Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2024

How Wall Street billionaires are reacting to the verdict against Trump

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

Under normal circumstances, you might think that Trump would find doors closed to him among the big-money folks on Wall Street after his trial ended with 34 guilty verdicts … yet the opposite is reported to be happening and his campaign is being inundated with big financial donations:

My quite strong suspicion is that Leticia James and Alvin Bragg have caused alarm by targeting business records and real estate valuations in corporate borrowing, things that everyone shares in finance, insurance, and real estate, for criminalization and destructive litigation. My bet is that capital is turning hard against lawfare, seeking to disincentivize and punish an attack on the basics of corporate business. People in business are horrified by a flamethrower of a prosecution over old business records.

So Bloomberg’s interpretation is that Wall Street is standing with Trump despite the verdict, but my bet is that Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other business interests are turning against Democrats because of the verdict — because Democratic prosecutors in New York (and especially Manhattan), America’s financial capital, are doing things like turning seven year-old business record misdemeanors into a long list of Frankenstein felonies.

That interpretation makes capital’s support for Trump self-interested rather than morally outraged, though not over Bloomberg’s explanation of lower taxes, as people who keep business records turn against the party that bizarrely overcriminalizes the handling of business records when the target becomes politically unfashionable. If capital turns against the Democratic Party — if the ATM machine stops spitting out campaign funding — the moment becomes pretty significant, and Alvin Bragg becomes the dog who caught the car.

Assassination-to-order, or war by other means

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

I was not well-informed about the goings-on within Vladimir Putin’s Russia even before the Russo-Ukrainian war went into high gear and disrupted all information from that part of the world and I hear much but trust nothing I’ve been hearing since then. kulak, on the other hand, seems to have paid much closer attention to Russian internal affairs, including one particular political assassination:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin (whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List“), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian-aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat-associated influencers, and other CIA-aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin-aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment … that somehow never occurred to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president … Every elite member of Russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even Soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind … that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

One can imagine the headlines if John Hopkins and RAND fellow Francis Fukuyama was so killed:

“It is the end of Fukuyama”
– History

And again remember, though the various income streams of the US elite may resemble embezzlement, protection rackets, and money laundering … these aren’t gangsters. These are complacent, highly agreeable, shockingly unoriginal and cowardly … academics and bureaucrats.

Indeed one can imagine Putin weighing the risk of such a reprisal and then deciding against it, not out of ethical concerns, but because the American ruling class is too unpredictable and prone to womanly hysterias.

Indeed amongst the few senior American and Ukrainian officials who knew of the attack beforehand you can imagine them salivating that Putin might respond in kind and the subsequent freakout might commit the US to joining the war (one of the few scenarios where Ukraine could possible survive against their overwhelming odds).

J.K. Rowling’s most convincing and true-to-life villain in the Harry Potter stories

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m with Jon Miltimore on this — J.K. Rowling’s most disturbing and best-written villain isn’t “He Who Must Not Be Named” or any of the other (frankly cardboard-y) magical villains … it’s Dolores Umbridge, a career bureaucrat who could have been drawn from any western civil service senior management position:

Umbridge, portrayed in the films by English actress Imelda Staunton, isn’t some apparition of the underworld or a creature of the Dark Forest. She’s the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, the man who runs the government (the Ministry of Magic) in Rowling’s fictional world.

Umbridge wears pink, preaches about “decorum” in a saccharine voice, smiles constantly, and resembles a sweet but stern grandmother. Her intense, unblinking eyes, however, suggest something malevolent lurks beneath. And boy, does it.

“The gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toadlike face, and clutching, stubby fingers, is the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter,” horror author Stephen King wrote in a review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the book in which Umbridge is introduced.

Umbridge’s “Desire to Control, to Punish”

What makes Umbridge so evil that King would compare her to Hannibal Lecter, the man widely considered the greatest villain of all time?

I asked myself this question, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that Dolores Umbridge is so real — and in more ways than one.

First, it’s noteworthy that Rowling based Umbridge on an actual person from her past, a teacher she once had “whom I disliked intensely on sight”.

In a blog post written years ago, Rowling explained that her dislike of the woman was almost irrational (and apparently mutual). Though the woman had a “pronounced taste for twee accessories” — including “a tiny little plastic bow slide” and a fondness for “pale lemon” colors which Rowling said was more “appropriate to a girl of three” — Rowling said “a lack of real warmth or charity” lurked below her sugary exterior.

The description reminded me of another detestable literary villain: Nurse Ratched, the despicable antagonist of Randle Murphy in Ken Kesey’s magnificent 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Kesey’s description of Nurse Ratched conjures to mind a character much like Umbridge.

“Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils — everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails …”

While there are similarities in the appearances of Dolores Umbridge and Nurse Ratched, their true commonality is what’s underneath their saccharine exteriors.

Snipers in World War 1

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published Feb 9, 2024

In fall 1914, the British and French armies on the First World War’s Western Front were wrestling with a problem: unseen German riflemen were picking off any man who showed himself above the trench. Something had to be done about it – and the result was the birth of the modern sniper.
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QotD: “Let the market handle it”

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

The argument is quite common. It’s also wrong. Its error is that it incorrectly identifies the set of choices for dealing with problems (and with “problems”).

Rodrik’s argument appears to be the height of reasonableness. “It is dogmatic and dangerous,” the argument’s champions rightly note, “to assume that one solution or one approach is the answer to every problem. Some problems call for the use of screwdrivers, others call for the use of hammers. Only a benighted fool insists on using a screwdriver to hammer in nails and on using a hammer to insert screws. The wise, non-ideological, enlightened, open-minded, reasonable, and scientifically aware person sometimes uses a screwdriver and other times uses a hammer. What could be more reasonable?!”

The error in this formulation is that markets are many tools. Markets are a toolkit with far more tools in it than government has access to. While government has only a few tools – mostly hammers (some sledge), saws, and clamps – the market is filled with many, almost countless, tools. And the market’s tools are much more varied, nuanced, specialized, and creative than are the government’s simple set of tools.

Put differently, to say “Let the market handle it” is just a shorthand way of saying “Let whoever is most willing, most able, most experienced, most knowledgeable, and best equipped be free to try his or her hand at dealing with each specific problem.” And to say “Let the market always handle it” is not – contrary to what Rodrik’s argument suggests – to propose a single, simple fix for all problems; it is to propose that the field be left open for as many fixes as are feasible to be tried. To say “Let the market always handle it” is to warn that using government as a fix crowds out – prevents – experimentation with many other possible fixes.

In short, the choice is not between only two alternative possible fixes: the market or the government. Instead, the choice is between a gigantically large and varied set of possible fixes (the market, with its many detailed specialized carpenters and master builders) or a tiny set featuring one possible fix (the government, with its hammering, sawing, and clamping officials, none of whom – unlike the case with market participants – can be reasonably presumed to know enough of the finer details of any of the problems that they are called upon to “fix”).

The truly reasonable person – the one who understands the benefits of having access to as many “solutions” to problems as possible – supports the market because he or she knows that to turn to government solutions is to drastically reduce the number of “solutions” that will be tried.

Don Boudreaux, “Very Bad Framing, or In Defense of ‘Let the Market Handle It'”, Café Hayek, 2016-08-12.

June 3, 2024

The “hallucination” problem that bedevils all current AI implementations

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Orlowski explains the one problem shared among all of the artificial intelligence engines currently available to the general public:

Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.

AI Overviews hasn’t had the effect that Google hoped for, to say the least. It has certainly garnered immediate internet virality, with people sharing their favourite answers. Not because these are helpful, but because they are so laughable. For instance, when you ask AI Overviews for a list of fruits ending with “um” it returns: “Applum, Strawberrum and Coconut”. This is what, in AI parlance, is called a “hallucination”.

Despite having a market capitalisation of $2 trillion and the ability to hire the biggest brains on the planet, Google keeps stumbling over AI. Its first attempt to join the generative-AI goldrush in February last year was the ill-fated Bard chatbot, which had similar issues with spouting factual inaccuracies. On its first live demo, Bard mistakenly declared that the James Webb Space Telescope, launched only in 2021, had taken “the first pictures” ever of Earth from outside the solar system. The mistake wiped $100 billion off Google’s market value.

This February, Google had another go at AI, this time with Gemini, an image and text generator. The problem was that it had very heavy-handed diversity guardrails. When asked to produce historically accurate images, it would instead generate black Nazi soldiers, Native American Founding Fathers and a South Asian female pope.

This was “a well-meaning mistake”, pleaded The Economist. But Google wasn’t caught unawares by the problems inherent to generative AI. It will have known about its capabilities and pitfalls.

Before the current AI mania truly kicked off, analysts had already worked out that generative AI would be unlikely to improve user experience, and may well degrade it. That caution was abandoned once investors started piling in.

So why is Google’s AI putting out such rotten results? In fact, it’s working exactly as you would expect. Don’t be fooled by the “artificial intelligence” branding. Fundamentally, AI Overviews is simply trying to guess the next word it should use, according to statistical probability, but without having any mooring to reality. The algorithm cannot say “I don’t know” when asked a difficult question, because it doesn’t “know” anything. It cannot even perform simple maths, as users have demonstrated, because it has no underlying concept of numbers or of valid arithmetic operations. Hence the hallucinations and omissions.

This is less of a problem when the output doesn’t matter as much, such as when AI is processing an image and creates a minor glitch. Our phones use machine learning every day to process our photos, and we don’t notice or care much about most of the glitches. But for Google to advise us all to start eating rocks is no minor glitch.

Such errors are more or less inevitable because of the way the AI is trained. Rather than learning from a curated dataset of accurate information, AI models are trained on a huge, practically open-ended data set. Google’s AI and ChatGPT have already scraped as much of the web as they can and, needless to say, lots of what’s on the web isn’t true. Forums like Reddit teem with sarcasm and jokes, but these are treated by the AI as trustworthy, as sincere and correct explanations to problems. Programmers have long used the phrase “GIGO” to describe what is going on here: garbage in, garbage out.

AI’s hallucination problem is consistent across all fields. It pretty much precludes generative AI being practically useful in commercial and business applications, where you might expect it to save a great deal of time. A new study of generative AI in legal work finds the additional verification steps now required to ensure the AI isn’t hallucinating cancel out the time saved from deploying it in the first place.

“[Programmers] are still making the same bone-headed mistakes as before. Nobody has actually solved hallucinations with large-language models and I don’t think we can”, the cognitive scientist and veteran AI sceptic, Professor Gary Marcus, observed last week.

Another problem is now coming into view. The AI is making an already bad job worse, by generating bogus information, which then pollutes the rest of the web. “Google learns whatever junk it sees on the internet and nothing generates junk better than AI”, as one X user put it.

I was actually contacted by someone on LinkedIn the other day asking if I’d be interested in doing some AI training for US$25 per hour. I really, really need the money, but I’m unsure about being involved in AI at all …

Decoding Nigel Farage’s “hidden agenda” … that isn’t actually hidden at all

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’ve been theorizing that the reason Nigel Farage didn’t plunge immediately into the British election campaign was that he was expecting Rishi Sunak to do his very best Kim Campbell impersonation and utterly destroy the Conservatives as a viable political party. It turns out that that’s pretty much exactly what he’s doing:

Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.

The biggest question of all, however, is what Farage wants to do after polling day. For months now, a growing band of Conservative MPs have been agitating openly for him to be admitted to the party; even Rishi Sunak now says he “respects” him.

Close friends of Farage believe his real plan is to wait for the Tories to implode, and in the aftermath arrive as a saviour in waiting. “He doesn’t want to be the person who puts the bullet in the back of their heads, why be seen to alienate Conservative voters?” said one, while a second, a senior Tory, said: “Our party needs to be able to come back with people like Nigel, where we basically go back to be that authentic Thatcherite party — his natural home.”

[Reform UK leader Richard] Tice says he wants to destroy and replace the Conservative Party, but when asked if he feels the same, Farage says: “I certainly don’t have any trust for them or any love for them”. So does he want to change it? “I want to reshape the centre-right, whatever that means.”

Asked directly if his friends are right and he wants to join the Tories, he adds: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here. It took them time, it took them two elections, they became the biggest party on the centre-right. They then absorbed what was left of the Conservative Party into them and rebranded.”

I suggest this sounds a lot like he’s floating a merger. “More like a takeover, dear boy,” he replies, grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

The “mass graves” moral panic at three

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

In the National Post, Father Raymond J. de Souza notes the almost un-noticed third anniversary of the dramatic announcement and ensuing moral panic over claims that hundreds of unmarked graves had been discovered at the site of a former Residential School in Kamloops, BC:

This past week marked the third anniversary of the dramatic announcement that 215 “unmarked graves” had been discovered near a former residential school in Kamloops. It was a global news story which had a significant impact in Canada. It was also a great media malpractice.

Many things were reported then that were not only not true, but had not even been claimed to be true by anyone. Recall the monstrously misleading headlines about mass murder and mass graves? For example, from the Toronto Star on 28 May 2021: “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found”.

Not true. No one ever claimed that remains had been found. Many people assumed that the “unmarked graves” held children, but the ground-penetrating radar employed cannot reveal if a body is in the soil, let alone whether it is a child or adult.

Tales of mass murder and mass graves produced a massive moral panic. Marches were held, symbolic children’s shoes were assembled, churches were burned and vandalized, hundreds of millions were committed to investigating further mass graves, the prime minister ordered flags at every embassy abroad and federal building at home to be lowered for nearly six months, a new federal holiday was instituted, the Catholic Church issued (another) apology and Pope Francis came to visit.

How can it now be that the anniversary of something so globally momentous passed so quietly this week?

It’s because the great media malpractice has been answered by journalists, a broader category in the digital world, who provided the effective response. It’s an inspiring David and Goliath tale of how courageous, good journalism beat out conforming, bad journalism.

We can take some pride here at the National Post, for on the first anniversary we published the remarkable reporting of Terry Glavin, who demonstrated exactly how media malpractice had produced a moral panic.

But aside from that, the work was carried out by writers — academics, reporters, amateur researchers and dogged citizens — outside of the legacy media. The story unfolded in C2C Journal, Dorchester Review, True North, Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Quillette.

Last December, a single volume collecting much of this work was published: Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by Christian Champion, founder and publisher of the Dorchester Review, and the well known academic and political player, Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary.

Those outlets which had perpetrated the original malpractice took a pass. The legacy media ignored the book, and Canada’s major book retailers did not sell it.

18th Century Spiced Hot Chocolate

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Feb 23, 2024

Rich, thick, dark hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon and cardamom

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1747

Up until the 19th century, the most popular way to partake of chocolate was to drink it. Aztecs drank a very bitter chocolate, and when Europeans brought it back home, they paved the way for one of the most perfect of food pairings: chocolate and sugar.

This hot chocolate is fairly dark, so feel free to add more sugar if that’s to your taste. It’s super rich and much thicker than most hot chocolates you’d get today, so you may only want to make a small amount of the drink and save the rest of the chocolate for later. The spices jump out at you, and even though mine still had a bit of grittiness from the cocoa nibs (it’s basically impossible to get it completely smooth at home), it was really, really good.
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QotD: Economic feedback

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

Well, now I think about it, most feedback is annoying.

Economics is full of it — as are other economic systems — and humans find it so annoying they have devised various means of shutting it down, and then become puzzled and do crazy stuff when the system goes out of control.

Take price controls. They deliberately shut down feedback. The idea is “people need to eat and the essentials should be cheap”. We went tons of rounds on this in the seventies in Portugal. It was FUN — not — and responsible for empty grocery shelves and problems getting the essentials. Because when cooking oil was dirt cheap by price control, everyone who had ridden this pony before (with bread, with toilet paper, with …) would buy everything in the grocery shelves. Meanwhile, because it was impossible for merchants to make a profit on the thing, they didn’t stock it. Which was okay, because the factories that made it couldn’t afford to at that price, so they stopped. And all the way down the line.

This is because what the idiot politicians were shutting down was the feedback. Prices are many things — and sometimes annoying when you really want a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones but your bank account is crying, to use a totally random example — but MOSTLY? They’re information. They’re feedback.

Because, yes, people work for profit, and profit — things that Warren and Sanders will never get — is not dirty, it’s what people live on, when prices go up — meaning there’s more demand than supply — people go “hey, you can make a profit in this” and start making more, until the supply and demand match, and you can’t make as much money, so people wander off to do other stuff.

You shut down the signal, and things go insane. You keep it shut down long enough while handing down lists of things that the government wants you to make, and vast famines sweep the land but you have a surplus of size 35 shoes for the left foot only. Because the directive handed the factory made that the easiest thing to do.

But it is not just in economics (though eh, everything is a branch of economics, as my reading in my 30s informed me. Which means that’s probably when I started going insane) that humans love shutting down feedback.

The truth is we don’t like reality very much, and are more or less perpetually at war with it.

We have this image of how things should be, and because we imagine it so clearly we think it’s a moral imperative.

Sarah Hoyt, “Shutting Off Feedback or How We Got Into This Fine Mess”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-04.

June 2, 2024

Japan vows to fight to the end! – WW2 – Week 301 – June 01, 1945

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 1 Jun 2024

This week President Truman and his aides meet to discuss the use of the atomic bomb. In Japan, the Imperial government vows to fight on even as Yokohama is turned to ash by firebombing. On Okinawa, Japanese 32nd Army withdraws from the defences of Shuri Castle but there is still plenty of hard fighting left for the Americans. There are US Navy command reshuffles and the stage is set for an Allied conference in Potsdam.

Chapters
01:21 Recap
05:08 The Fight on Okinawa
08:38 The Interim Committee And The Bomb
14:02 Notes
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A definite sign of the end-times – “South Park is going into its 27th season”

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

I’d pretty much given up on watching anything on television around the time that South Park went on the air, so I never “stopped watching it” because I wasn’t watching anything on TV by that time (although I did see Team America: World Police in the theatre). Andrew Sullivan says I’ve been missing something quite worthwhile for all this time:

South Park is going into its 27th season. And it has rarely been better. (I simply can’t believe so many people I meet say they haven’t watched in years. You’ve been missing out!) The new special on obesity — a deft masterclass of social commentary — has a brutal takedown of suburban white women jonesing for doses of Ozempic like meth-heads; a definitive — and musical! — digression into the insanity of the American healthcare system; pure, character-driven humor in a figure like Randy Marsh — a far subtler parody of the average American male than Homer Simpson; and, of course, Eric Cartman — the “big-boned” fat-ass kid whose capacity for pure evil was first truly captured in the epic “Scott Tenorman Must Die“.

You can read books on Ozempic, scan op-eds, absorb TikToks, and even listen to the Dishcast! — but nothing out there captures every single possible social and medical and psychological wrinkle of this new drug than this hour of crude cartoons. Yes, there are fart jokes. There are always fart jokes. But fart jokes amid a sophisticated and deeply informed parody of insurance companies? Or, in other episodes, toilet humor guiding us through the cowardice of Disney, the dopey vanity of Kanye, the wokification of Hollywood, the exploitation of black college athletes, the evil of cable companies, the hollowness of hate-crime laws, the creepiness of Christian rock, or the money-making behind legal weed? Only South Park pulls this off. Only South Park gets away with all of it.

It’s a 1990s high-low formula at root, sophisticated cultural and political knowingness married to crude cartoons, silly accents, m’kay, and a talking Christmas turd, Mr Hankey. Generationally, it really marked a moment when merging these two worlds seemed the most creative option — not an abandonment of seriousness, but the attachment of a humane levity to it. South Park can be brutal, but it is never cruel. Unless you’re Barbra Streisand or Bono. And virtually every character (even Eric) is redeemable. Except Meghan Markle.

Yes, Matt and Trey have tried other things. To wit: just one of the best and most successful musicals of the 21st century, The Book of Mormon. They’ve pioneered deep-fakes. They also just renovated and relaunched a huge Denver restaurant they loved as kids, Casa Bonita, memorialized in a classic Cartman-is-evil episode. Twenty years ago, they actually created an entirely puppet-acted movie with epic sex and vomit scenes as a commentary on the war on terror, Team America; and are now teaming up with Kendrick Lamar to shoot a live-action comedy about a biracial couple where the black boyfriend interns as a slave re-enactor only to discover that his ancestors were owned by his girlfriend’s. No landmines there.

But they always return to South Park and evince no desire to transcend it — partly because it has become an entire world that can expand and contract at will: a world where Mel Gibson tweaks his nipples and smears his feces, Mickey Mouse acts like a mafia don, Michael Jackson’s nose falls off, Meghan Markle is a literal empty vessel, Christopher Reeve eats fetuses for their stem-cells, and Tom Cruise works in a fudge factory where, yes, he does a lot of the packing.

And in two decades of an acutely polarized and politicized culture, what team is South Park on? Precisely. You can’t tell, can you? — which is a staggering achievement in its own right. And it’s not about risk-aversion: the duo was targeted by Islamist terror and didn’t blink. They also took on the censors at the MPAA — savor this memo — and obliterated one of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV” by saying “shit” 162 times in one episode.

They’ve shown Martha Stewart putting a whole turkey up her back-hole, Paris Hilton putting a whole pineapple up her front-hole, Caitlyn Jenner running over innocent pedestrians, and Jesse Jackson demanding that his big black ass be ceremoniously kissed. They’ve tackled Scientology and Mormonism; they’ve shown intergalactic Catholic priests astonished at the idea they have to stop raping young boys; and they beat Dave Chappelle by two decades with “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” — their take on sex reassignment.

They have done all this, taken no prisoners, and remain uncancellable. Why? Because their mockery is genuinely universal (including themselves), their courage is real, and because they remain humane.

By humane, I mean they show how you can skewer and yet still love. As a young gay man, I often winced at the careful, all-too-sensitive depictions of gay men in most movies and television, the elaborate ways in which the subculture was homogenized and prettified for straight audiences. But in South Park, I could see the gay reality as I had already witnessed it in all its bewildering variety: the right-wing, elementary school teacher Mr Garrison … dating Mr Slave — a leather-daddy with a gerbil called Lemmiwinks living in his upper colon; I could see Big Gay Al get expelled from the Boy Scouts — and defend their right to do so; I could see Butters’ dad on the DL at the White Swallow bathhouse; in time, I could see Satan having a gay love affair with Saddam Hussein, because his other boyfriend was so lame. They even made AIDS funny. The offense worked because it always conveyed an actual truth about gay men, while also obviously mocking us with love. (Mr Slave was portrayed as a moral paragon next to Paris Hilton, for example, and Mr Garrison eventually ends up with Rick, a total normie.) South Park‘s role in helping America grow up on the topic of homosexuality, especially the young male demographic who followed them, is deeply under-rated.

THIS is how Plastic Model Kits are MADE! I spent a day at the UK Airfix Factory!

Filed under: Britain, Business, China, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Model Minutes
Published Nov 26, 2022

In November 2022 a press day was held at the UK factory which manufactures quickbuild and the NEW Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IXc in 1/24 scale from @OfficialAirfix. During the visit we were given presentations from Luke (researcher) and Chris (designer) on the various elements that go into creating the designs of the tooling.

Join me in this video where I take a look at how plastic model kits are actually manufactured, focusing on the physical creation of the kits through injection moulding and quality control at the Plastech factory in Newhaven.

I’d like to extend my thanks to Airfix and Plastech for putting on this event.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:48 Research & Design
01:36 Plastech Background
02:47 Tooling Prep
03:21 Injection Moulding
06:38 Quality Control
11:31 Boxes & Packaging
13:21 Packing a kit!
16:04 Conclusion
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QotD: The Spartans do not deserve the admiration of the modern US military

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

The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta — Spartaganda, as it were — is alive and well.

Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises — an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other”, a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War — but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.

June 1, 2024

So who did write Shakespeare’s plays?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mere mortals might be tempted to answer “Well, Shakespeare, duh!”, but to the dedicated conspiracist, the obvious is never the right answer:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

Was Shakespeare a fraud? The American writer Jodi Picoult seems to think so. Her latest novel By Any Other Name is based on the premise that William Shakespeare was not the real author of his plays. Specifically, in her story, the poet Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) pays Shakespeare for the use of his name so that she might see her work staged at a time when female playwrights were extremely rare.

The theory that Shakespeare was a woman isn’t original to Picoult. As with all conspiracy theories relating to the bard, the “true” Shakespeare is identified as one of the upper echelons of society (although not an aristocrat, Lanier was part of the minor gentry thanks to her father’s appointment as court musician to Queen Elizabeth I). Those known as “anti-Stratfordians” – i.e., those who believe that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him – invariably favour candidates who had direct connections to the court. The general feeling seems to be that a middle-class lad from a remote country town could not possibly have created such compelling depictions of lords, ladies, kings and queens.

[…]

The notion that the actor Shakespeare could have hired out his identity to Lanier, or anyone else for that matter, makes no sense if one considers the collaborative nature of the theatrical medium. Shakespeare was the house playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the company that became the King’s Men on the accession of James I). His job was to oversee productions, to write on the hoof, to adapt existing scripts in the process of rehearsal. (This is probably why his later plays such as Henry VIII contain so many stage directions; at this point he was almost certainly residing in Stratford-upon-Avon, and so was not available to provide the necessary detail in person.) It was never simply a matter of Shakespeare dropping off his latest script at The Globe and quickly scarpering. If he was being fed the lines, it is implausible that nobody in the company would have noticed.

[…]

The theory that Shakespeare’s contemporaries – fans and critics alike – would all collude in an elaborate deception requires a full explanation. The burden of proof is very much on the anti-Stratfordians, but proof doesn’t appear to be their priority. They seem to think they know more about Shakespeare than those who actually lived and worked with him. It’s oddly hubristic.

All of this nonsense began with the Baconian theory propounded by James Wilmot in 1785 and has never gone away. The candidates are usually university educated and aristocratic: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Oxford – even Queen Elizabeth I has been proposed. The anti-Stratfordian position seems to be based on a combination of class snobbery and presentism. They assume that the middle-class son of a glover who did not attend university could not have developed the range of knowledge needed to inform his plays. They forgot, or do not know, that the grammar school education of the time would have provided a firm grounding in the classics. Shakespeare would have been steeped in Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and much more besides. Let’s not forget that Ben Jonson, the most scholarly of all his contemporaries, didn’t go to university either.

Moreover, the plays make clear that Shakespeare was a voracious reader. The idea that one must have direct experience in order to write about a subject is very much in keeping with the obsessions of our time, particularly the notion of “lived experience” and how writers ought to “stay in their lane”.

As I’ve joked in the past, I believe the theory that Homer didn’t actually write The Iliad and The Odyssey … it was another Greek chap of the same name.

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