Quotulatiousness

December 28, 2018

“Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves” strikes again

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the latest use of the ridiculous “lone wolves” excuse for terrorism:

A week before Christmas two young ladies from Scandinavia vacationing in Morocco – Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway – were brutally stabbed and decapitated and then had the final moments of their lives uploaded as triumphal snuff videos to Facebook, Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse.

Fortunately, if you were thinking of getting a little nervous about your next holiday in the Maghreb, this bloody double-murder was the work of merely another “lone wolf”:

    In a press conference in Rabat yesterday, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sabik labelled the suspects “lone wolves”…

Wait a minute: “lone wolves” plural? You mean, the wolf wasn’t lone? No, indeed:

    What ‘lone wolf’ gang did before Scandinavian tourist beheadings

There’s a whole gang of lone wolves?

    A motley crew of “lone wolves”, including two street vendors, a plumber and a carpenter, hunted backpackers to kill in the Moroccan mountains.

At last count, nineteen “lone wolves” have been arrested for the double-murder. That’s a rugby team plus bridge four of lone wolves. They’re the least lonesome lone wolves in town.

And are they really that “motley”? (See photo above for representative three-nineteenths of the lone wolf pack.)

For almost a decade, I have made mocking reference to Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. But there’s no point to jokes, is there? Because, as absurd as they are, you wait a year or two and everybody’s doing them entirely straight-faced. The phrase “lone wolf” was created by the Pansy Media to ward off the suggestion that all these lone wolves might have something in common. Just as “all politics is local”, all jihad is lone. And, if you use the phrase often enough, it has such a pleasing anesthetizing effect you don’t even notice that you’re sitting there typing, perfectly seriously, about a gang of nineteen lone wolves.

Same number as the 9/11 hijackers, by coincidence. But we hadn’t yet taken refuge in such halfwit evasions.

Needless to say, the decapitation video went “viral”. Among those who were “spammed” with pictures of the severed heads were the mums of the girls, whose first Christmas without their beloved daughters was further enlivened by social-media enthusiasts posting snaps of the decapitated women to their mothers’ Facebook pages. But Big Social Brother knows its priorities: It was too busy banning Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch website is one of the few remaining outlets that doesn’t take refuge in platitudinous drivel about “lone wolves”.

November 27, 2018

QotD: Gandhi’s view of India as a nation

Filed under: Africa, History, India, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

No one questions that the formative period for Gandhi as a political leader was his time in South Africa. Throughout history Indians, divided into 1,500 language and dialect groups (India today has 15 official languages), had little sense of themselves as a nation. Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians felt about as close as Christians and Moors during their 700 years of cohabitation in Spain. In addition to which, the Hindus were divided into thousands of castes and sub-castes, and there were also Parsees, Sikhs, Jains. But in South Africa officials had thrown them all in together, and in the mind of Gandhi (another one of those examples of nationalism being born in exile) grew the idea of India as a nation, and Muslim-Hindu friendship became one of the few positions on which he never really reversed himself. So Gandhi — ignoring Arabs and Turks — became an adamant supporter of the Khilafat [Caliphate] movement out of strident Indian nationalism. He had become a national figure in India for having unified 13,000 Indians of all faiths in South Africa, and now he was determined to reach new heights by unifying hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths in India itself. But this nationalism did not please everyone, particularly Tolstoy, who in his last years carried on a curious correspondence with the new Indian leader. For Tolstoy, Gandhi’s Indian nationalism “spoils everything.”

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

November 2, 2018

QotD: Modern men are “the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet”

Filed under: Africa, Australia, Books, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A new book claims even modern athletes could not run as fast, jump as high, or have been nearly as strong as our predecessors.

The book, Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister, describes many examples of the inadequacy of the modern male, calling them as a class, “the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.”

Given spiked running shoes, Indigenous Australians of 20,000 years ago could have beaten today’s world record for running 100 and 200 meters. As recently as last century, some Tutsi males in Rwanda could have easily beaten the current high jump world record, and bodybuilders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been no match in an arm wrestle with a Neanderthal woman.

Twenty thousand years ago six male Australian Aborigines chasing prey left footprints in a muddy lake shore that became fossilized. Analysis of the footprints shows one of them was running at 37 kph (23 mph), only 5 kph slower than Usain Bolt was traveling at when he ran the 100 meters in world record time of 9.69 seconds in Beijing last year. But Bolt had been the recipient of modern training, and had the benefits of spiked running shoes and a rubberized track, whereas the Aboriginal man was running barefoot in soft mud. Given the modern conditions, the man, dubbed T8, could have reached speeds of 45 kph, according to McAllister.

McAllister also presents as evidence of his thesis photographs taken by a German anthropologist early in the twentieth century. The photographs showed Tutsi initiation ceremonies in which young men had to jump their own height in order to be accepted as men. Some of them jumped as high as 2.52 meters, which is higher than the current world record of 2.45 meters.

Lin Edwards, “Modern men are wimps, according to new book”, Phys.org, 2009-10-21.

August 25, 2018

QotD: India’s caste system

Filed under: Africa, History, India, Law, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… Gandhi, born the son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian principality and received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in London, [began] his climb to greatness as a member of the small Indian community in, precisely, South Africa. Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to limit Indian immigration and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians to carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to measures under consideration in the U.S. today to control illegal immigration). The film’s lengthy opening sequences are devoted to Gandhi’s leadership in the fight against Indians carrying their identity papers (burning their registration cards), with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class section of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to step off the sidewalk. This inspired young Indian leader calls, in the film, for interracial harmony, for people to “live together.”

Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a “caste” Hindu, and from one of the higher castes. Although, later, he was to call for improving the lot of India’s Untouchables [Dalits], he was not to have any serious misgivings about the fundamentals of the caste system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, to my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which Gandhi grew up, and had only recently left, some castes could enter the courtyards of certain Hindu temples, while others could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village well. Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to leave the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and perpetually to call out, giving warning, so that no one would be polluted by their proximity. The endless intricacies of Hindu caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but in Madras, where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar could pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, Kammalans polluted at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at 48 feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at 64 feet. All castes and the thousands of sub-castes were forbidden, needless to say, to marry, eat, or engage in social activity with any but members of their own group. In Gandhi’s native Gujarat a caste Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive ritual ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage composed of milk, whey, and (what else?) cow dung.

Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial. In fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for the reduction of caste barriers in India — a campaign almost invisible in the movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, leaving the audience with the officially sponsored if historically astonishing notion that racism was introduced into India by the British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitariansim is one of the most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie.

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

August 17, 2018

Thomas Clarkson: The First Abolitionist

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 26 Jul 2018

The brutal and cruel transatlantic slave trade lasted for more than 300 hundred years. In 1785, Thomas Clarkson, a man you’ve probably never heard of, firmly held to his belief that no man can rightly claim ownership over another. That year he vowed to end the transatlantic slave trade. This is his story.

August 16, 2018

Three Great British Wartime Deceptions

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Italy, Middle East, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lindybeige
Published on 15 Aug 2018

http://www.audible.com/Lindybeige or text ‘Lindybeige’ to 500 500 for a free thirty-day trial and one free audio book.
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Tales of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in World War One, El Alamein in WW2, and of the extraordinarily successful failure that was Operation Camilla in East Africa. One man with terrific hair rambles for over half an hour about ruses of deceit against the enemies of the Empire.

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

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August 10, 2018

What’s So Great About Casablanca? Ask a Film Professor.

Filed under: Africa, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ScreenPrism
Published on 19 Dec 2016

We all know Casablanca is a great movie — but what makes it great? We talked to film professor Julian Cornell about why Casablanca is one of the classic love stories in cinema.

August 6, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Leviathan – Extra History – #5

Filed under: Africa, Health, History, India, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 4 Aug 2018

This is a global pandemic. The flu jumps ship, literally, onto the docks of American Samoa, of South Africa, of Alaska, of India. The 1918 flu infects every human continent.

August 4, 2018

Rhodesia Made Their FALs Great With This One Weird Halbek Device!

Filed under: Africa, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 14 Jul 2018

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The Halbek Device was a clamp-on muzzle brake designed by two Rhodesians, Douglas Hall and Marthinus Bekker. It was patented in Rhodesia in 1977 and in the US in 1980, and manufactured in small numbers for the Rhodesian military. I have seen these occasionally, and doubt they are actually very effective. But during a filming trip to South Africa I had a chance to actually try one on a select-fire R1 FAL, complete with high speed camera to find out for sure. So, let’s see what they really do…

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

July 12, 2018

Sometimes, the worst reporter is an eyewitness

Filed under: Africa, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In criminal cases — especially those dramatized for movies and TV — the strongest evidence against an accused is often an eyewitness to the crime. But as Dave Freer points out, what the person-on-the-spot saw isn’t always congruent with what objectively happened, especially when filtered through news reporting:

Back in the dark ages – 1980’s in South Africa the BBC Radio News reported on a labor dispute/picket protest led by the ANC aligned organizers in a fishing town up the West Coast of the Cape. The picket line had been savagely broken up by the police with dogs (the BBC reporter of the time was a passionate promoter of the anti-apartheid cause, and as his media was not within the country could report whatever he liked without any form of censorship.) The local Afrikaans press reported on the incident too. There wasn’t a lot to report on from one horse towns on the West Coast, and the Cape Town Riot squad dispersing a protest with dogs was news, if not big news. The one set of media carried it from their point of view as a bad thing, and the other as a good thing.

Now, as it happens I was – quite inadvertently – there, along with my pregnant wife. I wasn’t protesting, or with the police. I was just at the tail end of a long sampling trip, collecting shark vertebrae and gut contents –as well as measurements of said sharks – at various fish processing plants up the west coast. I was a very broke research scientist, and paying dog-sitters or putting our two hounds (a sloppy bull-terrier x keeshond cross and a dim-witted but loveable Old English Sheepdog) in kennels was just an expense that couldn’t be met. So they traveled with us, sleeping in the back of the truck. They loved the trips. My wife used to record for me – as it was a bloody, slimy, smelly dirty job, making writing difficult while you were doing it. Now, typically – as we were taking nothing of value, fish processors were quite obliging about us sampling the catch – as long as we didn’t get in the way. In this particular fishing town, that meant starting really early on the previous night’s landings, before work started. The track to the shark plant was a narrow alley next to and around the corner from the main only large employer in the town – they dealt with pilchards and anchovies.

We got there in the dark and had worked hard for several hours, and, tired, smelly, bloody and laden with sample buckets of vertebrae sections, (for age and grown studies) were glad to be heading for a coffee and giving the dogs a run before heading home. The dogs of course knew the pattern and were hyper with ‘walk-delight’, as always.

So: Barbara driving we headed around the corner and into the midst of a whole bunch of people. My dogs – confined to the back canopy — were barking. They were already excited for their walk and liked to tell the world… My wife, being herself, hooted and drove slowly towards the protestors –all we wanted was out of there… And, to be honest, we couldn’t actually turn around – and the sea was behind us.

Now, whether the protestors got freaked the idea that cops were somehow behind them, or just the noise of the two dogs was enough – people scattered in all directions running and screaming. We drove out, past the couple of local cops, having no idea what the hell we’d done, and wondering if we were in trouble.

A friend later told me the Cape Town Riot squad (we were about 2 hours away from the city) showed up about an hour and half after this, and were somewhat peeved at being called out for nothing.

The news media reported the event from their point of view. The essential facts were in a way true. A protest had been broken up by dogs. The riot squad had come up from Cape Town. The rest was the story that they wanted to tell their audience. They, or their sources, may have actually believed their version of events. Who knows? But I gave up on believing their reportage was overly accurate after that.

July 11, 2018

Men of Harlech

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

Mark Mains
Published on 16 Apr 2011

This stirring music first appeared as “March of the Men of Harlech” in Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards (Edward Jones, London 1784). The song was also used in the movie Zulu (1964). To learn more visit: http://www.rorkesdriftvc.com/myths/my… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_H…

July 7, 2018

Zimbabwe and Hyperinflation: Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire?

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 3 Jan 2017

How would you like to pay $417.00 per sheet of toilet paper?

Sound crazy? It’s not as crazy as you may think. Here’s a story of how this happened in Zimbabwe.

Around 2000, Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, was in need of cash to bribe his enemies and reward his allies. He had to be clever in his approach, given that Zimbabwe’s economy was doing lousy and his people were starving. Sow what did he do? He tapped the country’s printing presses and printed more money.

Clever, right?

Not so fast. The increase in money supply didn’t equate to an increase in productivity in the Zimbabwean economy, and there was little new investment to create new goods. So, in effect, you had more money chasing the same goods. In other words, you needed more dollars to buy the same stuff as before. Prices began to rise — drastically.

As prices rose, the government printed more money to buy the same goods as before. And the cycle continued. In fact, it got so out of hand that by 2006, prices were rising by over 1,000% per year!

Zimbabweans became millionaires, but a million dollars may have only been enough to buy you one chicken during the hyperinflation crisis.

It all came crashing down in 2008 when — given that the Zimbabwean dollar basically ceased to exist — Mugabe was forced to legalize transactions in foreign currencies.

Hyperinflation isn’t unique to Zimbabwe. It has occurred in other countries such as Yugoslavia, China, and Germany throughout history. In future videos, we’ll take a closer look at inflation and what causes it.

July 3, 2018

French North Africa in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Africa, France, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 2 Jul 2018

Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco were all part of French North Africa before and during World War 1. They all contributed in material and men to the war effort and the French colonial soldiers were praised for their bravery.

July 1, 2018

Mapping medieval trade routes

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Open Culture linked to a fascinating new map by a Swedish grad student, showing trade routes during the Medieval period:

A small portion of Martin Jan Månsson’s trade map of the Middle Ages.

“I think trade routes and topography explains world history in the most concise way,” Månsson explains in the very small print at the map’s lower right corner. “By simply studying the map, one can understand why some areas were especially important–and remained successful even up to modern times.”

The map covers 200 years, spanning both the 11th and 12th centuries, and “depicts the main trading arteries of the high Middle Ages, just after the decline of the Vikings and before the rise of the Mongols, the Hansa and well before the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope.”

It also shows the complex routes already available to Africa and Asia, and the areas where Muslim and Christian traders would meet. The open-to-trade Song Dynasty ruled China, and the competitive kingdoms in the Indonesia region provided both Muslims and Europeans with spice.

Looking like a railway map, Månsson’s work shows how interconnected we really were back in the Middle Ages, from Greenland in the west to Kikai and Kagoshima in the East, from Arkhangelsk in the frozen north to Sofala in modern-day Mozambique.

The full-sized, high-resolution map can be downloaded here.

Update: Tim Worstall was kind enough to link to this post and uses Månsson’s map to help explain the gravity model of trade:

A standard observation is that places which are closer together trade with each other more than places which are further apart. Add to that the thought that larger economies will trade more with other larger economies – well, you know, more economic activity means more economic activity – and you get the gravity model of trade. So, therefore Britain’s trade future lies with those places nearby, in the EU, than with places further away like the Commonwealth or the US.

This is, sadly, actually the level of debate over Brexit at times. We should trade with France because it’s 26 miles away, so there. The point being that while the gravity model is true – among the best empirically supported of all economic observations – that’s not actually what it says. Rather, that those places which are closer by trade distance trade more with each other. Trade distance being a more complex point than mere geographical location.

[…]

The point here being that by showing the trade routes it is showing us this trade, or perhaps economic, distance which is what the gravity model is about. Valencia and Palma were very much closer – and trade very much more – than Valencia and Toledo, despite roughly equal distances crowfly wise.

June 28, 2018

Shifting attitudes toward mass immigration in Europe

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Gates of Vienna, Baron Bodissey maps the way public sympathies are changing in the wake of the immigration/refugee waves of the last few years:

From Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, a Razor-Wire Curtain Has Descended…

Immigration-related events are moving rapidly this in Europe summer. The situation is in such flux that now would be a good time to step back and try to get an overview of the process.

Three years ago the dead baby hysteria, followed by Chancellor Merkel’s invitation to the world (“Y’all come in and set a spell, bitte!“), launched the Great European Migration Crisis. Since then I’ve read hundreds of news articles and analyses about the flow of “refugees” and the reactions to their violent and fragrant arrival in Western Europe.

After digesting all that information I created the following map, which presents my subjective evaluation of the different approaches to migration by various European countries. I’ve rated the policies of 28 different countries (the EU 27 minus Croatia, plus Switzerland) on a scale from 0 to 100, from zero (red) for the open-borders attitude of the “Welcoming Culture” to 100 (blue) for the absolute refusal of mass migration by the Visegrád Four (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic). Data from the last six months weighs more heavily in the score assigned to each country — for example, Spain and Italy recently changed governments, which has strongly affected each country’s migration policy.

[Click to see full-sized image]

The grouping of countries based on their stance on migration bears a striking resemblance to the division of Europe into East and West by the Iron Curtain. This is especially true if we roll the clock back three months — back then Italy and Bavaria would have been quite red. And the analogy becomes even more apt if we remember that Austria was occupied by Soviet troops until 1955, which gives it one foot in the Eastern camp.

The biggest change in the past three months has been the formation of a new anti-immigration government in Italy. The “xenophobia” of the East Bloc has now broken through the razor-wire curtain and gained a foothold in Western Europe. No wonder EU politics is in such turmoil! After failing to contain the “anti-European” attitudes of Poland and Hungary, Brussels now has to contend with Matteo Salvini. Italy is one of the “big four” pillars of the European Union, so its defection to the anti-migration side carries enormous significance for continental politics.

The situation is metamorphosing rapidly, but before we analyze the process of change — the “delta”, as they say in the military-industrial complex — let’s go over the snapshot of current European migration policies.

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