Quotulatiousness

July 21, 2026

Exit Starmer, enter Burnham

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Britain swapped out Prime Ministers on Monday, pushing Sir Keir Starmer out to the curb and installing former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham in Number 10 Downing Street. In The Critic, Robert Hutton reports on the day’s events:

Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visiting Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School in Manchester on 13 April 2026 with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

As Keir Starmer walked out of Number 10 for the last time, he was greeted by a huge cheering crowd. Wow, this guy is popular! He should consider running for office. “My work is done”, he told us, offering possibly the most misguided example of marking your own homework since George W Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” six weeks after invading Iraq. Although we shouldn’t be harsh: Liz Truss listed leading the nation in mourning the late Queen as her big achievement in office.

Starmer’s, as he pointed out yet again, was winning the election. The list of things done since then was slightly more vague. But again, Boris Johnson’s departing speech claimed credit for a high-speed train line to Manchester and a number of hospitals that still do not, as such, exist. At least Starmer could truthfully say that he was leaving “with a smile”. Was he also, as he claimed, going “with good grace”? Well, unlike Johnson, he managed to get through the speech without attacking the people who forced him out.

It wasn’t entirely cheery. His wife Victoria was wearing black, and Rachel Reeves was crying, once again. The departing prime minister warned us not to succumb to division and to “unite different people under our common flag”. Although he completely failed to help that happen while he was in office, and showed little interest in trying.

With that, he was off to Buckingham Palace, where the band was playing a medley of Bon Jovi songs. Shot through the heart, and only himself to blame, he gave Labour a bad name.

But if Starmer was going out in a blaze of inglory, the rest of us were only halfway there. While the King conducted his exit interview in the Palace’s Chinese Dining Room (imagine having a different space to eat every takeaway) we had to hold on, ready or not, through the hour in which we were without a prime minister and living, as it were, on a prayer.

Andy Burnham had put on a suit for the day, a concession to the soft southern ways of the monarch. We half-expected him to leap out of the car in Downing Street and rip off the whole ensemble, Full Monty-style, to reveal black jeans and a T-shirt underneath. Perhaps he felt that would be taking his personal branding too far.

A fresh crowd of Labour types had gathered, looking more convincingly happy than the ones who had stood behind the last guy. They included the incoming prime minister’s mum, and the youngest person present: Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram’s 10-week-old grandson, currently scheduled to become the King’s 49th prime minister, in about 2038.

Not everyone is as excited as Burnham’s Labour Party supporters:

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill bids an unfond farewell to Two-Tier Keir:

Sir Keir Starmer: the PM who did nothing about the sense of doom pervading Britain, but he did ban “doomscrolling“. The man who did zilch to mend our fraying social fabric, but he did stop kids from perusing its consequences on TikTok. The man who failed – catastrophically – to alleviate that bleak feeling many of us have that Britain is broken, but he did cover the next generation’s eyes to just how broken we are.

Starmer should be remembered for his social-media ban for under-16s, that mad, illiberal law, due to come into force in spring next year, that promises to liberate youth from the angst-inducing “doomscrolling” inflicted on them by Big Tech’s wily algorithms. Not because it’s a “landmark” policy, as he claims. And not because it will be effective – kids will find a workaround. No, it’s because leaving intact the social conditions of doom while tweaking the machine so that fewer people can ‘scroll’ those conditions is Starmerism summed up: a regime of hollow theatricality, devoted more to managing the optics of crisis than mustering up the competence to avert it.

Starmer is a man without a legacy. He promised competence over charisma and delivered neither. His was a phantom premiership: government without governing. You could ask a hundred Brits to name a policy he enacted and I reckon five, at best, could do so. Even his vanishingly small number of apologists usually only squawk about what he didn’t do. He didn’t drag us into the Iran-US War. He didn’t follow through on his promise to cut the winter-fuel allowance for pensioners. He didn’t murder anyone. A man so staggeringly insubstantial that even his fans prefer his inertia to his initiative.

For me, the terrifying nothingness of Starmerism is best summed up in the fact that he recently said his “proudest achievement” was scrapping the two-child benefit cap, the Tory-introduced measure that meant families could only claim additional welfare payments for their first two kids. But Starmer opposed cutting that cap. For ages. In fact, in July 2024, he withdrew the whip from seven Labour MPs who voted to scrap it. It was only under pressure from his parliamentary colleagues that he relented. What can you even say about a man whose “proudest achievement” is a course of action foisted on him by others? That’s Sir Keir: the political weathervane who mistook a gust of wind for his own internal moral compass.

Making out like a bandit – Christopher Nolan’s sweet deal for The Odyssey

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Hollywood accounting is always a murky pool to wade into … unlike accounting in the real world, it’s very, very difficult for outsiders to understand how the money is spent and where the profits go. Christopher Nolan’s new film seems to have broken new ground in Hollywood accounting, very much to Nolan’s benefit:

So Nolan is getting 15% off direct revenue, (not profits, gross, and his wife another 5%) from the Odyssey, basically risk free, AFTER his 20 million up front.

That’s a better cut than a lot of mob bosses take off drug dealers (which tend to vary between 5 and 30% depending on how much violence they can command).

And probably core stars (Damon and Hathaway mostly) are getting some smaller percent of the same deal.

This is unheard of. Basically a violation of fiduciary duties to the investors.

Studio execs paid all these people to make this movie this way against their own investors’ interests.

So if another 10-30% of gross is divided across Damon, Hathaway, Holland, Pattinson, and Theron … You know the real stars (Zendaya, Nyong’o, and Page don’t draw crowds and aren’t getting that) …

Then you might have to effectively cut all revenue first by 50% for theaters, then by another 40-50% for the star power.

It other words … The Odyssey would need to make 800 million – 1 billion before it could even hypothetically start to turn a profit for investors.

All the Woke casting etc. Is actually a cover for basically outright money laundering and embezzlement by the entertainment class. And because its “sticking it to the Chuds” business news and institutions are covering for the fact a bunch of studios just defrauded Universal Studios’ parent Comcast, to possibly the tune of hundreds of millions.

Comcast is a publicly traded company. That’s 401Ks and pension funds.

And all the woke stuff is in there so that no studio execs, corporate leaders, media, or corporate watchdogs will call them out for basically transferring hundreds of millions of retiree dollars into their own pockets.

All the discussion of “Will the Odyssey make its money back” is missing the point that there is almost NO WAY for the Odyssey to actually produce a reasonable return to investors … BY DESIGN.

It is a pure, basically fraudulent, wealth transfer from American middle-class investors to Hollywood insiders irrespective of whatever money the film does or does not make … intentionally.

And all the woke window dressing is chaff, or a bonus to prevent any institutions from having the nerve to call them out lest they get called, racist, sexist, and transphobic.

Frederick the Great’s 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his look at all things Machiavelli, including Prussian king Frederick the Great’s polemic against the author of The Prince:

Frederick the Great, 1781
Oil portrait by Anton Graff (1736-1813) in the Sanssouci Palace collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe Machiavelli’s teachings have no relevance in any remotely civilized political system. Maybe they’re far worse than irrelevant: maybe they’re all entirely evil (as they appear), and in addition, would prove the ruin of both the people and their ruler.

This was, as it happens, the view espoused by one important ruler: the Prussian king Frederick the Great. In his 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel, he claims Machiavelli’s book is “one of the most dangerous that ever appeared in the world”, in that the political crimes it encourages would impose “a lasting misery upon whole nations”. Truly great rulers, says Frederick, aren’t the avaricious, amoral, self-serving, shape-shifting demons that Machiavelli describes. Rather, they are those “whose business it is to administer justice, and to set examples of justice to their subjects; and who, by their magnanimity, mercy, and goodness, ought to be the living images of Deity”. Thus, Frederick sees his rebuttal as “a defense of humanity against a monster who would destroy it”; it is “an antidote to poison”.

Frederick ruled Prussia for nearly 50 years. Most historians rate him a success. On the face of things, he seems like the kind of critic who knows what he’s talking about.

But Machiavelli would say, not so fast. What did Frederick do almost immediately after assuming power? Without any provocation, he launched a war to seize the large, prosperous, populous province of Silesia (now in southwestern Poland) from the Habsburg Monarchy. And he did so on a convoluted, centuries-old dynastic claim which sounded as unconvincing to his contemporaries as it does to us now. In the three Silesian wars which followed (the third turning into the Seven Years War), well over a million soldiers died fighting. Millions more wound up maimed, psychologically scarred, or otherwise ruined. Of course, millions of non-combatants also suffered: wives lost husbands, mothers and fathers lost sons, children lost fathers and uncles and brothers. Those non-combatants also suffered displacement, terror, deprivation, and injury. Over two decades, Frederick’s wars — particularly the Seven Years War — convulsed Europe. Frederick gained 30% more territory and 50% more citizens, but the cost was losing 10% of the Prussian population to combat or disease (the modern equivalent of 35 million Americans, 6 million English, or 3 million Australians). The point is: if his actions are anything to go by, Frederick didn’t oppose Machiavellian power moves as much as he professed, if at all. Machiavelli might even argue that in taking pains to proclaim his opposition to Machiavelli even as his wars of acquisition injured and killed millions, he was doing exactly what Machiavelli had advised: seeming to be good even as he was doing whatever the hell he wanted, for his own purposes. Most people will buy the act anyway, says Machiavelli, so why not?

This brings me back to Machiavelli’s claims about how rulers do in fact act, and how they must act to avoid ruin. And that in turn brings me back to the original wording of The Prince, and what real-world credibility Machiavelli might have as a political commentator.

As it happens, Machiavelli was no armchair quarterback. Even if he hadn’t spent nearly fifteen years at the highest levels of Florentine government (which he did), he might well have qualified as a political expert just by virtue of growing up in the tumultuous time and place he did. Between the jockeying Italian states, the myriad (and ever-changing) foreign alliances and enemies and designs, the political influence of the papacy, and Florence’s own internal politics, Machiavelli’s home city furnished more than enough lessons in how the political world could, and often did, operate.

Business idea – socialist-themed holiday camp

Filed under: Business, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This idea is a banger, but it won’t attract the audience who really could benefit from the experience: the camp experience is what they want you to have, not for themselves.

New startup idea: a socialist-themed holiday camp where affluent Westerners pay premium prices to experience the system they keep voting for.

Picture it. You arrive at Camp VS (Virtue Signal) and hand over your passport (you won’t need it, exit visas take eleven years to process). Staff assign you to a concrete panel block, 320 square feet, shared with two other families you’ve never met. The heating works from 6 to 8 a.m. The elevator works never. Authentic Khrushchyovka construction, guaranteed.

Your daily itinerary: Wake at 5 a.m. Stand in the bread line until noon in minus 15 Celsius. The bread runs out at 11:40, but the queuing builds character, and character is the only thing not in shortage. Afternoon activities include a second line for toilet paper (there is no toilet paper) and a mandatory lecture on how the shortages prove capitalism sabotaged the harvest.

For guests seeking the deluxe package, we offer the Gulag Experience: rock-busting in a quarry under armed supervision, with optional whipping for anyone who fulfills less than 110 percent of quota. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote 1,800 pages about this amenity. Rave reviews, in a sense.

Every fourth guest works as an informant. You won’t know which one. Complaining about the food earns you a midnight interview with camp security, and the food gives you plenty to complain about: it’s cabbage. All of it. Abolish market prices and you abolish economic calculation, so nobody can know what to produce, in what quantity, or for whom. The planners guess. The planners guess cabbage.

Checkout is where the theme really lands. You can’t. The wall around the camp faces inward, and East Germany shot 140 people at theirs between 1961 and 1989 to keep paying customers from leaving the workers’ paradise.

The irony here is that this business would only survive under capitalism, because it needs voluntary customers, market prices, and profit signals to exist at all. Run it as an actual socialist enterprise and within a year the camp has no bread, no rocks, and no guests. Just like the original.

Mauser M90 DA: Not Mauser and Not a High Power

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Feb 2026

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mauser firm was not in good shape. It had no new products, and its ability to survive marketing its name and legacy pistols was waning. Without much vision for the future, it turned to rebranding production from other companies, like Renato Gamba in Italy and FÉG in Hungary. From FEG they got the “Mauser Model 80” — a licensed copy of the Browning High Power — and the “Mauser Model 90” — a rebadged FEG P9R.

The P9R / Mauser 90 is often assumed to simply be a double-action modification of the High Power, but this is not true. The slide is almost identical in appearance to the High Power slide except for the decocking lever, but the frame has several important differences. The barrel lockup is taken from the S&W series of automatic pistols instead of the High Power, and the trigger mechanism is a stirrup around the magazine well instead of moving through the slide like a High Power.

In total, FEG made 26,000 of these pistols for Mauser. The plan was to sell them in Europe, but by 1995 sales remained poor and about 18,000 remained in Mauser inventory. In order to get rid of them, they were offered on the American market, where they were gobbled up by importers like Century between 1995 and 2001.
(more…)

QotD: Why Tiktok?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don’t make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you “engaged” with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]

But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.

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