Quotulatiousness

May 6, 2025

If “a trade imbalance constitutes an American ‘subsidy’ justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite getting his preferred choice elected as Canadian Prime Minister, US President Donald Trump still seems determined to troll Canadians about becoming the “51st state”. Among his shifting set of justifications for this is the trade imbalance between the US and Canada, which Trump chooses to interpet as a “huge” subsidy the US is providing to Canada. On that basis, there are going to have to be a lot more US states in the future:

So now we have serious commentators gaming out the pros and cons of war with Canada. What started out as a mildly amusing bit of presidential “trolling” is now being discussed as next year’s Donbass.

If, for the purposes of argument, one accepts the President’s line that a trade imbalance constitutes an American “subsidy” justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet: last year Washington had a one-and-a-quarter trillion-dollar imbalance with the world. It’s not hard to figure out why: over recent decades the uniparty turned a country that used to make things into a crappy low-wage service economy. […] The US now has trade imbalances with — or “subsidies” of — not only the countries that you’d expect (China, Mexico, Germany, Japan, India) but a lot of ones you wouldn’t (Finland, Algeria).

True, Canada is closer than Algeria, so there are national-security implications for Washington: the country and its politicians (Trudeau, Carney) have been entirely hollowed out by Peking, but then so it goes south of the border (Biden, McConnell). And Trump’s plan for a “fifty-first state” will not solve that problem.

The “fifty-first state” shtick can’t ever have been serious, can it? Geographically, the fifty-first state would be bigger than the other fifty combined, and with a bigger population than California’s. Last time they added stars to the flag, both parties got something out of it: the GOP Alaska and the Dems Hawaii. So wouldn’t it make more sense to make Canada’s ten provinces and three territories a baker’s dozen of new American states with a couple of senators apiece? Yeah, sure – if you want Republicans never to win a national election again.

So, aside from last week’s vote, how is the other side reacting? Last Thursday’s print edition of The Spectator contained a curiously phrased squib from my old editor, Charles Moore:

    The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the “honour to be a friend”, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse.

Let’s just run that again:

    If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person …

The last time his mother opened Parliament in Ottawa was in 1977 — her Silver Jubilee year. Trudeau-wise, Justin’s father Pierre was not keen on it, but didn’t feel he could pick and win a fight with the Palace over it. A quarter-century later, Trudeau’s successor Jean Chrétien, a towering colossus of micro-pettiness, was annoyed at being given a crappy seat at the Queen Mum’s funeral and so scuttled Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee throne speech.

So why would Charles Moore think it “likely” that the King would be opening Parliament in Ottawa later this month? If, as it was in my day, Speccie columns for Thursday’s magazine have to be filed on Tuesday, that would make Moore the first guy in either the Canadian or UK media to know what was not revealed to the world until Friday […]

The King has travelled far less in the first three years of his reign than his mother did: shortly after her Coronation, the Queen set off on a tour of parts of the Commonwealth that kept her away from London for six months. Her son can’t do that because he’s very sick with cancer. So it’s quite something that he’ll land in Ottawa on Monday May 26th, deliver the throne speech the following day, and then fly out again. Carney wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t going to take the opportunity to put his view of Canadian sovereignty into the Sovereign’s mouth.

So, if Trump really has the “honour to be a friend” of the King, the only point of this 24-hour flying visit is so His Majesty can send the message that friends don’t let friends threaten to steal each other’s countries. In fact, he has made a point of referring to himself as “King of Canada” quite a bit of late. […] The “King of Canada” bit was done at the instigation of Carney. Which is odd. Especially from a party that has spent half-a-century diminishing and degrading the Crown, and for a monarch who is, unlike his mother, largely unloved and unloveable. Yet Carney seems belatedly to have come around to the old-school monarchist view that, without the Sovereign, there is insufficient to distinguish Canada from its domineering southern neighbour — especially when that neighbour keeps talking about taking it. On the other hand, both the King and his Canadian prime minister are bigtime players at the World Economic Forum, so they’re not the most obvious choice for defenders of national sovereignty. On the other other hand, it’s one thing to surrender it to fellow globalists, quite another to surrender it to Donald Trump.

I have no idea where this is headed, and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be happy to hear it. But Trump has doubled down on it, and Carney is playing the King card to oppose it. As longtime readers know, I have a general preference for smaller nations as happier homes for their people. If Alberta or Quebec voted to secede, why would you take the trouble to do that just to become a minor and inconsequential part of another big country?

But, that aside, why would it be in America’s interest to absorb a hostile population of mostly lefties over a vast and unpoliceable landmass? The history of the last thirty years is that China has shown there are subtler ways of taking over the world without firing a shot, while America has persisted in doing it the old-fashioned way and, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere, has gotten nowhere. Why add Canada to the list?

May 5, 2025

Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.

The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.

(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)

If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.

While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.

Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.

Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.

Still from The Battle of Britain

The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.

The Bloody Battle of Agincourt | Animated Episode

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

The Rest Is History
Published 30 Nov 2024

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.

The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 endures as perhaps the most totemic battle in the whole of English history. Thanks in part to Shakespeare’s masterful Henry V, the myths and legends of that bloody day echo across time, forever enshrining the young Henry as the greatest warrior king England had ever known. So too the enduring idea of the English as plucky underdogs, facing down unfavourable odds with brazen grit. And though the exact numbers of men who fought in the two armies is hotly contested, the prospect was certainly intimidating for the English host looking down upon the vast French force amassed below them the day before the battle. Hungry and weary after an unexpectedly long march, and demoralised by the number of French that would be taking to the field, the situation certainly seemed dire for the English. One man amongst them, however, held true to his belief that the day could still be won: Henry V. An undeniably brilliant military commander, he infused his men with a sense of patriotic mission, convincing them that theirs was truly a divinely ordained task, and therefore in this — and his careful strategic planning the night before the battle — he proves a striking case of one individual changing the course of history. However, the French too had plans in place for the day ahead: total warfare. In other words, to overwhelm the English in a single devastating moment of impact, sweeping the lethal Welsh archers aside. So it was that dawn broke on the 25th of October to the site of King Henry wearing a helmet surmounted by a glittering crown and bearing the emblems of both France and England, astride his little grey horse, and riding up and down his lines of weathered silver clad men, preparing them to stride into legend … then, as the French cavalry began their charge, the sky went black as 75,000 arrows blocked out the sun. What else would that apocalyptic day hold in store?

Join Tom and Dominic as they describe the epochal Battle of Agincourt. From the days building up to it, to the moment that the two armies shattered together in the rain and mud of France. It is a story of courage and cowardice, kings and peasants, blood and bowels, tragedy and triumph.

00:00 What is to come …
00:50 Shakespeare and Henry V
02:53 Agincourt is exceptional
04:15 The battle is a test of God’s favour
05:27 The English see the French forces …
09:30 The French aren’t offering battle
10:40 Why the French delay
11:13 The French think they’re going to win
11:35 An ominous silence
12:35 Henry’s plan
20:50 The French plan
24:28 How big were the armies
28:49 The lay of the land
34:50 Henry makes the first move
37:00 The French charge into darkness
38:57 The French army advances
45:50 Reaction to the slaughter
(more…)

QotD: English intelligentsia and the Soviet Union

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is important to realize that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the Western liberal tradition. Had the M.O.I. chipped in and definitely vetoed the publication of this book, the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the U.S.S.R. happens to be the current orthodoxy, and where the supposed interests of the U.S.S.R. are involved they are willing to tolerate not only censorship but the deliberate falsification of history. To name one instance. At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World — a first‐hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution — the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it. Some years later, the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was, there was little or no protest. To many English intellectuals it teemed quite a natural thing to do. And this tolerance of plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet regime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilization over a period of 400 years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian regime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the U.S.S.R. in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

“By the known rules of ancient liberty.”

The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep‐rooted tradition without which our characteristic Western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency.

And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to these pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do so is a deadly sin. One can explain this contradiction in only one way — that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed toward the U.S.S.R. rather than toward Britain.

I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty; indeed, I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against fascism. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in Republican France, and it is not so in the United States today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact I have written this preface.

George Orwell “The Freedom of the Press”, 1945 (written as the preface to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).

May 4, 2025

One Fine Day in the British Empire 100 years ago

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

Nigel Biggar discusses One Fine Day by Matthew Parker, which looks at the state of the British Empire in the mid-1920s with a moderately jaundiced eye (as you’d expect for a modern popular history about the empire):

The approach is imaginative: to present a snapshot of the British Empire a century ago, five years after its victory in the First World War, when its territory was most extensive and at what must have seemed its zenith. The result is a display of the Empire in all its ad hoc variety, from the white-majority settler “dominion” of Australia to the non-settler “protectorate” of Uganda. The reader meets colonial officials who were sympathetic and conscientious in their dealings with those they ruled, as well as some who were brutally arrogant and dismissive. He also hears from native people who appreciated the benefits of imperial rule, as well as those who felt humiliated by Western dominance. And he learns that, if the British were late in introducing democracy to India, they were the very first to do so, for its like had never been seen before. To its great credit, no one can read this book and conclude that the British Empire was a morally simple thing.

However, it seems that our snap-shooter was fascinated mainly by the Empire in the east and grew tired as he travelled westward. Of the thirty-seven chapters, he devotes twenty-two to Australasia, the Pacific, South-East Asia, and India. There is very little mention of the Empire in South Africa, almost nothing on the Middle East (Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq) and hardly a reference to Canada. In addition, the publisher appears to have become alarmed at the length, since readers wanting to consult the notes or bibliography are directed to the author’s website.

What is more, the synchronic approach suffers from myopia, relegating major imperial achievements to walk-on parts. We do hear about the Empire’s humanitarian suppression of slavery, but only incidentally. The reader is not told that Britain (along with France and Denmark) was among the first states in the history of the world to repudiate slave-trading and slavery in the early 1800s and that it used its imperial power throughout the second half of its life to abolish slavery from Brazil across Africa to India and New Zealand. And in ending his book by reporting the 1923 cession of Rwanda to Belgium and Jubaland to Italy as tokens of imminent imperial dissolution — “Very soon, of course, the trickle became a flood” is the very last sentence — the author allows the reader to overlook the extraordinary, heroic contribution that the British Empire went on to make in the Second World War, when, between the Fall of France in May 1940 and the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, it offered the only military resistance to the massively murderous, racist regime in Nazi Berlin, with the sole exception of Greece.

While our imperial tourist is a generally an honest reporter, presenting the good as well as the bad elements of the Empire, his account is not innocent of unfairly negative bias.

The problem first manifests itself in the decision to open his account with the story of the mining ruination of a tiny Pacific territory by the British Phosphate Company. He then returns to this in the book’s closing pages, where describes it as a tale of “extractive colonialism at its most literal”. While an attentive reader of the pages in between will notice that the Empire sometimes brought native people economic opportunities and benefits, the lasting impression given by this bookending is that it was — as neo-Marxists have always claimed — basically exploitative. And yet Rudolf von Albertini, whose work was based “on exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial world to 1940” (according to the eminent imperial economic historian, David Fieldhouse) judged “that colonial economics cannot be understood through concepts such as plunder economics and exploitation”.1

Parker’s negative bias appears most strongly in his crude, unreflective understanding of the racial attitudes of the imperial British. While he does bring onto the stage colonial Britons who express a range of views of other peoples, including sympathy and benevolence (albeit usually “paternalistic”), he nevertheless tells us that “ideas of white supremacy remained a guiding structural principle of the empire. This racist ideology was a coping stone of empire” (p. 8). What he has in mind is specifically the idea of a fixed “hierarchy of races”, with whites permanently established at the top — “what we would now call white supremacism” (p. 65). Such a view could claim the authority of natural science, since at the turn of the twentieth century “European scientists all still agreed that human beings were naturally unequal … and that there was a hierarchy of races” (p. 138).

    1. D.K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 168; R. von Albertini with Albert Wirz, European Colonial Rule, 1880–1940: The Impact of the West on India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, trans. John G. Williamson (Oxford: Clio, 1982), p. 507.

May 2, 2025

QotD: The Victorian attitude toward illegitimacy

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

Perhaps nothing divides us more profoundly from the Victorians than our attitude towards the illegitimate child (even the word illegitimate has almost disappeared from use in this context, as being unfairly stigmatising). That the sins of the parents should be visited upon children, by regarding those children themselves as tainted, seems morally monstrous to us, self-evidently cruel and unjust. We cannot even imagine — and I include myself — how anyone could be so morally primitive as to disdain a child merely because its parents were unmarried: and this is so however much we may believe in the virtues of marriage as an institution. The idea of fallen women also seems to us now to be horribly censorious, and hypocritical into the bargain: for no one ever spoke of fallen men, though they were essential to, the sine qua non of, the existence of fallen women.

I am still shocked by the recollection that, as late as the early 1990s, there were still a few women in psychiatric hospitals in Britain who were there principally because they had been admitted seventy years earlier after having given birth to an illegitimate child. No doubt they had quickly become institutionalised and could scarcely have coped with life outside; but to think of a long human life passed in this impoverished way (the wards for “chronics” had beds so close together that they allowed for no privacy whatever) as a kind of punishment for what is now no longer regarded even as an indiscretion, reminds one of La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long. One cannot fix one’s mind on such a horrible injustice for long.

Of course, it was stigma like this that gave stigma itself a bad name — stigmatised so to speak, in fact, to such a degree or effect that the very name of stigma has a completely negative valency. No one has a good word to say for it, though whether there ever was, or could be, a society completely without it, I am unsure.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Situational Nature of Scorn and Stigma”, New English Review, 2020-04-28.

May 1, 2025

Military Tactics In The Falklands

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

Pegasus Tests
Published 27 Dec 2024

A discussion with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons about Argentine and British tactics during the Falklands War.

#forgottenweapons

April 30, 2025

Low-energy Europe

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Depending on who you read, it appears that the massive power outage in southwestern Europe nearly expanded across the continent, as Spain and Portugal went dark taking parts of other neighbouring countries’ networks down as well. James Price explains that this sort of thing is likely to be a recurring phenomenon as Europe leans ever more heavily on unreliable sources of electricity:

In his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray accused Western European nations of Geschichtsmüde, being weary of history. President Trump might translate this by recycling a sobriquet he used against Jeb Bush — being low-energy.

This is now literally the case in both the United Kingdom and Germany, who have the most expensive energy costs in the developed world. The consequences have been catastrophic, in economic, political, environmental, and even geostrategic terms.

The true tragedy is that so much of the pain is self-inflicted, the result of bad, rushed policy designed to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside, rather than actually keeping people warm.

Net Zero

The commitment in Britain to “net zero emissions by 2050” was signed into law in the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership, as an attempt to give her a “legacy” after three painful years as Prime Minister. That legacy is likely to be lost, like the works of Ozymandias, as the world comes crashing back to economic reality.

The debate over the introduction of net zero was conducted during the Conservative Party’s leadership contest to succeed May, and therefore all attention was away from what would prove to be the most impactful economic decision of the year. The debate lasted all of 90 minutes.

The results have been completely devastating for Britain’s economy in all sorts of corrosive ways. For one, 169 years after Henry Bessemer worked out how to mass-produce steel in Sheffield, Yorkshire, Britain almost lost its ability to make the stuff here in Britain. Global factors like Chinese dumping play a part, but the extent of environmental regulation on British industry is making it impossible to sustain any kind of heavy industry. And now, British Steel has been nationalized once more, lumping the taxpayer with the losses and liabilities, but without doing anything to address the root causes.

But the government meddling does not stop there. In agriculture, a cruel, ideological attack on farmers (over whether farms can be charged inheritance tax) is going to spur more prime farmland to be turned into solar panel fields in a country where the sun often doesn’t shine.

There are now many statutory requirements to push environmental policies in all sorts of areas, to the complete detriment of other requirements, namely economic prosperity, that would otherwise be carefully balanced. So new homes in Britain have to have small windows, to increase insulation efficiency.

HS2, a much delayed and hideously over-budget high speed rail line between London and Birmingham, is building a one-kilometer-long tunnel to prevent bats being harmed by high-speed trains. The tunnel will cost over £100 million to build. Not only is there no evidence that the trains would interfere with bats, but there is also some evidence that the bat tunnel may actually be a bat-killing tunnel.

Hinkley Point C, the only nuclear power station being constructed at the moment in Britain, is having to construct a “fish disco” at huge costs to push fish away from being sucked into the cooling system.

This kind of environmental “everythingism” is not just holding back progress, not just costing huge amounts; it is corrosive of every attempt by people who just want to get on with building and growing — even “green” enterprises. Orsted, an offshore wind company, had to fill in forms five times longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and had to wait nearly three years for a decision to build one farm.

And specifically about the Spanish situation that nearly triggered a Europe-wide blackout, from the social media network formerly known as Twitter:

SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW

From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.

“What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.

“At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric [shake]. What exactly does “shake” mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:

“1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or [being] destroyed. This is called that “opens” a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.

“2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.

“3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.

“What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.

“Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off — [they are] very sensitive to frequency variations — 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a “0 MW” nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country [turned] off.

“To [restart] a completely dead network, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.

“The result is that, after almost 10 hours, only 35% to 40% of the national supply has been recovered, and there are still large areas in the dark or under scheduled cuts.

“The situation reveals a very serious underlying problem:

“Spain is still an energy island: it only has 3% foreign exchange capacity compared to its total demand.”

Part 2:

“The network depends a lot on variable renewables, which are disconnected quickly in the face of any instability.

“The lack of physical inertia reserves (i.e. large rotating masses such as thermal power plants or classic hydraulics) prevents the disturbances from damping.

“And poor maintenance planning left without enough hydraulic muscle to respond to a crisis.

“The most likely causes, with current data, are:

“A combination of technical failure in protection or in synchronization, added to a serious lack of operational forecast and maintenance (probability ≈ 40%).

“The possibility of an intentional cyber-physical attack remains in analysis (≈ 25% estimated probability).

“Other factors such as human error, punctual atmospheric phenomenon or mixed causes complete the rest.

“In short: an initial shake at the most sensitive point of the Spanish network — the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, door to Europe — left the peninsula isolated and vulnerable. The network could not sustain its own demand because it did not have sufficient assistance, nor stable physical reserve, nor enough bootable plants in black. Three of five hydroelectric jumps were out of service when they were most needed.

“For this reason, Spain went out in five seconds, and that is why it still continues to light little by little, fragile, slow and exposed.”

QotD: The experience of the infantryman through the ages

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What about the other common difficulties of soldiering? How universal are those experiences: the bad food, long marches, heavy burdens and difficult labor and toil?

Well, here is where we come back to the note I made earlier about how “warring” and “soldiering” were different verbs with different meanings. After all, while soldiering implies these difficulties, warring doesn’t, necessarily. And it isn’t hard to see why – the warrior classes in these societies, often being aristocrats, generally didn’t do a lot of these things. It is, for instance, noted in the Roman sources when a general chose to eat the same food as his soldiers, because most Roman aristocrats didn’t when they served as generals or military tribunes. The privileges of rank and class applied.

And that’s something we see with medieval aristocrats too. On the one hand, Jean de Bueil talks about the “difficulties and travail” of war, but at the same time, Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).

Jean le Bel (quoted in Rogers, op. cit.) contrasts the situation of the nobles in Edward III’s army (1327), where “one could see great nobility well served with a great plenty of dishes and sweets – such strange ones that I wouldn’t know to name or describe them. There one could see ladies richly adorned and nobly ornamented” while in the camp proper an open brawl between the regular soldiers from England and Hainault broke out and eventually turned into an open battle in which 316 died, but so segregated was the camp that, “most of the knights and of their masters were then at court, and knew nothing of this” (Rogers, 66-7). Likewise, except in fairly extreme positions, most of the ditch-digging, camp-building duties would fall to the common soldiers (and, as Roel Konijnendijk can quite accurately tell you, ditches are important! When in doubt, dig some ditches – or make others dig ditches for you).

That said, these differences are not merely confined to the high aristocrats. Marching under a heavy load is often given as one example of the quintessential “soldier experience”, but it seems that many Greek hoplites went to war with a personal slave or servant to carry their equipment for them, despite being infantrymen. The Romans carried equipment and supplies something closer to what a modern soldier might (both in terms of weight and also, apart from ammunition, in terms of what was carried), but then non-Roman sources like the Greek writer Polybius (18.18.1-7) or the Jewish writer Josephus (BJ 3.95) appear quite stunned with the amount of tools and equipment the Romans carry (and Polybius, by the by, is writing before Marius’ mules). Evidently the Roman impedementia was quite a bit heavier, though even the Macedonians carried much more than a Greek hoplite army (Note Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1978 on this).

Meanwhile, Jonathan Roth is quick to note (in The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C. – A.D. 235) (1999)) that despite either bad or insufficient rations being a common complaint of soldiers, such complaints appear absent from Roman sources, even in the context of legionary mutinies. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Roman soldiers ate quite well, with fairly ample rations. In camp the Roman soldier’s diet was not so different from what he might eat in peacetime (especially once we get into the imperial period with legions stationed in semi-permanent bases); on the march they had to make do with bucellatum, a hard biscuit something like hardtack. But for many Italian peasants, the diet doesn’t seem to have been much worse – or much different – from what they ate in peacetime.

By way of sharp contrast to the plodding, heavily loaded but surely very lethal Roman legionary, the impis of the Zulu traveled fast, light and sometimes somewhat hungry. Zulu warriors generally carried only their equipment on the march, while supplies were carried by udibi, boys serving as porters. Even then, such supplies were minimal – the Zulu force that arrived at Rorke’s Drift (1879) had only been out six days, but none of the warriors in it had eaten in two. Such minimally supplied flying columns, moving fast and with considerable stealth (one cannot read anything on the Anglo-Zulu war without noticing how, even with cavalry scouts, Zulu impis seem so often just to appear next to British forces) were the norm for Zulu warfare. And to be clear, this wasn’t some “primitive” or underdeveloped form of war – the light and fast operational movements of the Zulu were intentional (much of it was a product of Shaka’s reforms) and very effective – albeit not so effective as to offset the massive advantages the British possessed in population, economic capacity or military technology. Nevertheless, not even every sort of common soldier was the heavily loaded, slow moving, well-fed ditch-digging sort like the Romans. The “soldier experience” needs to cover the lightly loaded and armed, fast moving, hungry, non-ditch-digging Zulu experience too.

And then of course when we consider nomadic peoples, we find that in many cases their lives on campaign were not that much different from their lives at peacetime, involving many of the same skills and activities.

In short, the experience of the drudgery of war – the bad food, long toil, heavy encumbrance and so on was all still quite contingent (or we might say “dependent”) on the society going to war. Social divisions mattered. Expectations about masculine behavior mattered. Military systems mattered. Yes, modern armies in the European tradition expect their soldiers to do a lot of labor and drudgery, but remember where that military system came from: it was the system of the common soldiers serving under the aristocrats who most certainly did not do those things but who did impose sharp, corporal discipline. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make this system ineffective – it was clearly effective. The point here is that it was socially contingent – a different society would have come up with a different system. And they did! The Early Modern European system is only one way to organize an army and historically speaking not even the most common.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

April 29, 2025

1984 and the Politicizing of Language

Filed under: Books, Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 16 Aug 2024

A dive into 1984 in relation to modern politics can’t be done without pissin’ in everyone’s Froot-Loops, so grab a tall glass of Victory Gin and let’s talk about how The Party functions, how doublethink makes us crazy, and how it’s not just those nutters on the other side that do it.

I take a few jabs at current sacred cows of the Left and Right here. Hopefully the comments won’t look like Hate Week.

00:00 Intro
01:46 Thoughtcrime and Doublethink
12:27 War is Peace
17:46 Oligarchal Collectivism
22:12 MiniTrue

Post-release edit: It’s been pointed out that I grossly oversimplified the military analysis later in the video, which is true. Man-portable air defense systems and maneuver warfare are a lot more complicated than this video implies. As for that one particular doublethink example mentioned so very briefly, some of the counterpoints have been … impressive contortions of language in their own right. But not interesting enough to discuss the matter further.

April 27, 2025

“[T]he practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party”

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the steady leftward march of pretty much every western nation that never, ever stops and only rarely slows down:

A ratchet allows rotation in one direction, but prevents rotation in the other direction. That’s been a common explanation of most western governments for decades … leftward motion occurs, but can only be stopped, never reversed.

In a shrewd assessment of the current campaign Down Under, Paul Collits cites a certain “niche Canadian”:

    Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it.

Of course, he could be talking about next week’s Canadian election or last month’s German election. As we have noted, Fred Merz, the incoming chancellor in Berlin, has yet to take office but what Americans call the honeymoon is over before the coalition has been officially pronounced man and wife. Hermann Binkert, head honcho of Germany’s INSA polling agency, says the country has never seen loss of approval on this scale between the election and the formation of the government. The so-called “far-right” AfD is now leading in multiple polls. Which would be super-exciting if voting hadn’t already taken place.

In America, the new administration certainly has the “will to address” the “unholy mess” but the Trumpian Gulliver is beset on all sides by District Court Lilliputians whose position is that what a Democrat president has done cannot “lawfully” be undone. This is a pseudo-“constitutional” recognition of the practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party. If the Left wins, they dissolve the border and trannify your kids. If the “Right” wins (Stephen Harper, Scott Morrison), they may pause some of the more obviously crazy stuff but they never actually reverse the direction of travel. Unless they’re the UK Tories (Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak), in which case they stay in the leftie lane without even shifting down to third gear.

So “politics”, as increasingly narrowly defined, is less and less likely to save you. Because the gap between “politics” and reality grows ever wider. Consider the instructive example of one Hashem Abedi. Mr Abedi and his brother plotted the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester. It was, from the Abedi viewpoint, a huge success: twenty-two dead, half of them kids, plus a thousand injured. It was a big deal at the time: lots of flowers, teddy bears, and heart-rending renditions of “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

So you’d have thought even the British state would have at least pretended to take it seriously. Hashem Abedi was detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure, and under one of the three supposedly toughest prison regimes in England and Wales. Nevertheless, on April 12th he put three of his guards in hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries“. A fortnight later, two are still there. How did a maximum-security prisoner manage to do that? Well, he used boiling cooking oil and weaponised kitchen utensils.

So how did he get hold of boiling cooking oil? Was he a finalist for Maximum Security Masterchef? Ah, well. The details remain vague, and as usual the worthless UK media has shown not the slightest curiosity in how the Ariana Grande perp came close to bulking up his death toll by fifteen per cent.

In the Footsteps of 45 Commando: 60 Miles Across the Falklands

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Dec 2024

I was recently joined by my friends Les Winner (Polaris Logistics) and Jari Laine (Varusteleka) for an epic trek across East Falkland in the footsteps of 45 Commando of the British Royal Marines. In 1982, the Marines landed to rebuff the Argentine invasion of the islands. Specifically, they landed at Port San Carlos on the far western side of the island, planning to use heavy-lift helicopters to move east to attack the Argentine positions around Stanley. However, the Chinooks they were counting on were on the Atlantic Conveyor, which was sunk by Argentine Exocet attack on May 25. That left the Marines with no choice but to hike the 60 miles or so overland. They did so overland in the South Atlantic winter, with combat loads and full rucksacks — it was a brutal movement that they executed with aplomb.

Les, Jari, and I wanted to see the ground, and so we headed out to follow the same path, albeit without the weapons or ammunition and in the summer. We took four days to complete the distance, meeting some really cool people and making lots of blisters along the way. This video is a record of that trip.
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April 26, 2025

A proposal for cutting the Channel crossing phenomenon

Filed under: Britain, France, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, David Wright suggests a concrete plan to stem the tide of “refugees” arriving in the south of England from Calais and other French Channel ports:

Illegal Channel crossings by rubber dinghies overloaded predominantly with young men have been an increasingly worrying trend for many years yet successive governments have made no serious or workable attempts to do anything about it.

Migrant crossings are up by more than 40 per cent on last year and a record for daily arrivals has been set. A total of 705 migrants in 12 boats crossed the Channel on Tuesday April 15, days after the previous record of 656 was set the previous Saturday. The total number of arrivals in 2025, at 8,888, is 42 per cent higher than at the same point last year and 81 per cent higher than at this stage in 2023. More arrivals were recorded in January to April than in the equivalent four-month period in any year since data on Channel crossings began in 2018.

The French authorities are providing lifejackets to ensure migrants can cross the Channel safely. The jackets are returned to the French once the migrants have been escorted to the mid-point of the Channel and are rescued by the British authorities, so that they can be re-used for future crossings.

We have seen French police on the beach at Calais standing idly by while migrants board dinghies to Dover.

[…]

The boats should be painted grey, a small gun mounted on the foredeck, and manned with recently retired RN personnel. (There would be no shortage of volunteers.) A small support base should be built in Folkestone harbour, initially using Portakabins for rapid start-up, with fuelling facilities, a small workshop, an accommodation block and a canteen. This could be achieved relatively quickly and at a modest cost to the defence budget. These boats would be tasked with patrolling the Dover Strait every day from dawn to dusk, three or four at a time. Drones could also be used to detect dinghies and direct the patrolling boats to them. They would not need to be at sea in weather too rough for small smuggler-boat crossings.

They should be tasked to intercept the smugglers wherever they are in the Channel, approaching our shores, over the mid-way line or just leaving French beaches, and turned back and escorted. On approach to the smugglers’ beach the Border Force vessel should stand off and launch a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) manned by four staff who would escort them until they grounded on the beach. With two of them standing guard with weapons the others, using box cutters, would slash long holes in the rubber dinghies and remove the outboard motors and drop them into the water to render them unserviceable. On completion the RIB should return to its vessel and the vessel withdraw to resume patrol. Input from serving senior naval officers would be needed to provide detailed operating procedures. Once deployed this division would be under the command of a senior serving officer.

Of course, French President Emmanuel Macron would immediately be protesting. But he hasn’t got a leg to stand on. France is a signatory to the Schengen Agreement which requires migrants/asylum seekers to be processed in the first safe country they enter. Not only that but Britain has paid France almost half a billion pounds to stop the migrants arriving at the beaches and boarding dinghies to Dover.

France has not only done nothing but trouser this cash while its navy continues to escort the dinghies into UK waters and hand them off to our Border Force or the RNLI.

The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Heavy Losses

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rex’s Hangar
Published 17 Nov 2021

Originally conceived in the early 1930s, by the time the first prototype of the Fairey Battle flew in 1936 it was already becoming obsolete. However, the RAF desperately needed combat aircraft, and so the Battle was put into production. It would go on to fight in the Battle of France, where it would take exceptionally heavy losses due to its slow speed and poor defensive armament. After being retired from front-line duty, the Fairey Battle would go on to becoming a successful training aircraft for the RAF and Commonwealth forces, serving the needs of combat flight schools in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

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Producing these videos is a hobby of mine. I have a passion for history, and personally own a large collection of books, journals and other texts, and endeavor to do as much research as possible. However if there are any mistakes, please don’t hesitate to reach out and correct anything 🙂

April 25, 2025

What Were Georgian Attitudes Towards Sex? | Georgian Pleasures

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

History Hit
Published 12 Sept 2024

Historian Dr Kate Lister removes Bridgerton‘s rose-tinted glasses, unlaces the corsets and unbuttons the breaches of the Georgians. Join Kate as she investigates how s*x and the world of celebrity were a big thing long before the 20th century.

The fabulous wealthy elite of Bridgerton look perfectly preened, their teeth, hair, make up, even their sex scenes are all filled with opulent glamour! But in reality a lot of people in Georgian society, including the wealthy, were dealing with a myriad of issues, from syphilis, teeth decay and scandals to laudanum and gin addictions. All of this would have been rife and incredibly visible on the big city streets during the booming industrial revolution.

Kate uncovers what went on betwixt the Georgian sheets: who’s doing what, where, how and with whom. Along the way she’ll explore extraordinary guides to s*x work in London and Edinburgh and unwrap the world of 18th century condoms, syphilis and even high profile and hidden sex clubs. All of this will help to unearth the real lives of the people stomping the streets, pubs and back alleys of these lavish Georgian cities. No stone is left unturned in the quest to reveal the real lives of Georgian society!
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