Month: July 2014

Random Neat Historical Fact: Pay Phones and Chronographs Edition

It always amazes me how technologies intermingle with one another. Consider the average automobile, which almost always have a cigarette lighter. This simple almost universal inclusion actually says a lot about the popularity of cigarettes in our society (at least the historical popularity). Most of these intermingling technologies go unnoticed by us because they’re just so common.

One of those technological minglings that I never noticed, even though I’m a bit of a horological nerd, specific markings on old chronographs. Oftentimes the minute subdail for the chronograph function will emphasize the markers for three, six, and nine. I always assumed this was merely an aesthetic thing and never questioned it further but as it turns out there was a functional reason for this:

It all comes down to the telephone. According to a watchmaker and enthusiast, I was informed that back in the 40s, 50s and early 60s when these watches were being produced, people used payphones regurarly. Cell phones obviously didn’t exist and many people didn’t have landline in their home yet. When using a payphone at the time, the money you put in got you three minutes of talk time, and you were cut off abruptly when your time was up.

The lines on the chronograph simply help you keep track of your telephone call. You’d start the chronograph, put in your money, and easily be able to know when to put more money in or to finish your conversation. Most calls were likely under 10 minutes, which is why only the first three-minute markers look like this.

I would have never guess that. After all pay phones were already in rare use when I was a kid. This makes me wonder if the next generation of children, who will likely have much more limited exposure to cigarettes, will be confused about what the removable button in the car that gets hot when pressed is for.

America No Longer Has a Monopoly on Reinterpreting Constitutions

For the longest time it seemed that no challenger existed to the United States’ monopoly on reinterpreting its own Constitution. Thankfully some competition has arisen as Japan has learned how to reinterpret its own constitution:

Under its constitution, Japan is barred from using force to resolve conflicts except in cases of self-defence.

But a reinterpretation of the law will now allow “collective self-defence” – using force to defend allies under attack.

Obviously this is good news for the United States. One of the biggest mistakes America made after World War II was disallowing Japan the ability to initiate force against foreign countries. This has prevented the island nation from joining us in many of our foreign excursions. Because we have been unable to access Japan’s first-hand experience at empire building we’ve been forced to muddle about as we try to learn how to play the game.

In addition to learning how to reinterpret its own constitution it appears as though Japan’s war mongering prime minister has also learned the American way of selling such shenanigans to his people:

PM Shinzo Abe has been pushing hard for the move, arguing Japan needs to adapt to a changing security environment.

“No matter what the circumstances, I will protect Japanese people’s lives and peaceful existence,” he told journalists after the change was approved.

Don’t worry citizens it’s all in the name of national security. While this reinterpretation of the constitution may seem like the wrong course of action trust me when I tell you that the barbarians at the gate will get you in your sleep if I don’t make this change. Now return to your jobs and wait until I declare war on a foreign nation (whose name will totally not be China) and force all of you to die in the name of our (and by “our” I mean my) glorious crusade!

Why Advocating for Gun Control in Gun Publications Carriers Consequences

The Atlantic has an article titled Why We Can’t Talk About Gun Control. In it the termination of Dick Metcalf from Guns and Ammo is discussed as an excuse for why this nation, supposedly, can’t have a discussion about gun control (you know, except for all of the discussions about gun control that happen every damn day):

In the column, Metcalf wrote that he did not believe it was an infringement of the Second Amendment to require some training before a person can have a concealed carry. He added that states can have a universal background check law without him feeling infringed upon.

That did not go over well.

The column appeared in the December 2013 issue of Guns & Ammo, but subscribers started getting it in late October. Within three days, Metcalf said, as responses poured in—by mail, in forums, and on social media—from what he called the pointed end of the bell curve, people who “think the constitution is the only law we need,” Metcalf was labeled a “gun control collaborator” and “modern-day Benedict Arnold.”

“What struck me most about what happened to me was that this huge media corporation [Intermedia, the owner of Guns & Ammo] was absolutely unprepared for the onslaught of social-media negativity,” Metcalf said, “when we went over that line and dared ask the question, whether people might think about whether or not regulation is by definition infringement.”

The tone of the article insinuates that us gun owners are such extreme nut cases that we tirelessly censor any attempt in the media to discuss gun control. Let me explain this from a different angle, namely from the angle of a gun owner and gun rights activist. As a gun owner I am the demographic that Guns and Ammo targets. It makes money by selling magazines primarily to its target demographic. When your target demographic involves gun owners and gun rights activists publishing articles that basically raise a gigantic middle finger to them is bad for business. Not surprisingly when Metcalf went on his little rant about supporting mandator background checks for all firearm transfers, a legalese way of making something as simple as gifting one of your firearms to your own fucking child a crime unless you also paid $20 to a federally licensed dealer to do nothing more than make a phone call to a federal agency, it irked Guns and Ammo’s target demographic. Why would gun owners and gun rights activists want to pay money to be told that they are potentially dangerous people who should not be allowed to possess a firearm unless some faceless bureaucrat working for one of the most violent governments currently in existence says so?

But here’s the thing, Metcalf hasn’t been silenced by us evil gun owners. His employment with Guns and Ammo was terminated but he’s still free to write for another publication. In fact there are many publications, including The Atlantic itself, that are more than happy to pay writers money to toe the gun control advocates’ line. Hell Michael Bloomberg would probably pay big money for a writer who was bullied by us big mean gun owners.

So The Atlantic’s assertion that there can’t be a conversation about gun control is flat out bullshit. It’s true that many of us who own guns aren’t willing to pay money to have gun control preached at us but we’re not stopping anybody from preaching. I’m also not willing to pay writers to call me a misogynist. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have a conversation about whether or not I’m misogyny for liking an author’s works, it simply means that I won’t fund the damn conversation.

Slaying Net Neutrality Under the Guise of Cyber Security

It has become obvious to our overlords in government that us slaves are rather fond of the way the Internet has worked since day one. But its corporate partners have dictated that they desire legal permission to throttle traffic selectively and what the government’s corporate partners want they get. So it’s time to play that wicked game again where the government slips in what it wants to do under the guise of something else. Net neutrality is now being sold as cyber security:

The cybersecurity bill making its way through the Senate right now is so broad that it could allow ISPs to classify Netflix as a “cyber threat,” which would allow them to throttle the streaming service’s delivery to customers.

[…]

The bill, as it’s written, allows companies to employ “countermeasures” against “cybersecurity threats,” but both terms are extremely broadly defined, and video streaming could easily fall within the purview of the latter.

“A ‘threat,’ according to the bill, is anything that makes information unavailable or less available. So, high-bandwidth uses of some types of information make other types of information that go along the same pipe less available,” Greg Nojeim, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. “A company could, as a cybersecurity countermeasure, slow down Netflix in order to make other data going across its pipes more available to users.”

You would think with a Senate full of lawyers that net neutrality could be force fed down our throat in a slightly more subtle way. This strategy just reeks of laziness in my opinion. There is only a handful of things I expect the government to do well: killing people, expropriating wealth from the people, pretend that it’s benevolent, and slyly sneak in its corporate partner’s agenda in a way that we don’t readily recognize.

But there you have it, net neutrality is now part of cyber security. And while cyber security hasn’t received much love from the slaves it’s easier to force feed to them because it’s part of OH MY GOD NATIONAL SECURITY!

Possibly the World’s Largest Pre-Digital Porn Collection

The United States is famous for its puritan views on sex. But the United States government has been smart enough, for the most part, to leave people’s porn alone. That wasn’t the case in the Soviet Union. Thanks to confiscation the Soviet government managed to create what is possibly one of the largest porn collections predating cheap high capacity digital storage devices:

It was the kinkiest secret in the Soviet Union: Across from the Kremlin, the country’s main library held a pornographic treasure trove. Founded by the Bolsheviks as a repository for aristocrats’ erotica, the collection eventually grew to house 12,000 items from around the world, ranging from 18th-century Japanese engravings to Nixon-era romance novels.

Of course privilege has its benefits. While the porn collection was off limits to the petty proletariat it was always available to the dictatorship of the proletariat (who were totally not bourgeois):

Off limits to the general public, the collection was always open to top party brass, some of whom are said to have enjoyed visiting. Today, the spetskhran is no more, but the collection is still something of a secret: There is no complete compendium of its contents, and many of them are still unlisted in the catalogue.

I’m sure that section of the library had to be steam cleaned multiple times a day.

The Soviet Union is a fascinating society to study. It was a society built upon the ideals of Karl Marx, which were supposed to usher in a new era of prosperity for the working class. Instead it ended up as one of the most oppressive states in the world. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat attempted to control every aspect of its peoples’ lives. Everything from the houses they lived in to the jobs they worked to the porn they consumed had to receive an official stamp from a Soviet bureaucrat to ensure it wasn’t anti-revolutionary, bourgeois, or whatever other imaginary threat the heads of the union came up with.

Mercenaries Threaten Government Official

Mercenaries are an interesting wildcard to study. They play some part in almost every major conflict yet are seldom mentioned in the history books. For example, when the United States declared an end to combat operations in Iraq it decided to leave a bunch of mercenaries behind. This receives little coverage by major media outlets who were simply declaring and end to the Iraqi conflict.

I referred to mercenaries as wildcards because their allegiances are often murky at best. Even if you’re paying them they might turn on you if one of your opponents makes a better offer. They may also turn on you simply because they feel as though you’re meddling in their affairs:

On Aug. 20, 2007, Mr. Richter was called in to the office of the embassy’s regional security officer, Bob Hanni, who said he had received a call asking him to document Mr. Richter’s “inappropriate behavior.” Mr. Richter quickly called his supervisor in Washington, who instructed him to take Mr. Thomas with him to all remaining meetings in Baghdad, his report noted.

The next day, the two men met with Daniel Carroll, Blackwater’s project manager in Iraq, to discuss the investigation, including a complaint over food quality and sanitary conditions at a cafeteria in Blackwater’s compound. Mr. Carroll barked that Mr. Richter could not tell him what to do about his cafeteria, Mr. Richter’s report said. The Blackwater official went on to threaten the agent and say he would not face any consequences, according to Mr. Richter’s later account.

Mr. Carroll said “that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit.

You read that correctly. A member of Blackwater Xe Academi threatened to kill a United States official. Between all of the other shenanigans members of Academi have pulled in Iraq I think it’s safe to say that it basically does whatever the hell it wants do. Considering this happened in 2007 and Academi is still there it appears as though the United States isn’t too concerned about it’s dog biting at its hand. I’m interested in seeing what kind of atrocities committed by Academi we’ll learn about in the coming years. If it felt safe enough to threaten a United States official chances are it felt safe enough to violate Iraqi citizens at will.

Hobby Lobby

The Nazgûl managed to stir up a bunch of political drama by ruling that privately held companies whose owners hold strong religious beliefs can be exempted for providing funding for certain contraceptives:

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby on Monday that for-profit employers with religious objections can opt out of providing contraception coverage under Obamacare.

The ruling deals directly with only a small provision of Obamacare and will not take down the entire law but it amounts to a huge black eye for Obamacare, the administration and its backers. The justices have given Obamacare opponents their most significant political victory against the health care law, reinforcing their argument that the law and President Barack Obama are encroaching on Americans’ freedoms.

As you can expect the Internet has exploded. Feminists are decrying this as a direct strike against women’s rights and the religious are hailing this as a great victory for religious freedom. Both sides, in their fervor to be louder than the other side, are missing the big picture. This battle isn’t one of women’s rights versus religious freedom, it’s the inevitable outcome of this country’s state-employer-insurer complex. Or as I like to call it the trinity of fuckery.

The state really made this entire fiasco possible. Today most people receive health insurance as part of their employee benefits package. Have you ever wondered why health insurance is tied to your employer? It’s because employers needed a way to provide higher wages during a time when the state implemented wage controls. Since the state said that employers couldn’t pay employees a higher wage employers decided to offer benefits, including health insurance, to bypass the controls. Today the state has further solidified the unity between health insurance and employment by mandating almost every employer provider employees with specific types of health insurance. That last part, requiring specific types of insurance, is the real kicker because it mandates certain types of contraceptives that many religious individuals oppose.

An employer with strongly held religious convictions is going to have problems funding coverage for certain types of contraceptives and abortions. Since they’re being mandated by the state to provide health insurance and that health insurance must cover some of the contraceptives they find objectionable they are using the only avenue left open to them: the courts. Hobby Lobby in this case decided to fight the contraceptive coverage and the state made an arbitrary decision, which sided with Hobby Lobby in this case. You can argue that the ruling was just or unjust until you’re blue in the face but it doesn’t matter what you believe. It only matters what the state believes.

Had the state never implemented wage controls and thus tied health insurance to employment we wouldn’t be in this mess. Assuming a lack of some other form of state meddling, employees would then be free to buy whatever health insurance plan worked for them. People with strong religious convictions against contraceptives could get a health insurance plan that didn’t cover contraceptives while people who want contraceptive coverage could get a plan that offered it. Their employer wouldn’t have a say in the matter since they wouldn’t be providing it. So the only viable solution is to break apart the trinity of fuckery.