Brexit THIS!

People, I am really getting tired of all the hand-wringing, apocalyptic post-Brexit posts.  Please try to take a deep breath and chill.

It's not that big of a deal. Yes I know stock markets are down. They will come back up.

Yes the pound is down. Who give a $%#$%#$? So what?

If the UK actually exits (for me this is p = .75), economically it will be fine. The US doesn't have zero tariffs with the EU, but we still manage to survive.

This whole thing is much closer to a non-event than the earth-shaking mistake it's taken to be.

Some specific things that really bug me.

1. Claiming that the result was not democratic. Rogoff and Gowder, you both know better.  This is just ludicrous.  There is nothing more democratic than a referendum. Full stop. This was pure democracy in action. Many people who claim to love democracy but dislike this outcome are tying themselves in knots trying to avoid the implication that in this instance at least they are anti-democracy ( welcome to the club, let me show you the secret handshake).

People, the US is not a democracy! We are a Republic. We have tons of checks on democracy. Deciding everything by a simple majority referendum would be a disaster in the US. But it would be a decidedly democratic disaster.


2. Claiming that some voters have a greater right to decide than others and shouting that they were "robbed". It turns out that the youngest voters went for remain while older voters chose leave. And of course this means that the old are robbing the young and the vote is somehow illegitimate because..... old people suck? Because 18-24 year olds have so much more economic and political savvy than do 60 year olds?

I do like the idea that the shorter is your remaining life span, the less your vote should count. I wonder if the folks who are screaming about the pernicious old voters in Brexit would be willing to apply this principle to US elections?


3. Blaming Reagan. Oh Neoliberalism, is there nothing bad that you didn't do? This one is a howler of the highest order. Brexit has nothing to do with what the people who decided it said was important and was caused by Ronnie and Margie Thatcher!  Whatever you are mad about, just trot out the old shibboleths and invoke the ritual incantations. Why hasn't Naomi Klein pinned Brexit on Milton Friedman yet?

Did something happen you don't like? Look back in history,  find the first other thing that you really don't like. There's your cause.

Brexit apocalypse punditry has been some of the stupidest and laziest punditry I've had the misfortune to endure.

We will all survive Brexit with little lasting damage. This will be clear within 6 months.

Men in Kilts

Men in Kilts Window Cleaning

Not sure what the "in Kilts" part is doing here, though of course that is what made me notice it.  So maybe that's the answer.

But is it so that interested parties can peek up the skirts when the lads are up washing windows?

Leading to the REAL question, of course:  Are these "true Scotsmen?"

Leading to a question I didn't even know about, the "True Scotsman Fallacy."

But then that all reminds me of the joke:  Scottish regiment visits France.  Young French female reporter breathlessly asks one of the soldiers, "Sir, people want to know:  Is anything worn under that kilt?"

Scotsman answers, "Nah, lassie, 'tis good as new!"

They ne'er shoods hae bann'd us

People. KPC has always been at war with Scotland.

Behold the Scottish sandwich:

1. No the bread is not a half meter in diameter.

2. That pink bit on the left is called "bacon" (really).

3. Scottish hens are so Scottish that they only lay eggs that big.

Here's the manager of the establishment that served up this monstrosity:

“Everyone was given appropriate training so we make sure that it’s according to our standards"

Weel dain, lads. Weel dain.

There ain't half been some clever bastards

People:

Scottish police are SOLVING MORE MURDERS THAN HAVE BEEN COMMITTED!

Now, this is not a Chicago voting deal with more ballots than voters.

This is for realz.

They apparently are solving all current cases and going back to solve leftover open cases from previous years, giving them a 109% success rate.

Of course there were only 52 murders in the last financial year in the whole country (for comparison, the District of Columbia recorded 108 homicides in 2014).

Scotland Denies Angus!

Our "Man in Scotland," K. "Haggis Man" Gaddie, sends this message from the field:


Scottish transit WiFi blocks "Kids Prefer Cheese" ... did you upset Adam Smith?

lookin' for love (in all the wrong places)

Nicci Taylor wants love. So she came up with a plan:

1. Sell all your stuff
2. Buy a camper
3. Drive it around looking for your soulmate

So far so good. But people, SHE IS GOING TO DRIVE IT AROUND SCOTLAND!!!

Nononononononnoooooooo!

Look I understand she's in England, and when the mean is that low any variance can be welfare improving, but Scotland?

People, here is the best looking human ever to come from Scotland:

Nicci is doomed.

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Man I was so excited to see this headline:

Tourists to Scotland ‘let down by quality of food’


The piece just writes itself:

If you don't like Scottish food, do as us Scots do and just drink all day.

Going to Scotland for the food is like going to France for military training.

Haggis: it's nae sa bad!

But sadly, the actual piece is just quoting a bloviating blowhard Scotsman complaining that not enough people eat in his restaurant at Gleneagles, which is actually about the most Non-Scottish place in all of Scotland. There's no data given that tourists complain about food quality.

The closest thing in the whole story is this:

Recent research found half of people visiting Scotland want to try local food while two-thirds think quality food is an important factor when dec­iding where to go on holiday.

So to Andrew Fairlie I say, "away wi ye now, ya daft wee cuntie". And to all prospective visitors to Scotland I say go for the hiking, scenery, golf and whisky. By all means, eat if you must. But try to avoid the "local delicacies"

Let my people go!

All over the interwebs, people are up in arms about Scottish independence, including a particularly hot take from LeBron this morning:

I wonder what all these people think of American independence?

Irish independence?

Indian independence?

Here is a good rule of thumb. England is a sphincter country. If you get a chance, run, don't walk, away.

thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense

When Robert Burns got mad, he got even:


Ellisland, 1791.


 Dear Sir:


 Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.


R.B.

Source is here. Hat tip to Mrs. Angus

The culture that is Scotland

"I've been a police officer in Greenock for 20 years and so I've seen a lot of wedding parties turn nasty, but this was something else".

And that's putting it mildly. Story is here.

A Scot on a Desert Island

One day a Scotsman, who had been stranded on a deserted island for over 10 years, saw a speck on the horizon. He thought to himself, "It's never a ship. Too small." As the speck got closer and closer, he began to rule out even the possibilities of a small boat or a raft.

Suddenly there strode from the surf a figure clad in a black wet suit. Putting aside the scuba tanks and mask, and zipping down the top of the wet suit, there stood a drop-dead gorgeous blonde!

She walked up to the stunned Scotsman and said to him, "Tell me, how long has it been since you've had a good cigar?"

"I've nod hae a smook in ten yahrs!" replied the amazed man.

With that, she reached over and unzipped a waterproof pocket on the left sleeve of her wet suit and pulled out a fresh package of cigars and a lighter.

He took a cigar, slowly lit it, and took a long drag. "Help ma boab!" said the castaway. "Och, that is verra goot! I'd forgotten how gra' a smook ken beh!"

"And how long has it been since you've had a drop of good Scotch whiskey?" asked the blonde.

Trembling, the castaway replied, "Ten years, but Crivvens, I ken still take a goot bucket!"

Hearing that, the blonde reached over to her right sleeve, unzipped a pocket there and removed a flask and handed it to him.

He opened the flask and took a long drink. "Tis nectar o' the gods!" murmured the Scotsman. "Losh, 'tis truly fantastic!!"

At this point, the gorgeous blonde started to slowly unzip the long front of her wet suit, right down the middle. She looked at the trembling man and asked, "And how long has it been since you've played around?"

With tears in his eyes, the Scot fell to his knees and sobbed ........."Michty me! Ken it really be ya hae golf clubs in there too!"

(With thanks to Shirley)

Damn, I'm not the greatest Kevin in Oklahoma anymore

People, check out Kevin Durant's stat line for the month of January:

In 15 games, Durant averaged 32.1 points, 8.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 1.1 steals. He shot 51.9 percent from the field, 53.2 percent on 3-pointers, and 89.8 percent from the foul line.

I have sent out a paper, done 3 referee reports, taught my classes, put together a dissertation committee for one of my students and almost completed a draft of a new paper.

Somehow, it's just not the same, is it?

Life in America just keeps getting better

First our overlords decided to let us eat jamón ibérico, and now, in even a bigger culinary coup, HAGGIS IS AGAIN LEGAL IN THE USA!!!!

From the Guardian:

Smuggled and bootlegged, it has been the cause of transatlantic tensions for more than two decades. But after 21 years in exile, the haggis is to be allowed back into the United States.

The "great chieftan o' the puddin-race" was one of earliest casualties of the BSE crisis of the 1980s-90s, banned on health grounds by the US authorities in 1989 because they feared its main ingredient ‑ minced sheep offal ‑ could prove lethal.

Some refined foodies might insist it always has been and always will be: in the words of Robert Burns, in his Ode to a Haggis, looking "down wi' sneering, scornfu' view on sic a dinner". But now, as millions of Scots around the world prepare to celebrate Burns's legacy tonight with an elaborate, whisky-fuelled pageant to a boiled bag of sheep innards, oatmeal, suet and pepper, its reputation has been restored, on health grounds at least.

Some notes on the above quote:

1. they banned sheep guts due to concerns about mad cow? WTF?

2. "great chieftan o the puddin' race"? Robert Burns, who ranks right behind Andy Murray but ahead of Robert the Bruce as the second greatest Scottsman ever.

3. In actuality, ALL meals in Scotland are "whisky-fuelled pageants"! However, speaking from experience, copious amounts of whisky would be a huge help in getting down a plateful of haggis.

hat tip to Felix the Fish

The match of the week (so far)

Taylor Dent beat Ivan Navarro last night, winning the 5th set tiebreaker 11-9. Both guys played serve and volley (Dent went to net 109 times, Navarro 146) with accurate and huge serves (Dent made 70% of his first serves with a top speed of 147 mph, Navarro 81% with a top speed of 130).

The full match stats are here.

After the match, Dent commandeered the umpire's microphone to thank the crowd and took a victory lap around the Grandstand, slapping hands with the crowd. He is coming back from two spinal fusion surgeries and has a great attitude about the sport as revealed in his post match interview.

Next up for Taylor is the most handsome Scottish person in all of history, Andy Murray.

Maybe it's just me...

But I think this is pretty Shi**y:

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

The letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, who has been widely criticised for taking the formal decision to permit Megrahi’s release.

The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests.

The whole piece is well worth reading. This coming week at the US open, we'll see one of Scotland's finest at work, but Gordon Brown is pretty much the bottom of the Scottish barrel. He stinks likes 3 week old haggis.

Blighty: where men are men and......

From our good friends at the AP:

LONDON – A British farmer who paid a new world record price for a sheep says the animal is the finest specimen he has ever seen.

Farmer Jimmy Douglas shelled out 231,000 pounds ($347,000) for the 8-month-old Texel ram called Deveronvale Perfection at an annual sale in Lanark, Scotland.

Douglas says the ram has "a great body and strong loin."

The British Texel Sheep Society says the fee paid Thursday is a world record, eclipsing a 205,00-pound price paid in Australia in 1989.

Society member John Yates says the ram will likely father pedigree lambs worth millions of pounds (dollars) for his new owner.

Breeder Graham Morrison, of Banff, Scotland, says he was staggered by the price but insists Deveronvale Perfection lives up to his name.

Man oh man oh man. "A great body and a strong loin"???? Really??? Does that guy realize he said that OUT LOUD???

No Need to Over-Complexificate This

There is no need to overcomplexificate* this. I think the following study goes a couple of steps too far.

The Heritage of Herding and Southern Homicide: Examining the Ecological Foundations of the Code of Honor Thesis

Robert Baller, Matthew Zevenbergen & Steven Messner Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, August 2009, Pages 275-300

Abstract:
The authors examine the ecological foundations of the thesis of a "code of honor" as an explanation for southern homicide. Specifically, they consider the effects of indicators of ethnic groups that migrated from herding economies (the Scotch-Irish), cattle and pig herding, and the relative importance of agricultural production across different areas in the Old South. Using county-level data on argument-related White male homicide offenders (1983 to 1998) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports, the authors observe the theoretically expected positive interaction between the proxy measure of the presence of Scotch-Irish communities, namely, the percentage of churches that were Presbyterian in 1850, and the number of cattle and pigs per capita in 1850. They also find a negative effect of an index of crop production in 1850 on argument-related offending. The overall pattern of these findings is highly consistent with the herding thesis advanced by Nisbett and Cohen.

Herding economies? That's full of sheep dip. It's pretty simple: if you give a bunch of Scottish Presbyterians guns, a LOT of people are going to die. And you can call it a code of honor. But it's more like one of Angus's jokes:

What is the origin of copper wire? It was a shortage: Two Scots, one penny.

*GW Bush may never have said this. But I bet he did.

(Nod to Kevin L)

Careful with that axe, Eugene

People, I post this Sunday morning in praise of an overlooked Scotsman, one Eugene Kelly.

I am a big fan, starting with the Vaselines (and his contributions to the Pastels), going through Captain America and right on to Eugenius.

Here is a short list of essential Eugene:

Pastels: Sittin' Pretty

Vaselines: The Way of the Vaselines

Captain America: Flame On

Eugenius: Oomalama

Here is what the Allmusic Guide has to say about Eugene Kelly.

Feast your ears, people.

Woo-Woo! Merry Christmas to me!

Mrs. Angus, doing her part to stimulate the economy, surprised me today with my Christmas present a week early. Feast your eyes people:

Great moments in Scottish History

Ladies and gentleman, Andy Murray (the best looking Scot in history) beat Roger Federer on Saturday and Gilles Simon on Sunday to win the Master's Series event in Madrid. Murray has won 4 titles this year and will finish the year ranked #4 in the world. Too bad Robert Burns is dead.

Feast your eyes people: