Quotulatiousness

June 24, 2012

Do your media outlets suffer from ADD?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Okay, it’s a trick question: they all do. Gerard Vanderleun pulls out an older piece (originally posted in 2003) that explains how and why your mainstream media became afflicted with ADD:

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let’s see if I can get the flame-thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.

What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.)

The only group that I can see in the United States that, as a group, is seriously afflicted with ADD is a group of would-be adults — the group we call collectively “The Mainstream Media.” For members of this group ADD is not an option, it is a requirement. Far from being a means to informing and enlightening the public, the primary role of the MSM is to distract it. At this they are very good since they are “Distracted from distraction by distraction” by their very nature. They are “the ADD professionals.” They actually get paid for doing this. Paid well for having a disease.

June 23, 2012

Autobiography as fiction, lightly dusted with personal history

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

Mark Steyn on America’s first Invented-American president:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’ new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish nonliterary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

[. . .]

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straitjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

June 22, 2012

The War of 1812 “remains the Jan Brady of American conflicts”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

In The Atlantic, Adam Chandler explains why the War of 1812 is an also-ran in the American war popularity contest:

Of the many holes in the American national memory, the War of 1812 may be the most gaping. The war that gave America its national anthem, birthed Uncle Sam, and anointed four future presidents as war heroes remains the Jan Brady of American conflicts for good reason: not only was it book-ended by two vastly more significant wars, but its causes weren’t sexy, its conclusions were muddy, and its most famous battle took place after peace was declared. And so 1812 remains the only American war known by its date. (Even Congress refused to establish a bicentennial commission, leaving the commemorations up to the states.)

But as history buffs, state and local governments, and (doubtlessly) some zealous reenactors begin the mark the conflict that started on this date in 1812, there is much that modern-day Americans can learn from this clumsy moment in the nation’s childhood.

[. . .]

Congress finally declared war on Britain, with impeccably bad timing: Just a few days earlier, the British foreign minister had decided to rescind the policy towards American trade that had caused all of the hullabaloo to begin with. But word did not reach America in time, and ill-equipped U.S. forces fecklessly staggered into Canada to show the British not to mess with American trade (and to possibly snag some of Canada’s sweet farm land). Aided by a confederacy of Native Americans, Canada mostly repelled the invasion and won a large number of battles.

The most ridiculous moment of all featured the United States surrendering the entire city of Detroit without firing a shot in defense. “It was the most colossal screw-up of the war,” Alan Taylor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explained in an interview. “And it comes at the worst possible time in the first major invasion. The Madison administration was counting on winning a quick victory in invading Upper Canada from the western end via Detroit to render the war popular. And instead, he got a catastrophic defeat.”

However, most Americans, if they remember it at all, recall the scene that inspired the writing of the national anthem or the (technically post-war) battle at New Orleans:

“All of those are events that come in the last months of the war when the British were mounting a counterattack against the United States.” Taylor explained. “They are all events that lead Americans to think they were on the defensive in the war and that the British were the aggressor. What’s lost sight of is that the United States declared the war and conducted the first two years of the war primarily as an invasion of Canada. And so Americans don’t remember the battles in Canada because they went so badly for the United States.”

June 21, 2012

Canada’s recession, in one Tweet

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

June 19, 2012

Robert Fulford: 1963-74 was a period where “everything connects in a web of deceit, paranoia and distorted ambition”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

An interesting article by Robert Fulford in the National Post, discussing the time between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon. I was too young to pay any attention to politics in those days, and I only started being aware of how weird it was through reading Hunter S. Thompson’s political writings of the time — and I still think it’s a great encapsulation of the bottled insanity of the US political system of that era.

For 11 years, 1963 to 1974, tragedy and shame were the most persistent themes of American politics. That period has never been given a name, but after four decades it feels like a distinct unit in history. From the death of John Kennedy to the resignation of Richard Nixon, everything connects in a web of deceit, paranoia and distorted ambition.

[. . .]

Even after ultimate power fell into Johnson’s hands, it left him squirming in frustration and rage. He was triumphant for a brief moment, pushing through Congress laws that opened society to black Americans. But he felt surrounded by enemies. Although he asked Kennedy’s men to stay on, he never trusted them. When Malvolio leaves the stage he threatens, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” That was how Johnson felt about Bobby Kennedy. Caro is especially good on the bitter 15-year struggle that consumed these two men, both smart but both hopelessly lacking in self-awareness.

Johnson’s second downfall, the swiftly increasing Vietnam war, was also America’s tragedy, a fruitless enterprise that cost many lives and wrecked American confidence in Washington. As Caro now says, “Everyone thinks distrust of government started under Nixon. That’s not true. It started under Johnson.” On Vietnam he lied so consistently that Americans ceased to believe anything he said. Journalists spoke euphemistically of his “credibility gap.” Trust in the political class never 
returned.

With Johnson so dishonoured that he couldn’t run for re-election in 1968, Nixon succeeded him. He brought with him a style darker and more paranoid even than Johnson’s. In covering up a break-in by his party’s operatives at the Watergate complex, he revealed that everything said about him by his worst enemies was true.

[. . .]

From beginning to end, Schlesinger despised Nixon. In 1962, when Nixon brought out his self-revealing memoir, Six Crises, demonstrating that his main interest in life was judging how others saw him, Schlesinger wrote in his diary “I do not see how his political career can survive this book.” Schlesinger, while he served power-mad leaders, didn’t understand them. He couldn’t imagine that just six years later, in 1968, Nixon’s furious ambition would make him president and then get him re-elected to a second term, the one he failed to complete because Watergate made him the first American president ever to resign in disgrace, a fate even worse than Johnson’s.

Schlesinger’s book provides an accompaniment to this heartbreaking era of shame. It never fails to remind us that, no matter what theories the historians construct, the course of history is usually shaped by a few frail, frightened and often deeply damaged human beings.

June 18, 2012

Speculation on the intended mission of the X-37B

Filed under: China, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

A blog post at New Scientist compares the achievement of the Chinese space program, which just successfully placed three astronauts aboard the ISS and the highly mysterious X-37B spaceplane which just completed a 469-day mission:

China’s space agency took the plaudits for successfully docking its crewed Shenzhou-9 spacecraft with its orbiting lab Tiangong-1 today, but the feat was slightly overshadowed by the weekend landing of the US X-37B spaceplane, which after a record-breaking orbital flight of 469 days showed just how far China has to go to catch up with advanced spacefaring nations.

At around noon local time, the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre relayed live pictures of Shenzhou-9’s docking on state broadcaster China Central Television. The space capsule held off at a distance of 62 kilometres from Tiangong-1 before making its docking approach just before 2pm — and once the crew had manually locked on to the latter’s cruciform docking target it took only eight minutes to latch the spacecraft together safely.

[. . .]

This Boeing-built spaceplane, roughly one quarter the size of the space shuttle, is equally mysterious. It flies to orbit on a regular rocket and when there deploys a solar array that gives its sensors the power they need for extended missions. It also has enough propellant to fire thrusters that make small changes to its orbit in a bid to foil surveillance. The vehicle re-enters the atmosphere just like the shuttle but lands entirely autonomously, making it a space drone.

At no point has the USAF revealed the craft’s purpose: in addition to spacecraft surveillance, it could deploy a robot that repairs (or disables) satellites in orbit, say some, while at the darker end of the spectrum of possibilities — it was a DARPA project in its early days — it could carry a warhead, using its drone homing capability to provide surprise precision strike from orbit.

Legal pratfalls ensue

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Scott H. Greenfield at the Simple Justice blog on how the legal equivalent of “two 12-year-olds rolling in the mud” morphed into a lawyer beclowning himself in an epic fashion:

But Matthew Inman, who does the Oatmeal, put the lawyer Charles Carreon’s letter demanding $20k on the web, with his own special touches, in a masterful response, one aspect of which was that rather than succumb to Carreon’s demand, he would raise some money for charity.

[. . .]

Three things to note: First, Carreon started suit in his own name, not that of his client, which suggest that this is for the wrong done him by the mean children of the internet. Second, he’s sued not only Inman, apparently for “incitement to cyber-vandalism,” but the Indiegogo, which handles charitable collections, as well as the two charities to whom Inman’s collection goes.

This is nuts. For a fellow who foolishly stepped in shit, he’s doubled quadrupled down. My guess is that he’s included the charities as stakeholders or beneficiaries of Inman’s actions, and wants the money collected to go to him rather than to fighting cancer or saving bears. He wants money collected to fight cancer to go to him instead. It’s unthinkable [that] anyone could do such a thing.

Who’s afraid of austerity?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

At the BBC News website, Niall Ferguson on why young westerners should welcome austerity:

The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.

In this regard, the statistics commonly cited as government debt are themselves deeply misleading, for they encompass only the sums owed by governments in the form of bonds.

The rapidly rising quantity of these bonds certainly implies a growing charge on those in employment, now and in the future, since — even if the current low rates of interest enjoyed by the biggest sovereign borrowers persist — the amount of money needed to service the debt must inexorably rise.

But the official debts in the form of bonds do not include the often far larger unfunded liabilities of welfare schemes like — to give the biggest American schemes — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly thirteen times the debt as stated by the U.S. Treasury.

Notice that these figures, too, are incomplete, since they omit the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments, which are estimated to be around $38 trillion.

These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure.

[. . .]

It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees.

If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

A second problem is that today’s Western democracies now play such a large part in redistributing income that politicians who argue for cutting expenditures nearly always run into the well-organised opposition of one or both of two groups: recipients of public sector pay and recipients of government benefits.

June 17, 2012

“For the weekend, I’ll have to be a turncoat”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

For some obscure reason (hint: because they didn’t win) American re-enactors are much less fond of War of 1812 re-enactments than Canadians:

When the first big battle of the War of 1812 is re-enacted this fall, the U.S. 1st Artillery regiment will mount an ear-splitting barrage. The Yanks will point their cannons at British redcoats across the Niagara River in Canada. They will wear blue. They will curse King George.

Unlike 200 years ago, they will all be Canadians.

Many Americans aren’t that into the War of 1812 — not like Canadians, anyway — so the latter often play the former in re-enactments along the international border here.

“For the weekend, I’ll have to be a turncoat,” says John Sek, 60, an English-born Canadian who will play a U.S. Army gunnery captain in the Battle of Queenston Heights. “There isn’t the same interest in the war on your side.”

To grossly generalize: Canadians, whose forebears helped repulse several U.S. invasions in 1812, regard the war that began 200 years ago Monday as a crucible of national identity. For them, its bicentennial is a big deal.

June 16, 2012

Obama’s really bad week

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

Matthew Continetti on President Obama’s really awful week:

I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”

Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech — which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications — revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.

The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words — “the private sector is doing fine” — that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.

Explosion 1812: “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

I may have to make some time to watch TV tomorrow:

This month’s 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812 will be marked with a colossal bang: the television premiere of Explosion 1812, a new documentary that argues the intentional detonation of Upper Canada’s main ammunition supply at present-day Toronto in April 1813 — described as “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America” — is a greatly underappreciated moment in history that was key to thwarting the U.S. conquest of Canada.

The two-hour, Canadian-made film — to be aired by History Television on June 17, the eve of the bicentennial of the formal U.S. declaration of war on June 18, 1812 — recounts how retreating British-Canadian troops at Fort York blew up the colony’s “grand magazine” along the Lake Ontario shore as American forces closed in on Upper Canada’s capital on April 27, 1813.

[. . .]

U.S. soldiers outraged at what they considered an act of extreme treachery — even a war crime because of their comrades’ fatal proximity to the explosion — went on a vengeful rampage in the captured capital, terrorizing the civilian population and pillaging residents’ property.Ê

Those actions, in turn, prompted a similar assault on Washington, D.C., in 1814, when the U.S. capital was stormed by British and Canadian troops who set fire to the White House.

Among the U.S. casualties at York was the famed commander of the invasion force, Gen. Zebulon Pike, an early explorer of the American West whose death — his chest crushed by falling rock from the blasted armoury — would be exploited to rally patriotic sentiment in the U.S. for the duration of the war.

Sometimes the navy gets far more use out of a ship than they expect

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Strategy Page on some extremely old ships still in service in various navies:

Last year, the British Royal Navy retired its oldest warship still in service, the 4,700 ton HMS Caroline. This light cruiser entered service in 1914 and fought in the epic Battle of Jutland in 1916. After World War II, Caroline served as a training ship, mostly tied up at dockside. When decommissioned last year, the ship could no longer move under her own power.

The Caroline was not the only World War I warship still in service. Currently, the oldest ship still in service is the Russian salvage ship VMF Kommuna. This 2,500 ton catamaran was built in the Netherlands and entered service in 1915. Kommuna began service in the Czar’s navy, spent most of its career in the Soviet (communist) Navy, and now serves in the fleet of a democratic Russia. Originally designed to recover submarines that had sunk in shallow coastal waters, Kommuna remains in service to handle smaller submersibles, does it well and has been maintained over the decades to the point where it cheaper to keep the old girl operational, than to try and design and build a replacement.

Most navies would not want to bring attention to their oldest ship, especially if it was nearly a century old. It’s different in the American Navy. For example, three years ago the carrier, USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) was finally decommissioned, and ceased to be the oldest ship in the fleet. The Kitty Hawk served for 48 years and 13 days. In that time, about 100,000 sailors served on the ship. The ship was the navy’s last non-nuclear carrier and, since 1998, the oldest ship in commission. “The Hawk” did not age well, and had lots of breakdowns in its final years. This led members of the crew to nickname the ship; “Shitty Hawk”.

June 15, 2012

The Canadian War Museum’s 1812 exhibit

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

Maclean’s finds the Canadian War Museum’s War of 1812 exhibit lacking in the triumphal chest-beating one might expect:

“If you’re a Canadian, the Americans invaded, and we pushed them back, and we evolved into an independent country. So as far as we’re concerned, it’s hardly worth saying that Canada won,” says exhibition curator Peter MacLeod, the museum’s pre-Confederation historian. “But the Americans have their own take on it. They went to war with the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world. And they fought them to a draw. They forced them to respect American independence and American sovereignty. So as far as the Americans are concerned, it’s just as obvious that they won.”

To the British, says MacLeod, the conflict in North America was a sideshow to the more important war against Napoleon in Europe. They invested the weapons and men they could spare, and the Royal Navy blockaded American ports, but defending Canada was of secondary importance.

For Native Americans, it was an existential fight. “Here is a chance presented to us,” the Shawnee leader Tecumseh said, “a chance such as will never occur again, for us Indians of North America to form ourselves into a great combination and cast our lot with the British in this war.”

Tecumseh’s coalition of Native American tribes believed that by aligning themselves with the British, they might stop American expansionism. “This is the last war where they have a serious chance to roll back the American frontier,” says MacLeod. “And it’s the last war where they have a European ally on their side. After this they’re facing the United States on their own, and the Americans basically roll straight to the Pacific.”

June 14, 2012

The Commerce Clause: how it evolved to empower government control of everything

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, the entire law “must be declared void.” Judge Vinson cites this Reason.tv video on page 47 of his decision.

June 13, 2012

Wine: drink what tastes best to you, not what the experts tell you to

Filed under: Europe, France, Randomness, USA, Wine — Nicholas @ 09:30

Yet another blind taste test that didn’t come out the way it was “supposed” to:

At the Princeton tasting, led by George Taber, 9 wine judges from France, Belgium and the U.S. tasted French against New Jersey [TC: that’s the New Jersey] wines. The French wines selected were from the same producers as in 1976 including names such as Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Haut Brion, priced up to $650/bottle. New Jersey wines for the competition were submitted to an informal panel of judges, who then selected the wines for the competition. These judges were not eligible to taste wines at the final competition The results were similarly surprising. Although, the winner in each category was a French wine (Clos de Mouches for the whites and Mouton-Rothschild for the reds) NJ wines are at eye level. Three of the top four whites were from New Jersey. The best NJ red was ranked place 3. An amazing result given that the prices for NJ average at only 5% of the top French wines.

A statistical evaluation of the tasting, conducted by Princeton Professor Richard Quandt, further shows that the rank order of the wines was mostly insignificant. That is, if the wine judges repeated the tasting, the results would most likely be different. From a statistically viewpoint, most wines were undistinguishable. Only the best white and the lowest ranked red were significantly different from the others wines.

There are good wines and bad wines. There are good wines and better wines. But my experience has always been that there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which you’re paying more money for no appreciable improvement in the quality of the wine. In other words, beyond that point, you’re paying for the prestige of the label or the mystique of the brand not for anything intrinsic to the liquid in the glass. As I wrote last year:

We’re in a golden age for wine, as more and more producers of inexpensive wines adopt better techniques and equipment for even their vin extremely ordinaire.

Wine isn’t a simple product: people buy wine for lots of different reasons, and one of those reasons is to signal higher social status by buying more expensive wine. As you get above a certain price level, the quality increases more slowly but the “prestige” makes up the difference (for those interested in the social signalling, anyway).

I’ve discovered that my palate isn’t highly developed enough to detect and appreciate the additional quality that a $100 bottle of wine is supposed to display over a $40-$50 bottle. It may be that I lack the ability to discriminate sufficiently between the two … or it may be that the primary difference is in the “prestige” and not in the palate.

If you’re buying wine to have with a nice dinner, find your point of diminishing returns and don’t go beyond it: you’ll save yourself a lot of money over time and still enjoy your wine. If, on the other hand, you’re buying wine specifically to impress then go as expensive as you like.

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