Extra Credits
Published on 24 Apr 2018Sci fi “pulp” stories sometimes have a reputation for being cheesy and over-dramatic, but they were extremely important for building up the sci fi genre as something *anyone* could write for AND get paid for — not just famous authors.
April 25, 2018
Hugo Gernsback – Pulp! Amazing Stories – Extra Sci Fi
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April 24, 2018
The Windrush scandal in Britain
Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:
The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.
For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.
It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.
The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.
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April 22, 2018
Planes, Guns and Automobiles I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 1 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published on 21 Apr 2018The year 1919 was the year when the world took the first step into the age of mass communication. Wartime developments now create the aviation industry, mass produced cars, broadcast media and … more guns.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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The balance-of-trade hobbyhorse
Don Boudreaux doesn’t have much sympathy with people who agonize over or — worse — set their national economic policies based on the balance of trade:
No concept in economics is responsible for more confusion and policy mischief than is the so-called “balance of trade.” The many fallacious beliefs about a trade deficit include the notion that –
– aggregate demand drains from each economy that runs a trade (or current-account) deficit, thus causing overall employment to fall in each country that runs a trade deficit;
– the GDP of a country that runs a trade deficit is lowered by that trade deficit;
– the denizens of a country that runs a trade deficit spend too much on consumption and save too little;
– a trade deficit is evidence of poor policy in any country that runs such a deficit;
– a country’s trade deficit would be ‘cured’ if only the people of that country were to save more or to buy fewer imports;
– a trade deficit in the home economy is evidence of ‘unfair’ trade practices by that country’s trading partners;
– a trade deficit means that each country that runs one is “losing,” and that to “win” at trade means running a trade surplus (or, at least, to not run a trade deficit);
– a trade deficit run by the home economy means that that economy’s trading partners who have trade surpluses are being enriched at the expense of the people in the home economy;
– a trade deficit necessarily makes the citizens of any country that runs one more indebted to foreigners;
– a trade deficit involves a net transfer of capital or asset ownership from citizens of each country that runs a trade deficit to citizens of countries that run trade surpluses;
– each dollar (or each yen, or each euro, or each peso, or each pound, or each you-name-the-currency) of a country’s trade deficit today means that the people of that country must sacrifice that much consumption sometime in the future;
– bilateral trade deficits have economic meaning and relevance;
– a trade deficit is something that should be “fixed” – that is, reduced or eliminated – through government policy, including especially through trade restrictions.
None of the above-listed beliefs about trade deficits is supportable. None. Not one. Not in the least. Each and every one of these beliefs is easily refuted with either basic economics or, in many cases, with simply a clarification of the definitions of terms and concepts used in national-income accounting. And yet these – and no doubt other – false beliefs about trade deficits (and about the so-called “balance-of-payments” generally) are widespread and spill daily from the mouths and keyboards of politicians, pundits, professors, and propagandists.
The belief that trade deficits cause economic problems in countries that run them – and that trade deficits necessarily reflect poor policies or profligacy by the people of those countries – is the economic equivalent of, say, the belief that the world is ruled by sorcerers who ride fire-breathing dragons and who marry their daughters off to centaurs. Both sets of beliefs are pure madness, yet one of them serves as the basis for real-world policies.
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The Lament for the Rohirrim – Lord of the Rings – Clamavi De Profundis
Clamavi De Profundis
Published on 31 Mar 2018Here is our version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem, “The Lament for the Rohirrim!” We hope you enjoy it:)
A note on our interpretation:
We approached this piece more “organically”. The melody was composed by singing the lyrics, seeking to be true to the notion of vocal folk tradition. Therefore, the feel of this song is more rhythmically free and more focused on simply dwelling on the questions and answers of the text. There are two sections of the piece: the melody is sung first in a “contemplative” setting, and then repeated in a more “epic” setting, to explore varying sentiments drawn from this beautiful text.
We hope you enjoy this as much as we did creating it! Thanks very much for listening and for your support!
We are unable to get permission to sell this song so we are posting it here free for your enjoyment. If you want a copy of the mp3, we are offering it to those who support us on Patreon!
My brother composed and arranged the piece. My family sang it.
Please no bad language in the comments. We want this to be family friendly:)
Lyrics:
Where now the horse and the rider?
Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk,
And the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring,
And the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest
And the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain,
Like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?
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April 20, 2018
April 18, 2018
Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility
ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.
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John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?
“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”
The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”
Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”
Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.
“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”
Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
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Bo Burnham – Today’s Country Songs
J GiL
Published on 8 Jul 2016
H/T to Victor for the link.
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April 16, 2018
QotD: The Canadian media
Ezra Levant, who now runs the Rebel Media online empire as a successor to the deceased Sun News TV network, has a long-running joke/critique about a “Media Party” that croons in unison on every public issue. Every time he mentions the “Media Party,” we, the Media Party, all fall into the same cross and scornful mood. We commiserate ironically with all our old co-workers at rival titles or channels about how there’s totally no such thing as a Media Party.
Ezra knows how to market, whatever else you want to say about him. He is out to devour our audiences and show, if mostly by loud assertion, that we in the Party are all lazy and lily-livered. He is not afraid to say that all the parts of the Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s ecosystem are inferior to his thingamabob. We don’t compete with each other like he does: we lack the spirit of the feud. We all sense there might actually be some kind of unified, monstrous Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s publication one day. And we want to be able to work for it. So even Posties are reluctant to say that the Globe on most days appears to have been edited by a dead Tory prime minister and printed on cobwebs, or that the Star sometimes seems to regard personal nastiness as a social-democratic credential.
The National Post was born in a spirit of newspaper war. If you tried to start such a war today it would seem absurdly counterproductive, almost suicidally stupid; and maybe it was. Now we are all just hanging on for dear life.
Colby Cosh, “Go ahead, hate the media – we deserve it”, National Post, 2016-07-25.
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April 15, 2018
QotD: Political words
When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946.
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April 12, 2018
Canadian Music Policy Coalition pushes to revive the idea of an “iPod tax”
Michael Geist on one particular rent-seeking submission to the federal government pushing for changes to Canadian copyright law:
The long-awaited Canadian copyright review is set to kick off hearings next week as a House of Commons committee embarks on a year-long process that will hear from a wide range of stakeholders. My Globe and Mail op-ed notes that according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, however, one stakeholder – the Canadian Music Policy Coalition, an umbrella group representing 17 music associations – got an early start on the review process last fall by quietly submitting a 30-page reform proposal to government officials.
The proposal, titled “Sounding Like a Broken Record: Principled Copyright Recommendations from the Music Industry”, calls for radical changes that would spark significant new consumer fees and Internet regulation. The plan features new levies on smartphones and tablets, Internet service provider tracking of subscribers and content blocking, longer copyright terms, and even the industry’s ability to cancel commercial agreements with Internet companies if the benefits from the deal become “disproportionate.”
The coalition, which includes the Canadian Council of Music Industry Associations, the Canadian Music Publishers Association, and copyright collectives such as SOCAN, asks the government to follow three main principles as part of its reform process: real-world applicability, forward-thinking rights, and consistent rules.
But the coalition proposal largely avoids discussing the current state of the industry, perhaps with the intent of leaving some with the impression that file sharing remains a significant problem. The reality is the music industry in Canada, led by the massive growth of authorized music streaming services, has enjoyed a remarkable string of successes since the last time copyright law was overhauled in 2012.
The Canadian music market is growing much faster than the world average, with Canada jumping past Australia last year to become the sixth largest music market in the world. Music collective SOCAN, a coalition member, has seen Internet streaming revenues balloon from $3.4 million in 2013 to a record-setting $49.3 million in 2017.
Moreover, data confirms that music piracy has diminished dramatically in Canada. Music Canada reports that Canada is below global averages for “stream ripping”, the process of downloading streamed versions of songs from services such as YouTube. Last month Sandvine reported that file sharing technology BitTorrent is responsible for only 1.6 per cent of Canadian Internet traffic, down from as much as 15 per cent in 2014.
Yet despite the success of Internet streaming services and the marginalization of file sharing activity, the coalition has crafted a reform proposal that would be more at home in 2008 than in 2018. For example, the industry is now calling for new fees to be set by the Copyright Board on all smartphones and tablets to compensate for personal copying. The revival of the so-called “iPod tax” would today go far further than just digital music players, as the coalition is asking the government to amend the Copyright Act to allow for fees to be imposed on all devices.
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April 11, 2018
Mumbai’s high court demonstrates lack of economic knowledge in theatre ruling
Movie theatres and multiplexes generally charge more for the concessions than sometimes adjacent businesses in the same area, and also usually forbid patrons from bringing in their own food to consume on the premises. A recent case before the Bombay High Court argued that this was unfair to moviegoers and the court agreed:
Bombay High Court in Mumbai
© A.Savin, Wikimedia Commons
This is an interesting little test of the judicial system – you know, those told that the Beatles were a popular beat combo – on the subject of property rights. The Bombay High Court has just failed this test too. The question is, multiplex cinemas, why is the food so expensive in them? The correct answer is because the owners of multiplex cinemas make a profit in that manner. According to the court this doesn’t wash. In fact, they seem not to have even considered the argument in that manner:
The Bombay High Court has ruled that food items and bottled water be sold at regular prices inside multiplexes. The directive was issued by a division bench of Justices S.M. Kemkar and M.S. Karnik last week in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Mumbai resident Jainendra Baxi. He had challenged the prohibition on carrying outside food in movie theatres and multiplexes across Maharashtra.
The economics here is simple enough. The people who order food inside the cinema, at those higher prices, subsidise the others who only buy the ticket to see the movie. Sure, that’s not the first round outcome, but it is the competitive equilibrium. Cinema owners being able to profit from food makes the basic ticket cheaper.
The rights based part is also simple enough. I’m running a business, I can and should be able to decide how people access that business. If I’m running a restaurant I’m entirely at liberty to insist that you only get to consume things at my table that you’ve bought from me. Even if I show a film at the same time.
Another way to put this is that the judges have just failed Chesterton’s Fence. They’ve not grasped why the limitation is in place to start with, therefore they see nothing wrong in ridding everyone of the limitation. And the net effect of this is going to be higher multiplex cinema ticket prices for everyone in Maharashtra.
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