Our World

The human ingenuity that helped expand the human race could well work to destroy it.

The probability that the human race will be drastically reduced in magnitude has risen meaningfully in modern times.

As an economic historian, I have always been fascinated by big changes occurring over time. The ultimate change, over the longest possible passage of time, relates to the creation and destruction of galaxies, planets, and related celestial debris. Confining ourselves to Earth, it relates to the creation and destruction of various forms of life over time.

My washer went on the fritz. The seal gave way and I ended up with a small pond in the laundry room.

We paid roughly $1600.00 bucks for the washer dryer combo maybe 10 or 12 years ago.

So I went appliance shopping yesterday. It was eye opening.

An LG combo was on sale so before taxes it was only a couple of hundred bucks more than the old set.

We had repairs done on both the old washer and the dryer to the tune of $400.00 each over the years. So it made sense to go with a new combo especially given the manufacturer changed the stackable mounting system and the dimensions of newer models so I can’t stack my old dryer on a new washer. Pity as it still works.

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I should say nothing lasts very long anymore. Liberals used to disdain the concept of ‘planned obsolescence,’ yet they say not a word about the increasing short lives of appliances and other items. Their own policies, supposedly designed to reduce carbon emissions and conserve energy and water, are part of the problem.

Those of you who are old enough to have had appliances from Whirlpool, Maytag, et al. in the distant past and have recently purchased new ones will know of what I speak.

A big thanks to everyone for their patience.

The blog migration while mostly peaceful was somewhat breaky and brittle.

The image optimizer decided to fritz but after some code supplied by product support it is operating again albeit with certain features in limbo.

BCF is old, old and swole up with over 200K posts and 100K images.

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Hi Everyone!

I am off to PQ to attend my niece’s daughter’s wedding. I am looking forward to the scheduled 11 pm Poutine snack at the reception.

I should be back Sunday evening, after a small post wedding family get together. Xavier will be all alone and will probably change the locks.

Please be aware that the Blog may be down for 4 to 6 hours if our host decides to make the move to the new server.

Sarcasticat will be looking after things while I am gone, please thank him for his fine efforts.

Thank you all!

BCF

And we’re back …

As I write these words, June 10 was not too long ago, but being before the European, British, and French elections, in some ways it feels like an eternity ago. June 10 is White Rose Day, the day on which, in 1688, the de jure King James III and VIII of England, Scotland, and Ireland was born. It precipitated the overthrow of his father in the so-called Glorious Revolution, the ongoing subjection of the British Monarchy to the political factions dominating Parliament, and the Jacobite uprisings so dear to song and story. In commemoration of the day, this writer had lunch with several other like-minded folk.

The power came back on when things were looking their most bleak at approx 3:30PM.

Our emergency generator was not guaranteed a fuel refill as silly things like hospitals may have needed it more than your stalwart blogger.

That would mean no elevators or water.

But so far so good touch wood.

Please thank Sarcasticat for rising to the occasion and filling in.

Thank you all.

BCF

The opening get-together in the annual summer summiteering season was titled G7 Italia, after the location at a posh resort on the Adriatic coast. It should rightly have been Dead Men Walking.

Rarely if ever have so many unpopular, discredited, likely-to-be replaced national “leaders” gathered on a stage to be opped for a photo that would be out of date almost the moment they landed back in the countries that desperately want to be rid of them.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Iranian government ann­ounces it has developed a nuc­lear bomb and threatens to use it on Israel. The United States reacts with the threat of military intervention, as it did in 1991 and 2003 in Iraq. Iran signals that it will not tolerate a third Gulf war and looks for allies. American forces mass to enter Iran, which orders national mobilisation. Russia, China and North Korea express their support for Iran, and Washington expands its intervention force, bringing in a British contingent. Russia enters the game, raising the stakes in the expectation that the West will back down. A nuclear standoff follows, but with tense and itchy fingers on both sides, as leaders gamble on the risk of not striking first, it all ends in disaster. The Third World War begins with an exchange of nuclear fire, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Neither the West nor its enemies are prepared to fight

Neither the West not its enemies are prepared to fight. Some 30 years ago, I coined the phrase “post-heroic warfare” to acknowledge a new phenomenon: the very sharp reduction in the tolerance of war casualties. My starting point was President Clinton’s 1993 decision to abandon Somalia after 18 American soldiers were killed in a failed raid. But in truth, post-heroic attitudes had already emerged — and not just in affluent democracies. In 1989, the Soviet Union, whose generals could once lose 15,000 men before breakfast without batting an eyelid, abandoned Afghanistan after 14,453 of its soldiers were killed over almost a decade.

Nor was the post-heroic phenomenon strictly related to the merits, or lack thereof, of any particular act of war. Margaret Thatcher stayed up all night writing personal letters to the families of every one of Britain’s 255 dead in the Falklands. But it did not mollify her critics, who argued that Britain should never have used force, even if it meant that Argentina would be allowed to conquer the islands.

If you’re hanging on to your car longer than ever, welcome to the club. Recent reports show that the average age of the American car is older than ever — and it’s for the same reason that the newest Star Wars show just flopped harder than anything since the notorious 1978 holiday special.

The University of Ottawa has launched a master’s program aimed at equipping students with the knowledge and skills they need to harness the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

The program, which opens next September, will be housed in the university’s psychology department, but run in partnership with the department of classics and religious studies. Students will be able to take a broad range of courses from neuroscience to comparative mysticism.

This guy was the inspiration for Doc in Back to the Future.

A difficult concept to explain to ordinary people is that some people and some ideas are unadulterated evil, not just in their implementation but in their conception. Most of us are unfamiliar with evil because we spend much time and effort staying as far away as possible. There’s also an impulse to humanize others. Many want to believe the best in people and trivialize or gloss over readily observable behaviors that might lead to seeing a person as evil. People misinterpret evil acts as separate and apart from having an evil soul.

One would not like to become overconfident about the coming European election results—the steady-on advice of The European Conservative’s Ellen Fantini is a must-read—but perhaps we can allow ourselves a moment to savor the taste of flop sweat oozing from the pores of anxious liberals. They sense that something terrible is about to happen to them, and they don’t know what to do.

In the last few years, we have witnessed a world that has become significantly less safe and secure. American and Western policy failures and strategic missteps appear to have emboldened adversaries and undermined allies. A lack of decisive action and coherent strategy has created power vacuums which have been exploited by hostile actors and resulted in increased instability and threats in the West to both national and global security. It seems urgent for the long-term survival of the United States and the Free World – where people enjoy unprecedented freedom of speech, property rights, economic opportunity, religious freedom and other civil liberties – not to accept assaults on these hard-won achievements either at home or abroad.