December 2015 Archives
Hidden Wonders of the Digital World: Lord of The Rings Online | Atlas Obscura
"So when a game company called Turbine, Inc. released The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), an open-world game that set out to create a living Middle Earth, it was no small task. They also had to do so without rights to the films or other media based on, or related to J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal works of fantasy--no visions of Frodo's hobbit house from the movies, or a Gandalf that looked like Ian McKellen. Their source material had to be the text of the the novels and their own designs.
"Somehow, though, those limitations have made LOTRO one of the most faithful visions of Tolkien's world."
The Star Wars Holiday Special - Dailymotion
Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca (and his family!), R2D2, C3PO, Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, and Art Carney in a two-hour special that everyone involved wishes they could forget.
Hyperbole and a Half: The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas
A little girl tries to spice up the nativity story with her own play, but is thwarted by relatives who crack themselves up with a running gag about the '80s pop up superstar.
George Lucas nearly wrote a perfect prequel trilogy. He just didn't notice | GamesRadar
Think in terms of Anakin as an outsider, able to perceive the limitations of Jedi traditionalism. Balance in the Force = balance between traditionalism and unfettered libertarianism?
A Response to John Piper: Why Gun Ownership is Biblical and Good -Part A | Pulpit & Pen
"First, Piper needs to understand that stopping a crime in progress is not bearing the sword in a Romans 13 fashion. Romans 13 deals with trial and penology. The man stopping his wife from being kidnapped and raped by a Muslim man in a gas station restroom (like what happened in North Dakota a few weeks ago) is not 'bearing the sword' Romans 13 style. He's not enacting vengeance. He's stopping a crime in progress. Throughout this article, Piper repeatedly cites verses that speak against vengeance, misapplying them to his position on self-defense. Any serious Bible student or teacher should know better than this simple but subtle difference-turned-distraction."
'I Am Called a Cult Leader. I Really Don't Care.' | Christianity Today
A revolting story of spiritual, financial, and sexual abuse in an independent "evangelical" "teaching" "ministry."
How to Love God by Getting More Sleep - Joe Carter
"My poor sleep hygiene was affecting my family, my work, and my physical health. And it was also affecting me spiritually....
"Sleep is a sign of trust and humility. But it's also a spiritual discipline. As D. A. Carson says, 'Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night's sleep--not pray all night, but sleep. I'm certainly not denying that there may be a place for praying all night; I'm merely insisting that in the normal course of things, spiritual discipline obligates you get the sleep your body need.'"
Carter offers some practical tips to improving sleep hygeine -- avoiding blue light, regular sleep and wake times, limiting alcohol and caffeine.
David Gelernter Transcript - Conversations with Bill Kristol
"Let's look at the generation after the Second World War. This is a cultural revolution, it seems to me to extend roughly from 1945 to 1970. So in 1970 everything is different. Things are radically different. And what happened during those 25 years? Colleges and universities became vastly, vastly more influential on American culture....
"Well, I think you saw these two processes just during the generation in which the Yale's and Harvard's and Stanford's became vastly more important than every before, because now everybody has got to get a BA. And journalists have to go to journalist school, and businessmen and teachers and all these guys. Law's a bigger profession than ever before. Medicine, suddenly doctors are making much more than anybody else - there was a period during which going to medical school was a frenzy.
"And during this same period, universities were being taken over by intellectuals and moving hard to the Left. Intellectuals have also been Leftist, have always been hard to the Left. So the dramatic steer to the Left coincides with a huge jump in the influence of American universities. We have a cultural revolution. And the cultural revolution is that we no longer love this country. We no longer have a high regard for this country or for the culture that produced it. We no longer have any particular feelings for Western Civilization....
"And we have a generational shift so that when we start in the 1970s and 80s, suddenly public schools' and college teaching went way down. ...
"So the schools were failing to teach but at least the parents had been educated before the cultural revolution. You know, they'd been educated in the 60s and the 50s, some by the 40s or the 30s. So they - When their children were taught garbage, when their children were taught nonsense, when their children were taught outright lies, at least the parents could say, "Hold on, not so fast, are you really sure about that?" Or "You know, there are Republicans in this country, too." Or, "You know, we've tried those policies, and they created catastrophes. Are you sure we should do this all again?"
"But what happened in - as we move out of the 90s and into the new century - the children educated in the first generation of the cultural revolution in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, those children are now the young teachers. And then the not-so-young teachers. And they're the parents.
"And so the children who were being taught nonsense and garbage and lies in school, instead of going home and having the parents say, "Well, wait a minute, this is really idiotic, by the way." The parents say, "Yeah, that's what I was taught, too." You know, the same....
"So we have second-generation ignorance is much more potent than first-generation ignorance. It's not just a matter of one generation, of incremental change. It's more like multiplicative change. A curve going up very fast. And swamping us. Taking us by surprise."
The Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders data fight, explained - The Washington Post
"We've established before and will reiterate here that there is nothing more important to a campaign than knowing as many details about you, the voter, as it possibly can. In most places, obtaining a list of registered voters and their vote history is trivial. (For example, the state of Ohio's full voter file is online.) That data usually includes other important details: Your address, your gender, your political party, your age, etc. But in an era when political candidates have the ability and desire to target ads to 45-year-old car enthusiasts who are recently divorced and live in the suburbs of Cincinnati, the more data the better.
"Since there's not much utility in, say, a senatorial campaign investing lots of money to build this thing out every six years, businesses stepped in to fill the void. There's a company called NGP VAN which runs a system that allows campaigns easy access to voter databases. Those databases are put together with the help of companies like TargetSmart, which helps the DNC take voter data from state parties (which get it from the state), cleans the data up, layers in consumer information and then slots it, in the case of the DNC, into the NGP VAN system."
11 Smells That Are Slowly Disappearing | Mental Floss
Ditto fluid, burning leaves, diesel fumes, new car smell (it's different now), chalk dust, the gum that used to be in baseball card packs, dust burning on vacuum tubes, phone books, Polaroid film, Magic Markers, and cap guns. "The sole company that still manufactures ditto fluid in the U.S. only sells a few thousand gallons per year these days, as opposed to the over 100,000 gallons they delivered during the 1970s."
"The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West's will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.
"But al-Qaeda didn't create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West's intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.
"Consider the following propositions:
- There is no truth, only competing agendas.
- All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West's history of racism and colonialism.
- There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
- The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
- Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
- The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
- For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.
- But "oppressed" people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
- When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist's point of view, and make concessions.
"These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, "political correctness" to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism....
"I think it's important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into slitting its own throat."
Gramscian damage - Eric S. Raymond
"Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West....
"As I previously observed, if you trace any of these [memetic weapons] back far enough, you'll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. ...
"The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the "leading elements" of society through their agents of influence.... This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.
"Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people -- at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life....
"While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn't outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture's response to Islamic terrorism....
"The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant....
"Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.
"Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars....
"I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin's memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media."
Selling Out the Newspaper Comic Strip - The Los Angeles Review of Books
Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) vs. Charles Schulz (Peanuts) on merchandising and artistic integrity.
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers for the rolling, bleeping alarm clock. Here is a direct link to the Clocky manual.
Seven uses for silica desiccant pouches.
Wells Cathedral - Rules for Choristers - 1460
How the boys are to take their meals: "Then they shall say their grace distinctly and audibly, after which they shall decently and silently approach the table and peacefully sit down. When they are seated they shall behave decently and not lean on the table. They must not deliberately or wantonly soil or spoil the cloth or other utensils in front of them, and they must take their food courteously and decently. They must cut their bread or break it decently, not gnaw it with their teeth or tear it with their nails. Also they must drink with their mouths empty, not full, and eat their food decently, in moderation and not quickly. On no account are they to raise their knives to their mouths with the food, nor clean their teeth with their knives. And if at dinner or supper-time there is anything lacking that they ought to have, they must ask for it softly not loudly, not in English but in Latin; and they must consider themselves satisfied with what is provided without any murmuring or disapproval."
Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields
Maps and photographs and descriptions of long-forgotten airfields.
American female pediatrician Simi Rahman writes:
"You really can't tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.
"And that's the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They're like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there....
"And that's when the absurdity started to really hit home. What in the world were we doing? We were training our children to kowtow without questioning an authority that we believed would keep them safe from evil western ways. And so the community's children went to Sunday school, wore hijab, prayed and fasted. They were enveloped in a Muslim identity that was unlike any that I had experienced before. I was raised in a Muslim country in the Middle East and religion was something we kept in its place, somewhere after school, soccer and cartoons. Here was a more distilled, pure and, most dangerously, a context-free Islam. There were no grandmothers here to sagely tell us which parts of the Quran to turn a blind eye to. There were no older cousins here who skipped Friday prayers and goofed off with their friends instead. Oh no. This was Islam simmered in a sauce of Midwestern sincerity, and boiled down to its dark, concentrated core. This was dangerous.
"As my children grew older, I grew more afraid. I had tolerated their father's insistence on sending them to Sunday school, where mostly they played and learned a few surahs. But as they grew older I knew it would change. A sincerity would creep in to their gaze, teenage rebellion would find just cause in judging your less religious parents as wanting and inferior. Bad Muslims. How many teenagers have started to wear hijab before their own mothers? I've lost count. Mothers who found themselves in this dilemma would choose to join their child on this journey. They would cover too, and as such offered a layer of protection from the ideology by offering perspective.
"I worried though, about the Internet, about radical recruiters posing as friends, finding willing and malleable clay in our unformed children. For we would keep them unformed. We would shield them from western influences in order to protect them, only to create a rift that could be exploited as an entry point. We would in essence be leaving our children vulnerable to radicalization.
"And that is exactly what has been happening. The young girls from Europe and the US who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS, have done so because they're looking for what all teenagers are looking for, a sense of identity, to differentiate themselves from their parents and find a separate identity, the thrill of rebellion, adventure. They can't date, drink or dance, so they might as well Daesh."
The Yale Problem Begins in High School | HeterodoxAcademy.org
"The Yale problem refers to an unfortunate feedback loop: Once you allow victimhood culture to spread on your campus, you can expect ever more anger from students representing victim groups, coupled with demands for a deeper institutional commitment to victimhood culture, which leads inexorably to more anger, more demands, and more commitment. But the Yale problem didn't start at Yale. It started in high school. As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimizers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it's hard to imagine how any university can open students' minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don't share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don't share their values."
How Marcuse made today's students less tolerant than their parents | HeterodoxAcademy.org
"Second, I argue that youthful intolerance is driven by different factors than old fashioned intolerance, and that this change reflects the ideology of the New Left. Herbert Marcuse, considered 'The Father of the New Left,' articulates a philosophy that denies political expression to those who would oppose a progressive social agenda. In his 1965 essay 'Repressive Tolerance,' Marcuse (1965) writes,
"'Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested...  Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.'
"The idea of 'liberating tolerance' then is one in which ideas that the left deems to be intolerant are suppressed. It is an Orwellian argument for an 'intolerance of intolerance' and it appears to be gaining traction in recent years, reshaping our commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and basic democratic norms. If we look only at people under the age of 40, intolerance is correlated with a 'social justice' orientation. That is, I find that people who believe that the government has a responsibility to help poor people and blacks get ahead are also less tolerant. Importantly, this is true even when we look at tolerance towards groups other than blacks. For people over 40, there is no relationship between social justice attitudes and tolerance. I argue that this difference reflects a shift from values of classical liberalism to the New Left. For older generations, support for social justice does not require a rejection of free speech. Thus, this tension between leftist social views and political tolerance is something new."
Tulsa Police Department live calls, mapped.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808), by Daniel Defoe
An excerpt of Daniel Defoe's satirical poem, "True-born Englishman," in which he exposes the typical motivation behind exposés of political functionaries. At least the public learns what might otherwise be hidden, even if the telling is driven by envy.
"Fools out of favour grudge at knaves in place,
And men are always honest in disgrace:
The court preferments make men knaves in course,
But they, who would be in them, would be worse.
'Tis not at foreigners that we repine,
Would foreigners their perquisites resign:
The grand contention's plainly to be seen,
To get some men put out, and some put in."
BBC - WW2 People's War - The British Flying Training Schools in the U.S.A. 1941-1944
Mike Igglesden describes his trip from Manchester, England, to Ponca City, Oklahoma, to train as a Royal Air Force pilot.
Royal Air Force Training in Oklahoma during World War II
Description and coordinates of the facilities used to train RAF pilots in Miami, Ponca City, and Tulsa. Part of a website by Scott D. Murdock, who visits and photographs the remains of past U. S. Air Force and U. S. Army Air Corps facilities for his site airforcebase.net. Here is his collection of Tulsa and other Oklahoma Air Force facilities. I didn't know that the Air Force had its Tulsa Transceiver Control Station from 1956 to 1962 at 1226-1228 (now 1232) E. 2nd Street, or its Air Corps Technical Training Command headquarters at the Tribune Building (now the Tribune Lofts).
How The Hidden Track Faded From Recorded Music | Atlas Obscura
I wasn't stoned, but I recall being surprised when the needle finally hit the second groove on one side of Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief album.
"The record featured a concurrent groove, which made it so that it would play different music based on where you placed the needle.... 'We had these visions of stoned fans, of which there were a lot in the early '70s, having the shock of their lives when brand new material was playing on a record they had had for months,' Python's Michael Palin recalled. 'Some people thought there was an alternative version because they would hear talk of these mysterious sketches that they had never heard on their record. It drove people mad. This was precisely why we did it, of course.'"
3 ways 'climate change' models are dead wrong
Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation:
"...we are persuaded by the empirical evidence that human use of fossil fuels causes very little global warming, the benefits of which probably exceed the harms of which, while the benefits of the energy derived from those fossil fuels far outweigh whatever net harms might arise from the slight warming their use causes.
"Notice the stress on empirical evidence. The only grounds for fears of dangerous man-made global warming are predictions made on the basis of computer climate models of how the world's climate responds to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration. But as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously put it, if our prediction 'disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.'
"One could go into enormous detail comparing model predictions with real-world observations, but the summary is this:
- On average, they predict twice the warming actually observed over the relevant period.
- Over 95 percent predict more warming, not less, than actually observed. If their errors were random, they would as frequently predict less as more. That they don't implies that their errors are not random but driven by some kind of bias, whether intentional and dishonest or unintentional and arising simply from misunderstanding, widely shared among the modelers, of how the climate system works.
- None of them predicted the complete absence of statistically significant global warming stretching back 18 years and 9 months, to February of 1997.
"In short, the models are wrong. They therefore provide no rational basis for any predictions about future global average temperature and consequently no rational basis for any policy related to such predictions."
The Left's Religious Ignorance | David French | National Review Online
"During my own time in places like Cambridge, Mass., and Ithaca, N.Y., I frequently encountered people who claimed they'd 'never met' another Evangelical or 'never heard' one of my relatively standard conservative arguments. Their ignorance was matched only by their condescension, as they were convinced they knew the 'true' motivations for my deeply held beliefs.
"That's not to say that nothing else matters besides religion, but when encountering people who proclaim faith-based motivations for their actions, it is generally prudent to take them at their word and evaluate their actions and intentions from within their own frame of reference. If the Left applied this framework to jihadists abroad and Christians at home, it would understand that the reality is both worse than they fear and better than they hope. Jihadists are more deadly and vicious than they understand, while the religious neighbors the Left so despises turn out to be among America's most kind and generous citizens.
"In other words, when it comes to religion, the credentialed Left needs an education. Its ignorance is making our nation weak and tearing it apart."
How Vince Guaraldi Made Charlie Brown Cool -- Cuepoint -- Medium
"Armed with Mendelson's story outline, Guaraldi knew he needed at least two more original compositions: something for an ice-skating sequence, and a vibrant number for a party that broke out on stage, when the kids failed to heed instructions from Charlie Brown, newly assigned director of the school Christmas play.
"The former became 'Skating,' a lyrical jazz waltz highlighted by sparkling keyboard runs that sounded precisely like children ice-skating joyously on a frozen pond. The latter emerged as 'Christmas Is Coming,' a bright bossa nova anthem with strong overtones of rock 'n' roll.
"'The cascading notes to Guaraldi's Vivaldi-like "Skating" are the most vivid representation of falling snowflakes in music,' a newspaper columnist wrote, decades later....
"'"The opening song was an instrumental,' Mendelson recalled. 'I felt we should get some lyrics, and some voices. We couldn't find anybody to write the lyrics, and I called all my Hollywood friends who were songwriters. But nobody took the assignment, so I sat down, and in about 10 minutes wrote the words to "Christmas Time Is Here" on an envelope...."
How Vince Guaraldi Made Charlie Brown Cool -- Cuepoint -- Medium
"Armed with Mendelson's story outline, Guaraldi knew he needed at least two more original compositions: something for an ice-skating sequence, and a vibrant number for a party that broke out on stage, when the kids failed to heed instructions from Charlie Brown, newly assigned director of the school Christmas play.
"The former became 'Skating,' a lyrical jazz waltz highlighted by sparkling keyboard runs that sounded precisely like children ice-skating joyously on a frozen pond. The latter emerged as 'Christmas Is Coming,' a bright bossa nova anthem with strong overtones of rock 'n' roll.
"'The cascading notes to Guaraldi's Vivaldi-like "Skating" are the most vivid representation of falling snowflakes in music,' a newspaper columnist wrote, decades later....
"'"The opening song was an instrumental,' Mendelson recalled. 'I felt we should get some lyrics, and some voices. We couldn't find anybody to write the lyrics, and I called all my Hollywood friends who were songwriters. But nobody took the assignment, so I sat down, and in about 10 minutes wrote the words to "Christmas Time Is Here" on an envelope...."
Mizzou Is What Happens When We Allow Too Much Privacy
"Clinton's claim to the supremacy of his individual moral truth paid handsomely. Cub demagogues at Mizzou, Ithaca, Hanover, and elsewhere are products of a culture that rewarded Clinton for discarding traditional synthesis between public and private scruples. Sever that unity, sanction perception over fact, and the means for moral reflection shrink to a grab bag of politicized 'values,' the weight of privacy among them.
"In private, Bubba was a moral grotesque. But his public persona exhibited concern for old-growth forests, ozone depletion, and racial discrimination. He opposed the Vietnam War and, later, sugary drinks. Plus, he left a budget surplus. What more can we ask?
"Answer: much more. But we have forgotten how to do it, forgotten even the import of the question. Mizzou and the rest are the price of our blackout."
