Quotulatiousness

December 26, 2019

“Make Gas Cans Great Again”

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

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton offers a simple, yet fiendishly clever policy for Donald Trump to secure millions of votes in the next election:

If Donald Trump wants to ensure he recaptures the 2020 electoral votes in the Great Lakes states he won in 2016 — and possibly add Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine — there is one simple thing he could do that would make him a hero to every snow-blowing American — issue an executive order to restore functioning gas cans.

To be clear, this would also make him a hero to tens of millions of other Americans throughout the country who use lawn mowers, power tools, etc around their homes or in their jobs. In 2009 the EPA banned the sale of gas cans that functionally pour gas. To be specific, the scientifically illiterate bureaucrats at the EPA outlawed gas cans with vents, mandating that all new gas cans must have crazy contraptions that require three hands to operate. Unlike the old gas cans, the new ones spill gas all over the user and onto the ground. The result of the EPA’s incompetence is a new gas can that is much worse for the environment than the one it replaced. The incompetent regulators at the EPA are so scientifically illiterate that they honestly believed that the vents on gas cans were there to allow gas fumes to escape, rather than the actual purpose of allowing air to flow in to the can so that gas can be poured out. Having received their “science” education in Oppression Studies classes at Grievance State University, these morons making rules for how we gas up our power tools have likely never handled a tool more powerful than their own personal groomers.

The government-mandated non-functioning gas can may be the most unpopular government-imposed regulatory rule since the 55 mile per hour speed limit. If you don’t know someone who mocks and despises these stupid red canisters, then you are living a very sheltered urban or upscale lifestyle. Most all working-class and middle-class Americans deal with these awful containers, and they mock the government for imposing them on us.

December 25, 2019

The Wildest Christmas Party Ever? – December 24th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – DAY 1

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

TimeGhost History
Published 24 Dec 2019

The first day of TimeGhost of Christmas is about a legendary Christmas Party bearing the equally legendary name of “the Eggnog Riots”, which took place on Christmas Eve in 1826 at the Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Sources:
NYPL Digital Collections
From the Noun Project:
Wine by Ayub Irawan
Drunk by Ates Evren Aydinel
Whisky by Made by Made
Rum by Andreja Kirma
clock by Maurício Brito

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Etienne Roussell – “A Winter’s Night”
Mike Franklyn – “Christmas Bliss”

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

December 24, 2019

Remy: “The First Noel” (Ballot Access Parody)

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

ReasonTV
Published 23 Dec 2019

Remy is creeped out by restrictive ballot access measures. Also by Prince Andrew.

——————
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Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

Written and performed by Remy.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.

LYRICS:

The first Noel I heard early one day
As I tried to run as a new candidate
My cheeks were wetter than Prince Andrew’s shirt
When the man spoke to me and he told me these words:

No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
No room for me on the ballot, oh well

I looked up a party wherein
I could join but was told “There’s no room at the inn”
No bed to lay and I heard “take a hike”
Like the time I bought my wife an exercise bike

No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
No room for me in the parties, oh well

My wish this year is to feel content
At the ballot and not—to be frank—incensed
Must it be so hard to boot folks we don’t like
But they claim it is lawful and I think that’s right, but …

No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
Seriously, how creepy is Prince Andrew?

December 23, 2019

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

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

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

December 21, 2019

The Treaty of Versailles And The Economic Consequences Of The Peace I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: Books, Economics, Germany, History, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 19 Dec 2019

Help The Great War and keep it free for everyone: https://patreon.com/thegreatwar

John Maynard Keynes was an economist and part of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He had high hopes for a new post-war order but when he realized what Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd-George and Woodrow Wilson were planning, he resigned from the conference. And then wrote a book about it: The Economic Consequences of the Peace became a bestseller and is one of the best known critiques of the Versailles Treaty.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
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» SOURCES
Demps, Lorenz and Materna, Ingo (eds.). Geschichte Berlins von den Anfängen bis 1945. Berlin, 1987.
Eichengreen, Barry. Golden Fetters. The Gold Standard and the Great Depression 1919-1939. New York 1995.
Horn. Britain, France and the Financing of the First World War, 2002.
Hudson, Michael. Trade, Development, and Foreign Debt: Volume 2. Pluto Press, London, 1992.
Hudson, Michael. Superimperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. Pluto Press, London 2003.
Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, New York, 1919.
Kinzer, Stephen. The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2018
Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 1960.
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. Penguin Books, New York, New York, 2003.
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes Volume I — Hopes Betrayed. Penguin Books, New York, 1983.

»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Mark Newton
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig

Channel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van Stephold

A Mediakraft Networks Original Channel

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2019

Repost – The Monkees – “Riu Chiu”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Uploaded on 15 Dec 2015

The Monkees perform “Riu Chiu” from Episode 47, “The Monkees’ Christmas Show”.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

December 20, 2019

Repost – Happy holiday travels!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

H/T to Economicrot. Many many more at the link.

December 16, 2019

“The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jason Morgan reviews Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom:

The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the “wrong side of history” (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter — are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist — and current PC target — Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni’s death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they’re in). It’s that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century. In his latest book, Google Archipelago, Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago’s regime of “simulated reality” “must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth.”

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

December 15, 2019

From “mascupathy” to “toxic masculinity”

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

Suzanne Venker on the well-aired notion that males are suffering from “toxic masculinity”, and must be “cured” by being more like females:

“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ve always been fascinated at the ease with which specious ideas spread. One day you’re living your life, and unbeknownst to you, someone who holds a reasonable measure of power has an idea based on his or her “research.” That person tells someone else, and then that person tells someone else, and the next thing you know, this new idea has spread like wildfire and people everywhere who are clamoring for answers to complex problems jump on board and say, “Yes, that’s it! That must be it!” All of a sudden, you start reading and hearing about it in the news. An idea has been born. It is now a fact.

That’s how I imagine we arrived at the bogus concept known as “toxic masculinity,” which was apparently deemed “mascupathy” 10 years go by psychotherapist Randy Flood. Mascupathy, Flood and his colleagues decided, is the failure of a man to shed his traditional manly ways. At that point, he officially has a disease.

“We just believe,” writes Flood in Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing The Malaise of American Manhood, “that there is a disease process that goes on when we raise boys to cut off half of their humanity in order to pursue the pinnacle of masculinity.”

This is the conclusion some, such as Flood, have come to for why men and boys are struggling:

    Women are graduating from college at higher levels. the male suicide rate is four times that of women, men have a harder time moving out of their parents’ homes than women. There are so many statistics that are telling us that men are struggling. Ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are men, but when there is a shooting we don’t talk about men’s mental health.

Actually, many people have addressed men’s mental health. We simply didn’t arrive at the same conclusion. Men and boys aren’t suffering from an overdose of masculinity; they’re suffering from a dearth of masculinity.

How could it be the former when millions of boys come from fatherless homes and when most boys are products of public schools, where only 23% of teachers are male? Single motherhood has skyrocketed over the last five decades — a whopping 40% increase. Who do we suppose is encouraging boys to “pursue the pinnacle of masculinity”? Their mothers and their female teachers?

Hardly. In schools, girls have the upper hand while boys go along for the ride. Their interests and their innate aggression were stifled the moment we got rid of recess and told boys to sit still and read books centered on women and girls. At home, boys of single mothers are largely responsible for themselves, which is why so many get into trouble. To the extent that single mothers are home, they may be very good at mothering. But they can’t be a father.

QotD: Naming military actions

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

I often note with amusement the significant differences in naming conventions for military operations between the US and the rest of the “Anglosphere”. A typical US Army operation might be “Operation Devastating Earthshatterer”, while a British or Canadian equivalent might be “Operation Broken Teaspoon” or “Operation Goalie Glove”. (I’ll pass up on the urge to attribute something mockery-tinged to French codenames … but only because Babelfish didn’t give me a useful translation for “Operation Wet Knickers” or “Operation Big Girl’s Blouse”).

Not that there’s anything wrong with a dose of belligerent overkill in your naming conventions…

Posted on the old blog (no longer online), 2004-09-09.

December 14, 2019

History of Space Travel – Guided by Starlight – Extra History – #6

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published 12 Dec 2019

What happened after we touched down on the moon? And where are we going in the future? While we may have lost the glitz and glamor of the Space Race, we have continued to make incredible progress in reaching the stars. We’ve come together to build space stations while in space, create the international space station, and started developing new technologies that could take us to Mars and beyond.

Start 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

December 13, 2019

Further adventures of the “Basic College Girl”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian has another tale of his university teaching career to share:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008. (Not the educational institution in the story…)
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

The Basic College Girl is so dumb, lazy, and entitled, she makes Hillary Clinton look like a criminal mastermind. I caught one recycling a term paper from another class because she’d forgotten to take the other professor’s name off the header. Hell, I caught one copy-pasting straight off Wikipedia because she’d left the hyperlinks embedded in the text.

And these were not Hail Marys. Just copy-pasting something, anything, Cuttlefish-style makes sense if you haven’t done a lick of work and it’s due in five minutes. It’s a one-in-a-million shot, sure, but since it took you all of 45 seconds and you’re going to fail anyway, you might as well try to shoot the moon. No, these were papers turned in with plenty of time to spare (I always had my term papers due at least a week before final exams).

Think about that for a second: Instead of coming to my office hours with a sob story, or trying to talk the registrar into an incomplete, or faking her own death, or doing literally anything else, more than a few BCGs turned in visible-from-space plagiarism and skipped on down to Starbucks for a triple foam half-caff venti soy chai pumpkin spice latte. YOLO!

That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is the BCG’s reaction when you catch them. When you point out that no, I’m not Professor Jones and this isn’t Spring 2014, the BCG’s universal, invariable reaction is … anger. At YOU.

At the time I was simply too pissed to think about it rationally (I trust you’ll believe me when I say that in the semesters just before I retired, my biggest challenge was keeping a look of utter contempt off my face). Looking back on it after some years, though, it makes sense. BCGs are all grandiose narcissists with Borderline Personality Disorder. Of course they’re just so wonderful that anything they deign to turn in should be given an A+, sight unseen. What other purpose could I, the professor, possibly serve, other than to mark it down for record-keeping? Now she’s forced to take the time to email me, or come down to my office hours, or what have you, just to set my dumb ass straight. It’s a real inconvenience!

December 12, 2019

“Socialism” and “Capitalism” in the United States

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

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan look at the supposed conflict between sharing, caring socialism and raw, heartless capitalism in the context of the American political theatre:

These terms were once very clearly defined. Socialism is state control of the means of production. The intent is that these means are to be used for the public good. By contrast, capitalism is simply private ownership of the means of production. The intent is that these means are to be used to advance the interests of those who own them, which will in turn create conditions of general prosperity that can be enjoyed by all.

When polled, Americans express relatively well-defined views on both. And while nowhere near a majority of the American electorate favors a completely socialist system, a recent Gallup poll indicates that more than four in ten Americans think “some form of socialism” is a good thing. But what is “some form of socialism?” A society is either socialist or it isn’t. The state either owns the means of production or it doesn’t. There is no middle ground. Even our openly socialist politicians rarely advocate anything near as drastic as government control of the means of production.

[…]

And just as transferism is not actually socialism, the system against which transferists rail isn’t capitalism, either. When they think of “capitalism,” transferists imagine a monied class that defrauds customers, pollutes the environment, and maintains monopoly power, all because the monied class is in bed with government. But capitalism is simply the private ownership of the means of production. What people are actually describing is something more appropriately called “cronyism,” which can manifest in a socialist system as easily as in a capitalist one. Cronyism isn’t a byproduct of the economic system at all; it is a byproduct of politics.

For current examples, one need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Socialists say these aren’t examples of “real socialism,” and they’re not. There was a time when these countries were indeed socialist, just as there was a time when the United States was capitalist. But cronyism has overtaken these countries’ economic systems, just as it did in humanity’s grandest socialist experiment: the Soviet Union. Life was simply different for inner-party members than it was for workers. This is the real danger that all countries face, regardless of the animating principles of their economic and political structures.

[…]

We need to answer the core question: how much transferism do we want?

In order to figure this out, we need to come to terms with the fact that any transfer is a confiscation of wealth from the people who created it. That confiscation will decrease wealth creation in the long term by decreasing an important incentive to take the risks necessary for creating wealth. Second, we have to recognize that transferism is addictive. No matter how much we transfer, people will always want more. The United States’ $23 trillion debt, the largest debt the world has ever seen, has come about because of American voters’ voracious appetite for transfers combined with politicians’ obvious incentive to provide them.

The solution politicians have found is to pass off the cost of the transfers to taxpayers who haven’t yet been born by borrowing the money, thereby leaving to the next generation the problem of repaying the debt or enduring unending interest payments. It’s a house of cards to be sure, but from their perspective, it will be someone else’s house of cards.

In the end, we have polluted our political discourse with two words that no longer have much meaning: socialism and capitalism. In the process, we don’t call the animating principle of modern American politics what it actually is: transferism. The only winners have been the politicians who manage to gather votes by keeping the electorate in a near-constant state of friction. And they keep winning if people keep thinking in categories that ceased to have any real meaning years ago.

December 11, 2019

Toward a working definition of “social justice”

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

David Thompson hacks through the jungle of misinformation to craft an initial working definition that appears to hit all the high points quite nicely:

“Social justice” entails treating people not as individuals but as mascots and categories. And judging a person and their actions based on which Designated Victim Group they supposedly belong to and then assigning various exemptions and indulgences depending on that notional group identity and whatever presumptuous baggage can be attached to it, with varying degrees of perversity. And conversely, assigning imaginary sins and “privilege” to someone else based on whatever Designated Oppressor Group they can be said to belong to, however fatuously, and regardless of the particulars of the actual person.

Which is to say, “social justice” is largely about judging people tribally, cartoonishly, and by different and contradictory standards, based on some supposed group identity, which apparently — and conveniently — overrides all else. It’s glib, question-begging and pernicious. Cargo-cult morality. Viewed with a cool eye, it’s something close to the opposite of justice. And yet, among our self-imagined betters, it’s the latest must-have.

In much the same way, “diversity” seems to be the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be. An unobvious proposition, to say the least. And then there’s “equity” — another word favoured by both educators and campus activists — and which is defined, if at all, only in the woolliest and most evasive of terms. And which, when used by those same educators and activists, seems to mean something like “equality of outcome regardless of inputs.” Inputs including diligence and punctuality. And that isn’t fair either.

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