Quotulatiousness

September 8, 2018

British tabloids try to stir up trouble with Argentina … again

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sir Humphrey tries to talk the tabloid press in off the ledge over some terrible reporting from the Falkland Islands:

River Class Patrol Vessel HMS Clyde is pictured exercising at sea. HMS Clyde patrols the territorial seas and monitors the airspace around the Falkland Islands whilst conducting routine visits and reassurance to the many small settlements found throughout the islands.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This week it was revealed that an Argentine survey vessel had been reported near the Falkland Islands, and that the local patrol ship HMS Clyde had reportedly been sent to investigate. This simple story led to a barrage of negative news suggesting that the RN had ‘confronted’ the vessel which was apparently looking for oil.

One of the greatest success stories in the last few years for British foreign policy has been the way a formerly tense and difficult relationship with Argentina has so rapidly been reset to become a genuinely productive one. Under the Kirchner regime, which used foreign policy gripes as a means of distracting attention from domestic woes, the relationship between Argentina and the UK was far less productive and strong than it could, or should, have been.

[…]

It is therefore immensely depressing to see some utter rubbish being spouted in the newspapers about what may or may not have happened off the Falkland Islands. The reality is far more simple than is being reported – the vessel in question was a scientific research ship conducting operations near the Burwood bank. Extremely bad weather forced a course change, which brought the vessel closer than planned to the Falkland Islands. (Full source can be found HERE).

The UK and Argentina operate a sensible arrangement to notify each other of movements in certain areas to reduce concerns and maintain effective communications. This agreement means that both nations provide 48hrs notice when a naval vessel will be within 15nm of the others coast line (noting territorial waters usually extend out to 12nm). Usually vessel movements and operational plans are known well in advance, and it is possible to communicate this in a timely fashion. Sometimes though, this doesn’t always go to plan – for instance when a vessel is changing course unexpectedly due to the weather.

On this occasion, it appears to have been the case that the Argentine authorities notified the UK of the vessels course and presence as soon as they were aware of its situation. The vessel herself is not one that is normally covered by these notification arrangements anyway (being a civilian research vessel).

What may have happened is that the UK may have identified an unknown vessel in the local area that they were not expecting to see (noting these waters are reasonably quiet) and began the process of sending HMS Clyde to investigate. As soon as it was clear that in fact this was an entirely legitimate presence, she returned to her normal duties. It is not even clear that HMS Clyde sailed, let alone went close to the Argentine vessel. As the Argentines themselves made clear, no overflight or challenge was made, and normal business continued as the weather improved.

A key statistic in the debate over gun violence in Toronto … turns out to be an invention

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

Matt Gurney on an important claim in the controversy about guns and crime in Toronto — that will probably not get anything like as much coverage because it doesn’t support the prohibitionists’ narrative:

Earlier this summer — a summer that has seen Toronto wracked by gun violence — a report came out that suggested lawful Canadian gun owners were to blame for at least some of the violence. The article was originally published by the Canadian Press, and was widely republished elsewhere, including at the CBC, the National Post, a dozen local newspapers, CTV News, and, yes, here at Global News. Since then, it has been widely cited in other news stories covering the issue, including in The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. The report was everywhere.

Here’s the problem. Newly released stats show clearly that it was wrong.

The article was based around an interview with a Toronto Police Services detective, Rob Di Danieli. Det. Di Danieli told the Canadian Press that Canadians who were lawfully licensed to purchase and possess firearms were increasingly a public safety issue. “They go get their licence for the purpose of becoming a firearms trafficker,” Di Danieli told the CP. “A lot of people are so ready to blame the big bad Americans, but we had our own little problem here.”

The CP article hangs on this revelation from the detective. It notes, in various places, “The number of guns obtained legally in Canada but are then sold to people who use them for criminal purposes has surged dramatically in recent years compared to firearms smuggled from the United States, Toronto police say,” and, “In recent years [investigators say they] have noticed a stark shift in where guns used to commit crimes are coming from,” and, “Legal Canadian gun owners are selling their weapons illegally, Di Danieli said, noting that police have seen more than 40 such cases in recent years.”

[…]

At the time the CP story first ran, there were no publicly available stats to support (or contradict) what di Danieli had told them. But now, those numbers are publicly available, thanks to Dennis R. Young, an Alberta-based researcher who filed a Freedom of Information request with the Toronto police and published their reply on his website. And these stats tell a very different story.

“Over the Hills and Far Away” – Patty Gurdy (Gary Moore / Nightwish Hurdy Gurdy Cover)

Filed under: Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Patty Gurdy
Published on 4 Mar 2018

This instrument is called “hurdy gurdy” and has its roots in the medieval times. It works like a mechanical violin with a wheel bow, that can play bass, melody and rhythm all at once.

If you want to support me, give me a thumbs up and share this video on any social media platform you like! Thank you 🙂

Produced by/Drums played by: Olaf Abor
Cello played by: Sandra Schmitt
Filming by: Pushingpixels (Markus Felix) and Andreas Heller

September 5, 2018

The continuing paranoid style in American politics

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

John Gray discusses the mass psychosis that gripped the left in November 2016 and still has not slackened that grip:

Visiting New York a few weeks after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, I found myself immersed in a mass psychosis. The city’s intelligentsia was possessed by visions of conspiracy. No one showed any interest in the reasons Trump supporters may have had for voting as they did. Quite a few cited the low intelligence, poor education and retrograde values of the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him. What was most striking was how many of those with whom I talked flatly rejected the result. The election, they were convinced, had been engineered by a hostile power. It was this malignant influence, not any default of American society, that had upended the political order.

Conspiracy theory has long been associated with the irrational extremes of politics. The notion that political events can be explained by the workings of hidden forces has always been seen by liberals as a sign of delusional thinking. A celebrated study by the political scientist Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), linked the idea with the far Right. Yet in New York in December 2016, many of the brightest liberal minds exhibited the same derangement. Nearly two years later, they continue to reach to conspiracy theory as an explanation for their defeat.

The former lead book reviewer at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, devotes several pages to Hofsfadter’s work in her short polemic, The Death of Truth. Citing him approvingly, she notes that “the modern right wing” has “tended to be mobilised by a sense of grievance and dispossession”. As Hofstadter put it, they feel that “America has been largely taken away from them.” The charm of this citation is the lack of self-awareness it reveals. It would be difficult to find a better description of the anguish of liberals such as Kakutani, who feel they have been robbed of their historically appointed role as the moral and intellectual leaders of society.

For those who embrace it, a paranoid style of liberalism has some advantages. Relieved from any responsibility for the debacles they have presided over, the liberal elites that have been in power in many western countries for much of the past 30 years can enjoy the sensation of being victims of forces beyond their control. Conspiracy theory implies there is nothing fundamentally wrong with liberal societies, and places the causes of their disorder outside them. No one can reasonably doubt that the Russian state has been intervening in western politics. Yet only minds unhinged from reality can imagine that the decline of liberalism is being masterminded by Vladimir Putin. The principal causes of disorder in liberal societies are in those societies themselves.

September 4, 2018

“So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill on the funeral of “maverick” Republican senator John McCain:

So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment. It’s the old political order. It’s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump / Brexit era.

The response to McCain’s death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. ‘John McCain’s funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet’, said a headline in the New Yorker, alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is ‘the resistance’ now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations, the Washington establishment.

The New Yorker piece, like so much of the McCain commentary, praises to the heavens the anti-Trump theme of McCain’s funeral. McCain famously said Trump couldn’t attend his funeral. And that in itself was enough to win him the posthumous love of a liberal commentariat that now views everything through the binary moral framework of pro-Trump (evil, ill-informed, occasionally fascistic) and anti-Trump (decent, moral, on a par with the warriors against Nazism). Even better, though, was the fact that orators at the funeral, including McCain’s daughter Meghan and both Bush and Obama, used the church service to slam Trumpism, without explicitly mentioning it, and in the process to big-up what came before Trumpism, which of course was their rule, their politics, their establishment. The Washington political and media set might seem bitterly bipartisan, said the New Yorker writer, but it is also ‘more united’ in one important sense – ‘in its hatred of Donald Trump’.

[…]

The religious allusions, the talk of vengeance against Trump, the misremembering of McCain’s life so that it becomes a moral exemplar against the alleged crimes of Trumpism, exposes the infantile moralism of the so-called resistance. Albert Burneko, assessing some of the madder McCain commentary, says there is now a ‘condition’ that he calls ‘Resistance Brain’, where people display an ‘urge to grab and cling on to anything that seems, even a little bit, like it might be the thing that Finally Defeats Donald Trump’. Even if the thing they’re grabbing on to is actually a bad thing. Like a seemingly endless FBI investigation into the elected presidency. Or George W Bush, whose moral rehabilitation on the back of Anti-Trumpism has been extraordinary. Or neoconservatism: this was the scourge of liberal activists a decade ago, yet now its architects are praised because they subscribe to the religion of Anti-Trumpism. Being against Trump washes away all sins.

September 1, 2018

QotD: Raising “taking offence” to be the highest moral ground

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The rule used to be, “If you lose your shit, you’ve lost the game.”

Now it’s the exact opposite: “If you lose your shit and throw a tantrum, you win. Always. Because obviously the person who takes offense and flies into rage over nothing must have moral superiority over people who are calm and rational.”

The old rules are gone now, thanks to the juvenilizing effect of social media — where all 55 year old men pretend to be 13 year old girls. And not just for some perverted sexual goal, but because acting like a 13 year old mean girl is now just sort of how 55 year old men, who should know a damn lot better, have decided it’s appropriate to present themselves.

It’s also due, of course, to relentless conditioning by the left that there is no such thing as an immature emotional outburst that should be restrained, or a minor psychic boo-boo that should be ignored and toughed out.

The left has taught society that internal emotional restraint is not to be valorized any longer; not to be treated as a personal characteristic to be valued and further trained.

The left teaches exactly the opposite — that to restrain one’s pettier, immediate emotional outbursts is to counterfeit one’s True Self, a true self which is apparently a 10 year old with developmental disorders, and that what everyone must do to be #Woke is not merely permit oneself to descend into hysterics but to actively seek out reasons to descend into hysterics as frequently and as derangedly as possible.

This is all just to repeat the central insight of this still-bracing piece from Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The Coddling of the American Mind”. In this article — sorry that I’ve repeated its premise so many times — Lukianoff discusses a previous phobia he had, and how he went through the process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to no longer be phobic about it. Basically, CBT taught him to deliberately expose him to small doses of the thing he feared and keep telling himself There’s nothing to fear here, get over it until his sensitivity to that trigger went away.

Lukianoff realized that what is going on on college campuses now — and I would say, in society generally — is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but one pointed in the precise opposite direction. Rather than teaching people to not sweat minor things that might “trigger” them, to desensitize them to those triggers, this malignant version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches people to panic, throw conniptions, fly into hysterics, and descend into lower-animal rage over minor things.

Rather than training people to de-sensitize them to petty bothers, this malignant version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trains them to be hyper-sensitive to trivial things.

It’s not merely that we are no longer valorizing — promoting; holding up as an ideal to aspire to — the age-old and well-proven ethic of emotional restraint and mastery of self.

We’re now actively valorizing, promoting, and inculcating the exact opposite — emotional promiscuity and performative hysteria.

Ace, “An Observance of the Decay of Learned Restraint”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-08-09.

August 29, 2018

The History of Virtual Reality – Cyberpunk, Anime, and the Movies – Extra Sci Fi – #2

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

Extra Credits
Published on 28 Aug 2018

From William Gibson’s Burning Chrome which introduced the word “cyberpunk” into pop culture, to modern-day anime like Sword Art Online that explore if technology really isn’t in our control, our anticipation for VR has only accelerated in the last 30 years. Many thanks to Oculus Rift for sponsoring the next two episodes of Extra Sci Fi and giving us a chance to explore our collective definition of virtual reality.

August 22, 2018

“The current spate of Jew-baiting is … like a Lord Of the Flies of the Woke”

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

Julie Burchill‘s latest column at Spiked:

As a lifelong cheerleader for the Jewish people, these recent months have been bittersweet for me; a highly unusual example of not wanting to be proved right. I resigned from the Guardian a whopping 15 years ago in protest over what I perceived as its slimy anti-Semitism – and, it must be admitted, the offer of three times the wages from The Times. I often wonder how the left-wing Jewish half-wits who slammed me then feel now that they’ve been well and truly trashed by the bullies they sucked up to.

The current spate of Jew-baiting is interesting in that it’s like a Lord Of the Flies of the Woke; raised on tofu and now high on the taste of blood, the snowflakes have finally found a minority group it’s fine to demonise, and my gosh, doesn’t that Two Minute Twitter Hate feel good! (The meekness of the diaspora Jews makes them honorary women in the eyes of the left – then the toughness of the Israelis sends the brosocialists into a maelstrom of cognitive dissonance a gogo.) But I’m hoping my Jewish chums and I can put the unpleasantness out of our minds for a few tuneful hours when Trevor Nunn’s revival of Fiddler On The Roof opens in December, just in time for Hanukkah.

This heart-warming story follows the fortunes of a Jewish milkman living in a Russian village with his wife and five daughters as he fights to hold on to his dignity among growing anti-Semitism – what a relief that times have changed! In the spirit of keeping an open mind, I’m going to apply the popular PC theory of extreme type-casting to my appreciation of the new Fiddler, and sincerely trust that JEWS ONLY will be cast in the main roles – I don’t mind if Gentiles play such minor roles as Russian Official and Priest. After all, the singer Sierra Boggess, after being judged too pallid for the role of West Side Story’s Puerto Rican heroine Maria in the BBC Proms production, recanted in a positively Orwellian fashion after social-media monstering. As did Scarlett Johansson recently after being being bullied out of a putative role as a cross-dresser. Women, eh? Even the divas among us are so used to saying sorry that it’s a wonder we ever got the vote – imagine the Suffragettes today, going around apologising to racehorses for being insufficiently sensitive to their shared cultural oppression!

The History of Virtual Reality – A New Place to Call Home – Extra Sci Fi – #1

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 21 Aug 2018

From Aldous Huxley to Philip K. Dick, early references to virtual reality simulations abound in science fiction literature, and tremendously impacted consumer anticipation for VR technology available in the modern day. Many thanks to Oculus Rift for sponsoring the next two episodes of Extra Sci Fi and giving us a chance to explore our collective definition of virtual reality.

August 20, 2018

The Opium War

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jeffrey Chen reviews Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War:

The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the ‘Opium War,’ was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald; within months it would be echoed across the benches of Parliament and across the carronades of the fleet sent to punish the Chinese crackdown on British trade. The war’s nomenclature revealed from the beginning the multivalent views the British public held towards the war: it was at once the “unjust and iniquitous” Opium War — to use Gladstone’s well-known phrase — as well as the patriotic ‘China War,’ as its proponents wanted it to be called. The historiography of the war is similarly divided among varied lines. Some see the war as reflective of China’s failure to catch up to Western technologies; others emphasize the British desire to avenge their slighted national honour as the prime motive for the conflict. A wide array of scholars have placed a central focus on the role of opium, while some prefer to see the war in the context of imperial and economic expansion. Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War is a worthy addition to these voices.

Chen’s portrait of the Opium War places the role of British traders and their lobbying efforts in the foreground by arguing that it was British knowledge of China, as transmitted via the merchant class, that contributed to the ‘making’ (in the sense of both manufacture and execution) of the war. Chen asserts that it was the decade-long campaign of bellicose editorials and pamphlets on the part of the Canton merchant intelligentsia, as well as an accumulation of knowledge on the details of China’s coastal defences and overall military strength, that made it possible for Britain to both conceive of and win the war. The book casts, as its main actors, the ‘Warlike Party,’ a group of British merchants in Canton who lobbied for military intervention to expand the Canton System of trade, and the ‘Pacific Party,’ who opposed the war and criticised the diffusion of opium as an illicit and immoral drug. By narrowing his focus towards the production of knowledge, Chen also elevates the importance of language. A chapter of the book is devoted to a summary of the ‘Barbarian’ controversy – the disagreements and narratives spun around the British choice in translating the Chinese character 夷 (Yí) as ‘Barbarian,’ rather than ‘Foreigner.’

Chen’s account is thus of a battle as much between China and Britain as an internal conflict within the British public sphere. Though Chen is careful to nuance his depiction of the war by overlaying the many causal factors detailed by existing scholarship, his book makes two main arguments, which, in the words of the author, are new to the field: firstly, that the decisive factor in the war’s escalation was due to the machinations of the Warlike Party; and secondly, that the Canton System represented a ‘soft border’ through which the British were able to secure intelligence on the Qing state, without a reciprocal exchange of knowledge.

Written in engaging, lucid prose that presents its ideas clearly, if repetitively, Chen’s monograph is studded with riveting selections of his primary source research, drawn from the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge’s Jardine & Matheson archive. These quotations are often reproduced at generous length from the Warlike Party’s Canton Register and the Pacific Party’s Canton Press, and they provide a revealing account of the vigorous rhetorical strategies employed by the two camps.

August 16, 2018

Mainstreaming misandry

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

Somehow the notion that it’s totally okay — even praiseworthy — to preach hatred of men has re-entered the mainstream and, worse, is being taken seriously by people who should know much, much better:

“You can’t hate all men can you? Actually I can,” writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the New Statesman in 2016. “As a class, I hate men.” Men are not a class but this doesn’t deter Moore from continuing her peroration. “I think any intelligent woman hates men,” she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on – #yesallmen.

Meanwhile, in ‘The Cut’ section of the New York magazine, a member of the public writing in complains to the ‘agony aunt’ – the journalist Heather Havrilesky – that she “hates men” and is in danger of becoming a “cranky old bitch”. Heather suggests in reply that she simply embrace her inner bitch. “Most men are terrible,” she says. “Most men are shit.”

In addition, two articles on Medium – not quite as mainstream as New York magazine, the Washington Post, and the New Statesman, but certainly not fringe – echo the theme. Turns out, it’s not only (self-defined) man-hating women who have turned towards hate as a response to gender inequality. So have some men – like Anthony James Williams who writes in Medium that, “Women don’t have to like us, and history shows us that they have a right to hate us.”

In the charmingly titled ‘When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do? Ijeoma Oluo – the mother of two boys, God help them – writes,

    This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists. This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.

If reading such hatred is exhausting, actually generating it must be even more so. I suspect hate is a young person’s game (although Danuta Walkers and Moore are not exactly spring chickens). It is tempting to shrug off this new misandry as just silly and something of a sideshow, but it’s possible that it represents a real strand of rising consciousness. If that is the case, it is not merely silly – it is dangerous. I have occasionally indulged in group hatred – ISIS in their racist, faithist, head-hacking, innocent-slaughtering prime, the Conservative Party in the 1980s, anyone involved in Prog Rock – but it’s not a very healthy principle to base your life around.

What does it mean to hate an otherwise random and unrelated group of people, as opposed to a specific individual? We can all enjoy hating, say, Nazis, pedophiles, and ISIS executioners beheading an aid worker. Hate can be reassuring, which is why it is so seductive. But when one is hating Nazis, one is hating people who subscribe to an ideology, an idea. Pedophiles and ISIS executioners are historically smaller groups, but they are also defined by a particular idea – sexual attraction to children and the cult of death. At some level, they’ve made a choice. No one is born a Nazi or an Islamist murderer, and even if Pedophilia is genetically influenced, that doesn’t absolve its perpetrators of guilt. However, hating men is not hating an idea or an abhorrent form of behaviour. It is hating half the world’s population, rich and poor, kind and cruel, black and white, gay and straight, just because they happen to have a Y chromosome.

To hate such a disparate group seems – is – demented. However, there is a prism through which it makes perfect sense, the prism constructed by the odd and contradictory fusion of neo-Marxism and post-modernism.

August 14, 2018

Demon Hunters S.O.L.: Cleanup Crew

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Zombie Orpheus Entertainment
Published on 23 Jul 2018

Honor. Glory. Adventure. The Clean-Up Crew gets none of these things. What they do get is every dirty, stinky, nasty job on this plane of existence. When you need a demon slain, call someone else. When you need that demon’s corpse to be disposed of per Guideline 345b while keeping the normies none the wiser? That’s when you call the Clean-Up Crew. It’s a dirty job, and they are the ones who have to do it.

Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.

August 13, 2018

Publish, perish … or cheat

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

In the Vancouver Sun, Douglas Todd tells the story of a Canadian academic who’s risked his career to expose what most of us would consider widespread cheating in academic publications:

A determined B.C. economics professor has journeyed into the heart of a dark world where academics seeking to advance their careers have had hundreds of thousands of their articles published for a fee in journals that either deserve suspicion or are outright phoney.

In academia, where the admonition to “publish or perish” is not an empty threat, it is often difficult for scholars to have their research published in legitimate journals, let alone top ones. But it’s becoming increasingly common for academics to get articles produced in questionable journals, just by forking over $100 to $2,500 Cdn.

Derek Pyne, a Thompson Rivers University economist who was granted tenure in 2015, is among the global academics who are exposing the deceptive journals, sometimes at a risk to their careers. Experts say these journals are chipping away at scientific, medical and educational credibility — and wasting the money of the taxpayers who largely finance public colleges and universities.

Pyne’s pioneering research has been cited by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. On June 23, The Economist, in a piece on blacklisted journals, praised the B.C. scholar, remarking: “This is an area in which data are hard to come by. But one academic has been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own institution.”

His dedication to truth, however, has not gone well for Pyne, who might be turning into one of the most noted professors at Thompson Rivers University. He has been at the public Kamloops institution since 2010, specializing in economic and mathematical theory related to education, religion, trade and crime.

On July 17, however, Pyne was suspended without pay. That’s after being banned on May 17 from the picturesque campus on a Kamloops hillside.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

QotD: The new Wobblies

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I live in two worlds. One has www in front of it. I must admit I don’t like the imaginary place that’s become the ironclad version of reality for most people. The jackanapes who rule the Friendface planet are the worst people extant, if you ask me. By the way, if you’re reading this, you asked me.

I don’t like the invertebrates who run the Intertunnel. I’ve decided they need a name. Let’s coin the term right here and now: The Wobblies. The Website Wankers of the World have united into a Voltron of suck, and they rule this alternate ecosystem that’s taken over the real world. They don’t care if anything productive happens in the brave new world they’ve created. As long as they lord over the nonproduction, of course.

Sippican, “Minor Swing by Minors”, Sippican Cottage, 2016-11-05.

August 12, 2018

QotD: Journalism

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

David Burge (@iowahawkblog), Twitter, 2013-05-09.

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