Quotulatiousness

October 21, 2023

Paul Krugman lives in a fantasy world where “The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Inflation continues to roar, despite calming words from government officials and legacy media pundits, as anyone who buys groceries could tell you. We long ago gave up going out for dinner, and now we’re very much living week-to-week and hoping the money lasts the whole month. Until my wife’s pension comes in late in the month, we’re utterly skint and trying to avoid spending any money at all. At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton refutes the pro-government propaganda of, among others, Paul Krugman:

Monty used to use this image at Ace of Spades H.Q., and I certainly think it’s appropriate to include it here.

My household’s monthly grocery bill continues to steadily increase, despite the grocery list containing a pretty consistent basket of goods. We are spending more but not bringing home any more groceries. I am blessed that inflation has not forced us to cut back what we buy, but that hardly seems like an “expectation smashing” spending spree.

This article points out that several categories of retailers are not seeing any revenue growth at all, including clothing stores, electronics and appliance retailers, and sporting goods stores. In other words, these dry goods retailers are seeing declining unit sales as consumers are forced to redirect their decreasing purchasing power toward food, housing, and utilities.

    Sales excluding auto and gas increased 0.6%, above estimates for a 0.1% increase compiled by Bloomberg.

That 0.6% monthly increase in spending annualizes to a 7.2% increase in spending over one year. As we’ve discussed often, the government’s published inflation figures are completely fraudulent, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that as of September the annual inflation rate is just 3.7%, down from 4.0% in May 2023.

John Williams’ website (shadowstats.com) tracks inflation using the same measurements used in the Carter era. The chart below is updated through May 2023, showing the official 4% inflation as reported by the US government (red line) versus inflation if calculated the same way it was calculated in 1980 (blue line.) Actual inflation is more than 12%, which is 3 times the official bogus government figure.

Therefore, the “expectation smashing” consumer spending that the media is reporting is not even keeping up with actual inflation, which means that consumers are bringing home less in the way of retail goods, despite the increased dollar amount they are spending.

This tweet below is not a parody. Nobel Prize winning propagandist economist Paul Krugman actually stated that excluding food, energy and shelter, “The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost.”

Thanks, Mr. Krugman, that’s very helpful. While inflation may be out of control on food, energy, and shelter, those are unnecessary discretionary expenditures. If people will just forego extravagances such as feeding their families and putting a roof over their children’s heads, they’ll do just fine in Biden’s economy.

Magic In Metal (1969)

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PauliosVids
Published 15 Dec 2018

From the British Motor Corporation Ltd (BMC).

QotD: The US Army’s Korean War blooding

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits — and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

The young men of America, from whatever strata, are raised in a permissive society. The increasing alienation of their education from the harsher realities of life makes their reorientation, once enlisted, doubly important.

Prior to 1950 they got no reorientation. They put on the uniform, but continued to get by, doing things rather more or less. They had no time for sergeants.

As discipline deteriorated, the generals themselves were hardly affected. They still had their position, their pomp and ceremonies. Surrounded by professionals of the old school, largely field rank, they still thought their rod was iron, for, seemingly, their own orders were obeyed.

But ground battle is a series of platoon actions. No longer can a field commander stand on a hill, like Lee or Grant, and oversee his formations. Orders in combat — the orders that kill men or get them killed, are not given by generals, or even by majors. They are given by lieutenants and sergeants, and sometimes by PFC’s.

When a sergeant gives a soldier an order in battle, it must have the same weight as that of a four-star general.

Such orders cannot be given by men who are some of the boys. Men willingly take orders to die only from those they are trained to regard as superior beings.

It was not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel’s trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last.

It would have died, but it might have held.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

October 20, 2023

Zulu Kingdom’s Last Stand – The Anglo-Zulu War 1879

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 18 Oct 2023

The Anglo-Zulu War in 1879 is one of the most well known colonial wars of the British Empire. And while the British ultimately won and annexed the Zulu Kingdom, at the Battle of Isandlwana they suffered one of their worst defeats.
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Orwell on “Boys’ Weeklies” (aka “penny dreadfuls”)

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Friedman is enjoying re-reading some of George Orwell’s collected essays and has some comments on one that I’m quite fond of as well — Orwell’s survey of “Boy’s weeklies” first published in Horizon March of 1940:

The Weeklies, of which Orwell identifies ten, produced by two different publishers and including two older series somewhat different from the others, were very popular reading, targeted at boys up to about fourteen or fifteen. All of the stories in the two older ones and many in the others were set in British public schools; Orwell suggests, plausibly enough, that much of the inspiration for the setting was Kipling’s Stalky and Company.

Orwell focuses mostly on the two older ones, each of which had a stock cast of characters and a setting that showed no sign of changing for the thirty years over which they had been coming out and recognizably stylized plots and dialog. He comments that although each claims to be written by a single named author — “Frank Richards” for one series and “Martin Clifford” for the other — it is obvious that a single author could not have done thirty years of weekly stories and that the stylized writing is in part a way of maintaining the illusion of a single author.

The essay is interesting both for the detailed, and to some extent sympathetic, description of the weeklies

    In the Gem and Magnet there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the normal athletic, high-spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier version of this type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious version (Harry Wharton), and a stolid, “bulldog” version (Johnny Bull). Then there is the reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely “clever”, studious boy (Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy who is not good at games but possesses some special talent (Skinner Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys from very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to play upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of characterization goes deeper than this. If one studies the correspondence columns one sees that there is probably no character in the Gem and Magnet whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the out-and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grabbing American boy) and, of course, the masters.

and for Orwell’s analysis of their political implications. He thinks they are designed, probably deliberately by the owners of the firms that publish them, to indoctrinate boys with conservative views — respectful towards the upper classes, ignorantly patriotic, contemptuous of foreigners, blind to the real problems of British society.

    Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the Thriller and Detective Weekly) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a hundred different papers. The Gem and Magnet, therefore, are closely linked up with the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times. This in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were not obvious that the stories in the boys’ weeklies are politically vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy doesn’t?), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to people like Lord Camrose.

The essay ends with a somewhat tentative suggestion that someone ought to produce a left-wing equivalent and a discussion of some problems in doing so.

It is an interesting essay on its own merits. Still more interesting is the response, an article by Frank Richards rebutting Orwell and defending his own work. It turns out that, contrary to Orwell’s confident claim, most of thirty years of weekly stories by “Frank Richards” were produced by the same person, with occasional stories by other authors when he was for some reason not available. Further, as Orwell comments in a later footnote to his essay, Frank Richards was also Martin Clifford, so the same person produced, for thirty years, most of the contents of two different weekly magazines for boys.

His response shows him to be an intelligent and articulate writer. His views are conservative in a general sense; he makes it clear that the setting of the stories is an unchanging 1910 England because he does not think much of the changes since. But he also makes it clear that the reason his stories do not include strikes, unemployment, labor unions, and a variety of other features of the real world is that he believes that providing boys an imaginative foundation in a secure world helps equip them to face future difficulties in a world much less secure.

    Of strikes, slumps, unemployment, etc., complains Mr Orwell, there is no mention. But are these really subjects for young people to meditate upon ? It is true that we live in an insecure world: but why should not youth feel as secure as possible? It is true that burglars break into houses: but what parent in his senses would tell a child that a masked face may look in at the nursery window ! A boy of fifteen or sixteen is on the threshold of life: and life is a tough proposition; but will he be better prepared for it by telling him how tough it may possibly be? I am sure that the reverse is the case. Gray — another obsolete poet, Mr Orwell! — tells us that sorrows never come too late, and happiness too swiftly flies. Let youth be happy, or as happy as possible. Happiness is the best preparation for misery, if misery must come. At least, the poor kid will have had something! He may, at twenty, be hunting for a job and not finding it — why should his fifteenth year be clouded by worrying about that in advance? He may, at thirty, get the sack — why tell him so at twelve? He may, at forty, be a wreck on Labour’s scrap-heap — but how will it benefit him to know that at fourteen? Even if making miserable children would make happy adults, it would not be justifiable. But the truth is that the adult will be all the more miserable if he was miserable as a child. Every day of happiness, illusory or otherwise — and most happiness is illusory — is so much to the good. It will help to give the boy confidence and hope. Frank Richards tells him that there are some splendid fellows in a world that is, after all, a decent sort of place. He likes to think himself like one of these fellows, and is happy in his daydreams. Mr Orwell would have him told that he is a shabby little blighter, his father an ill-used serf, his world a dirty, muddled, rotten sort of show. I don’t think it would be fair play to take his twopence for telling him that!

As a child in England in the early 1960s, I didn’t encounter any of the stories by Frank Richards (at least, I strongly doubt it), but many of the storylines and tropes of his work were still echoed by later authors, especially in the British comics (Lion, Tiger, Valiant, Rover, and The Hotspur among the many offerings). Alongside the heroic adventure stories, the war stories, science fiction, and the (omnipresent) football stories, there were still some that might well have been comic versions of Mr. Richards’ originals.

I missed them after we emigrated, but I was delighted find that the W.H. Smith bookshop at Sherway Gardens carried a few of them (at a significant mark-up, of course) so I was still getting my occasional comic fix until about 1974.

Look at Life – Oil Aboard (1963)

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 18 Apr 2020

The oil industry and the manufacture of fuel.

QotD: The Gen-X-Files

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Just to take one small example, The X-Files was hitting its stride in 1994, and I was smack dab in the target demo: Nerdy college dude. And yet, all the show’s basic assumptions rubbed me wrong. Mulder was obviously supposed to be cool, but as I saw it, the show went out of its way to make him look like a loser — no girlfriend, no family, not even a pet, spanks it to porn (an at least somewhat risqué thing to imply on network tv, even at that late date). More than that, though, was the show’s attitude towards the government. You’re asking me to believe that the government — Bill Clinton’s government — is competent enough to keep an alien conspiracy under wraps?

I wasn’t in any way political back then. If forced to pick a side, I’d have been reflexively liberal, like all college kids are. I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on out in the world, let alone in the corridors of power in Washington, but even I found that pretty farfetched.

More importantly, the zeitgeist I saw was rapidly changing. X Files creator Chris Carter was born in 1956 and grew up in sunny SoCal (his wiki entry makes sure to give us his favorite surfing stance), so he more than most probably wrestled with the dilemma of how to bring Flower Power into Ronald Reagan’s 1980s. Hence the weird disconnect of the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton got his groovy, greasy, chicken-fried hippie self into the White House: The same people who, in their own college days, had nothing but hatred for the CIA and their domestic Mini-Me, the FBI, were all of a sudden kinda sorta coming around on the idea that The Feds are our friends — since, you know, the Feds are now us. It’s probably not a coincidence that Agent Mulder, FBI, was the star of The X-Files.

Explains a lot about “Gen X”, don’t it? When every single authority figure in your life, from the President on down, tells you to Fight the Power, the only way out of the clown show is to be, you know, like, whateverrr about everything — learned helplessness, 1994 version.

But smoked-out, flannel-clad, and apathetic is no way to go through life, and so we turned into a generation of suck-ups and toadies. Oh, the lunatic Marxists in the Teachers’ Unions want to encourage kids to “transition” in elementary school. Dude … you know, like, whateverrr. The college kids of 1994 are the middle managers, the Deep Staters, the lever-pullers of 2021. It’s working out about as well as you might’ve expected. You don’t need Agent Mulder to solve this mystery.

Severian, “1994”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-15.

October 19, 2023

Why there are no regional refuges available to Gazan civilians

Filed under: History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West outlines the sad story of Palestinian civilians uprooted from their homes by the many conflicts that have convulsed the region:

Arab attacks in May and June 1948.
United States Military Academy Atlas, Link.

It is generally a good idea for refugees to be housed in neighbouring countries rather than on different continents, for a number of reasons, but we should be wary of casually stating that Arab states should house Gazans. In a difficult region many of these countries have already put themselves under enormous strain through acts of immense generosity, and none more so than Jordan.

[…]

The survival of Jordan’s monarchy has been one of the more surprising outcomes of the past few decades, and experts have repeatedly bet against it. The country has an unusually bad hand in many ways. Situated beside the disputed Holy Land, it lacks the natural resources of neighbouring Saudi Arabia and Iraq, while also being more remote than Lebanon or Syria, which had long been at the heart of Mediterranean trading networks and far more plugged into European markets.

But most of all it has suffered the destabilising effect of refugees. Abdullah is named after his great-grandfather, the first King of Jordan, whose assassination in 1951 forms the opening of Hussein’s autobiography; indeed he calls it “the most profound influence of my life”. He was just 15 years-old when he travelled with his grandfather to Jerusalem to perform Friday prayers, where the monarch was shot dead by a Palestinian. The gunman then fired at Hussein but the bullet struck a medal his grandfather had given him.

Abdullah I had ruled the new kingdom for just five years, and it endured an incredibly bad start with defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which led to a surge of refugees. Estimates of exact numbers seem to vary hugely, but in Lion of Jordan, Avi Shlaim writes that 700,000 Palestinians left in 1948, and of these “450,000 ended up in Jordan, which did more than any other Arab state to help them resettle and integrate with the rest of society”.

He wrote: “The refugees in Jordan wanted to preserve their separate Palestinian identity, but this ran counter to Abdullah’s policy of ‘Jordanization’.” He gave them citizenship rights “but the refugees were a great burden on the weak Jordanian economy; it simply did not have the financial resources to cope with a humanitarian tragedy on such a vast scale.” Many ended up in resentful poverty and “the Palestinians thus became an important factor in domestic Jordanian politics”.

Another source suggests that in 1949, “Jordan welcomed approximately 900,000 refugees by amending the country’s 1928 Law of Nationality to grant equal citizenship to Palestinians; the 1954 Law of Jordanian Nationality later extended citizenship to Palestinians who arrived in Jordan after the 1949 addendum.”

After another defeat against Israel in 1967, up to 300,000 displaced Palestinians in the West Bank retained Jordanian citizenship, and today around 40% of the Jordanian population descend from Palestinian refugees, although the figure may be higher (again, they vary hugely). What seems certain is that about 40% of displaced Palestinians and their descendants live in Jordan, with another 10% in Syria (although many of those have since fled to Lebanon).

The Hashemites, unlike some Arab countries, were keen to integrate the newcomers and to avoid them having to endure a permanent refugee existence; that is why three-quarters of Palestinians in Jordan are Jordanian citizens, although Palestinians from Gaza aren’t, that area having been part of Egypt before the Six-Day War.

In contrast Palestinians who fled to Syria were not given citizenship, for all the talk of solidarity, and often remained in refugee camp-cities for decades (many of which were heavily affected by the Syrian war).

In Lebanon it was even worse; there the Palestinians could neither gain citizenship, nor in many cases access things like healthcare, education or work. The situation here was uniquely dangerous, because their arrival tipped the country’s incredibly delicate balance between Christians, Shia, Sunni and Druze; in 1975 the country descended into civil war, a horror that saw a modern example of shibboleths where Christian militiamen would present tomatoes to suspected Palestinians and ask them to pronounce the name.

This refugee surge had a destabilising effect on Jordan. Already in 1958 things were so bad that Hussein hoped to form a tripartite union with Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counter the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Neither neighbour was too keen on the idea, and Saudi prince Abd al-Ilah remarked that “Hussein’s trouble stemmed from the fact that 70 per cent of his subjects were Palestinians with no loyalty to the throne”.

But in 1970, three years after the Six-Day War, it reached a crisis point, with the British ambassador commenting that “the mixture became so volatile that the container exploded”. There now came full civil war in Jordan between the army and the Palestinian fedayeen.

Jordan had become home to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, but this umbrella group was itself split into different factions, Fatah being the largest and most moderate. They were reluctant to get involved in the internal affairs of other Arab states, but this was not the case with the more extreme Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Dr George Habash (who, as his name suggests, was a Christian) and the Marxist-Leninist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (yes, it does get very Life of Brian).

Build a saw-bench: transform your woodwork

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 18 Oct 2023

Building TWO traditional sawbenches. Construction lumber. Simple build.
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The evisceration of Bill C-69 (aka the Impact Assessment Act)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Environment, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada to strike down large parts of the federal Impact Assessment Act caught a lot of people by surprise. The court hasn’t made much of a habit of rejecting the federal government’s ever-increasing encroachments on provincial jurisdiction, so this ruling is a bit of a black swan. It’d be nice if the Supremes were going to be more vigilant in future, but that’s unlikely. Colby Cosh explains why this is a “remarkable political moment”:

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screen capture from CPAC video.

To hear the Liberals talk now, you would think that the Supreme Court’s 7–2 rebuke of C-69 was a mere bump in the road. Steven Guilbeault, the federal environment minister, appeared on CTV’s Question Period to reassure the public that the law can be “redefined” to accomplish its grandiose intentions; it’s just a matter of “course-correct(ing)” the text a smidgen in order to “comply with the spirit” of the ruling.

Here’s an idea for the minister: maybe just go ahead and comply with the ruling, period?

Comply with the spirit, he says. Having taken the trouble to decrypt the ruling, which is not exactly a masterpiece of lucid clarity, I wonder at the environment minister’s priorities. Rather than appearing on television with a bunch of happy talk, he ought to have been mopping up the seas of blood left by the court’s evisceration of his Impact Assessment Act.

In essence, the Liberals created an apparatus whereby a federal panel would perform environmental and social assessments of major infrastructure projects based on the possibility that they might “cause adverse effects within federal jurisdiction”.

The underlying pretext is that the federal government’s powers are sometimes engaged by the creation of mines, wells, roads and other such projects — even when they are confined within one province’s borders — because they can conceivably affect federal matters such as fisheries, migratory birds, Aboriginal welfare, treaty obligations and other “national concerns”.

This is true as far as it goes, but the court majority’s finding was that this constitutional pretext for creating a federal assessment scheme isn’t actually reflected in the scheme itself. The Liberals, asserting a right to investigate hypothetical infringements on the federal sphere of power, created a law that essentially allows them to veto anything that a province might want to permit.

As the law is written, the initial assessment-agency decision to “designate” a project for assessment can be based on just about anything, including “any comments received … from the public” and “any other factor the Agency considers relevant”. In the final decision-making phase, which is to be based on the “public interest”, specific federal heads of power are also cast aside: whoever makes the final call at the cabinet level is to evaluate a project for “sustainability”, for example.

Chiappa Triple Threat at the Range

Filed under: Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Mar 2014

I had the chance to play with a friend’s new Chiappa Triple Threat at the range last week, so I took the opportunity to put together a video. It was intended for a different website, but they already have someone reviewing the gun — so I figured I might as well post it here. It’s not a forgotten weapon yet, but I suspect it will be before too long. Not because the gun is bad — it’s actually quite nice as far as I could tell. But it is definitely a niche market item, and way overpriced.
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QotD: Revolutionary terrorism in Tsarist Russia

Filed under: History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Russian Revolution should not have been a surprise. For decades leading up to it, Russia was gripped by an ever-rising wave of sadistic revolutionary terrorism. Gary Saul Morson describes it like this:

    Country estates were burnt down and businesses were extorted or blown up. Bombs were tossed at random into railroad carriages, restaurants, and theaters. Far from regretting the death and maiming of innocent bystanders, terrorists boasted of killing as many as possible, either because the victims were likely bourgeois or because any murder helped bring down the old order. A group of anarcho­communists threw bombs laced with nails into a café bustling with two hundred customers in order “to see how the foul bourgeois will squirm in death agony”.

    Instead of the pendulum’s swinging back — a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand — the killing grew and grew, both in numbers and in cruelty. Sadism replaced simple killing. As Geifman explains, “The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal irrational compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries”. One group threw “traitors” into vats of boiling water. Others were still more inventive. Women torturers were especially admired.

What do you think was the response of “moderate” Russians to all of this? Academics and journalists and liberal politicians and forward-thinking businessmen, that sort of people. If your guess is that it horrified them and caused them to grudgingly support the forces of order, you would be … wrong. In fact, quite the opposite: making excuses for terrorism became trendy. Lawyers and teachers and doctors and engineers held fundraisers for terrorists, donated to charities that supported insurrectionary behavior, and turned their offices into safe houses. Apparently chaos and death were one thing, but it was much, much scarier for your friends and neighbors to think you might be a reactionary. Naturally this same class of people were the first to be herded into the camps, or into the cork-lined cellars in the basement of the Lubyanka. Despite all my boundless cynicism about human nature, I still can’t quite believe that this all actually happened.

Dostoevsky predicted it 50 years beforehand.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.

October 18, 2023

The greatest sin of Twit-, er, I mean “X” is that it allowed us hoi polloi to peek behind the curtains of governments, universities, and major corporations

Filed under: Books, Education, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest book review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf begins with a brilliant explanation for the coming fall of western civilization at the hands of Twit-, er, I mean “X”:

The greatest gift bestowed by admittance to elite institutions is that you stop being overawed by them. For instance, there was a time when upon hearing “so-and-so is a Rhodes Scholar”, I would have assumed that so-and-so was a very impressive person indeed. Nowadays I know quite a lot of former Rhodes Scholars, and have seen firsthand that some of them are extremely mediocre individuals, so meeting a new one doesn’t phase me much. My own cursus honorum through America’s centers of prestige has been slow and circuitous, which means I’ve gotten to enjoy progressive disenchantment with the centers of power. Trust me, you folks aren’t missing much.

I have a theory that this is why Twitter has been so destabilizing to so many societies, and why it may yet be the end of ours. Twitter offers a peek behind the curtain — not just to a lucky few,1 but to everybody. We’re used to elected officials acting like buffoons, but on Twitter you can see our real rulers humiliating themselves. Tech moguls, four-star generals, cultural tastemakers, foundation trustees, former heads of spy agencies, all of them behaving like insane idiots, posting their most vapid thoughts, and getting in petty fights with “VapeGroyper420.” There’s a reason most monarchies have made lèse-majesté a crime, there’s a level at which no regime can survive unless everybody pretends that the rulers are demigods. To have the kings be revealed as mere men who bleed, panic, and have tawdry love affairs is to rock the monarchic regime at its foundations. But Twitter is worse than that, it’s like a hidden camera in the king’s bedroom, but they do it to themselves. Moreover it seems likely that regimes like ours which legitimate themselves with a meritocratic justification are especially fragile to this form of disenchantment.

This is also why the COVID pandemic was so damaging to our government’s legitimacy. I’ve been inside elite institutions of many different sorts, and discovered the horrible truth that most of the people in them are just ordinary people making it up as they go along, but one place I hadn’t quite made it yet was the top of our disease control agencies.2 So in a bit of naïveté analogous to Gell-Mann amnesia, I just assumed that there was some secret wing of the Centers for Disease Control which housed men-in-black who would rappel out of helicopters and summarily execute everybody in Wuhan who had ever touched a bat. And I was genuinely a little bit surprised and disappointed when instead they were caught with their pants down, and a bunch of weirdos on the internet turned out to be the real experts (the silver lining to this is that now we all get to be amateur scientists).

So much for public health. But if there’s one institution which still manages to shroud itself in mystery while secretly pulling all the strings, surely it’s the Federal Reserve. You can tell people take it seriously because of all the conspiracy theories that surround it (conspiracy theories are the highest form of flattery). And there’s a lot to get conspiratorial about — the Fed manages to combine two things that rarely go together but which both impress people: technocratic mastery and arcane ritual. The Fed employs a research staff of thousands which meticulously gather and analyze data about every aspect of the economy, and they have an Open Market Committee whose meeting minutes are laden with nuanced double-meanings that would make a Ming dynasty courtier blush, and which are accordingly parsed with an attention to detail once reserved for Politburo speeches.

And they also control all of our money! Is it any wonder that people go a little bit crazy whenever they think about the Fed? I can’t think of a more natural target for the recurring cycles of ineffectual populist ire that characterize American politics. So it is with great regret that I’m here to report that they, too, are making it all up as they go along.

    1. And that lucky few have much to gain by maintaining the charade. A stable ruling class is one that has much to offer potential class traitors, so they don’t get any ideas. It’s when the goodies dry up, whether due to elite overproduction or to a real reduction in the spoils available, that things fall apart.

    2. That’s not quite true: I did once attend an invite-only conference at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The food was awful, and I wasn’t even able to find the lab where they created crack cocaine, HIV, and Lyme disease.

George Orwell’s views on Rudyard Kipling’s worldview

Filed under: Britain, History, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman comments on Orwell’s essay “Rudyard Kipling“, published a few years after the poet’s death in Horizon, September 1941:

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer, 1895.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

    During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

Orwell’s essay on Rudyard Kipling in the Letters and Essays is both more favorable and more perceptive than one would expect of a discussion of Kipling by a British left-wing intellectual c. 1940. Orwell recognizes Kipling’s intelligence and his talent as a writer, pointing out how often people, including people who loath Kipling, use his phrases, sometimes without knowing their source. And Orwell argues, I think correctly, that Kipling not only was not a fascist but was further from a fascist than almost any of Orwell’s contemporaries, left or right, since he believed that there were things that mattered beyond power, that pride comes before a fall, that there is a fundamental mistake in

    heathen heart that puts her trust
    In reeking tube and iron shard,
    All valiant dust that builds on dust,
    And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

But while there is a good deal of truth in Orwell’s discussion of Kipling it is mistaken in two different ways, one having to do with Kipling’s view of the world, one with his art.

Orwell writes:

    It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have.

There are passages in Kipling, not “Loot“, the poem Orwell quotes but bits of Stalky and Company, which support the charge of a “strain of sadism”. But the central element which Orwell is misreading is not sadism but realism. Soldiers loot when given the opportunity and there is no point to pretending they don’t. School boys beat each other up. Schoolmasters puff up their own importance by abusing their authority to ridicule the boys they are supposed to be teaching. Life is not fair. And Kipling’s attitude, I think made quite clear in Stalky and Company, is that complaining about it is not only a waste of time but a confession of weakness. You should shut up and deal with it instead.

A more important error in Orwell’s essay is his underestimate of Kipling as an artist, both poet and short story writer. Responding to Elliot’s claim that Kipling wrote verse rather than poetry, Orwell claims that Kipling was actually a good bad poet:

    What (Elliot) does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced.

I am left with the suspicion that Orwell is basing his opinion almost entirely on Kipling’s best known poems, such as the two he cites here, both written when he was 24. He was a popular writer, hence his best known pieces are those most accessible to a wide range of readers. He did indeed use his very considerable talents to tell stories and to make simple and compelling arguments, but that is not all he did. There is no way to objectively prove that Kipling wrote quite a lot of good poetry and neither Orwell nor Elliot, unfortunately, is still alive to prove it to, but I can at least offer a few examples …

Why the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program will cost so much more than equivalent US or British ships

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé outlines the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program — the next-generation front-line combat ships for the Royal Canadian Navy intended to replace the current Halifax-class frigates and the already retired Iroquois-class destroyers:

Building warships is an expensive business, especially if you’re getting back into it after a few decades. Take the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC). Fifteen CSCs will be built at Halifax’s Irving Shipbuilding to replace Canada’s current frigates and decommissioned destroyers. According to a 2022 study by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), the CSC acquisition will cost $80.2 billion. Given that defence inflation is well above regular inflation, and that regular inflation is running hot, that number isn’t going to go down.

Canada’s CSC will be a variant of the Type 26 Global Combat Ship originally designed for the Royal Navy. The Canadian variant includes significant changes to the original Type 26 design, notably to the combat systems. With the estimated per unit cost of each ship topping $5.6 billion, the National Post‘s John Ivison warns that the CSC is out of control. Ivison notes that the United States Navy (USN) acquired its Constellation-class frigates for $1.66 billion. Why, he understandably asks, is Canada paying so much for the CSC, and to what end?

The Canadian government always views major military purchases for the Canadian Armed Forces primarily as regional economic development projects and always attempts to get all or at least a major part of the construction done in Canada. To most people this sounds sensible: big military equipment acquisitions mean a lot of money being spent, so why shouldn’t most of that money be spent inside Canada? The answer, in almost every case, is that it will be significantly more expensive because Canadian industry doesn’t regularly produce these ships/planes/helicopters/tanks, so a lot of money will need to be spent to construct the factories or shipyards, import the specialized equipment, hire and train the workforce, etc., and no rational private industry will spend that kind of money unless they’re guaranteed to be repaid (plus profit).

Ordinary items for the Canadian military like clothing, food, non-specialized vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) may carry a small extra margin over run-of-the-mill stuff, but it will generally be competitive with imported equivalents. Highly specialized items generally won’t be competitively priced exactly because of those specialized qualities. The bigger and more unusual the item to be purchased, the less economic sense it makes to buy domestically.

There are also the conflicting desires of the elected government (who generally want to target the spending to electoral districts or regions that benefit “their” voters), the permanent bureaucracy (who want to ensure that programs last a long time to ensure jobs within the civil service), and the military procurement teams (who have a tendency to over-optimistically estimate up-front and long-term costs because they want to get the procurement process underway … it’s tougher to stop something already in-process than one that still needs formal approval).

Once there’s a budget and capabilities are identified, the requirements for individual projects are prepared. It’s here that the comparison with lower cost, off-the-shelf alternatives runs into difficultly. The USN has lots of different types of ships that do lots of specific things. The above-mentioned Constellation-class is one of many different types of warships that the USN will sail, each with specific mission sets and roles. The Canadian military has only been directed to acquire fifteen CSCs, but the government expects the CAF to do a variety of missions at sea — not as many as the USN, of course, but still a good number. Canada has other military ships, including the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels (AOPS) also being built by Irving, but the CSC will be Royal Canadian Navy (RCN)’s primary expeditionary platform. Canadian defence planners, therefore, need those 15 ships to be capable of undertaking various missions and roles. Compounding this challenge are technological changes and the ever-evolving threat. The requirements for the CSC need to be continuously updated, and in some cases expanded, to keep pace with these developments, too.

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

On purely economic grounds, it would often make sense to add Canada’s order on to existing US, British, or other allied military orders to benefit from the economies of scale … but pure economic benefits don’t rank highly on the overall scale of importance. There’s also the understandable desire of the government to buy fewer items with wider capabilities as the government’s requirements for the military change with time and circumstance.

Were Canadian defence planners too cavalier in their requirements and design modifications? Maybe. Looking at it from their perspective, though, we should appreciate that they thinking about capabilities for a ship that Canada will use until the 2100s.

Doubts about the CSC are going to keep multiplying. The per unit costs can only increase so much before people start seriously discussing reducing how many of them will be built. You can be sure that some within government are already asking “Why 15? Why not 12?” Serious concerns are also being raised about whether the defence budget can afford to maintain CSC and keep them technologically up to date after the fleet is introduced. Given the CAF’s personnel recruitment troubles, moreover, it’s unclear if the RCN will have enough sailors to operate the full fleet. The first CSC that hits the water, furthermore, will have all sorts of kinks and problems that will need to be sorted out. That’s standard for first ships off the line, but you can be sure that every failing will be met with handwringing and charges of incompetence.

To address these concerns, the government must let DND/CAF better explain what the CSC is designed to do and why it needs to do it. Simply telling Canadians that it’s the right ship isn’t enough when it’s easy to point to lower-cost alternatives. As well, the government needs to be far more transparent about estimates of costs and what’s driving them. Political and public support for the CSC shouldn’t be taken for granted, and growing concerns about the program can’t be simply brushed away.

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