Quotulatiousness

January 28, 2024

We had to destroy the democracy to save it

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

Matt Taibi asks if there’s already an “electoral fix” in place, as we see more and more evidence that Joe Biden and the Democrats will stop at nothing to keep Trump — and would-be Democratic challengers — off the ballot completely:

The fix is in. To “protect democracy”, democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House”. It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy”. Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy”. Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will”.

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

    We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.

The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.

NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.

Summer, 2020. The TIP media blitz.

For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.

Himmler Takes Command – WW2 – Week 283 – January 27, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jan 2024

A new German Army Group has been formed, tasked with protecting the Reich from the east and commanded by none other than Heinrich Himmler, who has never held such a command. The Soviets are really on the move in the east and have even begun reaching the prewar German border. In the west the Allies have cleared the Roer Triangle and are also working hard to eliminate the Colmar Pocket. In the Far East the Americans are advancing on Luzon, and in Burma the Allies have success on the Arakan and the Shwebo Plain, and finally manage to re open the Burma Road with China.

01:27 Soviet advances in East Prussia
09:23 Hungary and the fight for Buda
11:19 Operations Nordwind, Cheerful, and Blackcock
14:23 Block 5
16:14 American advances on Luzon
18:55 Allied successes in Burma
22:06 Summary
22:26 Conclusion
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Adolescence is “a profoundly unnatural life-stage”

Filed under: Business, Education, Europe, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the plight of the younger Millennials and the Gen Z kids in our over-supervised safety-at-all-costs culture today:

Child labour laws did generally get younger children out of dangerous places like mines, mills, and factories. Modern child labour laws instead keep young adults from gaining work experience in many cases.
Photo of pre-teen children working in a mill in Macon, Georgia in 1909. Photo NCLC.01581, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

Mostly, it gets attributed to “kids these days” but unless you have kids, these days, you don’t know how they are bound. And even if you do, you might not realize it, because all you see is the infantilization of a generation, and not that they, themselves, aren’t the ones doing the infantilizing, but all those “good rules” and regulations and laws are doing it.

I realized about 10 years ago that my son’s generation was about 10 years behind where we were. In their mid twenties they were doing things we did in our teens. It was disconcerting. And even I had no idea why, other than too much regimentation in school, too much of a never end of button counting, and not enough room or freedom to think or be on their own.

Since then … I’ve seen more. And a lot of the reason they are younger than we were is that the entire world is geared not to let them grow up. I mean, let’s be glad that — unprepared or not — they’re legal adults at 18, or people would be denouncing them for walking alone down the street, without an “adult” at 25.

There’s also … adolescence is in some ways a profoundly unnatural life-stage, and more or less invented in the 20th century. In the past, sure, people were children, and people grew to be adults, but there wasn’t this protracted time period where they were adults in size and at least some ability, but weren’t allowed to be adults: they weren’t allowed to earn or spend, or make their own decisions, for years.

The earn or spend thing is important. Kids used to grow along with their tasks. Read Tudor or colonial memoirs, and you find four year olds looking after cows or horses, or learning Latin, or other unlikely things even for twelve year olds in our time.

Mom went to work at 10 and started getting a salary. It wasn’t much, and 90% of it went to her parents’ budget. But she was working, holding down a job, doing things that were maybe not at adult level, but could lead to it, eventually, if she applied herself. This was normal for her generation. In my own generation, amid the working class, most people went to work at 10. Heck, amid the middle class, most people went to work at 15 or so, after 9th grade. Were they more mature than the rest of us that went all the way to college?

I wouldn’t have thought that at the time, but yes, of course they were. Most of my elementary school classmates were married, with kids by the time my biggest worries were final exams. Of course, with my intellectual pride I looked down on them but now I understand they were managing a very difficult job, which at the time I could not have done.

I always feel stunned and shocked when someone says the kids should be “holding down two jobs like I was at 16” or “working to pay their way through college”. (That last is a giggle as it has two impossibilities. Finding a job that pays enough after college which has a lot of make-work expectations, and making a full-time middle-class salary, which is what college costs these days.) Two Jobs. At 16. The difficulties in giving work to 16 year olds, increasingly restriction of hours, etc. combined with chaotic scheduling in the only unskilled jobs remaining (mostly just retail) means that until recently none of them could find A job. Let alone two. And the recently was during Covid. I haven’t seen so many little 16 year olds cashiering, or serving at tables recently. And that’s because most people I’m seeing are around my age: I guess unemployment is biting hard.

But you know, all these strong rules against “child labor” mean that most kids hit 18 or, if they’re going to college, 22 or — more likely, as most degrees (remember make work?) are taking 6 or 7 years — 24, with absolutely no job experience. Which means their applications aren’t even looked at. Not seriously.

Honestly, almost every young person — particularly young men — I know who found a job, and is doing relatively well, did so through contacts. Through friends of friends. Through knowing someone.

This is a bad sign, because it’s how Portugal functions, and it is not in any way shape or form meritocracy, which in turn contributes to other things falling apart.

But more and more what I’m seeing is young people hitting their mid twenties lost, and doing this, and doing that, and trying this and trying that, and nothing ever gels. To make things worse, they don’t have the habits mom had by 10, because they haven’t been allowed to acquire them.

There was a similar generation — one, while here we’re well into two — in Portugal, where unemployment was so bad (the generation before mine) that most people weren’t “established” on a path till their mid thirties. I’d guess about half of them never got the knack of it: of the day to day of working, fulfilling the work duties, just … the unglamorous day to day that makes us adults.

Food That Time Forgot: Pemmican, The Ultimate Survival Food

Filed under: Cancon, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published Oct 29, 2023

Pemmican is and has always been the ultimate survival food. Pemmican revolutionized trade in the 18th century by giving travelers a new compact source for energy. Originally used as a food to help Native Americans make it though harsh winters, pemmican turned into an entire industry by the late 1700s.
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QotD: Never depend on “surveys” for real-world issues

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

There’s a reason “social science” is all horseshit, and that reason is: surveys. All of this stuff is based on surveys, and as it happens, I have quite a bit of experience of being on the receiving end of these. You see, back in grad school I was involved with a young lady in the Soash Department — I know, I know, but a man has certain needs, ya feel me? — and so I was always on call to take whatever goofy little tests they dreamed up, as a favor to her and her equally spastic hardcore Lefty friends. Anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but I’ve got a lot of anecdotes, and I can tell you — anecdotally — that there are two huge, self-reinforcing problems with these surveys: a) respondent pool, and b) design.

The respondent pool is, overwhelmingly, college kids taking them for class credit. Knowing what we know about Basic College Girls, who again are the majority of all college kids, is it any surprise that the results just happen to confirm the conclusions the slightly older, but no less Basic, Grad Student Girls were looking for? Throw in the design problem — questions about as subtle as “Do you think all races should be treated equally, or are you a monster?” — and you’ve got scientific proof that Liberals are good people and Conservatives suck.

Severian, “Is vs. Ought II: Moral Foundations Theory”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-20.

January 27, 2024

Flashpoint: Texas

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

Theophilus Chilton wonders if you’re ready for a full-blown Constitutional crisis:

I’m sure that by now, we’re all aware of what is continuing to take place down in Texas. Far from backing down in his standoff with FedGov over the seizure of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass and subsequent expulsion of federal agents, Gov. Abbott has directed the state’s National Guard to continue interdicting illegal immigrants. Indeed, in response to the recent SCOTUS decision allowing the Feds to dismantle the razor wire Texas installed, they’ve simply installed more, in direct defiance of the wishes of the Regime. The Regime has now responded by giving Abbott and Texas an ultimatum — restore control of the park to the Federal government by the afternoon of January 26, or … well … something. Whether the governor ultimately continues to tell the Feds to get bent remains to be seen, but so far the trend is looking pretty good.

Of course, it helps that — for once — Republicans across the country have actually found a little courage to support doing what’s right. As of writing this, the Republican governors of 25 other states have all issued statements of support for Texas’ position. Hence, there are now an outright majority of states whose executives (who control their various National and State Guards) are publicly backing Texan efforts to secure our border. Many of these governors have explicitly cited the Biden administration’s continued abandonment of the federal government’s constitutional duty to protect the several states from invasion and the constitutional right of the states to act in their own defence as sovereign entities in their own right.

Needless to say, this is a constitutional crisis that would not have been conceivable even twenty years ago (well, except for this one movie that seems to have been amazingly prescient). Since 1865, the doctrine of absolute federal supremacy has been in force and the balance of power between the state and national governments has inexorably trended in Washington, DC’s favour. Occasional spurts of opposition to the contrary, most of the previous incipient talk by states about “reining in the federal government” generally proved to be all words and no action. On a few things (e.g. marijuana legalisation), the Regime allowed states to “oppose” federal policy if these were policies that the Regime wanted to change anywise but couldn’t “officially” at the federal level. But on anything that was a true Regime priority, FedGov brooked no dissent. So it is now, but the calculus has changed. What would have been impossible in 2003 is now on the verge of happening in 2023.

This all highlights the fundamental illegitimacy of our current federal government. There is no moral or legal case to be made to justify the actions of the Biden administration. The federal Constitution both enjoins the federal government to protect the states from foreign invasion (which being overrun with millions of foreigners breaking our laws most certainly counts as) and also grants the states the right to protect their own borders and sovereignty. Instead of doing this, the Biden administration has been purposefully inviting hordes of migrants to enter this country. Indeed, this is being encouraged in contravention to statutory federal law as well. Further, if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is correct (and he almost assuredly is), the administration has even been partnering with criminal cartels to smuggle illegals into this country. All in all, there is absolutely no justification to be credibly made for the Regime’s actions and anyone who supports them are in opposition to the Constitution, the laws, and the people of this land.

Despite the fevered ravings of various progressive “Christians” on social media, the moral argument for allowing the Regime to throw the gates open is nonsense. Indeed, the whole attempt to craft a “biblical” argument for open borders is simple-minded and ignorant of the relevant scriptural and historical context. Simply put, the Bible’s approach to “the stranger” falls into line with common ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean modes of hospitality that were meant to “tame” the foreigner and integrate him into a society, thus preventing him from causing disruption to that society. If that couldn’t be accomplished, then the “inhospitable foreigner” was either to be expelled or eliminated. Needless to say, this applied only to individuals or small family groups — large masses of foreigners attempting to enter an ancient country would have been rightly recognised as an invasion and dealt with accordingly.

However, the illegitimacy of the current Regime and its actions alone can’t explain why the Republicans have closed ranks so precipitously. After all, Republican politicians are not exactly known for their intestinal fortitude when faced with opposition of any kind. Yet, even Northeastern moderate squishes like New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu have signed onto supporting Texas in this. Something changed that has caused the GOP, almost as a whole, to support this, either openly or tacitly.

Modern academics “were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans”

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

In the National Post, Gad Saad offers an action plan to bring our universities back to a slightly more reality-based view of the world and prevent further postmodernist deterioration:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

This year, I am celebrating my 30th year as a professor. During those three decades, I have witnessed the proliferation of several parasitic ideas that are fully decoupled from reality, common sense, reason, logic and science, which led to my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. As George Orwell famously noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”. Each of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, originally in the humanities and the social sciences, but as I predicted long ago, they have infiltrated the natural sciences, and now can be found in all areas of our culture.

These destructive ideas include, but are not limited to, postmodernism (there are no objective truths, which is a fundamental attack on the epistemology of science); cultural relativism (who are we to judge the cultural mores of another society, such as performing female genital mutilation on little girls?); the rejection of meritocracy in favour of identity politics (diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) as the basis for admitting, hiring and promoting individuals); and victimhood as the means by which one adjudicates between competing ideas (I am a greater victim therefore my truth is veridical).

I was first exposed to this pervasive academic lunacy via my scientific work at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and consumer behaviour. Central to this endeavour is the fact that the human mind has evolved via the dual processes of natural and sexual selection. Nothing could be clearer, and yet I was astonished early in my career to witness the extraordinary resistance that I faced from my colleagues, many of whom were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans.

Apparently, human beings transcend their biological imperatives, as they are strictly cultural beings. This biophobia (fear of using biology to explain human phenomena) is the means by which transgender activists can argue with a straight face that “men too can menstruate and bear children”. Biology is apparently the means by which the patriarchy implements its nefarious misogyny, making us all “wrongly” believe that men can on average lift heavier weights and run faster than women, notwithstanding a litany of evolutionary-based anatomical, physiological, hormonal and morphological sex differences.

According to radical feminists, these differences are largely due to social construction. Hence, a man who stands 6-4 and weighs 285 pounds can wake up one day and declare himself to be a transgender woman. Anyone who disagrees with this notion is clearly a transphobe.

AFN-49: The Forgotten Full-Auto Brother of the FN-49

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Oct 2023

0:00 Introduction and Overview of the AFN 49
1:23 Detailed Insight into the AFN 49’s Global Presence
3:01 Demonstration and Explanation of the AFN’s Unique Features
5:05 Auto Trip Feature: A Deep Dive
7:27 Unique Characteristics of the AFN 49
8:48 The Journey of AFN 49s to the US
10:17 Conversion of Luxembourg AFN 49s: A Historical Perspective
10:43 Conclusion and Acknowledgements

A note to censors: This video is not a tutorial on full auto conversion. It is an explanation of how the system works, and provides no instruction of how to fabricate or modify parts to modify a semiautomatic firearm into a fully automatic one. Doing that would be illegal for most people — although certainly not all; conversion or ownership of machine guns is legal in most places with the appropriate government permission.

The SAFN, aka FN-49, is one of the classic post-war European battle rifles, and was sold to nine different countries in the early 1950s before the FAL became FN’s primary combat rifle offering. What is often forgotten is that despite being limited to a fixed 10-round magazine, nearly half of all FN-49s produced were actually fully automatic AFN-49s. The Belgian Army, Luxembourg Army, Luxembourg Gendarmerie, and Belgian Congo all purchased the automatic pattern. So today, we’re going to take a look at how it differs from the regular SAFN that we are used to seeing.

Interestingly, a batch of the Luxembourg Gendarmerie rifles were imported into the US without anyone realising that they were automatic until they arrived and were being unpacked. InterArms went to the IRS (the NFA was a tax law administered by the Treasury; this was before the formation of the ATF) and proposed removing the selector levers and auto sears, as well as milling off their attachment points on the receivers. The IRS agreed that this would be an acceptable conversion to render the guns legally semiautomatic only, and the changes were made before the rifles were sold. They remain on the US collector market today as an interesting example of legal conditions prior to the adoption of a pointless and punitive decree of “once a machine gun, always a machine gun”.

Many thanks to the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History in Brussels for access to this very cool piece! Check them out here: https://www.klm-mra.be/en/
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QotD: McCarthy was right

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s likely that just about everything you know about Joe McCarthy, his life, his political career and his work against the Soviet infiltration of American government is incorrect, the history having been almost without exception written by his staunch enemies, in turn building on the work of McCarthy’s contemporaries to delegitimise and destroy the junior Senator from Wisconsin. Even in the conservative circles, the memory of McCarthy is often treated as a bit of family embarrassment; in part the testament to how successful the left-wing narrative has been but also perhaps the faint memory that half of his own party (the so called liberal wing) despised him at the time and worked hand in hand with the Democrats to destroy him.

Yet McCarthy was right – not just in a general sense of clearly understanding that communism is not merely an alternative path to a brighter future but an evil and inhuman ideology at war with the liberal, democratic and Christian West, but also in focusing on the federal bureaucracy’s strangely ineffectual response to the presence in its ranks of many people, often in very senior and influential positions, suspected of working for the communist cause.

Contrary to the official version, it was never McCarthy’s role to unmask Red agents; a job more appropriately done by investigative agencies. In his legislative role overseeing federal bureaucracies, he made it his mission to inquire why so many individuals, whose loyalty has already been put under the question mark by numerous internal and external investigations, had no problems staying in sensitive jobs for years and moving unhindered from one agency to another. Those named by McCarthy (on the Democrat insistence) were not simply some random individuals with vaguely progressive sympathies; already at the time many of them have been identified as Soviet agents and security risks in the testimony of communist renegades (like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley) or through secret FBI surveillance. Others were suspects on the account of their associations with Eastern European or local communists and causes.

Over the following decades, most have been further incriminated from a variety of sources, including Soviet defectors and the deciphered Venona transcripts of secret Soviet intelligence cables, which mention some 400 individuals in the 1940s and 50s United States as active agents and contacts or abettors and helpers. The problem was not Reds under the beds, but Reds quite literally in positions of access to highly valued classified information or positions of influence over the shape of US policy, from the White House, through the State Department, to a host of other departments and agencies. All this is now beyond any dispute, but these weren’t mere idle speculations at the time either. Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, T.A. Bisson and dozens and dozens of others did conspire in small groups and networks to pass on classified information to the Soviets or steer the American foreign policy into the direction favourable to the communists (particularly in China during and after the war). And yet, despite all having serious question marks over them, they were allowed to work in government for years undisturbed. It was not because of some giant communist conspiracy at the highest levels of government but because of the bureaucratic inertia, old boys’ networks and the organisational reluctance to admit problems – but also because communist agents within protected and promoted each other. Time and time again mistakes got buried instead of rectified. McCarthy dared to shed the public spotlight on the continuing outrage and ask why. It was like a poor country cousin being invited to a formal dinner by his big city relatives and dropping a loud fart between the entree and the main.

But the story of McCarthy goes beyond these well-established historical facts to the campaign of character assassination and falsification of the record that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. There is truly nothing new under the sun when the entrenched liberal establishment wants to protect its turf and fend off its enemies and as you read what McCarthy has been subjected to in relatively short period of 1950-54 you will no doubt experience a sense of deja vu from recent history: indiscriminate mud throwing in a hope that something sticks; blatant lies, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of evidence; politicians working hand in hand with public servants to coordinate the attacks; destroying and withholding of information and evidence (for example, the security information about the suspected individuals being physically transferred from the State Department to the Truman White House so that it could not be subpoenaed or otherwise accessed; a practice condemned by the Republicans and then continued by the Eisenhower White House); blackmailing witnesses or preventing them from testifying; biased media running the narrative (fake news is nothing new); whitewashing the accused and discrediting the accusers; incessant lawfare; trumped up charges and defamation. Coincidentally, McCarthy too was compared to Hitler while at the same time being accused of helping Russians. McCarthyism is not what McCarthy has done to his supposed victims; it’s what the left has done to him. It’s what it keeps doing to people who get in the way and threaten to disturb the business as usual.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Before there was Trump, there was Joe McCarthy”, Daily Chrenk, 2019-09-30.

January 26, 2024

Canada’s sooper-sekrit warship program

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Pugliese on the cone of silence the federal government seems to have pulled down over the Canadian Surface Combatant shipbuilding program as it steadily escalates in total cost to the taxpayer:

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

National Defence has brought in a new and unprecedented shroud of secrecy around a controversial warship project now estimated to cost taxpayers more than $80 billion.

After withholding documents for almost three years, the Department of National Defence has released nearly 1,700 pages of records that were supposed to outline specific costs and work done so far on the Canadian Surface Combatant program.

But all the details of what taxpayers have so far spent and what type of work has been done by Irving Shipbuilding for that money have been censored from the records.

“I pretty much got nearly 1,700 blank pages,” Ken Rubin said of the access to information request he filed to National Defence in April 2021 about the warship program. “I have never seen this level of secrecy or lack of accountability over a project that is costing so much.”

Rubin, an investigative researcher who has used the access law to obtain federal documents for decades, said there was not a single cost figure contained in any of the 1,700 pages. One page noted that Irving was required to perform 19 specific tasks, but all details were censored. Others pages listed numerous amendments made to the CSC program, but all details were blacked out. Information about the annual profit Irving has made so far on the CSC project is censored.

Irving declined to provide comment, referring this newspaper to National Defence.

Defence Minister Bill Blair’s office sent this newspaper a statement noting the “minister believes strongly in openness and transparency, and expects the Department of National Defence to respect the rights of Canadian citizens, permanent residents and persons or corporations present in Canada, to access records of government institutions that are subject to the Access to Information Act“.

National Defence noted in a statement that, since some of the records involved Irving Shipbuilding, government officials consulted with the firm to determine if the records contained proprietary information of the firm. Irving objected to the release of information, the department added.

But Rubin pointed out that National Defence was not required to follow Irving’s orders on what records could be released to the public. The amount of tax dollars spent on the surface combatant and how that money was being spent shouldn’t be secret, he added.

In addition, National Defence originally claimed in a statement to this newspaper that the long delay in providing the documents was because Rubin had asked for 20 years of records. But, when challenged on that claim, the department acknowledged it wasn’t true. It did not, however, provide an explanation why it had provided false information to this newspaper.

The Canadian Surface Combatant project will involve the construction of 15 warships for the Royal Canadian Navy at Irving on the east coast.

Why isn’t Trump Derangement Syndrome or Biden Derangement Syndrome in the DSM?

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander wonders if the kind of political insanity that takes over the lives and personalities of so many Americans should qualify as a kind of mental dysfunction:

Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on?

I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before?

You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true. Here are some stray findings that I think deserve to be synthesized:

  • Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments. You can give people simple math/logic problems and confirm that they get the right answers. Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things.
  • Paranoia and conspiracy theories, considered psychotic symptoms in individuals, are almost the norm in politics. Forget the people who believe that Biden/Trump/FEMA/whoever literally want to put them in camps. The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia (if you don’t believe this about your side, at least consider it on the other!) I’m not just making fun of other people, I find myself making this mistake constantly.
  • Politics can create such strong emotions that they impair normal social functioning. People mock college students who demand trigger warnings whenever they have to listen to a conservative speaker. But I’ve talked to some of these college students and they’re not making it up — they find listening [to] a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space. If you’re a right-winger who feels tempted to dismiss this response, imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail. Obviously you could just fake the right answers and fly through easily, but doesn’t something about this still sound profoundly enraging and invalidating on a deep level? Enraging even beyond the level of (for example) having to fake the right answers in a class on acupuncture because you’re doing an undercover investigation or something?
  • Politics can become something between an addiction and an obsession. People can spend hours every day watching cable TV or scrolling through their Twitter feeds, trying to stay abreast of the latest outrage the other side is perpetrating. To be clear, they hate this. Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.

In any other situation, a condition with impaired cognition, psychotic symptoms, emotional instability that impaired normal functioning, and associated addictions/obsessions would qualify as a mental disorder. So again, which mental disorder is it?

This post is about the possibility that it might be trauma.

Javier Milei to the parasites in Davos – You are the problem

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

Jon Miltimore on Argentine President Javier Milei’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month:

Argentine President Javier Milei speaking at the World Economic Forum gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, January 2024.
Photo by Flickr – World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Javier Milei went to Davos to attend the 54th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting last week.

Attendees of the meetings — often derided as global elites who bask in their pomp, privilege, and luxury as they try to address global problems with collectivist solutions — received a jarring message from Argentina’s newly-elected president: you are the problem.

“Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” Milei said in his prepared remarks. “And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty.”

[…]

This is just a sprinkling of the topics discussed in Davos, of course, but you’ll notice a common current that runs throughout them: the solution to virtually every problem requires more government and “collective action”, and less freedom.

This is precisely the kind of thinking Milei, a self-described libertarian, took aim at in his speech, which was a clarion call for leaders to reject collectivist thinking and embrace individual freedom.

“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei told the audience. “We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world; rather they are the root cause.”

As Milei pointed out, few can better attest to the failures of collectivism than Argentines. The country surged to prosperity in the latter half of the nineteenth century, only to experience a massive drop in prosperity due to its embrace of Peronism, a blend of fascism and socialism named after the left-leaning revolutionary Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974) who dominated Argentine politics for decades following his initial ascent to power in 1946.

While many of Milei’s predecessors, such as the jet-setting Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a self-described Peronist and progressive, were delivering international speeches in Copenhagen about tackling climate change through “a new multilateralism”, Argentines watched their country slowly collapse into poverty.

By embracing protectionist trade policies and rampant government spending, Peronists set Argentina’s economy on fire. By 2023, 40 percent of the population was in poverty and inflation had reached more than 140 percent due to massive money printing. Because of the constantly eroding value of pesos, Argentine merchants are compelled to update prices on chalkboards throughout the day.

The human disaster in Argentina was not caused by climate change or AI or “misinformation”.

It was caused by Argentine politicians and bureaucrats abandoning free-market capitalism, an economic system that brought about unprecedented human prosperity across the globe, and a stark contrast to its various collectivist counterparts — fascism, Peronism, communism, anti-capitalism, etc.

This is why Mr. Milei called capitalism the only “morally desirable” economic system, and the only one that can alleviate global poverty.

Which Is Easier To Pull? (Railcars vs. Road Cars)

Filed under: Economics, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published Nov 7, 2023

A lot of the engineering decisions that get made in railroading have to do with energy. How does the rolling resistance of a 20-ton freight railcar compare to my little grocery hauler?
(more…)

QotD: How an oath worked in pre-modern cultures

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

You swear an oath because your own word isn’t good enough, either because no one trusts you, or because the matter is so serious that the extra assurance is required.

That assurance comes from the presumption that the oath will be enforced by the divine third party. The god is called – literally – to witness the oath and to lay down the appropriate curses if the oath is violated. Knowing that horrible divine punishment awaits forswearing, the oath-taker, it is assumed, is less likely to make the oath. Interestingly, in the literature of classical antiquity, it was also fairly common for the gods to prevent the swearing of false oaths – characters would find themselves incapable of pronouncing the words or swearing the oath properly.

And that brings us to a second, crucial point – these are legalistic proceedings, in the sense that getting the details right matters a great deal. The god is going to enforce the oath based on its exact wording (what you said, not what you meant to say!), so the exact wording must be correct. It was very, very common to add that oaths were sworn “without guile or deceit” or some such formulation, precisely to head off this potential trick (this is also, interestingly, true of ancient votives – a Roman or a Greek really could try to bargain with a god, “I’ll give X if you give Y, but only if I get by Z date, in ABC form.” – but that’s vows, and we’re talking oaths).

Thus for instance, runs an oath of homage from the Chronicle of the Death of Charles the Good from 1127:

    “I promise on my faith that I will in future be faithful to count William, and will observe my homage to him completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit.”

Not all oaths are made in full, with the entire formal structure, of course. Short forms are made. In Greek, it was common to transform a statement into an oath by adding something like τὸν Δία (by Zeus!). Those sorts of phrases could serve to make a compact oath – e.g. μὰ τὸν Δία! (yes, [I swear] by Zeus!) as an answer to the question is essentially swearing to the answer – grammatically speaking, the verb of swearing is necessary, but left implied. We do the same thing, (“I’ll get up this hill, by God!”). And, I should note, exactly like in English, these forms became standard exclamations, as in Latin comedy, this is often hercule! (by Hercules!), edepol! (by Pollux!) or ecastor! (By Castor! – oddly only used by women). One wonders in these cases if Plautus chooses semi-divine heroes rather than full on gods to lessen the intensity of the exclamation (“shoot!” rather than “shit!” as it were). Aristophanes, writing in Greek, has no such compunction, and uses “by Zeus!” quite a bit, often quite frivolously.

Nevertheless, serious oaths are generally made in full, often in quite specific and formal language. Remember that an oath is essentially a contract, cosigned by a god – when you are dealing with that kind of power, you absolutely want to be sure you have dotted all of the “i”‘s and crossed all of the “t”‘s. Most pre-modern religions are very concerned with what we sometimes call “orthopraxy” (“right practice” – compare orthodoxy, “right doctrine”). Intent doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting the exact form or the ritual precisely correct (for comparison, ancient paganisms tend to care almost exclusively about orthopraxy, whereas medieval Christianity balances concern between orthodoxy and orthopraxy (but with orthodoxy being the more important)).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Oaths! How do they Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-28.

January 25, 2024

The Bathtub Hoax and debunked medieval myths

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman spends a bit of time debunking some bogus but widely believed historical myths:

“Image” by Lauren Knowlton is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The first is a false story that teaches a true lesson — the U.S. did treat Amerinds unjustly in a variety of contexts, although the massive die off as a result of the spread of Old World diseases was a natural result of contact, not deliberate biological warfare. The second lets moderns feel superior to their ignorant ancestors; most people like feeling superior to someone.

Another example of that, deliberately created by a master, is H.L. Mencken’s bathtub hoax, an entirely fictitious history of the bathtub published in 1917:

    The article claimed that the bathtub had been invented by Lord John Russell of England in 1828, and that Cincinnatian Adam Thompson became acquainted with it during business trips there in the 1830s. Thompson allegedly went back to Cincinnati and took the first bath in the United States on December 20, 1842. The invention purportedly aroused great controversy in Cincinnati, with detractors claiming that its expensive nature was undemocratic and local doctors claiming it was dangerous. This debate was said to have spread across the nation, with an ordinance banning bathing between November and March supposedly narrowly failing in Philadelphia and a similar ordinance allegedly being effective in Boston between 1845 and 1862. … Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was claimed to have campaigned for the bathtub against remaining medical opposition in Boston; the American Medical Association supposedly granted sanction to the practice in 1850, followed by practitioners of homeopathy in 1853.

    According to the article, then-Vice President Millard Fillmore visited the Thompson bathtub in March 1850 and having bathed in it became a proponent of bathtubs. Upon his accession to the presidency in July of that year, Fillmore was said to have ordered the construction of a bathtub in the White House, which allegedly refueled the controversy of providing the president with indulgences not enjoyed by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Nevertheless, the effect of the bathtub’s installation was said to have obliterated any remaining opposition, such that it was said that every hotel in New York had a bathtub by 1860. (Wikipedia)

Writing more than thirty years later, Mencken claimed to have been unable to kill the story despite multiple retractions. A google search for [Millard Fillmore bathtub] demonstrates that it is still alive. Among other hits:

    The first bathtub placed in the White House is widely believed to have had been installed in 1851 by President Millard Fillmore (1850-53). (The White House Bathrooms & Kitchen)

Medieval

The desire of moderns to feel superior to their ancestors, helps explain a variety of false beliefs about the Middle Ages including the myth, discussed in detail in an earlier post, that medieval cooking was overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.

Other examples:

Medieval witch hunts: Contrary to popular belief, large scale persecution of witches started well after the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval church viewed the belief that Satan could give magical powers to witches, on which the later prosecutions were largely based, as heretical. The Spanish Inquisition, conventionally blamed for witchcraft prosecutions, treated witchcraft accusations as a distraction from the serious business of identifying secret Jews and Muslims, dealt with such accusations by applying serious standards of evidence to them.

Chastity Belts: Supposedly worn by the ladies of knights off on crusade. The earliest known evidence of the idea of a chastity belt is well after the end of the crusades, a 15th century drawing, and while there is literary evidence for their occasional use after that no surviving examples are known to be from before the 19th century.

Ius Prima Noctae aka Droit de Seigneur was the supposed right of a medieval lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night. Versions of the institution are asserted in a variety of sources going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but while it is hard to prove that it never existed in the European middle ages it was clearly never the norm.

The Divine Right of Kings: Various rulers through history have claimed divine sanction for their rule but “The Divine Right of Kings” is a doctrine that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with the rise of absolute monarchy — Henry VIII in England, Louis XIV in France. Medieval rulers were absolute in neither theory or practice. The feudal relation was one of mutual obligation, in its simplest form protection by the superior in exchange for set obligations of support by the inferior. In practice the decentralized control of military power under feudalism presented difficulties for a ruler who wished to overrule the desires of his nobility, as King John discovered.

Some fictional history functions in multiple versions designed to support different causes. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria has been variously blamed on Julius Caesar, Christian mobs rioting against pagans, and the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, the Caliph Umar having supposedly said that anything in the library that was true was already in the Koran and anything not in the Koran was false. There is no good evidence for any of the stories. The library existed in classical antiquity, no longer exists today, but it is not known how it was destroyed and it may have just gradually declined.

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