Via the OldSchoolCool subreddit.
15 September 2015
12 September 2015
Introducing Jeremy Corbyn - updated
Few American voters may yet have heard of Jeremy Corbyn, the previously obscure British parliamentarian who is poised to become leader of the official Labour opposition to David Cameron’s government. But if they have been following the US presidential race, they may already understand the general idea.The article from The Guardian excerpted above goes on to mention populist uprisings in France and Greece. There is also an analysis of Corbyn's rise at Salon.
Slap a beard on leftwing Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and make him as casual as a Romantic poet and you have a good approximation of the elderly radical across the Atlantic who is shaking the fragile pillars of the British establishment and could (at least in theory) become Queen Elizabeth’s next prime minister of the not-so United Kingdom...
To the amazement of pundits and politicians alike, Corbyn’s campaign took off in July much as Sanders’s own has done for the Democratic nomination. Despite being unfashionable democratic socialists, both men tapped a deep well of resentment against the mainstream political elite by people who feel patronised, neglected and left behind.
Britain’s Labour Party is going through its own Bernie Sanders moment – except that it’s more like a Bernie Sanders moment on steroids and set to warp drive...And here's a related op-ed piece in The Spectator.
A longtime member of Parliament from North London who appears not to own a tie, Corbyn has spent his entire political career as a rebellious Labour “backbencher” – that is, he has never been part of the party leadership, nor held a government post when Labour had a majority...
Like Sanders, Corbyn has long advocated for a rejection of austerity politics and a return to seemingly outmoded policies of ambitious social spending, government activism and higher taxes on big business and the rich. He has proposed universal childcare and free higher education for all, wants to renationalize Britain’s railroads and utilities, and believes the country should withdraw from NATO, scrap its nuclear missiles and invest most of its military budget in job programs...
If no one finds Corbyn’s politics so amusing anymore, there is an element of comedy in the Armageddon that Labour’s centrist establishment may have called down upon itself. In the interest of greater transparency and democracy, the party opened this year’s leadership election to anyone who registered online as a party supporter and pay a minimal fee – and the apparent result is a whole lot more democracy than they wanted. Ballots started going out this weekend to 610,000 or so Labour members and supporters – more than half of whom signed up during the current campaign and are highly likely to be Corbyn voters. Labour’s leadership underestimated the public appetite for candidates and ideas that lie outside the safe zone of neoliberal consensus politics, and is now likely to reap the whirlwind. It’s a lesson that will not be lost on political leadership castes around the world.
I would welcome informed opinion from some of the many TYWKIWDBI readers in the UK and EU.
Updated September 11: Corbyn elected in victory of landslide proportions -
More details at The Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the BBC, The Observer, The Times, and other British and European publications. It might even be mentioned briefly in some American ones.
Addendum: The Guardian has a succinct summary of Corbyn's beliefs and policy proposals:
On the economyContinued at length at the link.
Corbyn is opposed to austerity and plans to bring down the deficit by growing the economy and taxing the wealthy instead.
He intends to introduce a “people’s quantitative easing”, which would allow the Bank of England to print money to invest in large-scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects, partly through a national investment bank.
Corbyn says he will fund this by reducing the “tax gap” and ending corporate tax reliefs.
On tax
Corbyn says there is £20bn in tax debt uncollected by HMRC every year and another £20bn in tax avoidance and a further £80bn in tax evasion that needs to be addressed.
On education
Corbyn has proposed a National Education Service, which he says would be “every bit as vital and as free at the point of use as our NHS”. The service would begin with universal childcare, give more power to local authorities, rethink the role of free schools and academies, introduce a minimum wage for apprentices and put more money into adult learning...
11 September 2015
"Crown shyness" explained
I recently encountered the term "crown shyness."
Crown shyness is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming a canopy with channel-like gaps. It is also known as canopy disengagement, canopy shyness, or intercrown spacing.The term was new to me, but the concept was not; it's quite readily observable by anyone who spends a significant amount of time in the woods. What did surprise me was the notion that the cause of this phenomenon is unknown; I had always assumed it was a manifestation of contact inhibition of growth. Apparently it's not so simple.
Photo credit.
Ozymandias and the trashing of Palmyra
Shelley's classic poem has occasionally been cited in news reports about ISIS' destruction of archaeological sites in Syria, implying that the ravages of time inevitably bring about the downfall and destruction of even the mightiest kingdoms and their symbols.
First, some background on the poem -
In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum's acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BC, and some scholars believe that Shelley was inspired by this... Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith, who also wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the very same title... Both poems explore the fate of history and the ravages of time—that all prominent figures and the empires they build are impermanent and their legacies fated to decay and oblivion.Here's the poem -
I met a traveller from an antique landNow, some salient commentary from an op-ed piece in The Atlantic -
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
If the ruined ruins of Palmyra could speak, they would marvel at our shock. After all, they have been sacked before. In their mute and shattered eloquence, they spoke for centuries not only about the cultures that built them but also about the cultures that destroyed them—about the fragility of civilization itself, even when it is incarnated in stone. No designation of sanctity, by God or by UNESCO, suffices to protect the past. The past is helpless...More at the link.
"...Wherever I cast my glance, the objects surrounding me announce death and compel my resignation to what awaits me. What is my ephemeral existence in comparison with that of a rock being worn down, of a valley being formed, of a forest that’s dying, of these deteriorating masses suspended above my head? I see the marble of tombs crumble into powder and I don’t want to die!”...
Yet as the world contemplates the destruction of Palmyra—I mean its destruction in our day, on our watch—we must resist the customary romanticism. It induces an aesthetic passivity, which would go too nicely with the West’s political passivity...
There was nothing metaphysical or inevitable about the recent detonation of the Temple of Baalshamin and the Temple of Bel. ISIS was not acting as the agent of time. It was acting as the agent of its savage ambitions. What was done in Palmyra was a crime. The crime was committed in particular circumstances and for particular ideas—in geopolitical and ideological contexts...
Palmyra, in its heyday during the first three centuries of the Common Era, was one of the ancient capitals of what scholars call syncretism and the rest of us call pluralism. It was a Middle Eastern destination on the Silk Road, a caravan city raised on an oasis in the Tadmurean desert that was situated on an important trade route. Its architectural and epigraphic remains portray a motley city formed in its character by Rome to the west and Persia to the east; Hellenistic and Central Asian influences mingled with Amorite, Aramaean, and Arab elements. In Palmyra one could find Greek sculpture and Chinese silk...
08 September 2015
Halfpipe of the gods
Since we've just mentioned snowboarding, I offer this photo of "High Cup Nick" in the Pennines, found at the EarthPorn subreddit.
Shredding
Posted for the word more than for the music. The Digg post was entitled "Tina S Continues To Be The Shred Queen Of YouTube With Her Cover Of 'Altitude'."
So I had to look up "shred."
Urban Dictionary, in its usual semi-helpful way defines it as "technically and rhythmatically [sic] hammering out amazing and lightning-fast solos on a guitar. 2. To play so amazingly fast on guitar you almost destroy it's strings."
During my search I found the word used more often with regard to snowboarding than to music. And the 'net in its infinite variety offered up a snowboarding dictionary, where "to shred" is "to tear up the terrain" or "to carve with intensity."
For the etymology of the stem word I turned to Wiktionary:
From Old English screade (from which also screed), cognate with German Schrot (“small shot”), Swedish skrot, Old Norse skrydda (“shrivelled skin”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kreu (“cutting tool”), extended form of *(s)ker- (“to cut”).(I find it interesting that screed is related). Wiktionary goes on to define the snowboarding "shred" in terms of "aggressiveness" and the music "shred" in terms of speed.
Now I open it up to readers to come up with the appropriate nuances and contexts for the use of the word. Also - is she that good? or is the "shred queen" appelation just hype?
04 September 2015
Clever anagrams
Dormitory = Dirty room
Evangelist = Evil's agent
Desperation = A rope ends it
The Morse Code = Here come dots
Mother-in-law = Woman Hitler
Snooze alarms = Alas! No more Z's.
Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one
Clint Eastwood = Old West action
Slot machines = Cash lost in 'em
Conversation = Voices rant on
Norwegians = Swen or Inga?
The piano bench = Beneath Chopin
Southern California = Hot sun or life in a car
Found in Word Nerd, by John D. Williams, Jr.
03 September 2015
Egypt, 1958
A two-minute excerpt from a speech by Gamal Abdel Nasser in which he comments on (mocks) the Muslim Brotherhood regarding head coverings for women. Note the genuine laughter from the audience.
How times have changed.
Some background:
Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein (1918 – 1970) was the second President of Egypt, serving from 1956 until his death. A leader of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 against the monarchy, he introduced neutralist foreign policies during the Cold War, co-founding the international Non-Aligned Movement...
Nasser led the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy and introduced far-reaching land reforms the following year. Following a 1954 Muslim Brotherhood-led attempt on his life, he cracked down on the organization, put President Muhammad Naguib under house arrest, and assumed executive office, officially becoming president in June 1956...
Calls for pan-Arab unity under his leadership increased, culminating with the formation of the United Arab Republic with Syria (1958–1961). In 1962, Nasser began a series of major socialist measures and modernization reforms in Egypt...
Following Egypt's concessions to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, Nasser resigned, but he returned to office after popular demonstrations called for his reinstatement...
After the conclusion of the 1970 Arab League summit, Nasser suffered a heart attack and died.
Divertimento
An explanation of why%20urls%20are%20so%20weird.
"An East Texas man ended up in the hospital after he fired a gun at an armadillo and the bullet bounced off the animal’s back and hit the man in his face..."
A grim report on the abysmal quality of water that Olympic athletes in Rio will encounter.
Bullfighting in Colombia is on a downward spiral. "...although cities such as Manizales can pack the house, nationally the industry cannot support itself."
"Scatt, clad in a white hard hat, bright orange t-shirt, and sturdy pants, is one of a dozen interns who have been chosen to spend the bulk of their summer learning how to spruce up mausoleums, monuments, and headstones at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Recruited from trade schools, colleges, and social programs around the city, they are the first participants in the cemetery's Preservation Training Program, created in partnership with the World Monuments Fund. The 12 interns will receive nine weeks of training in the art of stonework restoration. "
An infographic about doughnuts.
Video of ISIS plundering an archaeological site.
A skier falls into a deep crevasse.
A table, probably in a pub, with a most unusual and creative design, crafted by Joe & Joni Rocco.
Cities can help put an end to puppy mills by mandating that pet stores can only sell rescue animals.
Remembering Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA scientist who kept thalidomide out of the United States. "For a critical 19-month period, she fastidiously blocked its approval while drug company officials maligned her as a bureaucratic nitpicker."
Police in Bangladesh killed six tiger poachers.
Fortune magazine sees the imminent end of the cellphone contract era.
A $30 device will hack your car's electronics and unlock it. "Kamkar’s device was used to successfully unlock cars made by Nissan, Cadillac, Ford, Toyota, Lotus, Volkswagen and Chrysler, and it also worked perfectly with a number of garage door openers, potentially giving the user access to a target’s home."
"According to the Defense Department’s annual “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702
Commentary and analysis of how/why Bernie Sanders is drawing huge numbers of people to his rallies.
Why "golf doesn't need the Olympics and the Olympics don't need golf."
Thoughts about Michelle Bachmann's belief in the imminent arrival of Biblical "end times" and its influence on her view of American foreign policy.
You have no time for this, but you will probably watch it all the way to the end anyway.
"Katie and her friends, it turns out, are guests at Camp Sundown, a charitable organization based in nearby Poughkeepsie. Run by Katie's parents, Dan and Caren Mahar, the summer camp brings together dozens of kids who suffer from xeroderma pigmentosum, a rare genetic disorder that renders sufferers unable to tolerate ultraviolet light." What a marvelous idea. (Here's a link to the camp's website.)
Positions taken by the Republican presidential candidates on the subject of torture.
Little girl likes her grandpa better than her grandma.
More than you need to know about trucks on the highway transporting liquid aluminum.
A tattoo with black henna can cause painful and permanent scarring.
One person's list of the 100 best novels written in English.
An Alabama church has opened a gun range. “This is an opportunity for us to reach out in the name of Jesus Christ in a setting that is completely unique. Even odd by some people’s standards. But who’s to say that church can’t happen right here...”
Gloom and doom scenario for world stock markets.
"The next time an annoying friend or relative attempts to argue that the Civil War was fought over anything other than slavery, here’s the definitive response delivered by Colonel Ty Seidule, a Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point."
Napoleon was NOT SHORT. "Confusion about his height also results from the difference between the French pouce and British inch—2.71 and 2.54 cm respectively; he was about 1.7 metres (5 ft 7 in) tall, which is above average for the period (for example, the average height of an English male was 165 cm.)"
The photos embedded today are of butterfly eggs, found in this gallery. Credit for all to Jay Cossey.
Top to bottom: Gulf Fritillary, Red Admiral, Monarch, Red-Spotted Purple, Bronze Copper, Question Mark, Cabbage White, and Giant Swallowtail.
02 September 2015
Americans are buying flamethrowers
As reported by Ars Technica:
Business is skyrocketing higher than ever due to the discussion on prohibition," Chris Byars, the CEO of the Ion Productions Team based in Troy, Michigan, told Ars by e-mail. "I’m a huge supporter of personal freedom and personal responsibility. Own whatever you like, unless you use it in a manner that is harmful to another or other’s property. We’ve received a large amount of support from police, fire, our customers, and interested parties regarding keeping them legal."
Byars added that the company has sold 350 units at $900 each, including shipping, in recent weeks. That's in addition to the $150,000 the company raised on IndieGoGo.
The Ion product, known as the XM42, can shoot fire over 25 feet and has more than 35 seconds of burn time per tank of fuel. With a full tank of fuel, it weighs just 10 pounds...
Shockingly, there are no current federal regulations on the possession, manufacture, sale, or use of flamethrowers.
"These devices are not regulated as they do not qualify as firearms under the National Firearms Act," Corey Ray, a spokesman with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, told Ars by e-mail.
At the state level, California requires a permit while Maryland outright bans them—Ars is not aware of any other state-level regulation. The Inhumane Weapons Convention, which the United States signed in 1981, forbids "incendiary weapons," including flamethrowers. However, this document is only an agreement between nation-states and their militaries, and it did not foresee individual possession...I'll refrain from any personal commentary; I'll just file it in the appropriate blog category.
Mayor Fouts remains unconvinced.
"If our own military doesn't use it and it's been banned by the Geneva Convention then why would someone think this should be sold to the general public?" he added. "I think it's too risky to gamble with people's lives. I can't think of something more horrific than to burn somebody alive, and that's what this would do."
CCC stonework in Alaska
It's been over a year since I've added any posts to the Civilian Conservation Corps category of this blog, in part because family circumstances have prevented me from doing the requisite exploration and photography.
Today I'm pleased to offer some photos submitted by reader AnneF, who on a trip to the Tongass National Forest in Juneau, Alaska, noted that the Skater's Cabin there was constructed by the CCC.
Skater’s Cabin Picnic Shelter is located on the shore of the southwest corner of Mendenhall Lake, near the Mendenhall Glacier. It is accessible from the Mendenhall Loop Road, approximately 6 miles from the Auke Bay Ferry Terminal, or approximately 13 miles from downtown Juneau. The cabin was constructed in 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps and is made with natural stone.The amount of mortar between the stones would suggest that the young men doing the work were relatively inexperienced, or perhaps that the available local stone was granitic and not amenable to shaping to fit. But the end result fits pleasingly into the natural landscape and has provided a welcome amenity to visitors for several generations already.
Thanks Anne!
Barbershop quartet championship performance
Never heard a barbership quartet? You'll be pleasantly surprised...
"This Could Be the Start of Something" (generally known as "This Could Be the Start of Something Big") is a popular song by Steve Allen, published in 1956.
Originally, the song was written as part of the score for the 1954 television musical production of The Bachelor. This score earned Allen a Sylvania Award (awarded "For Outstanding Contribution to Creative Television Technique").
In 1956, "This Could be the Start of Something" replaced the original opening theme to Allen's NBC talk show, "Tonight Starring Steve Allen" until Allen left the show in 1957 to be replaced by Jack Paar.
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