Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2022

As federal minister of public safety, it’s Marco Mendicino’s job to lie to Canadians

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

At least, the headline is my interpretation of Matt Gurney‘s somewhat more cautious and measured assessment of the minister’s recent performance:

To celebrate World Press Freedom Day last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said some wonderful things about the importance of truth.

“In the age of disinformation and misinformation,” the statement read, “independent, fact-based reporting is vital. We must all come together to support the work of journalists and double down in the fight against disinformation.”

Stirring stuff. But does the prime minister, his government and the Liberals’ many supporters think any of that actually applies to them?

Marco Mendicino is the federal minister of public safety — a tough job in challenging times. But I’ve come to the unsettling conclusion that Minister Mendicino is not being honest with Canadians.

On the issue of gun control, I’m sorry to say he’s simply lying.

Last week here at The Line, I analyzed the Liberals’ proposed Bill C-21, a package of gun-control measures. My views on this file differ sharply from the government’s. But I’d have hoped that we could at least agree that honesty should be central to the government’s proposals and publicity.

No dice. Last weekend, on CTV’s Question Period, the minister said this: “Bill C-21 doesn’t target law-abiding gun owners, it targets handgun violence, it targets organized crime … I have enormous respect for law-abiding gun owners …”

Well, let’s just go have a gander at the minister’s own webpage, eh? The Public Safety Ministry summarized the proposed legal and regulatory changes. There are 13 specific proposed changes to the Firearms Act. Two are “internal” to the government itself and don’t directly bear on gun owners, law-abiding or otherwise. One targets firearms-related marketing, another is exemptions for “elite sports shooters”. The remaining nine are entirely aimed at the “law-abiding gun owners” the minister insists aren’t being targeted. The page also notes that the government will also be changing regulations (separately from the proposed bill) relating to the safe storage of firearms and ammunition magazine limits … again, aimed entirely and solely at law-abiding gun owners. Indeed, along with some entirely process-focused Criminal Code proposals, there’s only one — one — proposed change that actually focuses on gun smuggling, which is widely believed by law enforcement to be the primary driver of firearms homicides in Canada. (Other planned changes are too vague to be properly analyzed in this context, but could plausibly be aimed at smuggling or blackmarket sales.)

But do the math. One clear mention of smuggling, at least 11 that only affect licensed owners. Denying this is dishonest, full stop.

Let’s be clear: the minister is entirely within his rights to argue that the proposed measures targeting lawful owners are necessary, appropriate and reasonable. These are legitimate debates. What is not up for debate is that the majority of these proposals exclusively target and/or affect law-abiding gun owners. There’s no ambiguity here. The meaning and purpose of C-21 is clear.

Gas Trap M1 Garand

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Sep 2016

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

The original design of the M1 Garand as adopted in 1936 used a “gas trap” system instead of a gas port drilled in the barrel. This system used a type of muzzle cap and false muzzle to redirect gas into the gas cylinder in the short distance between the end of the rifled barrel and when the bullet left the muzzle. The system worked, but was not ideal.

Several problems were found with the gas trap system as the guns went into production. These included cleaning complexity, an unstable front sight, and a potentially weak bayonet mounting point. Most significantly, however, one rifle in testing had a screw work loose in the muzzle cap, which allowed parts to shift out of alignment and resulted in a bullet striking the gas plug and blowing the entire assembly off the gun. This led to a decision to redesign the gas system of the M1 to use a simpler gas port drilled in the barrel.

When this design change was made, 18,000 rifles had been completed and parts were made for an additional 33,000. Those guns were completed with the available parts, and the new gas system was used for all further production. Gas trap M1s are very rare today because the guns were updated to the new system when they were overhauled during WWII, and in 1947 the Army ordered all remaining gas trap rifles destroyed.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

QotD: Modern disposable clothing

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

Rich Americans – or even middle-class Americans – excel at throwing things away, and the richer we become, the bigger the mounds of cast-off clothing swell. The Salvation Army at one time tried to sell all of the clothing in its stores or to give it away, but the supply now so far outstrips domestic demand that only a fraction of the clothing collected by the Salvation Army stays in the United States. There are nowhere near enough poor people in America to absorb the mountains of castoffs, even if they were given away.

Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, 2015.

June 10, 2022

Don’t think of it as “Shrinkflation” … think of it as corporations helpfully trying to help you lose weight (at the same or higher prices)

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

Companies have several different ways to cope with rising input prices, including just swallowing the increases without passing them on to consumers … stop laughing, I mean it’s at least theoretically possible, right? They can also just hike retail prices, which we’ve seen a fair bit of already, but that sometimes agitates consumers enough to materially depress sales. A sneakier way, which we’re also seeing a lot of, is to shrink the product but sell it for the same price. Sometimes, it will take a while for people to notice they’re getting less than they used to:

Original image from www.marpat.co.uk

The rise in consumer prices has rightly received a great deal of attention, as inflation hovers around 40-year highs. Everyone can see that virtually everything is getting more expensive, but fewer have noticed that many items are also getting smaller.

On Wednesday the Associated Press ran an article under the headline “No, you’re not imagining it — package sizes are shrinking.”

The AP spoke to one shopper, Alex Aspacher, who does a lot of shopping for his family of four in Ohio. He noticed he was still paying $9.99 for Swiss cheese even though the package had shrunk from a pound to 12 ounces.

“I was prepared for it to a degree, but there hasn’t been a limit to it so far,” Aspacher told the AP. “I hope we find that ceiling pretty soon.”

This phenomenon — known as “shrinkflation” — is nothing new, of course. It’s just more pronounced now than in any time in recent memory because inflation is much higher.

But what exactly is shrinkflation? As economist Peter Jacobsen explained last year, it’s simply a different kind of inflation.

“Shrinkflation is a form of inflation because you’d have to spend more money to get the same quantity or quality as you did in a previous year,” he explained. “The prices have remained the same, but the products are worse.”

The only difference is, instead of raising the price of an item or service, businesses are reducing the quantity or quality of it while keeping the price the same.

Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate who has tracked shrinkflation for decades, told the AP shrinkflation is rampant at the moment because of the underlying economic conditions.

“It comes in waves,” said Dworsky. “We happen to be in a tidal wave at the moment because of inflation.”

The Early Roman Emperors – Part 1: Augustus

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 26 Sep 2021

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

The common male delusion that they “age like fine wine”, unlike women who “hit the wall”

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

Ed West considers the brutal truth that while beauty may indeed be fleeting, ugliness is life-long:

George Clooney at the White House, 12 September, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.

The male psyche is filled with delusions, forming a sort of psychological protection against real life. Just as men tend to overestimate how competent they are at any given task, they are programmed to wildly overestimate their value in the mating market. The brutal truth of dating apps has shown that around 80% of men are basically unattractive and, in many societies, a significant chunk would fail to find a mate at all, forced to set out on a longship in the hope of winning glory and a girlfriend. We don’t contemplate this, because reality would be just too much to take for most of us.

Among the many delusions males have is the idea that, unlike women, they don’t become less attractive with age; in the minds of many men, female attractiveness peaks early and, while most men don’t improve with age, looks are less important for us so female preference doesn’t really change.

That explains the popularity of a certain genre of feature piece, usually in the Daily Mail, in which women in their 30s lament that there aren’t any available men left, and they can’t get a date despite being beautiful and wealthy and having their own career. Many quite embittered men take pleasure in these pieces, gleeful that the shoe is now on the other foot, and that the women who spurned them have hit “The Wall”.

The Wall is the name given to the drop in female attractiveness that comes with age, the decline beginning quite early, around 20 or 21, as judged by searches on dating sites and the number of approaches a woman receives. There are even cruder measurements, such as the average hourly earnings of strippers, lap dancers or prostitutes, and which again show a decline from the early 20s which becomes steep after 30. If you think that’s a depressing measurement, there are even bleaker ones highlighted by Louise Perry in her new book, on rape victims, which show a very similar pattern.

These are all quite horrible measurements, but then science is an empty moral void and the data only has deeper meaning if you choose to give it any. It doesn’t measure attractiveness as most of us feel it; people become more interesting as they get older, and as men mature their interests change, too. What’s strange about our species is that men’s prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain concerned with judgement — doesn’t fully mature until around 25. As women enter their peak for male attention, their male contemporaries have not even finished maturing yet, and are at the pinnacle of stupid behaviour (as measured by things like car accidents).

Some men take pleasure in female contemporaries hitting the Wall, because while those contemporaries became very desirable in their late teens, they struggled to find a date, and so convinced themselves that they were playing a long game. But it just isn’t true — men hit the Wall, too, and it’s not even that much later.

Many men seem blissfully unaware that, while the dating game may seem brutal and unfair in adolescence, it’s going to remain brutal and unfair later, just in different ways. They’re not going to mature into a debonair George Clooney-type who has the women gushing over his overgrown ear hair. They’re just going to become increasingly repulsive as they age.

Ancient Greek Olives – Gifts from A Goddess

Filed under: Europe, Food, Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Jun 2021

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QotD: Talinn, Estonia

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

My first impression of Tallinn, as I disembarked, was that it was dirty. Maybe it was the aftermath of winter, but the streets were caked with what looked like cinders. Where you get off the ferry is probably the least welcoming place, as it looks like a freight terminal that is under construction. In fact, most of Tallinn is under construction. Every other building is wrapped in plastic and the streets are torn up everywhere. This is not the best time for tourism, so maybe that’s why it seemed so grimy, but that was my first impression.

My second impression was that it stinks, stinks of diesel exhaust. It seems they have found a way to power everything with diesel, including bicycles and pets. When I walked out of the tunnel from the ferry to land, I was engulfed in a cloud of diesel exhaust from a passing truck. I’m surprised the EU permits it, but maybe they look the other way for the former communist countries. Maybe the Estonians just cheat. Either way, it reminded me of what it was like in America in the 80’s when city buses were like crop dusters …

Rather than follow the crowd to Old Town, I went the other direction and walked a dozen blocks to the east, then another dozen blocks or so south. If you look at a map, the tourist area is to the west, so I figured the real Tallinn was to the east. Given the history and layout of the city, my guess is the east is mostly built in the 20th century, but a lot of it dates to previous centuries. Estonia was a battle ground fought over by Danes, Russians, Germans, Swedes and Poles for most of its history, so it is tough to know.

For example, I walked past an apartment building, probably built in the middle of the last century. It was the drab concrete style popular with communists. Next to it was a cool looking old wood structure that would look at home on Cape Cod. Upon closer inspection, I saw it had undergone a recent renovation, so maybe it was old, but maybe it was just made to look like it dates to the 19th century. You can’t trust anything now. Even in a place like Estonia, everything is becoming a reproduction of a long gone culture of a foreign people.

If you want to get a sense of what life was like under the Soviets, walking around this part of Tallinn is a good way to do it. You see the old buildings and dilapidated old houses. It’s not a slum, but it has that aesthetic the Soviets were so famous for back during the Cold War. Lots of concrete and gray paint. The materialism of the Bolsheviks was really just the total lack of spiritual beauty. They were ugly people and that ugliness was made manifest their building and city planning. They were vulgar and depraved.

The Z Man, “Travelogue: Talinn”, The Z Blog, 2019-04-03.

June 9, 2022

Moving Sprinting to the extremes

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

Scott Alexander considers the passion-provoking question, “which US political party has moved further/faster to the extreme end of the spectrum?”

Matt Yglesias has written a couple of posts […] on the subject of this meme (originally by Colin Wright, recently signal-boosted by Elon Musk):

He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have “changed a lot” since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other.

I’m less wise, so I’ve been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this.

I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways:

  • Which party’s policy positions have changed more in their preferred direction (ie gotten further left for the Democrats, or further right for the Republicans) since 2008 — or 1990, or 1950, or some other year when people feel like things weren’t so partisan?
  • Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans?
  • Which party has become more ideologically pure faster than the others (ie its members all agree and don’t tolerate dissent)?
  • Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals? That is, suppose one party wants 20% lower taxes, and plans to convene a meeting of economists to make sure this is a good idea. The other party wants 10% higher taxes, and says a conspiracy of Jews and lizardmen is holding them back, and asks its members to riot and bring down the government until they get the tax policy they want. The first party has a more extreme policy position (20% is more than 10%), but the second party seems crazier.

I think these subquestions are easier to get clear answers on and will hopefully start less of a fight, starting with …

Packing My Basement Shop and Moving to a New Building

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 8 Jun 2022

Out of the basement & over to the new shop!
(more…)

A brutal microcosm of the English Civil War

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Critic, Jonathan Healey reviews The Siege of Loyalty House by Jessie Childs:

Late in the summer of 1641, with Charles I deep in dispute with his Parliament, alarming reports reached Westminster of Catholics amassing arms at Basing House in Hampshire. At this point in time, few expected civil war, but plenty feared an imminent Catholic plot. Recent reform to the Church had introduced lavish ceremonies which looked, to many eyes, like the trappings of Rome, and Charles himself was married to a Catholic.

More to the point, England’s Catholics had done it before. Every year, people marked the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason, which was already stuck in the national consciousness as the quintessential Popish rebellion: an armed coup plotted by dissident aristocrats gathering weapons on their great rural estates and planning subterfuge at the highest levels.

Yet civil war came, and when it did it would be nothing like the “Popish Plots” of Protestant imagining. It would be fought over constitutional as much as religious divides. And, rather than a rebellion, it would be an armed struggle between two competing fiscal-military organisations — effectively between two competing states.

The English countryside became militarised. Now, it was not just a landscape. It was territory. The great houses were no longer places for covert plotting; now they were centres of command and control. And few were more important than Basing House.

Hampshire today is a pleasant place: gentle and verdant with rolling chalk hills, shaded woodlands, and quiet valleys. But in the 1640s it became contested and dangerous: a dark, malevolent land of violence and death. People looked upon one another with suspicion, and riders were ambushed and killed as they travelled at night. Parish churches were stormed, towns starved and bombarded. Armies of musketeers, pikemen, and cavalry traversed the folding lanes of the county looking to bring bloodshed and plunder.

[…]

A crucial theme is encapsulated in the book’s denouement. The deputy sent to pacify Hampshire for the New Model was Oliver Cromwell. He had been in the thick of the fighting from the start, and before then was an earnest — if obscure and scruffily-attired — Member of Parliament. But Cromwell really rose to prominence in 1644 and 1645, on the back of his military abilities. He represented a new approach to the war: the pursuit of total victory even at the cost of sharp bloodshed.

It was Cromwell’s direct — even brutal — efficiency that brought the siege of Basing House to its end. The walls fell and many of the garrison were killed. Slaughtered, too, were a number of Catholic priests in a moment of violence that was representative of the way the war was heading. Cold-blooded murder of female camp followers had been perpetrated by royalists in Cornwall and by parliamentarians after Naseby. King Charles had allowed a bloody storm of Leicester which had cost many civilian lives, and Cromwell would go on to oversee the horrors of Drogheda and Wexford in Ireland. The chivalry of Waller and Hopton would come to seem a long way in the past.

The Paul Sellers Mortise Guide

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 4 Feb 2022

Mortise guides were once an unknown aid in woodworking realms but they ensure parallelity to the outside face of any mortise you cut and increase your levels of accuracy to near perfection.

Paul invented this guide for woodworking students to improve their mortising work and saw thousands of them succeed in cutting perfect mortises but also found himself reaching for one daily too.

Make metric and imperial sets and customise them for specific jobs too.

——————–

Want to learn more about woodworking?

Go to Woodworking Masterclasses for weekly project episodes: http://bit.ly/2JeH3a9

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——————–

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QotD: Cicero and the end of the Roman Republic

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

De legibus (“On the Laws”) along with his earlier work, De re publica (“On the Republic”) show Cicero attempting to grapple with the nature of the Roman Republic and the prospect for reform. In a sense, De re publica looks backwards, with the discussion couched in a fictional dialogue set at the tail end of the life of Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 BC), although Cicero intends the subject – a rumination on the nature of the Republic and its proper workings, based on a discussion of its history – to be applicable in his own time.

De legibus is more aggressively forward looking. Set in Cicero’s own time (it is a dialogue between Cicero, his brother Quintus and their friend Atticus), De legibus first sets out a theory for the general foundation of law […] to use as the basis for a reformed model of the Roman Republic, which is summarized in the third book. Damage to the text means that De legibus cuts off in book three, and there are smaller gaps and fragments in the earlier books as well.

It’s important to get a sense of the situation in the 50s B.C. when Cicero is writing to understand why he feels this is necessary. The previous round of civil wars had ended in 82 B.C., with the victor, the arch-conservative L. Cornelius Sulla, imposing a revised republic with shocking brutality and bloodshed. By the 50s, it would have been clear to anyone paying attention that the peace and apparent stability of the Sullan reforms had been a mirage – the disruptions of the 60s (including the Catilinarian conspiracy, foiled by Cicero) were not one-offs, but merely the first rattlings of the wheels coming off the cart entirely. I don’t want to get too deep into the woods of how exactly this happened; there are any number of good books on the collapse of the Republic which deal with this period (Scullard’s From the Gracchi to Nero (1959) is a venerable and straight-forward narrative of the period; Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939) is probably the most influential – reading both can serve as a foundation for getting into the more recent and often more narrowly directed literature on the topic, note also Flowers, Roman Republics (2011)).

It’s in this context – as the Republic is clearly shaking apart – that Cicero is ruminating on the nature of the Republic, how it functions, what it is for, and how it might be set right. Despite this, Cicero should not be taken for a radical, or even really for much of a reformer; Cicero is a staunch conservative looking to restore the function of the old system, in many cases by a return to tradition as much as the renovation of it. Cicero’s corpus is a plea to save the Republic as it was, not to bury it; it was a plea, of course, that would go unanswered. In a real sense, the Republic died with Cicero.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.

June 8, 2022

The Climate Wars are dead, merely collateral damage from the Russia-Ukraine War

Filed under: Europe, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

JoNova links to this Foreign Policy article by Ted Nordhous, signfiying the end of a “lame Cold War substitute” as the conflict in Ukraine pushes it decisively off the agenda for most western nations:

Four days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment of the impacts of global warming. Leading media outlets did their best to pick out the most dire scenarios and findings from the report. But the outbreak of the first major European war since 1945 kept the report off the front page or, at the very least, below the fold. “Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt” simply couldn’t compete with “Putin Is Brandishing the Nuclear Option”.

Meanwhile, the headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.

In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes — and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power — haven’t changed that basic existential fact.

Virtually overnight, the war in Ukraine has brought the post-Cold War era to a close, not just by ending Europe’s long era of peace, but by bringing basic questions of energy access back to the fore. A new era, marked by geopolitically driven energy insecurity and resource competition, is moving climate concerns down on the list of priorities. If there is a silver lining in any of this, it’s that a shift of focus back to energy security imperatives might not be the worst thing for the climate. Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik — and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide — could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades.

The issue of climate change burst into the global debate just as the Cold War was coming to an end. As one existential threat seemingly receded, another came into view. For much of the international community, particularly the United Nations and its agencies, climate change also became much more than an environmental issue, offering an opportunity to reshape the post-Cold War order to be more equitable, multilateral, and politically integrated.

Nonetheless, when the framework for climate action emerged in the early 1990s, it built on the experience of the Cold War era. U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements became the model for global cooperation on climate change. Just as the superpowers had signed treaties to gradually draw down their nuclear weapons stocks, nations would commit to draw down their emissions. Yet the first major agreement to propose legally binding limits on emissions — the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — was dead from the moment the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected its terms, even before the negotiations had been finalized. Combine U.S. opposition with the understandable reluctance of energy-hungry, fast-developing nations such as China and India to even consider limiting emissions, and the inefficacy of international climate action was set.

The Story Behind the Dambuster Raid – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 7 Jun 2022

The thousand-bomber offensive was about to begin as Air-Marshall Harris was assembling his forces. Yet one man was to challenge his strategy. The aircraft designer Barnes Wallis thought: “What if there was a way to destroy Germany’s industrial might not by simply dropping thousands of bombs over its cities, but by a precision strike against its dams?” For this, a new kind of bouncing bomb was to be delivered.
(more…)

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