Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2019

A visual masterclass in trolling

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

For all that Donald Trump is known for trolling his opponents on Twitter, he’s certainly not the only one, as these makeshift posters in Massachusetts illustrate:

The locals are outraged, but as Alaa Al-Ameri describes, they’re not quite sure how to safely express their fury:

Think of Posie Parker’s billboards quoting the dictionary definition of the word “woman”. The power of such acts comes from two things. First, they acknowledge – usually with irreducible simplicity – that something that went without saying a moment ago has suddenly become unsayable. Secondly, the outrage they provoke does not come from any epithet, caricature or insult, but rather from having the nerve to draw the viewer’s attention to an act of cognitive dissonance that we are all engaging in, but would rather not acknowledge.

The result is that those who attempt to explain why the act is offensive end up simply tying themselves in knots, while revealing that they have never given a moment’s thought to the position they find themselves defending. This seems to generate even more anger, with the inevitable online mob quickly joined by politicians, journalists and other public figures, eager to see that the heretic is made an example of.

At their best, these acts of public disobedience are examples of real-life Winston Smiths pointing out to the rest of us that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”. Their persecutors, like his, are those who know and fear the truth of Smith’s next sentence: “If that is granted, all else follows.”

The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement “Islam is right about women”. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.

The reason for their dilemma is obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention. Western society has managed to convince itself (at least in public) that any statement criticising any aspect of Islam is, by definition, bigotry. As a result, Western societies have effectively decided to enforce Islamic restrictions on blasphemy, and called it “tolerance”.

The strain of conforming to this lie is evident in the fumbling attempts by the interviewees to explain their objections. Do they believe that Islam is right about women? If so, why the objection? Do they believe that Islam is wrong about women? If so, in what sense is the statement an attack on Islam or Muslims? Do they believe that the author of the poster is saying that “Islam is right about women”, but doing so ironically? In which case, the objection can only be that the author is guilty of a thoughtcrime by stating that “two and two make five” with insufficient sincerity. Or do they worry that they are guilty of thoughtcrime for noticing the irony?

How the Federal Reserve Worked: Before the Great Recession

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 13 Mar 2018

The Federal Reserve has massive influence over the United States and global economy. But how the Fed uses its tools to stimulate or shrink aggregate demand has changed since the Great Recession. We’ll start by covering how it was done prior to 2008.

September 25, 2019

The Money Multiplier

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 25 Jul 2017

When you deposit money into a bank, do you know what happens to it? It doesn’t simply sit there. Banks are actually allowed to loan out up to 90% of their deposits. For every $10 that you deposit, only $1 is required to stay put.

This practice is known as fractional reserve banking. Now, it’s fairly rare for a bank to only have 10% in reserves, and the number fluctuates. Since checkable deposits are part of the U.S. money supplies, fractional reserve banking, as you might have guessed, can have a big impact on these supplies.

This is where the money multiplier comes into play. The money multiplier itself is straightforward: it equals 1 divided by the reserve ratio. If reserves are at 10%, the minimum amount required by the Fed, then the money multiplier is 10. So if a bank has $1 million in checkable deposits, it has $10 million to work with for stuff like loans and reserves.

Now, typically, the money multiplier is more like 3, because banks can always hold more in reserves than the minimum 10%. When the money multiplier is higher, like during a boom, this gives the Fed more leverage to move M1 and M2 with a small change in reserves. But when the multiplier is lower, such as during a recession, the Fed has less leverage and must push harder to wield its indirect influence over M1 and M2.

Next up, we’ll take a closer look at how the Fed controls the money supply and how that has changed since the Great Recession.

September 23, 2019

M4 Sherman – The Workhorse of D-Day

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Engineering
Published on 21 Sep 2019

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Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage

Virtual Tour: Newly Renovated Cody Firearms Museum

Filed under: History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 27 Jul 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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The Cody Firearms Museum has spent many months undergoing a complete renovation and rebuilding, and is now back fully open to the public. The new layout has not just improved visibility and put the guns in better display context, but it has actually increased the number of guns on display. When I last filmed at Cody, most of the really interesting unusual stuff was back in the vaults — but during filming this past week we had to take a remarkable number of guns out of displays to film. This is a great improvement — the Cody museum was always good, but this new design has made it the best firearms museum in the United States, in my opinion.

Visiting? The CFM is part of the 5-museum complex that is the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in beautiful Cody, Wyoming:

https://centerofthewest.org

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

QotD: Harry Truman’s second thoughts about the CIA

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it got out of hand. The fella … the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. Why, they’ve got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I’ve told you, one Pentagon is one too many.

Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on. They’ve become … it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.

That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it’s got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there’s got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don’t care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.

And when you can’t do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we’re on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn’t have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn’t prove that, I don’t know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.

Harry S. Truman, quoted by Jeff Deist, “Truman Was Right About the CIA”, Mises Wire, 2017-03-08.

September 20, 2019

QotD: Red Flag laws for politicians

Filed under: Humour, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

You know what I’d like to see?

Red Flag laws for Congress.

Any Congresscritter says or does, something unConstitutional, anyone should be able to file a Red Flag violation and have that politician’s powers to write bills, attend sessions of Congress, vote, draw a taxpayer-funded paycheque, live in a mansion in Washington DC, or anything else tied to the job of being a Congresscritter immediately suspended.

There would be a hearing within fourteen days before a judge in their home district, where the Representative or Senator would be given the opportunity to show where in the Constitution what they said, or the law they proposed, or the action they did, was explicitly authorised, and if they can show that, their rights to all the goodies of being an elected representative of the People would be restored.

If they can’t, then they can sit at home for a year and twiddle their thumbs. Not allowed into the Capitol, no drawing a paycheque, no voting, no proposing bills, nothing added to their pension funds, zip, zero, NADA to do with being an elected official.

And their party doesn’t get to fill that slot. Their party doesn’t get to vote on their behalf. Their party doesn’t get to help them with re-election.

No, that Congresscritter, and the seat they occupy, goes into the penalty box for a year.

After a year, if their term in office hasn’t expired, they can take up their duties again.

Unless, and until, they mention violating the Constitution again, and someone files another Red Flag complaint.

Lawdog, “Sauce for the goose…”, The Lawdog Files, 2019-08-06.

September 17, 2019

“How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority?”

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

Mark Steyn on a recent you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me raid by ICE:

Because AOC and the open-borders left want to abolish ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the right is obliged to defend it. This is a pity, because ICE is a deeply weird agency with, to put it mildly, increasingly curious and eccentric priorities.

Last week, for example, under crack agent Tatum King, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit staged (that seems the appropriate word) a raid in Oakland of the Oakland Raiders game:

    ICE targeted vendors of unauthorized T-shirts, hats, caps and bandannas. The agency said the raid was done in partnership with NFL brand security representatives and state and local law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department said it was not involved.

    Officials said they seized about $11,000 worth of illegal swag — undoubtedly, most of it silver and black — during the ‘Monday Night Football’ game and its pre- and postgame tailgate parties.

    Tatum King, special agent in charge of the San Francisco Homeland Security Investigations unit, said about 400 pieces of merchandise were seized but no one was arrested. NFL brand officials issued warning letters and may be pursuing civil action, he said.

As they should — and in small claims court, if eleven grand is the best a no-expense-spared federal-state-local raid with everyone in the full Robocop can come up with.

But what business is it of ICE’s “Homeland Security Investigations” division? This arrest-less “raid” and its attendant publicity ballyhoo undoubtedly cost US taxpayers more than the barely five figures’ worth of Oakland Raiders swag they’re now passing round the office.

Like ICE, HSI was created post-9/11 — to enforce four hundred laws “combating terrorism and enhancing national security”. How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority? Which it undoubtedly is:

    King said the agency is committed to ensuring the public purchases ‘legitimate products’ instead of cheaper knockoffs often sold outside stadiums like the Coliseum.

[…]

Tatum King appears to be the usual showboating tosspot in this regard. The picture above shows him after a previous raid netted him some Golden State Warriors merchandise. Agent King can’t keep actual MS-13 warriors out of the Golden State, but he can crack down on underpriced baseball caps and sweatshirts.

The President has declared, repeatedly, that there is an emergency at the southern border. I agree with that. He has also said that, therefore, he needs more resources. That’s harder to agree with when a rogue bureaucracy refuses to act as if there’s an emergency and deploy its existing resources accordingly.

In fact, I’m not sure the left’s alleged war on ICE isn’t just their usual sly deflection, intended to provide a bit of useful cover for a subversive immigration bureaucracy to carry on doing as it’s done for a generation now and refuse to enforce existing immigration law — at least for anything that matters.

September 16, 2019

QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?

Filed under: Education, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?

  • Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
  • Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
  • Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
  • Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
  • As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
  • As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
  • Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.

If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?

Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.

September 14, 2019

QotD: America and its army

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained the civilians who heeded the trumpet’s call. The civilians did the fighting, of course — but they did it the Army’s way.

In 1861 millions of volunteers donned blue or gray. Millions of words have been written on American valor, but few books dwell on the fact that of the sixty important battles, fifty-five were commanded on both sides by West Pointers, and on one side in the remaining five.

In 1917 four million men were mustered in. Few of them liked it, but again they did things the way the professionals wanted them done.

The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

But since the Civil War, the Army had neither the esteem nor the favor of public or government. Liberal opinion, whether business-liberal or labor-liberal, dominated the United States after the destruction of the South, and the illiberal Army grew constantly more alienated from its own society.

In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around — the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Légion Étrangére, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.

But acquiesence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society’s purpose is to live; the military’s is to stand ready, if need be, to die.

Soldiers are rarely fit to rule — but they must be fit to fight.

The military is in essence a tool, to be used by its society. If its society is good, it may hope to be used honorably, even if badly. If its society is criminal, it may be, like the Wehrmacht, unleashed upon a helpless world.

But when the Wehrmacht dashed against the world, it was brought to ruin, not by a throng of amateurs, but by well-motivated, well-generaled Allied troops, who had learned their military lessons.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

September 12, 2019

QotD: Canadians and Europeans

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the current issue of The Spectator, Niall Ferguson argues that the Anglo-American “special relationship” is doomed.

“The typical British family,” he writes, “looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can.”

He has a point, though cultural similarities are not always determinative: Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But they still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can.

Mark Steyn, Telegraph, originally posted to the old blog (no longer online), 2004-09-30.

September 11, 2019

Environmental virtue signalling – it’s other people who need to change, not me

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

Heather Mac Donald notes that, as with so many other things, young people who like to virtue signal about their environmental concerns don’t consider it incumbent on them to change … it’s always other people whose habits must be changed, by force if necessary:

FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.

The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is — based on informal observation — bunk. The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.

This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints — whether it’s the cavalcade of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “quick day trip” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is not one of those changes appropriate for him.

Most young people have not yet reached such a flamboyant level of energy use, but if they could, they undoubtedly would, with as little sense of anachronism as that of Al Gore in his energy-guzzling mansion. These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed.

New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

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

Colby Cosh discusses the genesis of Atwood’s best-known work from 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale and the new sequel published this week, The Testaments:

In a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday, Atwood insisted again, as she always has, that her book wasn’t a prediction. People who read her book in a spirit of active dread, the kind of people who dress up as Handmaids and march on legislatures, will say that, well, dystopias are created specifically so that they won’t come true. What Atwood is trying to say goes deeper than that, and contradicts it. She won’t even insist that the book was intended as a warning. “I’m not a prophet,” she pleads, while everyone around her tells her what a terrific prophet she is.

What she means, but cannot say because it would sound arrogant, is: “I’m not a prophet, dammit, I’m an artist.” If tyrannies were easy to predict and prevent by spritzing around a bit of literary bug spray, they couldn’t come about in the first place. Atwood knows better than this; she knows that tragedies of this scale never take the form that an author might anticipate. Moreover, people who read The Handmaid’s Tale as a mere tract are deaf to its satirical elements — particularly those of the epilogue, in which the story is revealed to have been unearthed by scholars in a still-more-distant future.

These people are also failing to see that The Handmaid’s Tale is a book — researched, not merely imagined — about the past of humankind. The whole book is predicated on the observation (also made implicitly in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) that totalitarian regimes are never libertine; they all police sexuality at least as strenuously as they do trade and creative activity, and always come with puritanical, sexually homogenizing features. The novel was heavily influenced by Ceausescu’s Romania and its pro-natalist Decree 770, which abolished contraception and imposed mass gynecological inspection on women of fertile age. Europeans and students (or veterans) of the Cold War will notice this, but how many of the young folk who dress up as Handmaids at protests have any idea? (Are some of them also cosplaying on Twitter as postmodern retro-communists?)

I am curious to see what the critics make of the sequel, because the act of writing one seems a bit cynical, and yet perhaps Atwood has found some clever way of making it work. Offred’s narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale is, as I say, unearthed in a later future; it is important to the functioning of the book that we come to see her as a figure from the past, a human voice whose plea from an obscure period has been flung forward into the hands of half-comprehending and unsympathetic scholarly boobs.

September 10, 2019

We’ve noticed this too…

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the increasing “green-ness” of her appliances — and the increasing uselessness of same:

For years we got expensive front loaders, and yet our clothes kept smelling, there were stains that would not come out, and these things seemed to last only 5 years, on the outside. And I knew it wasn’t our problem, as such, because at the same time we started noticing we couldn’t get our clothes clean, the detergent aisle of the supermarket sprouted an entire section of odor removing things, Febreeze got added to detergents, and, in general, people smelled odd …

Then the washer broke while we were also very, very broke (we were paying mortgage and rent in the run up to buying this. I saw an ad for, I THINK a $300 washer, and we went to look. What we found, instead, was a $200, not advertised washer. As we’re looking at it the saleswoman hurries over and tells us we don’t want it. This washer, she says, uses lots of water. For those who don’t know I suffer from an unusual form of eczema. While it’s triggered mostly by stress with a side of carbs, it can also, out of the blue, take offense at a slight trace of detergent left on the clothes. I’ve found that the eczema got markedly worse the less water the washer used. And it required me to run the washer three times, once with soap and two without to avoid major outbreaks. The idea of using lots and lots of water was great, so I was all excited. Which shocked the poor saleswoman halfway to death. I will point out, though, though that this washer washes well enough I can get away with only one extra rinse cycle and if I forget it it’s usually survivable. Also, our clothes don’t smell. Unfortunately, we’ve not found that [type] of washer any of the times we’ve walked through the appliance aisle, so I think that choice has been eliminated.

Certainly the choice of dishwashers that use “lots” (i.e. what they used 20 years ago) of water and electricity was never offered to us. And since we seemed to have really lousy luck with dishwashers, I found every time we replaced one over the last 20 years, they had less space for dishes (more insulation, to allow for less electricity) to the point that I needed to do 3 or even 4 loads for a family of four. I mean, I cook from scratch, but I really don’t use that much stuff. And it ran slower than before. Right now our dishwasher actually washes (a bonus) but it takes four hours to run a cycle. I rarely do more than one wash a day, though, because it’s just Dan and I, and we … well … the kids used a lot more glasses and little plates, and frankly meals get more complicated for four people.

All the same, there was a time there, for like 10 years, where we were running all this “green” approved stuff, and not only was I running the washer and drier more or less continuously, but to make things more “interesting” I was using MORE water and electricity, in the sense that I was running the appliances a ton more.

This of course is what I also found with the “low flush” toilets. We had them in our previous house, and we found that we spent an inordinate amount of time flushing the toilet. Also, since it took four or five flushes to do the job or one, the fact we were actually only using half the water per flush didn’t save any water. We spent instead twice to three times the amount of water the “high flush” toilets had spent.

All this, btw, to appease Paul Ehrlich — the prophet of wrong. As in, if he foresees something it will be wrong — and his ridiculous idea we’d run out of potable water in 1978. Apparently none of these people have noticed that 1978 has come and gone with no problems. And as for electricity, if they stop their idiocy about nuclear, it’s not even a consideration. (And no, Chernobyl isn’t a caution about nuclear energy. It’s a caution about stupid communist regimes. They can’t run anything — not even a nuclear plant — without destroying it.)

Lightbulbs are another favourite … several years back, our provincial government was pushing us all to get rid of our old incandescent bulbs and replace them with these great new energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. The new CFLs cost roughly ten times as much as the old bulbs, but we were assured up and down that they’d last twenty times longer, so we’d not only save money on electricity, but also have to replace the bulbs so infrequently. Of course, the CFL bulbs were pathetically bad — not only were they expensive, the light they gave was (at best) marginal and they didn’t even last as long as typical incandescent bulbs.

So now, of course, we’re being encouraged to use LED bulbs. Sure, they’re more expensive than the old incandescent bulbs, but they save on electricity and last many times longer! Except, of course, they don’t. The old incandescent bulbs in my office started to fail one after another, so when I was down to only one working bulb, I gave in and bought four replacement LED bulbs … they were on sale for only 2-3 times as much as the old bulbs! That was in March. I’ve already had to replace two of the LED bulbs. This is starting to feel familiar…

On the bright side (pun unintentional), the LED bulbs don’t provide the entertainment of a toxic waste cleanup in your home the way the CFL bulbs did when they were broken.

Shooting the Milkor M32 40mm Grenade Launcher

Filed under: Africa, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 6 Jul 2019

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Thanks to Milkor USA, I have a chance today to do some shooting with both the M32 and M32A1 rotary grenade launchers they make for the US military. I’m using 40mm chalk training ammunition, with some steel targets at about 75-85 meters. In live fire, it’s quite clear how much of an improvement the M32A1 trigger is over its predecessor!

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Forgotten Weapons
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