April 15, 2011
Arousing the voters, Menorcan style
It’s a perennial problem: how do you manage to get the voters interested in your candidacy? How can you get them excited? Sole Sánchez Mohamed has an answer for you:
A Menorcan political candidate has caused a bit of a rumpus ahead of Spain’s forthcoming municipal elections with a seriously in-your-face advert in the local press.
Sole Sánchez Mohamed, head of the Partit Democràtic de Ciutadella (PDC), posed with an evidently willing pair of male hands to make her point, or rather, pair of points. The caption declares: “Two great arguments.”
To further her election cause, the wannabe mayoress of Ciutadella appeared in monthly magazine Més Iris Menorca dressed only in her smalls while adopting “sadomasochistic poses”, as you can see here (NSFW).
And you folks complain about “attack ads” in Canadian elections.
April 13, 2011
“Using the principle of ‘demonstrated preference,’ this music video ranks as the most popular in human history”
Jon sent me this article by Jeffrey Tucker which re-interprets Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as a libertarian allegory:
Far more significant is the underlying celebration of liberation that the day Friday represents. The kids featured in the video are of junior-high age, a time when adulthood is beginning to dawn and, with it, the realization of the captive state that the public school represents.
From the time that children are first institutionalized in these tax-funded cement structures, they are told the rules. Show up, obey the rules, accept the grades you are given, and never even think of escaping until you hear the bell. If you do escape, even peacefully of your own choice, you will be declared “truant,” which is the intentional and unauthorized absence from compulsory school.
This prison-like environment runs from Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to late afternoon, for at least ten years of every child’s life. It’s been called the “twelve-year sentence” for good reason. At some point, every kid in public school gains consciousness of the strange reality. You can acquiesce as the civic order demands, or you can protest and be declared a bum and a loser by society.
“Friday” beautifully illustrates the sheer banality of a life spent in this prison-like system, and the prospect of liberation that the weekend means. Partying, in this case, is just another word for freedom from state authority.
The largest segment of the video then deals with what this window of liberty, the weekend, means in the life of someone otherwise ensnared in a thicket of statism. Keep in mind here that the celebration of Friday in this context means more than it would for a worker in a factory, for example: for the worker is free to come and go, to apply for a job or quit, to negotiate terms of a contract, or whatever. All of this is denied to the kid in public school.
Leaders’ debate provides no significant changes
I didn’t bother watching the first debate on TV last night, as I didn’t think there would be any purpose in doing so. Lots of people seem to have felt the same way, as polling immediately after the debate showed little change in support:
It was Stephen Harper’s debate to lose — and he did not.
It was Michael Ignatieff’s debate to win — and he did not.
A poll done exclusively for QMI Agency immediately after Tuesday night’s English-language debate shows that English-speaking Canada was, by and large, unmoved by the two-hour duel among the four party leaders.
Asked who won the debate, 37% of those surveyed by Leger Marketing said Harper was the victor. About 21% said Ignatieff won.
Those numbers roughly mirror voter support in polls Leger has done before and during the election campaign.
April 11, 2011
Election bombshell in leak of Auditor General’s report?
The Winnipeg Free Press has a potentially explosive article about a leak of part of the Auditor General’s report:
The Harper government misinformed Parliament to win approval for a $50-million G8 fund that lavished money on dubious projects in a Conservative riding, the auditor general has concluded.
And she suggests the process by which the funding was approved may have been illegal.
The findings are contained in the draft of a confidential report Sheila Fraser was to have tabled in Parliament on April 5. The report analyzed the $1-billion cost of staging last June’s G8 summit in Ontario cottage country and a subsequent gathering of G20 leaders in downtown Toronto.
It was put on ice when the Harper government was defeated and is not due to be released until sometime after the May 2 election. However, a Jan. 13 draft of the chapter on the G8 legacy infrastructure fund was obtained by a supporter of an opposition party and shown to The Canadian Press.
This could be the big break that the opposition parties have been waiting for: the leak is just about perfectly timed for maximum effect (just before the first debate), and the Auditor General has refused to discuss the news story or to give any interviews during the election campaign.
Wormme mashes up Theodore Sturgeon and Frederick Winslow Taylor
wormme read an older Atlantic article linked from Instapundit and had this to say:
Via Insty, this is one of the best things I’ve ever read. It eviscerates the myth of management competence the way that Joe Biden destroys the idea of government competence. But let’s take a step back from the specifics of business management. Look at all the other occupations that share management’s main trait.
Because in reality they’re all the same thing.
Here’s some fields in which competence is assumed, all evidence to the contrary: government, law, management, education, economics, scholarship, and all journalistic media.
Notice what they all have in common? As a primary feature?
Jaw flappin’, tongue waggin’, hot air spewin’ talkety talk talk words blah blah blah.
“Them that can, do. Them that can’t, teach.” And manage and report and govern. But you don’t hear that adage anymore, do you? The Talkers have brainwashed people into thinking they’re Doers as well.
I expect this is the thing that actually brings down Western Civilization. The Doers letting the Talkers take over the Doings.
The chin-waggin’ industries want “ex cathedra” status for their every mumble. How do they repay? By finding nothing but fault in the Doers: industries, energy production, “big box” stores, etc., all the way down to the evil of the Happy Meal.
This still wouldn’t have spelled civilization’s doom, had the Talkies remained apart. Journalism in particular is supposed to report on lies and wrongdoing. And they do so with gusto, when investigating Doers. Do you ever see them going after fellow Talkers like that? They’re in cahoots. Total…cahoots.
April 9, 2011
Upheaval in Finnish politics?
Ilkka is enjoying the spectacle of the “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) folks in Finland who are horrified at the rise of a new party:
Canada will have yet another federal election that will bring yet another minority government, and back in the old country, the parliamentary elections have begun with the first early voting days, and the right-wing protest party True Finns is predicted to grab a significant chunk of the parliamentary seats. The impotent tantrum of the SWPL greens and leftists, along with the media that they still mostly control, reacting to the cognitive dissonance of the working class abandoning them has certainly been a laugh riot. Besides, this whole surge illustrates how just one voice of just the right pitch can smash a sufficiently ossified, smug and complacent echo chamber to little shards of glass by its mere existence. One can only imagine what the Finland of the 1970’s would have been like, had the Internet existed back then to give these voices a voice, as all leftism and progressivism can keep the reality at bay only if they get to have a totalitarian control of all media to constrain the parameters of debate.
April 8, 2011
Swearing in soccer? Gasp! Shock! Horror!
Duleep Allirajah wonders how the Football Association has managed to avoid hearing what soccer players say on the pitch until now:
Rooney swore? So f***ing what
Those fretting over the footballer’s anglo-saxon turn of phrase have clearly never been to a match before.
Wayne Rooney’s angry outburst was curious. What did it mean? Who was he addressing? In appearing to pick a fight with a TV camera, it immediately struck me as an homage to Robert De Niro’s famous ‘You talking to me?’ scene in Taxi Driver. But maybe I’m reading too much into it.
In a statement issued by his club, the player said: ‘Emotions were running high, and on reflection my heat-of-the-moment reaction was inappropriate. It was not aimed at anyone in particular.’ Maybe he was railing against his inner demons. Maybe there is no deeper meaning. Maybe it was a release of pent-up frustration after months of domestic strife and poor goal-scoring form.
But enough of my speculative interpretation, it’s the Football Association’s response that we should really be bothered about. The FA has banned Rooney for two matches for using ‘offensive, insulting and/or abusive language’. You don’t need to be a lipreader to work out that footballers swear quite a lot; every Saturday you’ll find them effing and blinding like proverbial troopers. But while disciplinary action for abusing match officials is nothing new, a ban for swearing per se is quite unprecedented.
April 7, 2011
When to drink a wine
Michael Pinkus tries to answer the inevitable question “When should I drink this wine?”
What I find myself telling people-who-ask sounds like a huge cop-out. I end up turning it around and asking them whether they like their wines fresh and fruity or with a little age on them, edging more towards the dried fruit or foresty floor.
Truth is, most people prefer their wines to have fruit rather than floor, which explains why new world producers, especially those in Chile, Argentina and Australia, do so well, their fruit is fresh, full and mouth-filling, especially at the time when most people drink them. Studies have shown that 90% of all wine is drunk within 24 hours of purchase, and 95% within 48 hours. That means that only 5% of you are lying your wines down for any length of time. That also means that you’re missing out on the best part of wine, its never-ending change-ability.
I trust that most of you have seen the movie Sideways — I seem to stick it into the DVD player (now Blu-ray) every year, it’s like catching up with old friend (granted they seem stuck in a Groundhog Day-like cycle — but until a sequel comes along I’m stuck with them). Anyway, I’m not ruining anything (for those who haven ‘t seen it) when I quote Maya here on the allure, and never-ending change-ability, of wine:
“It’s a living thing.” She begins. “… I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks … And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.”
It’s rare for me to open a bottle of wine within 48 hours of purchase, unless I’m travelling, but I’ve seen this stat quoted frequently. I think it’s sad that so many people are missing out on the (in my opinion) greater pleasure of tasting wines that have been given an opportunity to mature. On the other hand, 90% of the wine that is made today isn’t intended to mature: wine makers respond to economic incentives just as much as everyone else does, and if that kind of wine sells well, that’s what they’ll end up producing.
Friend of Randian cultists afraid to say what he really means
The victim of Objectivist intimidation is poor little P.J. O’Rourke, who has to be very careful how he reviews Atlas Shrugged:
Atlas shrugged. And so did I.
The movie version of Ayn Rand’s novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.
Meanwhile, members of that tribe of “Atlas Shrugged” fans will be wondering why director Paul Johansson doesn’t knock it off with the incantations, sacraments and recitations of liturgy and cut to the human sacrifice.
But that’s about as far as he dares to go, risking retribution from Randian cultists. Oh, wait . . . he does go a tiny bit further towards martyrdom after all:
But I will not pan “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians — and I do — saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead.
The woman is a force. But, let us not forget, she’s a force for good. Millions of people have read “Atlas Shruggged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20th century, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and — I’m just saying — crazy old bat. But the 20th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.
April 6, 2011
A good example of what not to crowdsource
The Guardian tried to enlist the brainpower of the crowd to solve the problems at Fukushima. As innovative as some of these solutions might be, it does demonstrate that there are things that cannot be crowdsourced:
Todd: “Build the worlds biggest tank over the whole site with pre-fab tilt slab concrete. […] I have done similar projects on a smaller scale but not with nuclear waste.”
Weston, Nuclear Radiologist: “repair the reacters befor any thing else bad happiens”
Andrew, Inventor: “water problem is un-fixable. Stop trying. Let it run off into the Pacific.”
Hugh, Geology Student: “I would use explosive materials to detach the Fukushima plant from the main land, use air-bags to float it 50km out into the pacific and then sink the whole lot 7000m down to the bottom of the Japan Trench.”
Max: “I suggest removing radioactive contamination there by using a small controlled explosion of a specially engineered nuclear device at the site of the stricken Fukushima plant”
OmegaSector: “IN FUTURE, ALL NEW NUCLEAR REACTOR MUST BE BUILT OVER A 1.2 km hole. Any out of control reactor, one press of a buttom and boom, the reactor will fail down 1.2 km and then seal up with soil.”
Denny, Assistant to Dr Strangelove: “Small scale nuclear strike.”
Kevin: “Japan has over 30,000 suicides per year — that’s over 80 per day. Since these people are planning to kill themselves anyway, how about the government asking for volunteers to go in, fix piping, visually inspect the damage, etc..?”
Not Einstein: “friendly radiation… to probably cancel out its effects. Its more like injecting good cholesterols to fight off bad ones in your body. I am not versed in these nuclear technicalities but I do understand philosophy of things, and sometimes you just need to fight fire with fire.”
Oscar. Mike. Golf.
April 5, 2011
Monbiot: the anti-nuclear lobby has mislead us all
George Monbiot has had an uncomfortable year of revelations. Full credit to him for being willing to admit in public that he was wrong:
Over the last fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.
I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott. Dr Caldicott is the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. She has received 21 honorary degrees and scores of awards, and was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. Like other greens, I was in awe of her. In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott’s response has profoundly shaken me.
First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so — all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.
I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink — in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.
H/T to Chris Greaves for the link.
Update: Here’s wormme with a remarkably timely example of the sort of thing that George Monbiot encountered:
And Rana included this report, subtitled “Experts warn that any detectable level of radiation is “too much”.”
The only “experts” who would say that are political activists who are either ignorant of science or traitors to it.
“The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no level of radiation that is so low that it is without health risks,” Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation,
There’s only three possibilities here: 1) whoever testified for the DOE did a truly awful job (doubtful), 2) Ms. Cabasso misunderstood the testimony and paraphrased it according to her liking (quite likely), or 3) Ms. Cabasso is a dirty little liar (don’t rule it out).
For chronic (long-term) concerns, the DOE (and NRC) use the linear no-threshold model.
“But what does that mean,” our non-geeks cry. It means it’s assumed that any increase in dose is an increase in long-term risk. No threshold, see?
So is this model true? No. Anyone expert in radiation knows it isn’t true, because we have the whole wide world to look at. And natural doses vary greatly. People pick up between 200 and 2000 mrem/year (2-20 mSv). With absolutely no harm observed at higher doses, so how is there heightened risk? And thousands of Taiwanese picked up 5000-6000 mrem/year (50-60 mSv) for years and years and had a much lower incidence of cancer than usual.
Then why do the DOE and NRC assume risk? Because they couldn’t prove there isn’t. Still can’t, despite the real world examples above.
But that is also true about everything. Marshmallows have killed in the past, and they will in the future. Dihydrogen oxide is the greatest mass murderer of all time.
Ionizing radiation is held to standards that would basically outlaw every other activity and material on earth. Fukushima is proof of that. No one has been killed by radiation, but we’re staring at maybe 25,000 dead. And how much have we heard about non-nuke carcinogens, no doubt swirling around by the ton?
Top Gear‘s Mexican jokes ruled not in breach of broadcasting regulations
In a surprisingly robust defence of free speech, Ofcom (the British broadcasting regulator) will not apply sanctions against BBC’s popular motoring show Top Gear for their anti-Mexican jokes during a review of the Mastretta MXT:
The watchdog noted that Top Gear is “well-known for its irreverent style and sometimes outspoken humour” and that it “frequently uses national stereotypes as a comedic trope and that there were few, if any, nationalities that had not at some point been the subject of the presenters’ mockery”.
Given the audience’s likely familiarity with the presenters’ “mocking, playground-style humour”, Ofcom suggested the majority of viewers “would therefore be likely to have understood that the comments were being made for comic effect”.
The ruling concludes: “Ofcom is not an arbiter of good taste, but rather it must judge whether a broadcaster has applied generally accepted standards by ensuring that members of the public were given adequate protection from offensive material. Humour can frequently cause offence. However, Ofcom considers that to restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression.”
The jokes and the Mexican government’s response were discussed in February.
The Wikileaks view of Indian politics
Pankaj Mishra talks about the ongoing release of information on India and the political and mercantilist string-pullers who infest every government function:
Food prices become intolerable for the poor. Protests against corruption paralyse the national parliament for weeks on end. Then a series of American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks exposes a brazenly mendacious and venal ruling class; the head of government adored by foreign business people and journalists loses his moral authority, turning into a lame duck.
This sounds like Tunisia or Egypt before their uprisings, countries long deprived of representative politics and pillaged by the local agents of neoliberal capitalism. But it is India, where in recent days WikiLeaks has highlighted how national democratic institutions are no defence against the rapacity and selfishness of globalised elites.
Most of the cables — being published by the Hindu, the country’s most respected newspaper in English — offer nothing new to those who haven’t drunk the “Rising India” Kool-Aid vended by business people, politicians and their journalist groupies. The evidence of economic liberalisation providing cover for a wholesale plunder of the country’s resources has been steadily mounting over recent months. The loss in particular of a staggering $39bn in the government’s sale of the telecom spectrum has alerted many Indians to the corrupt nexuses between corporate and political power.
April 4, 2011
Tweet of the day: Charlie Sheen
Faux John Madden: Charlie Sheen has bombed in Chicago and Detroit. All that’s left is for him to bomb in Green Bay and he’s duplicated the Vikings season.
