[T]he Nazis’ focus on the threats that risky habits pose to “public health” makes perfect sense in light of their collectivist ideology. “Brother national socialist,” said one bit of Nazi propaganda, “do you know that your Führer is against smoking and thinks that every German is responsible to the whole people for all his deeds and missions, and does not have the right to damage his body with drugs?”
Smith adds: “Clearly there were considerable links between the promotion of particular lifestyles and the racial hygiene movement. Tobacco and alcohol were seen as ‘genetic poisons,’ leading to degeneration of the German people.”
The point, I hasten to add, is not that today’s “public health” paternalists are Nazis. I am not suggesting that everyone who hates smoking is just like Hitler. But there is an unmistakable totalitarian logic to the notion that the government has a responsibility to promote “public health” by preventing us from engaging in activities that might lead to disease or injury. The implication is that we all have a duty to the collective to be as healthy as we can be, an idea the Nazis embraced but one that Americans ought to find troubling.
Jacob Sullum, “So What If Hitler Was an Anti-Smoker?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2004-12-17.
December 5, 2019
QotD: [Literal] Health Nazis
December 2, 2019
A bad IDEA for classroom peace
In Quillette, Max Eden discusses the rise of “room clears” as teachers resort to evacuating classrooms to prevent harm to students from one disruptive one:
Last month, NBC Nightly News aired a segment on the latest classroom-management technique to sweep America’s schools: “room clears”: When a child throws a tantrum that could physically endanger his peers, teachers evacuate all of the other students from the classroom until the troublemaker has vented his rage upon empty desks, tables and chairs. The technique was virtually unheard of five years ago. But 56 percent of surveyed teachers and parents in Oregon now report having experienced a room clear in their or their child’s classroom over the last year.
Surrendering the classroom to a single student: The average reader might well ask why anyone thinks this would be a good idea. Yet the policies that make this approach inevitable have been applauded by a wide range of authorities, from the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Trump-administration’s Department of Education.
The emergence of room clears is a product of several fashionable education-policy trends designed to protect the rights of troubled students, often with little regard for the rights of their classmates. These include the provisions contained in the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which mandates that special-education students be subject to the “least restrictive environment” possible. When it comes to students who are hard of hearing, dyslexic or developmentally delayed, this policy likely has done a great deal of good. But many schools also label disruptive or violent students as having an “Emotional and Behavioral Disability” (EBD). Rather than provide these students specialized attention in separate settings, schools often funnel them into traditional classrooms.
In a national poll, two thirds of surveyed teachers at high-poverty schools reported that there is a student in their classroom who they believed shouldn’t be there; and 77 percent of surveyed teachers report that a small number of disruptive students cause other students to suffer. Unfortunately, IDEA’s provisions don’t adequately account for the rights and interests of general-education students, and teachers typically have little say over who is in their classroom.
Once they are assigned to a traditional class, EBD students can become virtually untouchable as far as discipline goes. Schools are discouraged by federal policy and activist groups alike from disproportionately disciplining students with disabilities — the effect of which is that principals are required to overlook many otherwise unacceptable transgressions. (Two thirds of teachers say that special-education students are treated more leniently than general-education students for the same offenses.) The worst-behaved students effectively are taught that the rules don’t apply to them in the same way they apply to others. Even when misbehavior edges toward violence, EBD students are becoming physically untouchable.
November 29, 2019
History of Space Travel – Red Star – Extra History – #4
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While rockets had been proven to be indispensable to the Second World War, the idea to send people up into orbit was still seen as fantasy. Space was important only as a method to further the range of missiles meant to land oceans away from their original launch point. But a man named Korolev will change all of that, with work so secretive, he will be referred to as Chief Designer for nearly his entire life. But we all know the name of his first project into space: Sputnik.
From the comments:
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1 day ago
We weren’t able to fit her into the episode, but the other famous first cosmonaut in space is Laika, the Soviet space dog. She was a stray who was taken in by the program to test the Sputnik 2 and some of its life support features (like a coolant fan). Unfortunately, Laika did not return from her mission alive but she’s still regarded highly in the history of space flight and has become a symbol for the space race and animal testing in general. Look her up!
I remember reading in Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe of the day on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1960 when he and his wife were told by a group of Red Army cadets of a Soviet rocket launch carrying a human into orbit for the first time. The story was officially denied and the capsule was said to be unmanned after all. Wikipedia says:
According to Gagarin’s biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies (Ivan Ivanovich) and human voice tape recordings (to test if the radio worked) that were made just prior to Gagarin’s flight.
In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, colonel Barney Oldfield revealed that an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok launch vehicles. The onboard TDU (Braking Engine Unit) had ordered the retrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of the attitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heat shield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel’s telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.
November 25, 2019
Why Can We See Through Glass? | Earth Lab
BBC Earth Lab
Published 24 Jan 2013Why can we see through glass, but not other solid objects? James May explains.
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November 24, 2019
Next stage in religious observance for those participating in the “Great Environmental Awakening”
Mark Steyn discusses the obvious next step for those newly converted to the Environmentalist religion:
To quote a line from America Alone: “The future belongs to those who show up.” And, while eugenics is universally condemned as morally repugnant, self-eugenics is an idea we can all get behind. Step forward the “Indefinitely Wild” columnist of Outside magazine, Wes Siler:
I Got a Vasectomy Because of Climate Change
Getting one was, by far, the most powerful personal action I could take for our planetMr Siler claims to be 38 years old, notwithstanding the prose style of an overwrought pre-pubescent. And he cannot stand idly by procreating while the planet burns. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his sperm for the remnants of Malibu […]
In fact, “the absolute biggest difference” you could make would be to kill yourself right now — rather than merely tossing your unborn children into the infernos of California. Alas, the self-extinction movement has not yet reached that stage of despair, although we should certainly encourage them to follow the necessary logic of their epocalyptic torments. For the moment (and, again, as I wrote in America Alone) contemporary progressivism has “adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion”.
As you might have noticed, there aren’t a lot of Shakers around today. Will there be a lot of anguished environmentalists around once every Wes Siler reader has had his scrotum anesthetized?
No. But at least they’ll have saved the planet, right?
Doubtful. Mr Siler notes that every little baby Siler comes with a price tag of 58 tons of carbon emissions per year. But that’s because he’s American. Mr and Mrs Siler could move to Somalia and have thirty kids for the carbon footprint of one Yank moppet. So why are the same people who lecture us that we only have twelve years to save the planet in favor of every Somali moving to Maine or Minnesota and acquiring a western-sized carbon payload?
November 22, 2019
To think we used to joke about environmentalism as a substitute religion…
… it’s long since stopped being a joke and become all but the state religion, as Barbara Kay notes on the tenth anniversary of “climategate”:
Rayne pointed out that a cursory perusal of the Environment Canada Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data database would illustrate that the daily summer maximum temperatures in Toronto showed no upward trend whatsoever. She further noted that a database for the WMO-certified Pearson Airport site demonstrated there was “absolutely no temporal correlation” for extreme July or August maximum temperatures between 1938 (when the database was initiated) and 2012.
In fact, there was no source in Canada then — and still isn’t — from which CAP could have plucked that ludicrous figure. University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick had at that time just created his invaluable site, yourenvironment.ca, which sets out a complete temporal record of officially recorded air and pollution levels everywhere in Canada. The data for the site is culled from provincial environment and natural resources ministries, or from Environment Canada. Over many decades, no matter where you look in Canada, the graph trends remain resolutely horizontal with tiny upward and downward spikes indicating extreme weather blips.
Every layperson who identifies as an alarmism skeptic has his or her own pivotal moment, and that idiotic “news” story in the Globe was mine. When reporters and editors act like deer in the headlights in the reception and dissemination of demonstrably impossible “information,” it’s clear evidence that they have been gripped by a socially contagious virus. These are the people who in the 19th century would have believed tulip bulb prices were never going to peak, even if every single family on the planet had enough tulip bulbs to fill a half-acre garden.
The late writer Michael Crichton, author of the best-selling 2004 techno-thriller, State of Alarm, was one of the first independent students of environmentalism to define environmentalism as a “religion,” and to observe that its principal characteristic was to cater to the state of alarm he believed is an inherent human need. Its dogmatists act as though they have been appointed Morals Police. And they do not take kindly to dissent.
Al Gore, whose 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth was received with uncritical awe, (one of my friends, normally very brainy, described it as a “religious experience”) was later found by a UK court to contain “nine key scientific errors.” It was deemed rife with “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush” and the judge ruled that the “apocalyptic vision” presented made it not an impartial scientific analysis, but a “political film.” He continues to hector the world as though that never happened from the depths of a home whose electricity kilowatt hours exceed twenty times the national average.
In 2007, environmental guru David Suzuki stormed out of a Toronto radio station interview when the host suggested global warming was not yet a “totally settled issue.” The incident revealed the mindset of the enviro-ayatollahs. (We see its 16-year-old version in little Pied Piper leader of the Children’s Crusade Greta “how-dare-you” Thunberg.) Suzuki perceived the radio host as a blasphemer, unworthy of his rational rebuttal. Suzuki actually felt enviro-infidels should be literally suppressed, and even opined that politicians who aren’t on board with his views should go to prison. You’d think a guy that far down the rabbit hole would be minding his own enviro P’s and Q’s, but like Al Gore, his real estate portfolio is humongous and his carbon footprint immense.
November 18, 2019
“I can’t help but wonder if a large majority of men won’t opt for the conflict-free humanoid over the real thing, with all of our baggage and hormones and mothers-in-law”
In the (US) Spectator, Bridget Phetasy reports on her visit to the factory where Realdolls are made:
One of the sex dolls on offer at Aura Dolls in Mississauga, the first “sex doll brothel” in the Toronto area.
Photo originally published by BlogTO – https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/11/sex-doll-brothel-mississauga/.
The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the “Ferraris of love dolls”, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.
[…]
The employees look at the “love dolls” as more than just sexbots. They know their customers want a couch buddy. They want someone to cuddle at night. Perhaps they’ve lost a spouse and don’t feel like dating.
Whitney Cummings logged on to a forum for men who own the sex robots and monitored their conversations for months. “I thought they were going to be creeps, psychopaths,” she says. “I don’t know what to tell you. They’re very lovely men. They’re lovely. They adore their dolls. They marry their dolls. That is happening.”
What strikes me amid the body parts, the rows of eyes, the wall of nipples and the robot “brains”: these aren’t your weird uncle’s sex dolls. With the introduction of AI, these dolls are offering something their predecessors couldn’t: intimacy and affection.
“I always looked at them as art and I always found it funny that because it’s a sexually usable thing, it’s disqualified as art in the higher sense in a lot of people’s minds. They go, ‘Oh that’s not art, that’s just nasty'”, says McMullen. “And what’s funny about that is now we’re doing this serious engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics and now people aren’t so quick to dismiss it.”
Realbotix is the natural evolution of Abyss Creations, the company McMullen started in 1997 (in fact, Abyss Creations made the doll for Lars and the Real Girl). What began as just “real dolls” now has a robotic component, an AI team and an app.
McMullen talks about how he’s always wanted to break free of the sex toy stigma. “Yes people use them sexually, but they also get this huge sense of companionship from having a doll and a robot.”
Fungus rock – the great placebo treasure (and the Mujahideen)
Lindybeige
Published 5 Jun 2015Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
The things that people valued and fought over in the past were not as they are now. You might not guess the tremendous significance of one tiny island off the coast of Gozo.
NEWS FLASH (March 8th 2017): the Azure Window, featured in this video, has collapsed into the sea.
More videos from Malta to follow.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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Fungus rock – the great placebo treasure
November 16, 2019
History of Space Travel – Kill Devil to V-2 – Extra History – #3
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Published 14 Nov 2019Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe
Early flight started as a utopian dream but quickly became the military’s top priority: first as reconnaissance vehicles, and then as weapons in their own right. After WW1, the threat of German aircraft led to the Treaty of Versailles banning Germany from having an airforce at all. But the Germans also found a loophole: rockets didn’t count as an airforce. Enter Werner Von Braun & the V-2 rockets.
November 12, 2019
Building Angkor – The “Lost” City – Extra History – #5
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After its decline, Angkor had become the Ancient, Lost City so prominent in our pop culture. Just one problem: Angkor was neither ancient (having declined around the same time as Hundred Years War) nor lost (people still lived there!). That didn’t stop the European visitors from trying to invent all kinds of stories for how this city could possibly exist, and stealing parts of the temple to bring back home. But despite all the hardships Angkor faced, it managed to become a national symbol for Cambodia and still remains to this day.
November 11, 2019
Addressing the real extinction-level environmental threat
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith points to what he thinks will be Donald Trump’s signature achievement: the United States Space Force.
The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth, Tsar Bomba, was 50MT. The Chicxulub impact was, at these numbers, 2 million times as powerful as Tsar Bomba.
Image and caption from Stephanie Osborn’s “Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor, Part 3 — The Impactor & Effects” at https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/10/31/incoming-the-chicxulub-impactor-part-3-%e2%80%95-the-impactor-effects-by-stephanie-osborn/
Many thoughtful observers believe that the most significant thing that Donald Trump has accomplished so far is his appointment of dozens of federal judges who share his philosophy of governance and I, amateur historian that I am, am inclined to agree with them — with one exception, that is, a little item that just might prove to be a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more important than anything else the Donald — or anybody else, for that matter — has ever done.
Most of us have become aware of the way that a relatively small piece of rock — an asteroid approximately the size of Manhattan Island or the Matterhorn — changed the course of life-history on this planet. It struck the Earth at 40,000 miles and hour, hitting what is now the northern coast of the Yucatan, generating a titanic explosion that ignited every plant standing above the ground, raising a tidal wave that swept over most of North America, and opening a chain of deadly volcanoes on the other side of the world, near India. The esteemed Bob Bakker to the contrary, the late, lamented dinosaurs, I believe, died from smoke inhalation.
Three quarters of all life on this planet, plant and animal, land and sea, was brutally exterminated by this “Cretaceous-Tertiary Event”, and apparently not for the first time. There was a much worse die-off between the Permian and the Triassic eras. The important fact, for you and me, is that there are thousands, if not millions of other lethal asteroids still out there, with which our vulnerable little blue marble is still playing a murderous game of roulette. It is only a matter of time before another “extinction-level event” occurs, possibly wiping out every last living entity on Earth. We can see plenty of evidence of that kind of phenomenon, that magnitude of destruction, elsewhere in the Solar System.
Take your precious carbon footprints and stuff them where the sun don’t shine, Greta. It is Donald Trump who has made the historic first move to prevent this very real cataclysm, and probably to extend the life of the human species indefinitely (an idea environmentalists hate), by calling for the organization of a United States Space Force. At this moment it still isn’t clear exactly what methods will work best to destroy or divert asteroids that threaten our home-world (I mention possibilities in my 2010 Ngu Family Saga novel Ceres), but it is something that must be done, sooner or later, probably by manned spacecraft.
The other important task for which we need a Space Force is to clean up the tens of millions of items of orbital debris that NASA and other agencies have very sloppily left circling over our heads. Remember when the Gemini astronauts simply threw those expensive Hasselblad cameras out the door? These objects range in size from particles of dust to cast-off booster stages which endanger satellites and spacecraft. A hunk of junk the size and shape of a small screw can damage solar panels, pressurized living and working spaces, as well as helmeted individuals in spacesuits, to whom that flying screw would be like a bullet through the head.
November 10, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on today’s doomsday cults
The recent antics of Extinction Rebellion activists in London encouraged Theodore Dalrymple to do a bit of reading on the psychology of such cults and their followers:
Man is the only creature, as far as we know, that enjoys the contemplation of its own disappearance from the face of the earth. We find the prospect of our annihilation by disease, famine, war, asteroid, or climate change deeply satisfying. We feel, somehow, that we deserve it and that the world would be a better planet without us.
When to this strange source of satisfaction is conjoined a license to behave badly in the name of salvation from earthly perdition, we can expect a mass movement that approaches insanity. So it is with the Extinction Rebellion, whose fanatical members have brought chaos to London recently by blocking streets, occupying crossroads, gluing themselves to public buildings and railings, and standing atop underground trains, to the fury of thousands of rush-hour commuters who don’t want to save the world but only get to work.
In order to try to understand their state of mind, I recently read a book by three psychologists, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, first published in 1956, called When Prophecy Fails. It recounts the reaction of a small doomsday sect in America founded by a housewife, who believed that most of North America was soon to be inundated by a great flood. When this failed to happen on the predicted date, members did not immediately conclude that the absurd grounds upon which their belief was based were false, but became even more convinced of their truth. When there is a contradiction between what we want to be the case and what is the case, our desire to believe often triumphs, at least for a time.
The beginning of the book gives a brief and selective history of sects that have predicted Man’s total annihilation in the near future, among them that of the Millerites in the 1840s in the United States. Reading the account of this sect, I could not help but think of the Extinction Rebellion that is now gripping London, to the growing fury of the rest of the population.
November 9, 2019
History of Space Travel – Revolutions – Extra History – #2
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As the Renaissance breathes new life into Europe, Copernicus develops mathematical proofs for the sun resting in the center of the universe. And from his works, a new world is born. The scientific world gets faster and faster. Revolutions of all kinds begin to set off chains of events that reshape human history. And as science improves, so do the tools of war. Both will be necessary to propel humanity to the stars. Join us on this race through the scientific works between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.
Copernicus’ publishing really came down to the wire! Legend has it that he was given the final printed pages on his death bed. When they presented him with the book, he awoke from a coma, saw his life’s work and finally passed away in peace. Or so the story goes.
QotD: British Cookery
Generalising further, one may say that the characteristic British diet is a simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet, drawing much of its virtue from the excellence of the local materials, and with its main emphasis on sugar and animal fats. It is the diet of a wet northern country where butter is plentiful and vegetable oils are scarce, where hot drinks are acceptable at most hours of the day, and where all the spices and some of the stronger-tasting herbs are exotic products. Garlic, for instance, is unknown in British cookery proper: on the other hand mint, which is completely neglected in some European countries, figures largely. In general, British people prefer sweet things to spicy things, and they combine sugar with meat in a way that is seldom seen elsewhere.
Finally, it must be remembered that in talking about “British cookery” one is referring to the characteristic native diet of the British Isles and not necessarily to the food that the average British citizen eats at this moment. Quite apart from the economic difference between the various blocks of the population, there is the stringent food rationing which has now been in operation for six years. In talking of British cookery, therefore, one is talking of the past or the future – of dishes that the British people now see somewhat rarely, but which they would gladly eat if they had the chance, and which they did eat fairly frequently up to 1939.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
November 8, 2019
Brendan O’Neill on the “Battle of Canning Town”
This piece is derived from a speech he gave on November 3rd at the Battle of Ideas festival in London:
One of my favourite political events this year was the Battle of Canning Town. This was the moment when Extinction Rebellion decided to send its painfully middle-class agitators to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work. What could go wrong?
Quite a lot, it turned out. There were many wonderful moments. The two posh greens who climbed on top of a Tube train at Canning Town were mocked and eventually dragged down. A commuter can be heard branding one of the protesters a “ponytail weirdo”. Elsewhere on the Tube system that day, commuters pointed out that the London Underground is run on electricity and is therefore pretty eco-friendly. “Are you that fucking stupid?”, one asked a smug-looking couple of XR agitators. “No wonder you can’t get jobs …”
But the best moment came during the Battle of Canning Town, during that clash between working people and eco-elitists, when one of the commuters shouted at the protesters: “The world is not coming to an end!” I thought that was brilliant. This woman was just trying to get to her job and yet she found herself having to act as the voice of reason against the new hysteria. And she rose to the occasion wonderfully. She said what many of us know to be true: humankind does not face extinction.
The reason I admire the Battle of Canning Town is that it represented a potential turning point in modern green politics. It was really the first time in a long time that eco-hysteria was subjected to public judgement, to democratic rebuke, to the rational scepticism of the people. For far too long green ideology has been insulated from public challenge and public debate and this has allowed it to become increasingly eccentric and even unhinged. The Battle of Canning Town represented a reasoned, bottom-up pushback against the protected hysteria of modern environmentalism.
This is the thing I find most fascinating about Extinction Rebellion: its very name is a lie. Those two words themselves are untrue. Humankind does not face extinction, and all reasonable people know this. We know that there is nothing in the IPCC reports – which themselves are often over-the-top – to justify XR’s harebrained claims that we have 12 years to save the planet, and if we fail billions of people will die. They’ve just made this up.
As for the second word – “rebellion” – this is a lie, too. Extinction Rebellion is not a rebellion. Rather, its ideology and misanthropy are entirely in keeping with the outlook of mainstream politics and popular culture. From the educational sphere to Hollywood’s output, from the political elite to the worlds of advertising and publishing, the ahistorical, anti-human idea that mankind is destroying the planet and will be punished by Weather of Mass Destruction for having done so is entirely accepted, and increasingly unquestionable, in fact.
