Quotulatiousness

November 15, 2023

Can we criticize the Climate Goblin now?

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill asks if it’s allowed to criticized Greta “The Climate Goblin” Thunberg now:

Can we criticise Greta Thunberg now? For a time, anyone who raised even the mildest objection to the pint-sized prophetess of doom risked being damned as a bully. Surely this moratorium on Greta-scepticism will end following her platforming – to use woke lingo – of an activist with very iffy views. An activist who has trivialised the Holocaust and seems pretty chilled about Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Calling out Greta for her fact-lite blather about the planet being “on fire” may have been forbidden – pulling her up for hanging out with Holocaust relativists must not be.

Thunberg has made waves by switching her focus from saving the planet to saving Gaza. Like every other Gen Zer with a TikTok and an insatiable urge to signal his / her / zir virtue to the world, she’s become an overnight authority on Israel-Palestine. She posed with a placard saying “Stand with Gaza“. She turned Fridays for Future – where pious rich kids bunk off school to raise awareness about climate change – into “Justice for Palestine” stunts. And on Sunday, she made a climate protest in Amsterdam pretty much all about Palestine.

She invited activists to the stage. One was Sara Rachdan, a Palestinian studying in Amsterdam. It didn’t take German newspaper Bild long to discover that Ms Rachdan holds views which – how should we put this? – are not very pleasant. On Hamas’s pogrom, Ms Rachdan said: “This is finally Palestinians taking action [against] the occupation”. She’s dabbled in Holocaust denigration. She shared a blood-spattered graphic comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza with the Nazis’ actions in Auschwitz. Repulsively, it implies the Jewish State is worse than the Nazis. Where 127 kids a day were killed in Auschwitz, 178 a day are currently dying in Israel’s war in Gaza, it alleges.

Shorter version: the Jews are more accomplished child-killers than even Hitler’s henchmen were. This is rank Holocaust relativism. Comparing the greatest crime in history to this horrendous war denudes that crime of its unique horror. It renders it ordinary. It was no big deal – just the same kind of thing you see on your TV screens every night from Gaza. The implication of moral equivalence between the Nazis’ minutely planned gassing of Jewish children and the deaths of Palestinian kids as a terrible byproduct of Israel’s war on Hamas is beyond immoral. It is the gravest of inversions, treating the Jewish State’s war against anti-Semitic mass murderers as indistinguishable from the Nazis’ acts of anti-Semitic mass murder.

Of course, there’s nothing to suggest Greta shares Ms Rachdan’s views. But isn’t her woke generation obsessed with “platforming”, with only rubbing shoulders with the perfectly politically correct and no one else? Indeed, Thunberg ostentatiously flounced out of the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year because it received funding from a firm that invests in fossil fuels. Take oil money and she’ll dodge you like the plague; describe an anti-Semitic pogrom as an act of resistance and she’s all over you like a cheap suit. Care to explain, Greta?

“If you cannot make your own pig iron, you are just LARP’n as a real power”

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander talks about the importance of an old industry to a modern industrial economy:

We probably need to start this out by explaining exactly what a blast furnace is and why it is important if you want to be a sovereign nation.

First of all, what it does;

    The purpose of blast furnace is to chemically reduce and physically convert iron oxide into liquid iron called “hot metal” The blast furnace is a huge, steel stack lined with refractory brick where iron ore, coke and limestone are charged into the top and preheated air is blown into the bottom. The raw materials require 6 to 8 hours to descend to the bottom of the furnace where they become the final product of liquid slag and liquid iron. These liquid products are drained from the furnace at regular intervals. The hot air that was blown into the bottom of the surface ascends to the top in 6 to 8 seconds after going through numerous chemical reactions. Once the blast furnace is started it continuously runs for four to ten years with only short stops to perform planned maintenance.

Why are blast furnaces so important? Remember the middle part of Billy Joel’s “Iron, coke, chromium steel?”

“Coke” is in essence purified coal, almost pure carbon. It is about the only thing that can at scale make “new” or raw iron, aka “pig iron”. Only coke in a blast furnace can make enough heat to turn iron ore in to iron. You can’t get that heat with an electric furnace.

Pig iron is the foundation of everything that follows that makes an industrial power. If you cannot make your own pig iron, you are just LARP’n as a real power.

It takes a semester at least to understand this, but here is all you really need to know;

    Primary differences

    While the end product from each of these is comparable, there are clearly differences between their capabilities and process. Comparing each type of furnace, the major distinctions are:

    Material source – blast furnaces can melt raw iron ore as well as recycled metal, while electric arc furnaces only melt recycled or scrap metal.

    Power supply – blast furnaces primarily use coke to supply the energy needed to heat up the metal, while EAFs use electricity to accomplish this.

    Environmental impact – because of the fuels used for each, EAFs can produce up to 85% less carbon dioxide than blast furnaces.

    Cost – EAFs cost less than blast furnaces and take up less space in a factory.

    Efficiency – EAFs also reach higher temperatures much faster and can melt and produce products more quickly, as well as having more precise control over the temperature compared to blast furnaces.

We’ll get to that environmental impact later, but the “Material source” section is your money quote.

Without a blast furnace, all you can do is recycle scrap iron.

You cannot fight wars at scale if all you have is scrap iron. You cannot be an industrial hub off of just scrap iron. If you are a nation of any size, you then become economically and security vulnerable at an existential level. I don’t care how much science fiction you get nakid and roll in; wars are won by steel, ungodly amounts of steel.

Where do you get the steel to build your warships? Your tanks? Your factories? Your buildings? Your factories?

If you can only use scrap, then you are simply a scavenger living off the hard work of previous generations. Eventually you run out. You will wind up like the cypress mills of old Florida where, once they ran out of cypress trees, they simply sold off the cypress lumber their mills were constructed of … and then went bankrupt.

The big brains of Hollywood display “a special kind of stupid”

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

Ted Gioia met with a group of executives from movie distribution firms outside the North American market back in 2016. It was a good time, financially, but the overall tone of the meeting was anxious because the trend seemed unsustainable:

These were smart people, but they didn’t make the movies. They just ran theater chains. But they didn’t need to be specialists in creativity or storytelling to know that hit films were now built on tired formulas, the same plot lines played out over and over again.

Special effects added some sizzle to the steak, but it was still the same stale meal night after night. Sooner or later, even superheroes die.

Other genres have come and gone — westerns and musicals and other box office draws of the past. Comic book franchises would eventually meet the same fate.

Source: Bo McReady

Back then, Disney was bragging to shareholders that another 20 Marvel films were already in the pipeline. And that was just a start. CEO Bob Iger explained that Disney owned the rights to 7,000 different Marvel characters — implying that brand franchises could propagate forever, like copulating Australian bunnies.

That was the party line in Burbank. But most of the people I spoke to that day privately expressed doubts about this formula-driven strategy. They hoped to enjoy a few more years of boom times, but worried about what would happen next.

    “It takes a special kind of stupid to kill off Indiana Jones or Toy Story or a Marvel superhero, but that’s exactly what’s playing out right now in the Magic Kingdom.”

As it turned out, they were right to worry. But a virus, not a superhero, let them down. The first COVID case happened almost exactly three years after my December 2016 talk.

But it now looks like the pandemic merely delayed the creative collapse.

Hollywood has saturated the market with look-alike movies. Their pipeline of films is now exploding like the Nord Stream, but with this difference—studios are still sitting on a huge pile of future bombs.

And what does a studio do with a bomb on its hands?

They have four options—and they are four kinds of ugly

  1. You delay the film, hoping for a better market environment in the future.
  2. You send it back for rewriting and more filming
  3. You cancel it entirely, and write off the investment
  4. You release it — sinking another $50 million, more or less, into marketing — and then watch it collapse at the box office.

Disney is getting a sour taste of strategy number four this week.

The Future of Railways (circa 1961)

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

Jago Hazzard
Published 26 Jul 2023

The future is slightly dingy.
(more…)

QotD: Enid Blyton not considered worthy of a commemorative coin

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the discovery by the Mail on Sunday that Enid Blyton — one of Britain’s most enduringly popular and influential children’s authors, creator of Noddy and the Famous Five series — was denied a commemorative 50p coin on the 50th anniversary of her death because a Royal Mint “advisory committee” declared that “she is known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer”.

Enid Blyton was born in 1897. Pretty much everyone of that generation — and of every one preceding it — would qualify as a “racist, sexist, homophobe” by the standards of the modern left.

As for “not very well-regarded”, well she has sold over 600 million books — which probably counts for something, no?

We do not know the identities of this Royal Mint “advisory committee” but we know exactly what type of person they are. They are the same type of people who make up the committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which has decided to make adverts that promote “gender stereotypes” effectively illegal in the UK.

[…]

There is no shortage of similar examples of the “political correctness gone mad” which has hijacked British culture. But the people enforcing it are a tiny minority of committed Social Justice Warriors — most of them educated in some worthless degree subject like gender studies, often “working” either in the human resources department or one with “diversity”, “equality”, or “sustainability” in their title — entirely at odds with the way most of the country still thinks.

Like the Soviet Politburo or China’s Central Committee, they are the very few who exert extraordinary — indeed, terrifying — power over the many.

True to Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s call for a “long march through the institutions”, these people have gained key positions of power the length and breadth of British culture.

James Delingpole, “From ‘Sexist’ Advert Bans to ‘Racist’ Enid Blyton, the Left Has Ruined Britain”, Breitbart, 2018-08-27.

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