Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2010

First Cryoburn review

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:59

I’m eagerly awaiting Lois McMaster Bujold’s next novel Cryoburn, which is due to be released next month. Here’s the first preview I’ve seen:

If you’re a big Lois McMaster Bujold fan, you probably already know this. If you’re sort of a fan and haven’t heard, you’ll want to know. If you’ve never heard or read her stuff — well, you really should.

Cryoburn is the latest installment in Lois’s wonderful series featuring Miles Vorkosigan, the frail, dashing, ever-resourceful and hopelessly romantic space-traveler who uses brains and charm to overcome severe physical handicaps as he flits around the universe in the service of his home planet’s security force. If you’re not familiar with these books, I can barely attempt to sum them up. Ms. Bujold has created a finely-textured, richly detailed, eminently logical — and deeply human — universe. The first in the series, Shards of Honor, finds Miles’s future parents on opposite sides of a planetary war. Romance blossoms and in Barrayar they have married and are attempting to conceive in the midst of a fierce political battle that turns violent, with devastating effects on the child they finally manage to bring into the world. With Warrior’s Apprentice, we jump ahead sixteen years to pick up the story of Miles and his struggle to live up to his father’s — and his own — high expectations. And on we go from there — for ten (now eleven) terrific books, plus some short stories and spin-offs — following Miles as he learns the ropes of war and politics to become ever more respected — and powerful.

[. . .]

I think her fans assumed that with Diplomatic Immunity, she had pretty much wrapped up Miles’s tale. To our delight, she has sprung Cryoburn on us and I can safely say that it does not disappoint. Miles, now married and with a growing family, and thoroughly enjoying his job as an Imperial Auditor (read: galactic trouble-shooter), is sent to Kibou-Daini (also known as “New Hope”) to investigate peculiar goings-on in that planet’s cryogenics industry. Getting cryo-ed is now big business and virtually everyone, at some point, opts to be frozen alive, in the hope of awakening to a cure for disease or old age, or simply a more pleasant future. But corporate shenanigans threaten to wreak havoc on millions of slumbering customers unless someone gets to the bottom of a burgeoning scandal.

One of the best parts of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series is that each one stands on its own as a novel: you don’t need to read them in sequence to get full enjoyment. I happened to read them in a mixed-up sequence myself, starting with Warrior’s Apprentice, then going backwards through Barrayar and Shards of Honor to get to Falling Free. In spite of that, I thoroughly enjoyed each book as a book despite taking them chronologically backwards.

September 9, 2010

Books aren’t a problem . . . I could stop any time . . .

Filed under: Books, Media, Randomness — Nicholas @ 00:01

I think I need to build more bookshelves.

September 7, 2010

The problem with knee-jerk reactions

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:28

Too often, they make you look like a jerk:

The CRTC has nixed the idea of “mak[ing] us all pay” for Fox TV News for now. But a CRTC under a compliant chairman could rubber-stamp whatever sort of licence Quebecor wanted, purely for political reasons, and the Fox News-ification of Canada would be unstoppable. Would that not be outrageous?

Yes. It would be outrageous. I’d sign a petition protesting it. But Ms. Atwood seems to accept this theory as fact. And it isn’t fact. Fact is that the petition is called “Stop ‘Fox News North’ ” and refers to its product as “hate media.” In a particularly astonishing Tweet on Thursday, Ms. Atwood revealed that she hadn’t even realized the Quebecor network wasn’t, in fact, to be called Fox News North! Had she done any due diligence whatsoever?

Anyone who supports Quebecor’s right to beam its product into our homes under reasonable commercial circumstances, as Ms. Atwood claims to, would do well not to sign that petition. It’s clearly opposed to the existence of Sun TV News, not just to the Prime Minister’s hypothetical meddling in the CRTC’s affairs. She’s far from the first celebrity to embarrass herself by blundering headlong and uninformed into politics (an urge that still baffles me). But she could at least own up to the gaffe. Surely it’s not a far-fetched idea that one’s signature beneath a block of text signifies approval of the foregoing.

Because I don’t watch much TV (except for NFL games), I must have missed the mass takeover of American TV by hate mongers. Yet another advantage of avoiding TV watching, I guess.

September 2, 2010

If not the founder, at least a notable contributor

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

John Pilger pays “tribute” to one of the more persuasive contributors to both militarism and commercialism of the 20th century:

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations.”

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom.” In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation.”

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events.”

Propaganda definitely existed before Bernays, but he may have been the one who codified and systematized the “science”.

September 1, 2010

“The Stig” to be unmasked

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

As I mentioned a while back, the BBC went to court to try to prevent a book publisher from revealing the identity of Top Gear‘s mysterious race car driver “The Stig”. The court has ruled against the BBC. James May, one of the presenters on the show, had this to say:

“Obviously I’m now going to have to take some legal action of my own, because I have been the Stig for the past seven years, and I don’t know who this bloke is, who’s mincing around in the High Court pretending it’s him.”

T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War

Filed under: Asia, Books, History, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Austin Bay recommends a book first published in 1963 as still being the best single-volume history of the Korean War (and I agree):

June 25 marked the 60th anniversary of North Korea’s premeditated attack on South Korea. The attack, which scattered South Korea’s weak and disorganized defense forces, began a vicious two and a half months of combat. The North Koreans would smash the ill-starred U.S. 24th Division’s Task Force Smith, then shove remnant South Korean troops and U.S. reinforcements into the Pusan Perimeter, at the southern tip of the peninsula.

In the weeks since June 25, I’ve re-read T.R. Fehrenbach’s “This Kind of War,” still the premier Korean War history. (Clay Blair’s “The Forgotten War” is also an excellent book.) Published in 1963 and reissued in 2000, “This Kind of War” is lyric history, delivering analysis in elegant, honest prose. Fehrenbach is also a decorated Korean War veteran, a man in touch with the emotions as well as the facts.

“This kind of war,” Fehrenbach writes, “is dirty business first to last.” Fehrenbach’s commentary on those first battles of July and August 1950 depicts the confusion of initial defeat and retreat, as well as the courage and intellect required to stem the onslaught. His chapter on the Inchon landing of September 1950 — the American amphibious counter-stroke — is incisive. Its 60th anniversary is two weeks away.

I think I first saw This Kind of War recommended by Jim Dunnigan, many years ago, but the Korean War has never been a major historical interest of mine. When I did get around to reading the book, it certainly opened my eyes. As Bay points out, the work is still topical because the war has never officially ended (as the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan amply demonstrated).

August 23, 2010

Unmasking “The Stig”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

A court case will decide whether HarperCollins can publish a book that reveals the identity of Top Gear‘s anonymous driver:

Publisher HarperCollins is in a legal dispute with the BBC over a book that reveals the identity of Top Gear‘s The Stig, BBC News understands.

Both sides appeared in London’s High Court on Monday after the BBC confirmed it was trying to halt its publication.

The Stig regularly takes to the track on the BBC Two show, but never removes his helmet on screen.

The BBC says the publication of the book breaches contractual and confidentiality obligations.

HarperCollins declined to give any official comment.

The dispute comes amid suggestions from several newspapers speculating that the character’s true identity is former Formula Three driver Ben Collins, based on the financial reports of his company.

August 13, 2010

Weekend reading material

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:47

When I got back from lunch today, the UPS truck had delivered my weekend reading material:

Update: The first fifty pages have been excellent. It’s interesting how many characters in his fiction are recognizably people from his early life in Missouri.

Raise your kid in the Rand-approved manner

Filed under: Books, Economics, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Eric Hague would like to assure you that today’s little contretemps was inevitable:

I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place — a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles — and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

H/T to The Tiger who said “The shove was uncalled for . . . but I’m otherwise with the girl.”

Maybe I should try to find a copy of Eric’s “illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged“. It sounds like great bedtime reading for the kiddies, “glossing over all the hardcore sex parts”.

July 26, 2010

You’d have to say that they’re still following his guidelines

Filed under: Africa, Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:10

In an issue of Granta several years back, Binyavanga Wainaina provided some highly detailed guidelines for western writers to use in their work about Africa. Based on the results, you’d have to say that his guidance has been taken to heart by most novelists, journalists, and television personalities:

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun for the link.

July 22, 2010

Cultivating a taste for parody

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

The Economist reviews The Oxford Book of Parodies by John Gross:

Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an immortal entertainment rolled into one. John Gross’s new anthology of parodies in English (with a few foreign titbits) has samples both high and low of this diverse genre.

[. . .]

Any well-known poem or character is fair game. A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin is revisited as an ailing pensioner who has retired to Spain (“He peers through a pair of bifocals;/He talks quite a lot to a bear that he’s got/Who is known as El Pu to the locals.”) Ezra Pound wrote a wintry variation on “Sumer is icumen in” (“…skiddeth bus and sloppeth us…”) But why limit oneself to a single writer? Portmanteau parodies let writers do two voices at once, thus “Chaucer” rewrites Sir John Betjeman (“A Mayde ther was, y-clept Joan Hunter Dunn…”) and “Dylan Thomas” redoes “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is night in the smug snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug household of Mr and Mrs Dai Bennet and their simpering daughters — five breast-bobbing man-hungry titivators, innocent as ice-cream, panting for balls and matrimony.”)

[. . .]

Documents, philosophies and schools of thought can be good fodder, too. H.L. Mencken did a “Declaration of Independence in American” (“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody . . .”)

July 12, 2010

Even the US Army can’t escape the past

Filed under: Books, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

StrategyPage looks at recent updates to the US Army’s training doctrine, and their need to re-learn from the past:

Over the last few years, the army has been revamping its training and operating manuals to reflect what was learned (or, often, relearned). The army has dozens of manuals, pamphlets and other documents detailing how the troops should be trained, and how they should fight. All these are being brought up to date with what has been learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of what is being lost is speculative stuff added in the 1990s, after the Cold War ended, and the army foresaw a future in which technology would change everything. Tech did bring many changes, but not always as anticipated. Combat and a live (not imaginary) enemy imposes a reality that often cannot be predicted.

For example, five years ago, the army completed a revision of its counterinsurgency (COIN) manual, for the first time in twenty years. The army has a long history of success fighting guerillas. Even Vietnam, which conventional wisdom counts as a defeat, wasn’t. The conventional wisdom, as is often the case, is wrong. By the time the last U.S. combat units pulled out of South Vietnam in 1972, the local guerilla movement, the Viet Cong, was destroyed. North Vietnam came south three years later with a conventional invasion, sending tank and infantry divisions charging across the border and conquering their neighbor the old fashioned way.

[. . .]

The main problem with COIN is that the American armed forces takes it for granted. U.S. troops have been defeating guerilla movements for centuries. Through all that time, COIN has been the most frequent form of warfare American troops have been involved with. But COIN has always been viewed as a minor, secondary, military role. It never got any respect. Even the U.S. Marine Corps, after half a century of COIN operations, were glad to put that behind them in the late 1930s. All that remained of that experience was a classic book, “The Small Wars Manual,” written by some marine officers on the eve of World War II. That book, which is still in print, contained timeless wisdom and techniques on how to deal with COIN operations, and “small wars” in general. Much of the work the army has done in the last five years, to revise their manuals, could have been done just by consulting the Small Wars Manual. In some cases, that’s exactly what was done.

The basic truth is that COIN tactics and techniques have not changed for thousands of years. What has also not changed is the professional soldiers disdain for COIN operations. This sort of thing has never been considered “real soldiering.” But the U.S. Army and Marines have finally come to accept that COIN is a major job, something that U.S. troops have always been good at, and something that you have to pay attention to. So when you see more news stories about the COIN manual, keep in mind the history of that kind of warfare, and how long, and successfully, Americans have been doing it.

July 7, 2010

The naked truth about nudity

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:37

A review at The Economist strips Philip Carr-Gomm’s A Brief History of Nakedness down to the basics:

When, where and how much you take your clothes off matters a surprising amount. A plunging cleavage is nothing remarkable in the right circumstances. Elsewhere it can get you fired — or stoned to death. Nipples are fine in parks in northern Europe (and many Mediterranean beaches) but not on American television, even when covered with a tassel. Male genitalia are OK in the greatest works of classical sculpture, but not, even when they measure just one millimetre, in children’s books. The female pudendum is strictly for pornographers, gynaecologists and feminists trying to make a point. Given that everyone ran around naked only a few thousand years ago, and that we all look more-or-less similar once unclothed, this is quite puzzling.

[. . .]

Philip Carr-Gomm’s lushly illustrated book takes a long and enthusiastic look at the politics and culture of nakedness. Nudism attracts eccentrics, and their stories, he feels, deserve to be told. But his po-faced treatment of their antics can be unintentionally comic. Mr Carr-Gomm is a self-professed Druid and a practitioner of Wicca (a modern form of paganism that can involve a lot of larking around naked) and enjoys stripping off his clothes during country walks. Halfway through the book many readers will feel they have read quite enough reverential descriptions of naturist and pagan cults in 1930s Britain.

Delineating the “bounds of the central government’s Constitutional authority”

Filed under: Books, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:18

Art Carden reviews a new book by Thomas E. Woods:

In Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, Professor Woods offers a thorough-but-compact discussion of the doctrine of nullification. As he writes, “(n)ullification begins with the axiomatic point that a federal law that violates the Constitution is no law at all” (p. 3). It is, according to the framework established by the Founders, an essential part of the system of checks and balances that defined the federal union. Even though they established federal-level checks and balances, the founders were troubled by the notion that the Federal government should be its own judge.

Nullification was formalized in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, and it essentially says that the states are not bound to enforce federal laws that step outside the bounds of the central government’s Constitutional authority. That raises two obvious questions. First, what are “the bounds of the central government’s Constitutional authority”? Second, what is the Constitutional relationship between the states and the central government? Woods discusses the three provisions that have been used to justify expansion of federal power — the “general welfare” clause, the commerce clause, and the “necessary and proper” clause — and argues convincingly that these were largely clauses of convenience that empowered the government to do the things necessary to fulfill their constitutional mandate. In Woods’s interpretation, this meant that the government had the constitutional authority to do mundane tasks in pursuit of their constitutional goals. They could buy lumber to build “needful buildings” and paper on which to print government documents without explicit permission, for example (p. 29). As Woods interprets it, the interstate commerce clause establishes the United States as a free trade zone. It does not give the government carte blanche to do as it pleases as long as it can cook up an “interstate commerce” rationale. Citing James Madison, Woods asks an important question: if the general welfare clause is sufficient to justify pretty much anything the Federal government wants to do, why bother with enumerated powers? Indeed, why even bother with a constitution?

Unfortunately, sympathy for nullification and states’ rights has been smeared by the association of these ideas with slavery. This is most unfortunate because it conflates a question of unambiguous moral evil (slavery) with a legitimate and difficult constitutional question.

June 18, 2010

When it’s rational to be irrational

Filed under: Books, Media, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:08

Cory Doctorow really likes Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality:

. . . there are sections in which the science of irrationality is readily converted into practical techniques for living better, and these really shine. My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus — that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.

Here’s where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure — a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship — you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain — an unpleasant chore, an awful trip — you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.

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