Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2011

The Perry-Paul pie-fight

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

The Ron Paul campaign released a new video, pointing out the fact that Paul had been one of a small group that originally supported Ronald Reagan for president (on the basis of Reagan’s professed desire for small government and lower taxes). Rick Perry, on the other hand, worked for Al Gore’s first presidential bid:

As Michael Suede says, it’s amazing that the Perry campaign’s response actually highlights Paul’s consistency and principles:

The Perry campaign released this statement in response to the pummeling:

     “Rep. Paul’s letter is a broadside attack on every element of President Reagan’s record and philosophy. Paul thought President Reagan was so bad, he left the GOP,” said [Perry spokesman Mark] Miner. “It will be interesting to hear Rep. Paul explain why Reagan drove him from the party at tomorrow’s debate on the grounds of the Reagan Library.”

     In one part of the letter, Paul wrote, “There is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government. That is the message of the Reagan years.”

     Paul continued, “Thanks to the President and Republican Party, we have lost the chance to reduce the deficit and the spending in a non-crisis fashion. Even worse, big government has been legitimized in a way the Democrats never could have accomplished.”

     Paul even went so far as to call Reaganomics, “warmed-over Keynesianism.”

In other words, Paul initially supported Reagan because Reagan talked a great game on issues that Paul supported: reducing the size of government and lowering taxes. Reagan was elected, continued talking the talk, but failing to actually do anything — in fact, government continued to grow during his presidency (even if you discount the military build-up). Paul broke with Reagan because Reagan hadn’t done what he was elected to do. And the Perry campaign thinks this is a negative?

You can say a lot of positive things about Reagan, but his actual record was not what his Republican hagiographers pretend that it was.

In the letter, Ron Paul explains that spending under Reagan exploded and that the administration didn’t live up to its promises to keep the debt under control. Then Ron goes on to PREDICT THE FUTURE as he explains the dangers behind exploding deficits. So in essence, the Perry campaign is saying Ron Paul is bad because HE IS TOO CONSERVATIVE.

September 5, 2011

How the wreck of a ship-of-the-line led to the Mary Rose

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

The bottom of the Solent must be carpeted with shipwrecks:

According to naval historian Dr John Bevan, the largely forgotten flagship, which sank in the Solent at Spithead in August 1782, helped divers to locate the wreckage of the Mary Rose in the 1830s — a full 150 years before the stricken vessel was raised from the seabed.

More than 900 people died when the Royal George sank, including 300 women and 60 children who were visiting the ship which was due to head for Gibraltar with HMS Victory.

It was the biggest loss of life in British waters.

The 100-gun battleship had been heeled on to its side for repairs to be carried out on its sea cock — a valve on the hull — when it began to take in water though its open gun ports. It capsized and sank.

“For weeks after the tragedy, bodies washed ashore at Southsea, Gosport and Ryde and were buried in mass graves along the seafront,” said Royal Marines Museum historian Stuart Haven.

The Royal George remained in shallow water just beyond the entrance to Portsmouth harbour for many years, “her masts standing above the water a macabre reminder of the tragedy,” Mr Haven said.

Some 50 years later the pioneering divers Charles and John Deane tried to recover the battleship, which had become a hazard to other vessels.

Between 1834-36 the brothers undertook a series of dives.

August 31, 2011

The “official” start of the Cold War: 5 September, 1945

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

George Jonas, in a review of Mark Steyn’s latest book, gives a thumbnail sketch of the real trigger event that started the Cold War:

Sixty-six years earlier, another writer put together a manuscript of sorts to let Western readers know they were headed for hell in a hand-basket. He wasn’t in Steyn’s league as a wordsmith, although he did write a non-fiction bestseller and win a Governor General’s Award for a novel called The Fall Of A Titan. But far from making the apocalypse amusing, Igor Gouzenko could make a slapstick comedy apocalyptic. No two writers were less alike, yet their work carried a similar message.

The Cold War began on a Wednesday, a few minutes after 8 p.m., on September 5, 1945. This was when a young, slight, nondescript man closed the door of an embassy building on Charlotte Street and walked out into the humid Ottawa evening. He looked a little bulky for a reason. He carried 109 documents under his shirt.

During August, 1945, while the atomic bombs were exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gouzenko had been discussing his defection with his wife Svetlana in their small apartment on Somerset Street. As a cipher clerk, Gouzenko knew a great deal about a Soviet spy ring operating through the office of GRU (military intelligence) Colonel Nikolai Zabotin. The aim of Zabotin’s spy ring was to secure atomic secrets. Gouzenko’s tour of duty in Ottawa was ending, and he feared that being privy to such information would reduce his chances of survival in Moscow. In self-defence, he triggered the Cold War.

The thing was damn hard to trigger. When it came to international intrigue, Canadians were wet behind the ears. Having just concluded a victorious war, they resisted the idea that they were at war again, this time with their former comrades-in-arms. Gouzenko knew that his tale might sound far-fetched, and carried documents with him for proof.

For two harrowing days, with his pregnant wife and their two-year-old son in tow, Gouzenko tried to convince incredulous Canadian journalists and Ministry of Justice officials that he was worthy of a hearing. Mackenzie King’s government couldn’t make up its mind about the defectors, and for a brief period actually considered returning them to the Soviets. Messengers bring bad tidings at their peril.

Gouzenko didn’t start the Cold War; he just warned us to do something, or get ready for Armageddon. So we did something, but 66 years later we’ve another Cassandra at the doorstep, telling us it wasn’t enough.

August 29, 2011

Site of Royal Navy’s WW1 submarine disaster to be used for wind farm

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

In 1918, the Royal Navy suffered the loss of two submarines, with another three damaged along with a light cruiser. And you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s okay, I hadn’t heard of it either, and the British government went to great lengths to conceal the incident, because no enemy vessels were involved:

An underwater war grave containing the victims of one of the worst British naval disasters of the first world war has been surveyed for the first time so it can be preserved in the middle of a windfarm.

The two K Class submarines were destroyed on 31 January 1918 during the so-called battle of the Isle of May, in which 270 lives were lost. The two submarines were sunk and three more damaged along with a surface cruiser.

But no enemy ships were involved in the sinkings, 20 miles off Fife Ness on Scotland’s east coast. The deaths were all caused by a series of night-time collisions within the British fleet.

So embarrassing was the incident that even though one officer was court-martialed, the facts were not generally admitted for more than 60 years, until after the death of the last survivor.

A longer account of the accident is on the Wikipedia page. It’s pretty grim reading.

TED talk: Tim Harford on trial, error and the God complex

Filed under: Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

August 28, 2011

ESR on railway sounds

Filed under: History, Railways, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:08

Eric S. Raymond now lives close to a very busy railway line:

My house is located less than a hundred feet from the Main Line, the principal passenger-rail artery out of Philadelphia to the west — Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and ultimately Chicago and points west. Two dozen times a day passenger trains come bucketing by, but they’re barely a murmur through the dense secondary-growth woods between my back fence and the railroad right-of-way.

The loud ones are the night trains, the big heavy freights they route through when all the passenger cars are put to bed. They come through here rumbling like muted thunder in the still dark, long blasts of airhorns falling away like the mournful cries of vast creatures in a rusty ocean. Some people would find the noise intrusive, but I don’t; it comforts me.

[. . .]

This is my first house so near a railroad track, but I think I will always prefer that now. And I expect I’ll always keep at least one balky antique clock where I can hear it sound. The well-lived life may be full of large ideas and emotions and struggles to build something that will last, but the little details also matter.

August 27, 2011

More photos from Japan’s abandoned “Battleship Island”

Filed under: Asia, History, Japan — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:42

I blogged about this last year, including a few photos of the island’s skyline. This post at How to be a Retronaut includes lots of interior photos:

Germany is an intensely weird place

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:30

Michael Lewis highlights one of the ways Germany is different from anywhere else on the planet:

Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech — all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties — for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

Dundes caused a bit of a stir, for an anthropologist, by tracking this single low national character trait into the most important moments in German history. The fiercely scatological Martin Luther (“I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole,” Luther once explained) had the idea that launched the Protestant Reformation while sitting on the john. Mozart’s letters revealed a mind, as Dundes put it, whose “indulgence in fecal imagery may be virtually unmatched.” One of Hitler’s favorite words was Scheisskerl (“shithead”): he apparently used it to describe not only other people but himself as well. After the war, Hitler’s doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces, and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him. Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. “The combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior-dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content — is very much a part of the German national character,” he wrote.

August 23, 2011

Markets hate uncertainty

Filed under: Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:34

I’ve often remarked that the economy won’t — can’t — recover as long as governments (the US government in particular) keep messing around with the rules of the game. Amity Shlaes explains why:

One product makes clear exactly how unusual this year’s slide has been, and offers a clue as to why 2011 broke the rules. It’s called the Congressional Effect Fund. Founded by Wall Streeter Eric Singer in 2008, the fund is premised on the idea that equity markets dislike a hostile Washington, tolerate a friendly Washington, but prefer an inactive Washington above all.

It follows that stock-market rallies would come most often when Congress is idled — in recess, at home, in the districts. From 1965 until early this summer, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, Singer’s proxy for stocks, rose 17 percent while Congress was out of session versus only 0.9 percent while Congress was working in Washington.

In one study, four scholars took a step back to look at a century of returns — from 1897, just after the Dow Jones Industrial Average was founded, to 1997 — and found that average daily returns when Congress was out of session were almost 13 times higher than when it was in. Their explanation: “Perhaps the market enjoys the temporary certainty exhibited by the absence of Congressional decisions.”

Singer is blunter. About Washington’s impact on the economy, he says simply: “Congress subtracts value.”

The regulators are still on the job, but the legislators appear to be the ones causing the greater degree of uncertainty — and thereby limiting market opportunities. Nice work, government.

A nice reminder that I haven’t listened to “Finlandia” recently

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:23

Which I quickly remedied while reading this article:

Wildly popular a century ago as an icon of Finnish nationalism in a late-Romantic vein, Jean Sibelius was largely dismissed by music aficionados after World War II as something of a conservative lightweight. So why is the Bard Music Festival this month featuring his work in a series of concerts titled “Sibelius and His World”?

Because his condemnation, much like his popularity, was based on reductive assumptions colored by politics. Sibelius’s aesthetic paradoxes mirror those of his biography, and his iconoclastic work deserves close, fresh, sustained, and open-minded attention. A modernist in traditional musical trappings, a globalist whose work spoke in a nationalist dialect, an innovator whose pleasing tonalities snuck his inventions into the popular ear, Sibelius is as underappreciated today as he was perhaps overlionized between the world wars.

[. . .]

Like many of his Finnish contemporaries, as a young man Sibelius embraced the idea and dream of Finland. The notion of the distinct Finnish nation was redefined along the lines of a mythic and literary heritage embodied in the epic The Kalevala. Ironically, the generational embrace of the Finnish language was somewhat awkward for him, because Swedish was his primary and dominant language. Nonetheless Sibelius, more than any other artist, managed to define and embody the spirit and aspirations of an emergent national movement. By 1914 he had become recognized worldwide as the standard-bearer of Finland. For the rest of his life (and to this day), Sibelius’s primary reputation has been as that nation’s granitelike icon.

Ah, “Finlandia”, followed by the “Karelia Suite” and the “Lemminkäinen Suite”. Lovely.

August 20, 2011

“I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness”

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:36

Michael Moynihan reviews a book by someone he really dislikes:

In 2003, the New York Times declared Eric Hobsbawm “one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad.” The Spectator, a right-leaning British magazine, gushed that Hobsbawm is “arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain’s, but the world’s.” The Nation anointed him “one of Aristotle’s ‘men of virtue.’ “

That the 94-year-old Mr. Hobsbawm has long championed dictatorial regimes hasn’t diminished his standing among the intelligentsia or within the establishment he so obviously loathes. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him a Companion of Honour — “In action faithful and in honour clear.” But even many of Mr. Hobsbawm’s admirers find his slippery defenses of communism discomfiting.

To his critics, his ideological dogmatism has made him an untrustworthy chronicler of the 20th century. The British historian David Pryce-Jones argues that Mr. Hobsbawm has “corrupted knowledge into propaganda” and is a professional historian who is “neither a historian nor professional.” Reading his extravagantly received 1994 book, “The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991,” the celebrated Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Mr. Hobsbawm suffers from a “massive reality denial” regarding the Soviet Union.

For his next trick, he’ll be knapping his own flint for arrowheads

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Okay, I exaggerate . . . a bit:

When IBM released its first personal computer, the 5150, 30 years ago, it was deliberately drab — black, gray, and low-key. That’s because IBM intended the 5150 to be a serious machine for people doing serious work.

So how better to celebrate this important anniversary than by using the 5150 for what it was meant to do? Working on a 5150 seems to be a tall task in today’s vastly accelerated computing world, however. Could a PC that’s as old as I am manage to email, surf the Web, produce documents, edit photos, and even tweet?

I sequestered myself for four days amid boxes of 5.25-inch floppy drives and serial cables to find out. The answer to my question turned out to be both yes and no — but more interesting was all the retro-computing magic I had to perform. In the end, my experiment proved two things:

  • People now use the PC for many things that weren’t even conceived of in 1981, and the 5150, unsurprisingly, is woefully underpowered for those advanced tasks. But when you use it for the core computing tasks the 5150 was designed for, IBM’s first PC has still got game.
  • Early floppy discs were just too darned small!

August 15, 2011

The London rioters are not “Thatcher’s grandchildren”

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Brendan O’Neill has little patience for what he refers to as an “Idiot’s Guide to Social Decay”:

Is there anything bad in the world that ‘neoliberalism’ is not responsible for? The rap sheet grows longer by the day. This nebulous yet apparently nefarious ideology is said to have brought about two wars in the Middle East, an economic recession, and the general disintegration of human morality. And now it stands accused of causing the destruction of parts of Tottenham, Hackney and other English city suburbs, as commentators rush to claim that the recent riots are the bastard offspring of the zealous promotion of market values. The rioters are ‘Thatcher’s grandchildren’, says one observer, their lives shattered and brains washed by the ‘neoliberal amoral creed’ which has ‘reigned unquestioned since Thatcher’.

This claim, the outrage-heavy but evidence-lite argument that the rioting is a product of the unleashing of market forces into every area of life, captures what the term ‘neoliberalism’ represents in modern public debate: not a serious attempt to analyse or describe events, but an expression of political exasperation, a borderline childish belief that a bogeyman, in a Thatcher mask, is responsible for every terrible thing that happens. The screech of ‘neoliberalism!’ is meant to sound assertive, radical even, but really it speaks to an extraordinary intellectual passivity and unwillingness to face up to the true forces laying waste to British communities.

As to why the recently riot-torn communities have become so poor and dysfunctional, there’s been a significant change in how communities used to cope with job loss and changes in business pattern and how those changes are handled today:

It is important to note that, throughout modern history, communities around Britain have been rocked by the vagaries of the market, by the wholesale closure of industries and massive job losses. Yet they did not respond by burning cars and looting Boots. The difference today is the almost total welfarisation of these communities, the intervention of the state into every single aspect of people’s lives and social relations, with a relentlessness that would have alarmed William Beveridge, the social reformer who founded Britain’s modern welfare state. In the past, communities that found themselves kicked hard by capitalism would have reorganised themselves and perhaps fought for jobs, or simply dissipated. People, entire families, would have upped sticks and moved to other areas with better job prospects, leaving behind a town that would have turned ghostly, waiting to be taken over by some prospector 20 years down the line. Today, by contrast, such communities are artificially maintained, massively subsidised by an interfering state pouring in economic and social resources in a way that was never experienced by interwar or postwar working-class communities that also underwent economic devastation. It is this invasion of the welfare machine, the erection of permanent scaffolding around communities with little remaining purpose, which has nurtured the kind of nihilism we witnessed in recent days.

Because when the state invades a community and puts it on the welfare equivalent of an artificial life-support machine, when the state seeks to provide for people’s every basic need and even to shape their morality and parenting practices, it has a seriously detrimental impact on community spirit and social bonds. The very idea of ‘community’ becomes corroded. People become so reliant on the state that they no longer turn to their neighbours for moral and social sustenance. What’s more, the external propping up of economically whacked communities massively undermines the social wherewithal and pioneering spirit that working-class communities would have utilised during times of economic hardship in the past, either by moving on or organising themselves into a job-demanding collective of some sort. Today, when people are sustained by the agents of welfare right from childhood to adulthood into old age, from Sure Start to jobseekers’ allowance or incapacity benefit to pension payments, both their individual and collective resourcefulness become seriously weakened. The risky business of reorganising your life and your community in response to economic upheaval is discouraged, in favour of simply living a safe if depressingly uneventful life in the welfare safety net.

August 11, 2011

Canada’s debt crisis happened at a fortunate time

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Father Raymond J. de Souza explains why Canada’s financial success story can’t be easily replicated by Europe or the United States:

The slaying of the deficit by Paul Martin saved Canada from the sovereign debt turmoil now afflicting Europe and America. While full credit is due to Mr. Martin, and it is gratifying to see other countries look to our experience, the turnaround in fiscal policy that Canada achieved in the 1990s is simply impossible to achieve in Europe or the United States in the near term. When we had our debt crisis, sparked by downgrades of the federal government’s credit rating between 1993 and 1995, we could make tough choices with the prospect of almost immediate results. No country has that option today.

That is only partly due to politics. Many have observed that the Liberal majority government of the day had the power to take dramatic action. That understates the case. Not only did the Grits have a majority, they had the near-certainty of another majority in 1997, given the disarray among the four opposition parties. The Chrétien government of 1995 was the most electorally secure government in Canadian history. No other country — not even Canada — has that circumstance today.

[. . .]

Europe and America face weak economic growth, rising debt service costs and no tax reforms to provide robust new streams of revenue. Even if granted the vast powers of the Chrétien government — not for nothing was it called the “friendly dictatorship” — neither Europe nor America have a path to slaying their deficits, aside from ever more brutal spending cuts. And indeed, if serious spending cuts add to unemployment and, in the short term, restrain economic growth, then the deficit may not shrink as welfare costs rise and revenues shrink.

Canada did well to respond to our crisis in the 1990s. We were lucky to have had it when we did.

August 10, 2011

English in India

Filed under: History, India — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:55

An interesting post at The Economist‘s Johnson blog looks at the evolution of “Hinglish”:

Once the British left India, Anglo-Indian died a natural death. In its place came a chutnified Indian English that mixes American and British versions of the language with vernacular words and syntax and direct translations of phrases.

A glimpse of the breadth of influences in contemporary Indian English can be found at the delightfully-named Samosapedia. A cross between Hobson-Jobson and Urban Dictionary, the website modestly describes itself as “the definitive guide to South Asian lingo” and invites users to “catalog and celebrate the rich, diverse and ever-evolving landscape of this region’s shared vernacular”. Over 2,500 words and phrases have been added since Samosapedia was launched at the end of June.

Samosapedia is a lot of fun. It is also fascinating. Many phrases it lists are common across India: A “chaddi buddy” (lit: underwear friend) is someone you’ve known since childhood; “kabab mein haddi” (lit: a bone in the kebab) is a third wheel with better imagery; an “enthu cutlet” (lit: an enthusiastic mincemeat croquette) is an overly earnest soul. But then there are those that come from regions, sub-cultures and even neighbourhoods. “Talking-shalking” highlights the Punjabi fondness for rhyme. “Sandra from Bandra” is a stereotype from a predominantly Catholic suburb of Mumbai. “Send it” refers to smoking pot.

The entries at Samosapedia also offer an insight into how Indian culture is changing. “Traditional with modern outlook”, often found in matrimonial ads, encapsulates the evolving nature of arrange marriage—or “love-cum-arranged marriage”—where the prospective bride and groom have far greater say in their partners than earlier generations did. “Behenji-turned-mod” is a condescending term for a traditional woman transitioning from fusty and oily-haired to a more urban, socially acceptable version of herself. It is telling that these undoubtedly modern but widely-used phrases exist in Hinglish, a portmanteau of Hindi and English.

Lots of links in the original post to various entries in Samosapedia.

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