I provided the vocals. You’ll find the other cover, Dust in the Wind, on Algal’s channel in the link below.
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QotD: What is Strategy?

Filed under: Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We should start by returning to our three levels of military analysis: tactics, operations and strategy. We’ve dealt with tactics (how you fight) and operations (where you fight, and how you get there). Strategy is an often misunderstood term: most “strategy” games (especially real-time strategy) are actually focused almost entirely on tactics and operations; as a rule, if “don’t have a war” isn’t an option, you are not actually doing strategy. Likewise, a lot of basic planning in business is termed “strategy” when it really is tactics; not a question of goals, but of means to achieve those goals. Because strategy is the level of analysis that concerns why we fight – and thus also why we might not fight. Let’s unpack that.

(Attentive readers who know their Clausewitz (drink!) will recognize that I am being both broader and narrower than he in how I use the term strategy. Clausewitz terms strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war” which is more nearly what we today mean as operations. In contrast, strategy as it is used today in a technical sense corresponds more nearly to what Clausewitz terms policy, the third element of his “marvelous trinity”. A full exegesis of Clausewitz’ trinity is beyond the scope of this essay, but I wanted to note the differing usages, because I’m going to quote Clausewitz below. And as always, every time Clausewitz gets quoted you must take a drink; it’s the eternal military history drinking game).

At the strategic level of analysis, the first question is “what are your policy objectives?” (although I should note that grand strategy is sometimes conceived as an analytical level above strategy, in which case policy objectives may go there). There’s a compelling argument common in realist international relations theory that the basic policy of nearly all states is to survive, with the goal of survival then suggesting a policy of maximizing security, which in turn suggests a policy of maximizing the military power of the state (which ironically leads to lower the security of other states who then must further increase their military power, a reaction known as the “security dilemma” or, more colorfully, the “Red Queen effect”). I think it is also possible for states to have policy goals beyond this: ideological projects, good and bad. But survival comes first.

From there, strategy concerns itself with the best way to achieve those policy objectives. Is peace and alliances the best way to achieve security (for a small state, the answer is often “yes”)? Would security be enhanced by, say, gaining a key chunk of territory that could be fortified to forestall invasion? Those, of course, are ends, but strategy also concerns itself with means: how do you acquire that defensible land? Buy it? Take it by force? And then – and only then, finally – do you come to the question of “what sort of war – and what sort of conduct in war – will achieve that objective?”

You may note that this is not the same kind of thinking that animates tactics or operations. Military theorists have noticed that for quite some time, often suggesting a sharp separation between the fellows who do operations and tactics (generals) and those who do strategy (typically kings or politicians). As Clausewitz says (drink!), “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose … war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy [emphasis mine].” In short, Clausewitz stresses – and leaders have long ignored to their peril – that of all of the factors in war, policy ought to guide action (although no part of the trinity may be neglected).

This creates subordination between the three levels of analysis (to get technical, this is because operations and tactics are part of a side of the Clausewitzian trinity which ought to be subordinate to policy). Operations is subordinate to strategy; an operation which achieves something that isn’t a strategic goal accomplishes nothing. And tactics is likewise subordinate to operations. Thus the thinking pattern should always proceed from the highest questions of strategy down to the prioritization of ends (still strategy), to the means to accomplish those ends (still strategy); only then to the execution of those means (operations) and then to the on-the-ground details of that execution (tactics). Of course what this tripartite division is mean in part to signal is that all three of these stages are tremendously complex; just because tactics is the subordinate element does not mean it is simple!

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.

January 26, 2023

Are memes the natural communications channel of non-progressives?

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

Sarah Hoyt on having to explain memes to her husband:

His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.

But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.

And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.

It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.

The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.

This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.

They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.

They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.

Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts “yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)

At least now most people know — it took Twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.

Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.

A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)

And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.

But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.

On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)

We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.

A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–”

The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.

Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.

Indigenous Weapons and Tactics of King Philip’s War

Filed under: Americas, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 20 Jan 2023

Native American living historians Drew Shuptar-Rayvis and Dylan Smith help me explore the military history of King Philip’s War from the indigenous perspective.
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Ukraine to receive Challenger II, M1 Abrams, and Leopard 2 tanks … both a solution and a new set of problems

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney outlines some of the benefits Ukraine will receive with this new transfusion of AFVs … and also the new and exacerbated set of practical problems that goes along with fielding so many different makes and models of tanks:

A British army Challenger Main Battle Tank, of 1 Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (1RRF), is shown returning to base after completing a firing mission as part of Exercise MedMan.
1RRF Battle group were based at the British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) in Canada.
MOD photo by Mike Weston via Wikimedia Commons.

A column getting into all the details of why [the German government] were withholding said blessing would be several times longer than this one will be. Suffice it to say this is just the latest manifestation of Germany’s extreme discomfort with this war. Some of it relates to the lingering fallout of Germany’s blood-soaked history. But we would be naïve not to attribute at least some of the reluctance to Russia’s deep influence among some segments of the German ruling elite.

Germany has contributed to the defence of Ukraine, and it would be unfair to deny that. It would not be unfair to note that Germany has typically only done so later than the other allies, and under enormous pressure.

As part of the deals being announced, the United States will be sending several dozen of its M1 Abrams tanks, and Germany will send Leopards. Berlin will also allow other allies to send further Leopards. (Canada hasn’t committed to sending any of ours yet, but our few remaining Leopards are reported to be in poor shape, and are also all the way across an ocean, so we might not even be asked.) The British will send the Challengers. This gives Germany the ability to claim, with a reasonably straight face, that it has not chosen to escalate the conflict. Heavens, no! It’s simply moving in lockstep with its allies! As fig leaves go, it’s a pretty small and transparent one, but for the purposes of diplomacy and maintaining the appearance of allied solidarity, it’ll do.

And this brings us to the problem that the plan is exacerbating. A year ago, the Ukrainian military was largely armed and equipped along Russian lines — both militaries were, after all, descendants of the Soviet Red Army. Since then, much of its original equipment has been destroyed or lost, but this has generally been offset by an influx of Western weapons into the country as the allies empty their arsenals and get their production lines running again. This has allowed Ukraine to keep fighting, far more effectively than the Russians, among many others, expected. Despite huge losses of manpower, the Ukrainian military seems to actually have grown stronger as the war has gone on, thanks to the power of its new weapons.

Sending news is good news to that extent. It will make Ukraine stronger still. But it is also producing a situation where the Ukrainians are armed with an absurdly unwieldy mix of weapon systems. This is laying the groundwork for a future logistics disaster.

Any individual soldier can learn to use any specific piece of equipment. That’s just a matter of training and experience. Soldiers are smart. The longer they serve, the quicker they’ll get at picking up new pieces of equipment and kit. The challenge is more on the backend. The logistics of sustaining an arsenal of completely mixed weapon systems is a nightmare. Not only must Ukraine procure a huge variety of calibers of ammunition, it must also procure, sort, and then distribute a bewildering array of spare parts to keep all these weapons running. It’s not that this is impossible. The fact that Ukraine fights on is proof that it is not. But it adds tremendous cost and complexity, and requires a much larger effort to sustain than would be the case if Ukrainian units were equipped with standard weapons across comparable units.

The numbers of NATO tanks are initially small enough that only a few battalions can be re-equipped with the donated AFVs, but each different “brand” needs its own specialized support in the way of maintenace, repair, and re-supply. Ukraine is going to have to have at least a company-sized, fully trained maintenance unit for each battalion of NATO tanks and the logistics system will have to ensure that the different types of ammunition and ordinary wear-and-tear maintenance spares are delivered quickly enough to keep those battalions combat-ready. Some NATO nations with much better facilities sometimes struggle to do this for a single type of AFV, never mind for several different types.

Update: Can’t help but agree with Matt here.

Tank Chats #165 | Striker | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 30 Sept 2022

In this weeks video, David Fletcher discusses the development and features of Striker, another vehicle from the CVRT family.
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QotD: Non-commissioned officers

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Deltas”, the “socio-sexual hierarchy” spergs inform us, are the good soldiers, the go-along-to-get-along types who know their place in an organization and — crucially — derive their sense of self worth from excelling in it.

Your ideal “delta” is something like a lifer noncom in a non-pozzed military. Back in the days, I’m told, new recruits and civilians used to call crusty old gunny sergeants “sir”, to which the gunny would reply “Don’t call me ‘sir’, I work for a living!” That’s the attitude. Those guys with all the stripes on their sleeves aren’t officers because they lack “command presence”; they’re not officers because they don’t want to be officers. They know themselves, and, crucially, they know where they best fit into the organization’s overall mission. “Get in where you fit in” is, in a very real sense, their identity.

Examples of that kind of guy are tougher to find in the historical literature, which is why we need to develop, and pump up, the archetype. […] the ideal is the centurion, the backbone of Marcus Aurelius’ army. A soldier, a Stoic, a leader … but one who knows, and values, his place in the organization above all things.

Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.

January 25, 2023

Sometimes – rarely – the boss really does embody all those “creative genius” tropes

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia considers the impact Steve Jobs had on Apple:

I share these reactions, because many other sectors of our culture (especially music) suffer from a similar malaise. And in most instances, the problems start at the top.

I’ve seen in so many different circumstances how the entire organization takes on the personality of the CEO — for better or worse. I’ve also seen how the replacement of a single individual can turn a bad situation into a great one, and vice versa.

The case of Steve Jobs is fascinating, and perhaps alarming too. He left Apple twice, and both times something similar happened.

In the first instance, Jobs was fired as CEO in 1985. The last thing he did before losing his job was launch the Macintosh computer. When he returned to Apple 12 years later, the single biggest source of revenue for the company was still the Macintosh. After more than a decade, the company was depending on the creativity of the guy they fired.

Steve Jobs died in 2011, and we have now reached the exact same time lag as before. Twelve years have elapsed since Jobs’s final departure, and the last big project he undertook before his death was the iPhone. And now after a dozen years, Apple’s largest source of revenues is still the iPhone. Once again, they are riding the momentum of his creativity, and have done shockingly little to expand his legacy.

By the way, in the interim between the two stints as Apple CEO, Jobs founded NeXT and ran Pixar. Fifteen Pixar films now rank among the 50 highest grossing animated films of all time, and they have won 23 Academy Awards. And because of his sale of Pixar to Disney, the entrepreneur’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs inherited 138 million shares of Disney stock.

That’s pretty good results for the lull in your tech career after you’ve been fired.

I know Jobs has many detractors. And maybe he was a hardass boss. In fact, he almost certainly was a hardass boss. But it’s tough to ignore those results — which not only changed a company but the entire culture of our times.

Dinner with Attila the Hun

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Jan 2023
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The “everyone is literally Hitler” expert

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

Chris Bray helpfully points out that Benito Mussolini combed his hair, which is also what Emmanuel Goldstein does:

We’re overproducing hysterical expert-scolds. I keep finding more of them in social media, loud and weirdly nasty, like feral cats in a hay pile. Here comes a shrewd take from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at NYU who has a highly marketable sideline as an expert on authoritarianism, responding to some genius-level political analysis from a guy with the requisite Ukrainian flag in his profile:

Observation: Marjorie Taylor Greene wore makeup on television.

Analysis: “That’s what Fascists do.”

See, members of Congress usually go on television in just an old pair of gym shorts and a dirty Schlitz Lite t-shirt, but this one particular person is trying to be Literally Adolf Hitler, so she wore a necklace and some lipstick. Textbook fascism!

Meanwhile, the governor of Florida just said that students in schools should put their phones away until recess, so they can focus on learning. This, too, is precisely identical to blackshirts marching on Rome:

Spend five minutes with this person’s social accounts, if you must, because this is what she does. It’s fascinatingly random, like a lady who lives on a bus bench wandering around the neighborhood describing random objects as Nazis. That’s a Nazi tangerine! That scrap lumber invaded Poland! Discarded juice boxes are Francisco Franco!

Eventually, if you make enough completely random angry noise, you get tenure and a book deal.

How to Easily Make Awesome and Authentic Cast Metal Lettering – it’s Cheating

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

Pask Makes
Published 1 Oct 2022

I’ve thought about making “fake cast metal lettering” for a while and as I have a project coming up where this would be ideal, now was the time to try it out. It worked fantastic and easy to do too! 🙂

As always I’m happy to answer any questions.
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