World War Two
Published Jan 31, 2024Geoffrey Pyke is remembered as an eccentric scientist who spewed out ideas like giant aircraft carriers made of icy Pykerete. But there was much more to him than that. He was a spy, a special operations mastermind, and his novel ideas contributed to the success of D-Day.
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February 2, 2024
The Sad Story of Churchill’s Iceman, Geoffrey Pyke
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“Who funds you?”
Tim Worstall considers George Monbiot (lovingly known as “The Moonbat” to early bloggers) and his demand that others make their sources of income transparent to show whether their opinions are being “bought” by shady interested parties:
George Monbiot has his positive attributes. His change of mind on nuclear power in the face of the evidence from Fukushima — that no one at all died from three reactors going pop, while 15k and more did from the tsunami and therefore he became in favour of nuclear — is an example. OK, that’s rather hitting someone over the head with a cluebat but it’s also true that Caroline Lucas didn’t manage to note that same point. So, there is that. Even if “more aware of reality that Caroline Lucas” is a low bar to have to clear.
George can also rather dig himself into holes. As he is here with his insistence about funding of varied think tanks and so on.
And, OK, let’s go look at George’s registry of interests […]
OK, that’s the sword that George declares he’s going to live by. Fair play and all that.
Except, except. Last year was pretty good, book royalties flowing in and more power to that typing. The core earning is The Guardian, royalties on top. Not unusual for a writer to be honest. Gain a core contract that produces an ongoing and assured income, spend time floating books or other work out there to see what happens to income. Freelancing is certainly a great deal more fun if you already know where the monthly nut is going to come from with such a core contract.
But, but.
Book royalties, umm, Penguin? Used to be part owned by Pearson, also at the time owners of the Financial Times. So that’s a connection into the shadowy world of international capitalists. It’s now Bertelsman, so foreign international capitalists to boot. Macmillan? They admitted to bribery in Sudan over a school books contract. So a link to international thieving capitalists too. HarperCollins? That’s Murdoch, no more need be said, right?
But, but, a reasonable response would be that this is all far removed from the level George works at. That would be a fair enough response too.
But note the thing here. By agreeing that there’s some level of connection which is too ephemeral to matter we are agreeing that this thing called the corporate veil exists. We can indeed don the tin foil hats and connect near anything we want. Pretty much all Europeans are 16th cousins for example. So I — and George — am/are responsible for WWI because we’re both related to the Kaiser, Emperor and Tsar all at the same time. It’s our family wot dun it, see? Within economic connections that concept, that there’s this thing ‘ere which is responsible not the further connections away from that, is called that corporate veil. I shop at Sainsbury’s sometimes. The Labour Minister husband of a Sainsbury’s heiress employed two butlers (before dumping her for his boyfriend if memory serves). It’s possible to claim that I therefore fund dual butlership but it’s not a claim that all that many are going to regard as valid.
But The Guardian, that core contract. The newspaper seems to have returned to profit recently but there was a decade or so there where it was losing tens of millions a year — and more in some 12 month periods. Those losses were covered by the profits from Autotrader more than anything else. So, George was funded by the facilitation of climate destruction through the trade in internal combustion engined cars.
If, you know, we wanted to put it that way.
J.M. Browning Harmonica Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published Sep 6, 2015Have you heard of Jonathan Browning, gunsmith and inventor? Among his other accomplishments, he is credited with designing the harmonica rifle in the US — and we have an example of one of his hand-made guns here to look at today (made in 1853). Browning was a Mormon, and spent several years slowly moving west periodically setting up gunsmithing shops before he reached his final destination of Ogden, Utah. There he settled down for good, and had 22 children with his 3 wives. One of those children also showed an aptitude for gunsmithing, and formally apprenticed to his father. You might recognize his name …
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QotD: Financial bubbles
That financial markets sometimes go off on one has been noted for centuries now. Dutch Tulips, the South Sea Bubble, Dotcom and more recently Bitcoin have all shown that the lust for easy speculation profits can lead to, well, to financial excess at minimum. Those with an orderly cast of mind like to point out that all of this is waste. If instead the truly wise and clever people – after we’ve installed them in government or at least the bureaucracy – could apportion society’s assets very much better. You know, truly invest in the diversity advisers civilisation so badly needs.
The thing is, economists often disagree at this point. Sure, financial bubbles, they occur. Sure, there’s waste in them. But perhaps the very bubble itself is an either useful or necessary part of the process.
Necessary in that perhaps it needs a mania to get some new technology over the finish line. I tend to think it’s not going to happen with Tesla but it did with Railway Mania. Without speculators searching for easy money the network never would have been built out. Without Dotcom Amazon probably wouldn’t have got funded through the decade it was scratching a living.
It’s also possible that it’s just useful. For the overbuilding in the mania might then leave assets that are repurposed to get other technologies over that finish line into general use. Global Crossing lost a fortune – no, really billions – on building out fibre optic cabling to girdle the world. Which was, after the bankruptcy, bought up by the Googles and the like to carry all this web and video stuff. It’s arguably true that without the previous overinvestment we’d simply never have developed – or perhaps not for decades – such resource and bandwidth-hungry hogs.
Tim Worstall, “Cloud Rendering – The Latest Proof That Investment Bubbles Actually Work”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-17.
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February 1, 2024
Rome: Part 1 – Mythical Origins to the Founding of the Republic
seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2024This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.
Lecture 1: Mythical Beginnings and the Founding of Rome (753 BC – 509 BC)
• What is said by the archaeology and modern research on the origins of Rome
• The lack of authentic literary history of Rome in its early period
• Legend of Romulus and Remus
• The establishment of Rome’s early monarchy
• Transition to the Roman Republic
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Newfoundland – “We used to be a country”
In The Line, James McLeod outlines a difficult period for the Dominion of Newfoundland which ended up narrowly voting to join Canada rather than resume self-rule that they’d had up to 1934 when the Newfoundland House of Assembly abolished itself:
Great Riot of 1932 in front of the legislature, the Colonial Building, in Newfoundland.
Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador (Reference PANL A2-160), via Wikimedia Commons.
Before 1933, Newfoundland was proudly a dominion within the British empire. Under the Statute of Westminster, Newfoundland had the same legal status as Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State.
Newfoundland was its own country. But it was a country in rough shape.
A year before the Amulree Report was published, a mob of about 10,000 people had gathered outside the Colonial Building in St. John’s. Families were living in destitution on six-cents-a-day government dole, and the government’s finance minister had just resigned and accused Prime Minister Richard Squires of personally lining his pockets with government funds.
The mob turned into a riot, which ultimately barged into the government building. Notably, the rioters briefly paused to observe a respectful silence when a brass band began playing “God Save The King”, but then they went back to rioting.
Squires fled on foot and went into hiding, and then emerged to call an election, which he lost in a landslide. During the campaign, one of his longtime allies, the prominent leader of the Fishermen’s Protective Union, openly wished for fascism.
“What is required for Newfoundland and what is most essential for the present conditions is a Mussolini,” said William Coaker.
Months later, with a new government, Newfoundland was on the verge of defaulting on its debt, and the British stepped in.
The vastly oversimplified version is that the British government was concerned that a member of the British Commonwealth defaulting on its debt could have major implications for the whole empire. So the British government bailed out Newfoundland, on the condition that a commission would be struck to investigate the island’s political and economic affairs. Lord Amulree, a British politician, was appointed as chair.
A year later, with the Dominion still teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the Amulree Report was delivered. It contained this passage, with my emphasis added: “That it was essential that the country should be given a rest from politics for a period of years was indeed recognised by the great majority of the witnesses who appeared before us, many of whom had themselves played a prominent part in the political and public life of the Island.”
Amulree considered the possibility of some sort of national unity government, but could not get past the conclusion that, “Even if a National Government could be established on a basis which led to a suspension of political rivalry, the underlying influences which do so much to clog the wheels of administration and to divert attention from the true interests of the country would continue to form an insuperable handicap to the rehabilitation of the Island.”
In 1934, the Newfoundland House of Assembly voted itself out of existence. It was replaced by a “Commission of Government” which was just six unelected men, appointed by the British. Fifteen years later, Newfoundlanders narrowly voted to join Canada, although to this day conspiracy theories still linger about how democratic the referendum really was.
I am not a Newfoundlander, and I’m hesitant to make any sweeping statements about how Newfoundlanders relate to their own history. But for a decade, I worked as a journalist in St. John’s, covering politics and public affairs. The collapse of democratic self-rule in the 1930s still looms large in the collective identity of the province.
The Kohima Epitaph: Britain’s Forgotten Battle That Changed WW2
The History Chap
Published 9 Nov 2023What is the Kohima Epitaph and what has it got to do with Britain’s forgotten battle that changed the Second World War? Well, those of you living in the UK and who attend Remembrance Sunday services will probably know the words even if you don’t know the story behind them:
“When you go home, tell them of us and say,
For your tomorrow, We gave our today.”The memorial which bears those powerful words, stands in a cemetery containing the graves over over 1,400 British servicemen and memorials to over 900 Indian troops who died alongside them. They died in one of the bloodiest, toughest, grimmest battles of the Second World War. A battle sometimes called the “Stalingrad of the East.”
Outnumbered 6:1 and half of whom were from non-combat units, the multi-national British garrison stood their ground in bloody hand-to-hand fighting, refusing to retreat or surrender for two weeks until relieved. And even then the battle continued for another vicious month. That stand stopped the Japanese invasion of India in its tracks and turned the tide of the war in South East Asia. Both for its ferocity and its turning point in the war, it has been called: “Britain’s greatest battle”.
The Japanese lost 53,000 men from their army of 85,000.
The British (14th Army) lost 4,000 men killed and wounded.This forgotten victory was made possible by General William (Bill) Slim commanding the 14th Army. Rather like the battle and the 14th Army, General Slim has not received the recognition that he is due. And yet, it is almost completely forgotten. Rather like the army that fought against the Japanese in Burma.
So, as we near Remembrance Sunday, I think it is time to reveal the story of the Battle of Kohima in 1944.
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QotD: English hypocrisy, spoken
Alas, this indirect way of speaking, always tinged with irony and humour, has almost disappeared in favour of a cruder and less amusing manner of communicating. Literal-mindedness has replaced subtle codification, and with it, a people who were once subtle, if sometimes perfidious, have become crass and often aggressive. Irony, which the whole population once both understood and employed, and was so strong an aspect of the national character, has now disappeared, replaced by a disposition to querulousness and indignation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.
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