Quotulatiousness

December 14, 2024

Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

To the left, Gabbard is widely criticized as some sort of Russian pawn, while to many on the right she’s unacceptable as a former Democrat and “girlboss”. Despite this, J.D. Tuccille says President-elect Donald Trump seems quite confident that she’s the right person for the job:

Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

United States President-elect Donald Trump is standing behind Tulsi Gabbard, his pick to be director of national intelligence. Like several of Trump’s nominees, former Democratic congresswoman Gabbard is controversial in D.C.-insider circles, and understandably so; she’s skeptical of the political establishment, often criticizes foreign policy and was apparently subject to surveillance and put on a terrorist watch list because of her dissident ways. In other words, she’s a rather promising nominee for an incoming administration that wants to completely revamp government institutions that desperately need reform.

Asked this week by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he has confidence in Gabbard despite objections raised in certain circles to her past actions and positions, Trump responded, “I do. I mean, she’s a very respected person.”

Trump was specifically asked about two meetings Gabbard had in 2017 with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now in exile, al-Assad and his relationships with American politicians shouldn’t be much of a worry anymore, but he plays a part in the official panic over Gabbard’s views on foreign policy.

In 2019, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton famously called Gabbard a “Russian asset“. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, aroused Clinton’s ire with her anti-interventionism in foreign policy matters and criticism of the political establishment and its hawkishness during the course of a short-lived campaign for her party’s presidential nomination.

“There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them. That does not mean the U.S. should be waging regime-change wars around the world,” Gabbard told CNN in early 2019. Her long-standing fears of Islamist extremism led her to consider al-Assad a less-bad alternative to a potential fundamentalist regime.

Gabbard returned Clinton’s slight by calling her “the queen of warmongers” and the “embodiment of corruption”. It’s unsurprising that the two no longer share a political party.

Gabbard’s dissent from establishment orthodoxy doesn’t stop at military matters. In 2020, she joined with libertarian-leaning Republican Thomas Massie, from Kentucky, to call on the U.S. government to cease its persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government when he published leaked documents revealing embarrassing details about official misconduct in Iraq and elsewhere.

Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates

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

The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:

📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.

In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…

Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.

It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.

This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.

And a follow-up response to another comment:

THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.

QotD: The One Ring in Lord of the Rings

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

Arguably the most famous piece of jewellery in all of fiction, the Ring is not only a brilliant plot device, capable of linking events that take place centuries apart; it is also the focus of one of Tolkien’s most important themes: power.

Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not fond of allegorical fiction. He had no time for the idea that the Ring — extremely dangerous but hard to get rid of — was an allegory of the atomic bomb. Rather, it was exactly what he said it was: an embodiment of power and the corrupting effects of power.

Tolkien shows us that the only people who can be trusted with great power are those who don’t really want it — or who do, but have the moral strength to reject it. Even then, it’s touch-and-go, the burden of responsibility taking a terrible toll on the reluctant bearer.

Numerous commentaries have been written on this aspect of the story — often summed up by the Lord Acton quote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Which is true enough. But Tolkien was onto a whole lot more than that …

Let’s begin at the beginning. The Ring was made at great cost to Sauron, its creator. He poured much of his own strength into an external object — one from which he could be separated, which in due course he was. So why take the risk? Sauron, though evil, was possessed of great cunning — why did he expose himself to such a vulnerability? Did old JRR just not think it through? Does the Ring actually represent a massive hole in the plot?

Not a bit of it. When you understand what Tolkien understood about the nature of power, it all makes perfect sense.

In a letter, he once wrote that the Ring was a “mythological way of presenting the truth that potency … if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passed, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control”. This is a crucial insight into the way Tolkien understood power to work.

Peter Franklin, “Tolkien’s guide to contemporary politics”, Unherd, 2019-12-24.

December 13, 2024

Kemi Badenoch … a Thatcher for the 2020s?

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

In The Free Press, Oliver Wiseman wonders if new British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch will do for her party what Margaret Thatcher did after she was elected leader in 1975:

“I like fixing things that are broken,” says Kemi Badenoch in her interview with Bari on the latest episode of Honestly. Badenoch, 44, was elected as the new leader of the UK’s Conservatives last month. And luckily for her, there are a lot of things that are broken.

One of them is her party.

In July, after fourteen years in office, the Tories were unceremoniously booted from power. They lost more than 250 of their Members of Parliament in the biggest electoral defeat in the party’s history. On the long road back to power, Badenoch must contend not only with a Labour government with a huge majority in Parliament, but also Nigel Farage — the Brexit-backing populist is on a mission to supplant the Conservative Party as the main alternative to Labour.

If Badenoch somehow manages to fix her party and return to power, she must then figure out a way to fix Britain — a country where wages have stagnated for a generation, public debt has ballooned, and there’s widespread anger at high rates of immigration. As another Brit, Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, put it recently in these pages: “Lately it seems that mine is a country with a death wish.” (Read his full account of what ails the UK here.)

In other words, Badenoch has a daunting in tray. And yet many — including Niall — are bullish on Badenoch, who he believes could be a “black Thatcher”.

As a woman in charge of the Conservative Party, Badenoch was bound to be compared to the Iron Lady. But in this case there are undeniable parallels. Much like Thatcher, Badenoch mixes steely determination with charm and charisma. She also, like Thatcher, knows what she believes. Her diagnosis of her party’s problems is straightforward: It has strayed too far from the values that have historically made it — and Britain — so successful.

And while Thatcher and Badenoch’s backgrounds are very different — one grew up in provincial England, the other spent most of her childhood in Nigeria — they are both self-made women with an appetite for hard work. Badenoch’s own story, and her family’s, is central to her politics. “I know what it is like to be wealthy and also to be poor,” she says today on Honestly.

There’s one other Badenoch–Thatcher parallel: the circumstances in which they took over their party’s leadership. Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975 — then, like today, a malaise had descended over the country, one that would lift during her time in office. These comparisons may be unavoidable, but does Badenoch welcome them? Bari asked her that in their conversation. “She is a heroine of mine. So it’s very flattering,” said Badenoch. “But it’s also quite heavy and she’s a different person. I admire her. But I want people to recognize that I’m not a pastiche of this person, that I am my own person.”

December 11, 2024

Canada’s current situation, as viewed by Fortissax

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Government, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fortissax recently spoke to an audience in Toronto. This is part of the transcript of his speech:

No doubt, many of you already have an idea.

The fact of the matter is this: 25% of the people in this country are, or soon will be, foreigners. Most of them are not the children of immigrants but fresh-off-the-boat migrants.

The economy? It’s in the dumps. Canada has the lowest upward mobility in the OECD for young people. One of the lowest fertility rates in the Western world. And the fastest-changing demographics in the Western world — as I’m sure you’ve all noticed here in the streets of Toronto, the old capital of Anglo-Canadians.

Think about this: approximately 4.9 million foreigners are classified as “temporary migrants.” Combine that with permanent residents, refugees, and immigrants, and that number swells to 6.2 million in just four years.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Crime is reportedly the highest it’s ever been. We have no military. The Canadian Armed Forces has faced retention issues for two decades. And what is command preoccupied with? Men’s bathrooms stocked with tampons and servicemen being “radicalized” by wearing extremist clothing like MAGA hats.

Let’s not forget foreign influence.

The Chinese Communist Party exploited the Hong Kong handover in the 1990s to infiltrate Canada, using British Columbia as their foothold. As Sam Cooper exposes in Claws of the Panda and Willful Blindness, they established a stronghold in Metro Vancouver, taking over the business community.

This “Vancouver Model”, as we Canadians ironically call it, normalizes our capitulation to foreign hostiles. Triads, working hand-in-glove with the Chinese communists, built a global drug empire. Fentanyl, mass-produced in football field-sized factories in China, is shipped to Vancouver and distributed across the entire Western Hemisphere.

Let this sink in: more Canadians have died from this economic warfare than all our soldiers lost in the Second World War.

And now, there’s India.

Intelligence agencies from the Republic of India have demonstrated their ability to conduct assassinations on Canadian soil. Recently, a Khalistani nationalist and separatist was killed — a figure I’ll leave to your sympathies or judgments. Regardless, this marks a disturbing shift.

India weaponizes its diaspora against the international community. In exchange for non-alignment with China, the West — particularly the Anglosphere — uses Indian migrants as wage-slave labor to suppress costs.

The result? A disaster.

In Canada, Australia, the U.K., and increasingly the United States, we see Indians climbing the ladders of power, pursuing their own interests — often brazenly. In Brampton, part of Greater Toronto, a 50-foot statue of the Hindu god Hanuman looms.

And let’s not forget the Punjabi Sikh population. They openly support an independent Khalistan — or remain at best indifferent to the cause. They have infiltrated Canada’s state apparatus, even reaching the Ministry of National Defense, where Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs during Kabul operations over broader Canadian interests.

In Surrey, British Columbia, the trucking industry is effectively controlled by Sikhs. In online spaces, Sikh nationalists demand Brampton be recognized as a province, seemingly aware that their homeland exists more abroad than in Punjab itself. The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, serves as yet another example — barred from entering India due to his sympathies for separatism.

But foreign influence is only half the story. Among our own lies another problem: disintegration.

Decades of Western alienation and economic parasitism by the federal government are fueling separatist movements in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is polling higher than the ruling CAQ, openly advocating for secession from Confederation.

Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives court immigrant voters, alienating native Canadians and abandoning their base.

And then there’s the economic misery.

The average Canadian home costs $700,000. The median income? Just $48,000. Upward mobility is nonexistent. The managerial regime hoards wealth and power, gatekeeping opportunity through credentialism, exorbitant tuition, and crushing taxes.

55% of Canadians have post-secondary education, and yet most have nothing to show for it. The regime is not run by titans of intelligence or visionaries. It’s run by ideologues — loyal to their cause, not to competence or merit.

The final insult: demographics.

Over the next six years, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become majority non-Canadian. The 50% threshold will be breached, with profound consequences for local politics.

Ontario will hover just above 50%, while Quebec and the Maritime provinces will remain over 70% and 80% Canadian, respectively. This is not a death sentence, but it is a profound transformation for Western Canada, which has historically been more propositional and less identitarian than the East.

This is where we are.

Our sovereignty is compromised. Our identity is eroded. But we are not yet defeated. What happens next depends entirely on us.

QotD: Simon Leys on George Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, China, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the very title of one of his essays, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page”, tells you the essentials of what you needed to know about the decipherment of publications coming out of China and the kind of regime that made such an arcane art necessary, and why anyone who took official declarations at face value was at best naive and at worst a knave or a fool.

What Leys wrote in 1984 in a short book about George Orwell might just as well have been written about him: “In contrast to certified specialists and senior academics, he saw the evidence in front of his eyes; in contrast to wily politicians and fashionable intellectuals, he was not afraid to give it a name; and in contrast to the sociologists and political scientists, he knew how to spell it out in understandable language.”

Leys drew a distinction between simplicity and simplification: Orwell had the first without indulgence in the second. Again, the same might be said of Leys — who, of course, like Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and with whose work there were many parallels in his own.

But immense as was Leys’s achievement in destroying the ridiculous illusions of Western intellectuals, as Orwell had tried to do before him, it was a task thrust upon him by circumstance rather than one that he would have chosen for himself. He was by nature an aesthete and a man of letters, and I confess that great was my surprise (and pleasurable awe) when I discovered that he was, in addition to being a great sinologist, a great literary essayist.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.

December 9, 2024

“Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray checks in on the vocational mental health clinic known as the New York Times:

Non-binary New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen

A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:

    Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.

    “Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.

    An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.

The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.

This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.

After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me … shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”

I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.

This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen.

Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.

“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”

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

Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:

I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.

For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.

I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.

All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.

QotD: The downfall of Boeing

Filed under: Books, Business, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Boeing was once a young startup, founded by the eccentric heir to a timber fortune. Through a mixture of luck, derring-do, and frequent cash injections from its wealthy patron, it managed to avoid bankruptcy long enough for World War II to begin, at which point the military contracts started rolling in. Along the way, it developed an engineer-dominated, technically perfectionist, highly deliberative corporate culture. At one time, you could have summed it up by saying it was the Google of its time, but alas there are problems with that analogy these days. Maybe we should say it was the “circa 2005 Google” of its time.

There’s a lot to love about an engineer-dominated corporate culture. For starters, it has a tendency to overengineer things, and when those things are metal coffins with hundreds of thousands of interacting components, filled with people and screaming through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, maybe overengineering isn’t so bad. These cultures also tend to be pretty innovative, and sure enough Boeing invented the modern jet airliner and then revolutionized it several times.

But there are also downsides. As any Googler will tell you, these companies usually have a lot of fat to trim. Some of what looks like economic inefficiency is actually vital seed corn for the innovations of the future, but some of it is also just inefficiency, because nobody looks at the books, because it isn’t that kind of company. Likewise, being highly deliberative about everything can lead to some really smart decision making and avoidance of group think, but it can also be a cover for laziness or for an odium theologicum that ensures nothing ever gets done. Smart managers steeped in this sort of culture can usually do a decent job of sorting the good from the bad, but only if they can last, because you see there’s a third problem, which is that almost everybody involved is a quokka.

Engineers, being a subspecies of nerds, are bad at politics. In 1996, Boeing did something very stupid and acquired a company that was good at politics. McDonnell Douglas, another airplane maker, wasn’t the best at making airplanes, but was very good at lobbying congress and at impressing Wall Street analysts. Boeing took over the company, but pretty much everybody agrees that when the dust had settled it was actually McDonnell Douglas that had taken over Boeing. One senior Boeing leader lamented that the McDonnell Douglas executives were like “hunter killer assassins”. No, sorry bro, I don’t think they were actually that scary, you were just a quokka.

Anyway, the hunter killer assassins ran amok: purging rivals, selling off assets, pushing through stock buybacks, and outsourcing or subcontracting everything that wasn’t nailed down. They had a fanaticism for capital efficiency that rose to the level of a monomania,1 which maybe wasn’t the best fit for an airplane manufacturer. And slowly but surely, everything went off the rails. Innovation stopped, the culture withered, and eventually planes started falling out of the sky. And now the big question, the question Robison just can’t figure out. Why?

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.

    1. This is how you know this story took place in an era of high interest rates!

December 8, 2024

The potential for retribution in a second Trump presidency

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

Francis Christian meditates on whether or how President-elect Donald Trump will indulge in eye-for-an-eye revenge against the individuals most clearly involved in the lawfare and other attempts to derail his re-election:

It was the English poet Alexander Pope who admonished us in the manner of the New Testament that “to err is human; to forgive, divine” — Errare humanum est, ignoscere divino.

The Old Testament in contrast, has the equally familiar and perhaps far more popular, “eye for an eye“, and in one of the most revolutionary statements ever uttered, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talked about us “having heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye’ — but I say unto you, love your enemies“.

To wish to take revenge upon one’s enemies is therefore human, but Jesus is asking mankind to rise above this basic instinct and instead, to forgive and love one’s enemies. This was all of course part of His Mission on earth — to change by His Life, His Cross and the Resurrection, the destiny of human beings from being bound to basic instincts and death — to being bound for eternal life, a different destiny and a new creation.

The mavens of Hollywood of course march to a different and more ancient tune (which has been handed down unchanged to them) and generations of movie goers and consumers of media have been brought up on the idea that revenge of the most explosively visceral kind is a good thing, even a noble thing.

My readers will undoubtedly have their own sincerely held beliefs about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us and once again, I do not wish this essay to turn out to be a sermon! What I wish to address instead, is to ask the question: what is the place for retribution, vengeance and revenge in the conduct of statecraft?

In other words, when President elect Trump said in a recently widely publicized interview that he was, “not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly“, was he declaring a principle of statecraft that makes for a fulfilling and productive Presidency? And is this also a principle of statecraft that will “make American great again?”

In typical, inimitable and endearing Trumpian fashion, the President-elect also added the tongue in cheek comment: “I am always looking to give a second and even third chance, but never willing to give a fourth chance — that is where I hold the line!”

It could be argued from the life of no less a colossal figure than Julius Caesar that decisive and devastating revenge upon one’s enemies makes for a strong and respected ruler and nation. Whilst still a private citizen, Julius Caesar was captured by pirates on the way to the Greek island of Rhodes (to which he was travelling in order to learn oratory from the famous professor Molon). Caesar raised his own ransom — then raised a naval force, captured his pirate captors and had them all crucified.

The later assassination of Caesar and the subsequent civil wars that rocked and roiled Rome is the subject of Shakespeare’s magnificent, Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The subsequent rule of Augustus Caesar was marked by stability, expansion of the empire, the building of roads and bridges (via which the Gospel was to travel), the making of sea and land routes safe for travellers (again, to the advantage of the early Christians taking the Gospel to Asia and Europe) the consolidation of Roman power — and the rule of (Roman) law. It was also during the reign of this austere, learned emperor that Jesus was born in a manger, in the Roman province of Palestine.

H/T to Brian Peckford for the link.

QotD: Who invented the vending machine?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This one surprised me: the vending machine was invented not for Coca-Cola or cigarettes or snack foods, but for books.

Richard Carlile was a shit-disturbing English bookseller. He insisted on selling Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason despite it being seditious and blasphemous for its attacks on organized religion, particularly the Church of England. Impressively stubborn, Carlile was arrested in 1819, imprisoned, and fined a massive £1,500 for selling Paine’s work. While a guest of the state, his wife, Jane, and other associates kept selling The Age of Reason, leading to more arrests.

Sometime around his release in 1822, Carlile came up with the idea of automating sales. His device was crude, but effective. A person inserted coins and pulled a lever that opened a compartment from which a copy of The Age of Reason could be retrieved without human intervention. Police had no one to arrest for selling seditious material.

The book vending machine didn’t keep Carlisle out of jail — he would spend nine years locked up for acts of political rebellion. Nor was he able to patent his device. I admire the hell out of him, tho.

Jump ahead to the early twentieth century and vending machines were being used in France and Germany to sell newspapers, postcards, maps, as well as books. The idea crossed the English Channel in 1937. Allen Lane, who single-handedly invented the modern paperback and founded Penguin Books with his brothers in 1935, launched the Penguincubator two years later. Based on the German machines, it was described by the Times as “an unfamiliar contraption of metal and glass”. Lane installed it at 66 Charing Cross Road, outside Collet’s bookshop.

Lane’s contraption was no more successful than Carlile’s. It got wheeled out of Collet’s shop at closing time every night and wheeled back in every morning when the shop opened. Another Charing Cross bookseller recalled seeing letters shoved under the shop’s door each morning complaining of coins lost in the machine. Customers also learned that you only had to pound the side of the box in order for it to disgorge about a third of its inventory. The Bookseller reported that when this was pointed out to the manager of Collet’s, he “gave his incontinent robot a terrific thrashing. As a result of this all the rest of the Penguin’s promptly fell out.”

That perhaps explains why I couldn’t find a mention of the Penguincubator in Stuart Kells’ otherwise excellent book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.

Ken Whyte, “Have I got a business for you!”, SHuSH, 2024-09-06.

December 6, 2024

Hegseth is clearly unfit to be Secretary of Defense because LOOK! A SQUIRREL!

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t recall having heard Pete Hegseth’s name before Trump nominated him to be the next Secretary of Defense, but Chris Bray clearly thinks the accusations are purely partisan:

Pete Hegseth is being Kavanaughed. And the only people dumb enough to fall for it are Republican senators.

I was willing to hear arguments that Hegseth wasn’t the best choice for Secretary of Defense. In his 40s, he’s on his third marriage, and while the rape allegation from his visit to a conservative conference in Monterey is clearly false, I was wide open to the argument that his actions demonstrated poor judgment. I was prepared to hear an argument. Like many combat veterans, Hegseth had some post-war chaos in his life. Discussion was merited.

But the more these arguments have been made, the dumber they’ve become. We’ve seen this play, and we know the third act: more heat, less light, the descent into completely irrational ranting.

Let’s pretend to take this number at face value, for the sake of argument, though Warren is egregiously misrepresenting the estimate about unreported assaults. Let’s just look at the structure of the claim: In 2023, while Lloyd Austin was the Secretary of Defense, 29,000 troops were sexually assaulted. Therefore, Pete Hegseth must never become the Secretary of Defense.

This is the kind of argument people make when they’re piling on, in an atmosphere of hysteria. It has no logic or order to it, and it does the opposite of the thing it’s intended to do: It depicts current leadership as failures, while arguing against a course correction. Bob punched me in the face, which proves that John is very bad. This is currently the logical structure of half the “news”.

In another Martha-do-you-hear-yourself moment, Lloyd Austin himself recently attacked Hegseth for arguing that women shouldn’t serve in the combat arms:

But read this carefully, and look for the own-goal:

Women serving in combat are facing more danger than men, Austin said.

Therefore, women should serve in combat. Explain the logic, Lloyd. Amazingly, the journalist who reported Austin’s comments missed the implications, mindlessly typing up the claim that women in combat are in more danger than men, then — next paragraph! — framing that statement as a rebuke to someone who warned that the service of women in combat “made fighting more complicated.” We’re not discussing; we’re ritually lining up behind our teams.

Liberal cabinet minister accepts “free” Taylor Swift tickets

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

I’ve often joked that it isn’t surprising that politicians can be bought … what is surprising is just how little it can take. This situation isn’t quite as clear-cut as that, but it looks bad to everyone except Liberal Party insiders:

Former Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan in happier times (yeah, it’s the only picture I have of the minister).

On Tuesday we learned that federal Liberal cabinet minister Harjit Sajjan will be attending a Taylor Swift concert at BC Place in Vancouver, in a private suite, courtesy of PavCo, the Crown corporation that operates the stadium. The federal government partially funds PavCo, including $116 million earlier this year for improvements to the stadium in advance of the 2026 World Cup.

It’s a textbook conflict of interest. Open and shut. Dead to rights. So much for Sajjan’s political career. Only … not. The only people who seem to disagree that it’s a conflict are federal Liberals and, sorry to say, the office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner — because Sajjan donated $1,500 to a food bank as a gesture to compensate for the coveted opportunity.

“If an item is paid for through a charitable donation, then it would not be considered a gift,” a spokesperson for the commissioner said in response to questions from National Post. “In the case of Minister Sajjan, for example, the original market value of a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver was roughly $600.”

Where do we even begin with this nonsense?

PavCo offered private-box seats to various dignitaries on the understanding they would donate some appropriate amount of money to good causes. Sajjan says he’s proud to have participated.

But you can’t “pay for” a free concert ticket — to use the commissioner spokesperson’s term — by giving money to a food bank. That’s like The Keg offering you a free dinner so long as you pay for it at Montana’s … except food-bank donations, unlike steak dinners, come with tax receipts.

December 5, 2024

Mélanie Joly in Halifax, demonstrated her belief that “communication” is much more important than “action”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney continues his report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum, where the Trudeau government’s representatives were Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Bill Blair, the Minister of National Defence:

Whoo boy. Mélanie Joly has got to go. Now. Today, if possible. Because we’ve got problems enough without, uh, well … maybe I should just explain what happened.

Joly is, of course, our foreign affairs minister. She and Bill Blair, the national defence minister, constituted the “star power” the Trudeau government sent to the Halifax International Security Forum, which I attended late last month. Joly would have, no doubt, taken part in many direct meetings with allied counterparts and various stakeholders behind closed doors during the three-day event. I can’t tell you what happened there. I can tell you, though, what happened during her public, on the record appearances. One of them in particular. And I can tell you what happened after it.

It wasn’t good.

I covered a bit of the basics about the Forum itself — what it is, who funds it, who shows up — in my last column about this year’s event, so I’ll skip the recap this time. Except for this: the event schedule is divided up into on-the-record panel discussions, off-the-record sessions (generally, those are the more interesting ones), and just lots of slack time for networking and gabbing over coffee and routinely excellent food. Joly took part in two of the on-the-record sessions. In one, she gave introductory remarks. They were about what you’d expect. The other time, she was a panelist. And that’s the one where things went wrong for Joly.

Joly was on a panel titled “Era of Unity: Victory for Ukraine”, moderated by Russian political dissident and chess grandmaster (uh oh) Garry Kasparov. Kasparov can be an aggressive moderator, and he and Joly sparred about the value of the United Nations. (I’m more of Kasparov’s view on the value of the UN, to put it mildly, but Joly more or less held her own under his questioning.) Kasparov followed up with a question about tangible support by Canada for Ukraine. He set it up as a hypothetical — he alluded to the recent re-election of Donald Trump, and noted that there are many who’d be happy to sell out Ukraine to secure some kind of peace with Russia. “Will Canada step in … will Canada play a bigger role? Canada is an important country, as you said,” Kasparov put to Joly. “When you have free time from diplomatic victories at the United Nations,” he asked, a bit mockingly, “can you help Ukraine win?”

Oh dear, I thought. This could be bad.

And it was. And then it got worse.

To Kasparov’s specific question — would Canada help Ukraine win? Would Canada step up and do more? — Joly replied at length about how much she believes in defence. And collaboration. And working together with allies. And why we need an Arctic strategy. And the value of deterrence. And the need for a stronger security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. And then some stuff about North Korean missiles. And then a nice bit about Canada’s long friendship with Ukraine. And how Canada, even though we’re smaller than the U.S., will always advocate for Ukraine at the NATO table.

I haven’t quoted directly from what the minister said. I am conscious about not wanting this entire column to become long quotes. You can see the entire exchange between Kasparov and Joly here, starting at around the 37 minute mark. What I can tell you as someone who watched it in person was that there was a real vibe shift — see, I can talk about vibes, too! — in the room as Joly spoke. Kasparov had asked a straightforward question and he’d gotten an answer that seemed as if Joly was envisioning a globe in her head, and spinning it, and just commenting on everything that came to mind as a different region came into view. Oh! There’s the Indian Ocean! Say something about the Indo-Pacific!

It was bad. Everyone in the room knew it was bad, with the possible exception of Joly.

But Joly hadn’t hit bottom yet.

We must always trust the experts, say the experts and their journalistic fart-catchers

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

Glenn Reynolds (aka the “Instapundit”) welcomes Nate Silver to the expert-doubting party:

Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote “The Suicide of Expertise”, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:

    Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.

    But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.

    It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

    And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty …

    On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.

    It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.

And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.

Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.

Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.

So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.

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