Quotulatiousness

February 2, 2024

“Who funds you?”

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

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.

February 1, 2024

Newfoundland – “We used to be a country”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Chap
Published 9 Nov 2023

What 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

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

Sir Guthrie is a hybrid, a scientist-turned-apparatchik. “I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” he says, in that suave, hypocritical English way, which is at once admirable and disagreeable. This manner of speaking, of never saying quite what you mean, was illustrated in a French book of the time, La Vie anglaise, which tried to explain English manners to the French. When an Englishman says, “We must meet again,” the author explains, he means: “I hope never to see you again”; and when he says, “I know a little about”, he means: “I am an expert in”, or possibly even “the world-expert in”.

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.

January 31, 2024

The ghost of Beeching haunts model railways?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Richard Bratby notes the solemn departure of the very last model railway train in Britain, at least based on recent reporting on the hobby:

“Platelayers hut and coal train” by Phil_Parker is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The last model train has departed, and in the attics and spare bedrooms of Britain, closure notices the size of thumbnails are being glued to cardboard stations. OO gauge track is being torn up; weeds made from lichen and flock shoot up where once there were busy miniature main lines. It’s Beeching all over again, just tiny. And in a desolate parade, once-cherished model locos trundle off to 4mm scale scrapyards, to stand lifeless and forgotten until, like their real-life forebears, they are broken up to be recycled as … oh, I don’t know. iPhones. Xboxes. Something modern, anyway. Something cool.

Well, I read it in the Telegraph, so it must be true. “Death of the Model Railway” proclaimed the headline last weekend, and the same story duly popped up all over the media, usually with some variant of “running out of steam”, or “going off the rails”. I was a bit late coming to the news because it was Saturday and I’d spent the afternoon building a model goods wagon from a plywood kit. I’d just added the lettering, and it came as a jolt to learn that the hobby no longer existed. Gingerly, I poked at the varnish I’d just applied — damn, still sticky, and now there was a socking great out-of-scale thumbprint spoiling the look of the thing. That seemed real enough.

But why did those headlines seem so familiar — and ring so false? True, 2024 has begun badly in the railway modelling world. Last week the organisers of the annual Warley National Model Railway Exhibition — a giant show held at the NEC in Birmingham, and a highlight of the hobby’s annual calendar — called it quits. A few days previously, the venerable model railway shop Hattons had announced that it was closing down after 78 years. Taken together, you can see why a journo from outside this particular subculture might link unrelated events into a bigger, juicier story. And let’s face it, a dig at railway enthusiasts is always good for a laugh, isn’t it?

I won’t deny that both events stung me. As a kid in the 80s I used to visit Hattons at its original Liverpool location. Even then, it felt old-school: a gloomy, musty terraced shop, piled to the ceiling with boxes and display cases. But a Saturday visit was like entering Aladdin’s cave and we’d always leave with some new treasure, wrapped in brown paper. Hattons has long since moved to newer, brighter premises and refocused on its mail-order business. I realise with a pang of shame that I’ve never used either.

As for the Warley Exhibition; well, I was there with my dad in November. It’s a regular father and son fixture a few weeks before Christmas, and if we’re honest we probably look forward to it rather more. It was rammed — 80-odd layouts (please, never “train sets”) from the UK, Europe and America, with crowds jostling four deep, and trade stands offering everything from antique clockwork models to the latest digital tech. My 12-year old eyes would have popped out of my head at the quantity and quality of products available. One stall was using airport-stye scanners to produce miniaturised replicas of its customers, so they could ride their model trains in person. If this is a hobby in decline, I’m not seeing it.

I’m going to stick my neck out here: correlation does not imply causation, and railway modelling is actually thriving. What the headlines describe is a collision of two familiar, but separate, 21st century trends the death of the high street, and the decline of old-style social clubs. Hattons never went bust: it read the runes and decided to get out in good order. As for Warley; well, if anything, the Exhibition seems to have been a victim of its own success. Like many leisure pursuits, railway modelling in the 20th century revolved around clubs, with all the paraphernalia of committees and tea rotas. People don’t do that quite so much nowadays.

January 30, 2024

The foul “nudgers” are at it again at Cambridge

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Gage reports on a recent fun-reducing experiment by paid psychological meddlers at Cambridge University:

“Wineglass” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Researchers found they could “nudge” people into drinking less wine when they denied the unsuspecting blighters a large 250ml measure.

Last summer, these wholly well-adjusted people convinced 21 Cambridgeshire pubs and restaurants to offer only small or medium glasses of wine. The result left the boffins breathless. But sadly, not in the medical sense of the word.

When denied a large, vivifying glass of wine, the subjects drank eight percent less than usual, and the pubs didn’t lose any money — smaller measures cost more. Puritans: two. Oenophiles: nil.

The usual suspects cooked up this obscene waste of time and money. Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge University, boasts lurid form in control freakery.

Her previous studies read like an almanac of neurotic impulses. The mad mullah dreams of shrinking plates and sinking sodas. This finger-wagger-in-chief obsesses with the vinous, porcine masses and what they may slip into their faces when she’s not looking. Marteau chillingly laments that large wine glasses “increase the pleasure of drinking wine”.

The fundamentally nosey swear these are the first murmurs of Utopia. Next, they’ll bend boozing regulations into a truncheon to batter the gastronomic swine over its head. They don’t stop. First, they shrink the large glass. Then, the medium glass affects as the large. What happens next? Take a wild guess.

This is not the work of some rogue Colonel Kurtz. One Daily Telegraph writer seized on the study. Employing the presumptuous “we” beloved of oppressive minds, they offered tips to help us drink less, assuming we drink large wines only because we are weak-willed effigies desperate for professional helpers to show us what’s best for us.

Advocates of “nudging” drive themselves senseless over this psychological thimblerig. The potential to correct “undesirable” behaviour proves too great to resist. They are a species of featherless biped with which I share nothing but the right to a trial before a jury of my peers.

As I write, I’ve just returned from a five-mile jaunt with 33 pounds strapped to my back. Loading a bag with weights burns double the calories. Therefore, whatever I do after that trek is my business alone. On my desk is a large glass of Portuguese red blend. Beside that soul-tingling measure sits a smouldering, hand-rolled, menthol-tipped cigarette.

Why strangers stake their mental well-being on what others put into their bodies, I will never know. Why they wish I’d sit here choking on sparkling water and its vegetable equivalent — celery — I’ve not the foggiest of insights. All I do know, friends, is that I am not the one in dire need of a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. My professional advice: Seven letters. Vulgar slang. A phrasal verb rhyming with “duck cough”.

January 29, 2024

Peter Hitchens isn’t onboard with the march to yet another war

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writing in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens decries the apparent drift by western politicians into yet another war:

Are we the baddies? What if the Ukraine war is just as stupid and wrong as the Iraq war, but the state propaganda has been more successful and hardly anybody has realised … yet?

Many people to this day still think the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think the gory attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took ages for opinion to swing on the Vietnam war, back in the 1960s. And, as one who opposed the Iraq war, I remember only too well just how many (who now think they were against it all the time) were fooled into backing Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.

The issue is more pressing as generals and admirals warn we must live in a militarised society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could get their way. If you go on backing this policy, you could be condemning yourself, your children or grandchildren to a world of war, privation and perhaps conscription into some sort of military service.

[…]

This is what I have never been able to work out. We have a Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while carrying a very small stick – thunderous, belligerent declarations while our Armed Forces melt away thanks to neglect and badly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe takes place, we can fend it off by dispatching our troops on the pestilential e-scooters and e-bikes which are this former Transport Secretary’s major contribution to the nation.

Certainly these vehicles are terrifying to those not riding them. They have nearly killed me more than once. And, piled up in heaps, they make formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding.

What Mr Shapps does not seem to grasp is that Britain became great by staying out of continental conflicts, and letting others do the fighting. Even in the battle against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.

Our greatness ceased when bombastic moralising took over, in 1914. We flung ourselves, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt, and bereft of the flower of our young manhood.

People still refuse to believe me when I say accurately that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-18 war debts (now worth about £40 billion) to the USA. But I promise you it is true.

Four years of terrible loss left the Russo-German problem unsolved and we had to do it all again in 1939. After that we were even more bankrupt, and in 1946 had to ration bread, like some desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterwards we were largely governed by grown-ups who had fought in actual wars and been wounded, and had seen death very near them, or endured bombing and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign trouble.

January 28, 2024

Himmler Takes Command – WW2 – Week 283 – January 27, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jan 2024

A new German Army Group has been formed, tasked with protecting the Reich from the east and commanded by none other than Heinrich Himmler, who has never held such a command. The Soviets are really on the move in the east and have even begun reaching the prewar German border. In the west the Allies have cleared the Roer Triangle and are also working hard to eliminate the Colmar Pocket. In the Far East the Americans are advancing on Luzon, and in Burma the Allies have success on the Arakan and the Shwebo Plain, and finally manage to re open the Burma Road with China.

01:27 Soviet advances in East Prussia
09:23 Hungary and the fight for Buda
11:19 Operations Nordwind, Cheerful, and Blackcock
14:23 Block 5
16:14 American advances on Luzon
18:55 Allied successes in Burma
22:06 Summary
22:26 Conclusion
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January 25, 2024

Finnish Jews, Polish Special Forces, and MREs – WW2 – OOTF 32

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, Germany, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Jan 2024

How did Finland treat its Jews, and what did Finnish people know about the Holocaust? Who were the mysterious Polish Silent Unseen? And, what sort of rations did soldiers carry? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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January 23, 2024

The battle of Sangshak, 1944

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dr. Robert Lyman discusses a new book by David Allison that covers one of the many small battles that made up the large Imphal-Kohima campaign:

When Wavell, by then Viceroy of India, visited Imphal after the battle in October, to bestow knighthoods on the four victors — Lieutenant Generals Bill Slim (14 Army), Montagu Stopford (33 Corps), Geoffrey Scoones (4 Corps) and Philip Christison (15 Corps) — he admitted to Slim that he found the battle hard to follow, as it seemed to have been fought in “penny-packets”. In professing his ignorance of Slim’s great triumph, Wavell nevertheless hit the nail on the head. Sangshak was one of those penny-packet fights which cumulatively determined the outcome of Japan’s audacious invasion of India.

Like many battles in insufficiently examined wars, Sangshak has suffered over the years from a paucity of rigorous examination. Louis Allen’s magisterial The Longest War gave it short treatment in 1984, and very little else. Until now. I’m delighted to say that a Hong Kong-based Australian lawyer with a military background — David Allison — has produced a new account of this crucial battle, and it is absolutely outstanding. It can be purchased here. I recommend it very strongly. It’s not long: at 159-pages of text you can make your way through this in a couple of days, but it is diligently researched, well written and judiciously argued. For those who know something of the battle, the big arguments in the past about the state training of the 50 Indian Parachute Brigade, the temporary breakdown of its commander, Hope-Thomson and the supposed loss of the captured Japanese map and orders by HQ 23 Indian Division, are calmly and satisfyingly explained.

The story can be briefly told. The territory to the north-east of Imphal (centring on the Naga village of Ukhrul) had only the lightest of garrisons and no real defences. Until 16 March it was home to 49 Brigade, which was then despatched to the Tiddim Road to deal with the advance in the south of Lieutenant General Yanagida’s 33 Division. The brigade had considered itself to be in a rear area, and, extraordinarily, no dug-in and wired defensive positions had been prepared. It was one of the most serious British planning failures of the campaign. The entire north-eastern portion of Imphal lay effectively undefended. The gap left by the brigade’s departure had been filled in part by the arrival of the first of the two battalions of the newly raised 50 Indian Parachute Brigade (comprising the Gurkha 152 Battalion and the Indian 153 Battalion), whose young and professional commander, 31-year-old Brigadier M.R.J. (“Tim”) Hope-Thomson, had persuaded New Delhi to allow him to complete the training of his brigade in territory close to the enemy. The area north-east of Imphal was regarded as suitable merely for support troops and training. At the start of March, the brigade HQ and one battalion had arrived in Imphal and began the leisurely process of shaking itself out in the safety of the hills north-east of the town. To the brigade was added 4/5 Mahrattas under Lieutenant Colonel Trim, left behind when 49 Brigade was sent down to the Tiddim Road. To Scoones and his HQ, the area to which Hope-Thomson and his men were sent represented the lowest of all combat priorities. Sent into the jungle almost to fend for themselves, it was not expected that they would have to fight, let alone be on the receiving end of an entire Japanese divisional attack. They had little equipment, no barbed wire, and little or no experience or knowledge of the territory. No one considered it worthwhile to keep them briefed on the developing situation. To all intents and purposes, 50 Indian Parachute Brigade was an irrelevant appendage, attached to Major General Ouvry Roberts’ 23 Indian Division for administrative purposes but otherwise left to its own devices.

Before long, information began to reach Imphal that Japanese troops were advancing in force on Ukhrul and Sangshak. Inexplicably, however, this information appeared not to ring any warning bells in HQ IV Corps in Imphal, which was preoccupied with the developing threat in the Tamu area where the main Japanese thrust was confidently predicted. On the night of 16 March, the single battalion of 50 Parachute Brigade took over responsibility for the Ukhrul area from 49 Brigade, which was hastily departing for the Tiddim Road. They had no idea that an entire Japanese division of 20,000 men was crossing the Chindwin in strength opposite Homalin. On 19 March, large columns of Japanese infantry were reported advancing through the hills.

No one had expected them to be where they were. But the first shock came to the Japanese 3/58 battalion (Major Shimanoe), part of Lieutenant General Sato’s 31 Division – troops whose objective was Kohima, and not Imphal – who were bloodily rebuffed by the determined opposition of the young Gurkha soldiers at an unprepared position forward of Sheldon’s Corner. The 170 Gurkha recruits refused to allow the 900 men of 3/58 to roll over them and inflicted 160 casualties on the advancing Japanese. In the swirling confusion of the next 36 hours, Hope Thomson and his staff kept their heads, attempting to concentrate what remained of the dispersed companies of 152 Battalion and 4/5 Mahrattas back to a common position at the village of Sangshak, which dominated the tracks southwest to Imphal.

It was at this now-deserted Naga village that Hope-Thomson, on 21 March, decided to group his brigade for its last stand, his staff desperately attempting to alert HQ 4 Corps in Imphal to the enormity of what was happening to the north-east. The Japanese columns infiltrated quickly around and through the British positions, heading in the direction of Litan. The Japanese now began days of repeated assaults on the position in a battle of intense bravery and sacrifice for both sides. Hope Thomson’s men could only dig shallow trenches, which provided no protection from Japanese artillery.

QotD: Shakespeare was apparently a terrible writer, according to Bayesian analysis

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

When SBF (whose initials immediately joined those of MBS and JFK as being instantly recognizable) was first arrested, I immediately proposed a typology of financial swindlers with two distinct poles — though no doubt there is a continuum between them that somewhat reduces the elegance of my typology.

First there is the dull, seemingly steady, respectable type, instantiated by Bernie Madoff, who had just the kind of personal gravitas that inspired confidence in the cautious. “Yes,” the cautious type thought as he gazed into Madoff’s calm and wise face, “he is just the type to whom I can safely entrust my money. He knows, if anyone knows, how to make money fruitful and multiply.”‘ His very dullness obscured from the cautious man the fact that he, the cautious man, was as motivated by greed and lust for painless enrichment as the most reckless gambler; and no man wants to think that he is motivated by greed. That is a vice that motivates others, not oneself.

Second there is the flamboyant genius type. For more adventurous investors in search of quick returns, a man like SBF is just the one to follow. His refusal to comply with elementary social conventions, even his wild hair, stood guarantor of his genius. Those who followed SBF as the children followed the pied piper deluded themselves by the following false syllogism:

    Geniuses are unconventional.
    SBF is unconventional.
    Therefore, SBF is a genius.

(Actually, even his unconventionality was conventional. Convention is that from which no man can ever fully escape.)

The nature of SBF’s “genius” has come to light in his thoughts of Shakespeare, against whose genius he applies statistical reasoning:

    I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare … but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming and very few people attended university; few people were even literate — probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favourable.

One could have a great deal of fun with this argument, for example by proving statistically that Isaac Newton was not one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, and indeed could never really even have existed, because the number of people in his time who could do simple arithmetic was so exiguous. How could he, then, together with Leibniz (another impossibility), have invented the calculus?

By contrast, we could also prove that we are living through a golden age of literature (as of every art) because there are now so many people who know how to write. Of course, our painting must be best because, comparatively speaking, our materials are so cheap and within the range of most people, all of whom have the time to take up painting. Think of how poor Spain was when Velasquez was painting! In Vermeer’s day they didn’t even have flush toilets! How, then, could his paintings be beautiful? Basquiat’s paintings must be much better because now we have electric light.

How could Dickens have been so funny when the infant mortality rate was so high and the life expectancy so low? Therefore, he was not funny. As for Mozart, he didn’t even have an electronic amplifier to his name, so how could his music have been any good? He hadn’t even heard of rap.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, of course, or one vulture a flock, but one cannot help but remark that SBF was not some poor child who managed, by hook or by crook, to crawl out of a noisome slum, but the child of two professors at Stanford University (admittedly of law) who was himself expensively educated and who was, by the standards of 99.999 percent of all previously existing humanity (to use an SBFian type of statistic), extremely privileged. He was of the elite. His immortal thoughts on Shakespeare would not have been possible without his education, for they certainly would not have occurred to — shall we say — an illiterate illegal immigrant from El Salvador or Honduras.

No, it requires many years of training to come up with arguments such as his. And this in turn raises the question of what is going on in schools and universities (if, that is, SBF is not completely sui generis) that their alumni end up by saying things that make the pronouncements of Azande witch doctors look like those of the latest science. Perhaps — and let us hope that — SBF is not typical of his breed.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Literary Financier”, New English Review, 2023-10-21.

January 22, 2024

Nationalization of British Railways: What Went Wrong?

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

Railways Explained
Published 22 Oct 2023

In today’s video we continue uncovering the story of railway development in Great Britain, as part of a special trilogy marking the Railways Explained’s achievement of 100,000 subscribers!

This is actually the second video in series, and it covers a period from the aftermath of World War II to the momentous era of rail privatization, which was quite challenging period for British railways, full of ups and downs, but it is mostly marked by the formidable challenges.

We talked about the pivotal moments, such as the birth of British Railways, the ambitious Modernisation Plan, the influential Beeching Report, structural reforms, and the eventual transition to rail privatization, which all defined the British railways during this transformative period.

This insightful journey through time illuminates the intricacies and milestones of a railway system that has left an indelible mark on the United Kingdom’s transportation history.
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January 21, 2024

The Duke of Wellington, perhaps best known as the inventor of the Wellington boot …

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Weaver Sheridan expresses some surprise that His Grace’s main source of fame is the credit for the invention of the Wellington, rather than his other, uninteresting achievements:

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) by Thomas Lawrence, circa 1815-1816.
Wikimedia Commons.

I know nothing should surprise us these days about dumbed-down Britain. But an article on the moronic Mail Online website the other day had me choking on my cornflakes.

It read: “In 2020, Mandy Lieu, 38, bought 935-acre Ewhurst Park in Hampshire, once owned by the inventor of the wellington boot, the Duke of Wellington, and vowed to turn it into a world-class organic farm and nature reserve.”

The inventor of the wellington boot!

Good grief, I know teaching of British history is nowadays outrageously skewed and bowdlerised, but I didn’t realise things had got this bad.

The article’s author obviously thinks the Iron Duke’s main claim to fame was the welly. Does she know nothing about him being a soldier and statesman, victor of the Peninsular War, victor of Waterloo, nemesis of Napoleon, twice Prime Minister? Or is the wellington boot reference made simply to get equally thick readers to relate to the story? Who cares about fusty old battles and boring politics? It is all so yesterday, isn’t it? But everyone knows what wellies are, don’t they?

To anyone with a modicum of interest in this country’s past, such ignorance is deeply depressing, to say the least. But I suppose it could be worse. Think what would happen if some Mail Online know-nothing hack was able to interview other historical figures …

“Sir Winston Churchill, tell us how you came up with the idea of a nodding bulldog to promote your insurance company.”

“Napoleon, having invented a popular type of brandy, was it perhaps rather egotistical to name it after yourself?”

“Pablo Picasso, as a car designer you must be thrilled to see your Citroën Grand C4 Picasso being crowned “Best Used MPV” in the Auto Express Used Car Awards 2023.”

The Red Army Overruns Poland! – WW2 – Week 282 – January 20, 1945

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 20 Jan 2024

The huge new Soviet offensives charge ahead this week, taking Warsaw and Krakow; in the west the Battle of the Bulge is officially called over … though there is still fighting there. On Luzon, the Americans push out of their beachhead, though there is heavy fighting to secure their flank.
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January 20, 2024

The British Empire would have failed a proper cost-benefit analysis

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Britain, Economics, History, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Institute of Economic Affairs, Kristian Niemietz is working on a paper on the economics of empire that, as he shows in this article, indicates that the empire was never a winning economic proposition for Britain as a whole, no matter how well certain well-connected individuals and companies benefitted:

The British Empire in 1914 (via antiquaprintgallery.com)

But is it actually true that imperialism makes countries richer? Does imperialism make economic sense?

This question was already hotly debated at the heyday of imperialism. Adam Smith believed that the British Empire would not pass a cost-benefit test:

    The pretended purpose of it was to encourage the manufactures, and to increase the commerce of Great Britain. But its real effect has been to raise the rate of mercantile profit, and to enable our merchants to turn into a branch of trade, of which the returns are more slow and distant than those of the greater part of other trades, a greater proportion of their capital than they otherwise would have done […]

    Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.

He believed that Britain would be better off if it dissolved its Empire:

    Great Britain would not only be immediately freed from the whole annual expense of the peace establishment of the colonies, but might settle with them such a treaty of commerce as would effectually secure to her a free trade, more advantageous to the great body of the people, though less so to the merchants, than the monopoly which she at present enjoys.

The liberal free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden agreed:

    [O]ur naval force, on the West India station […], amounted to 29 vessels, carrying 474 guns, to protect a commerce just exceeding two millions per annum. This is not all. A considerable military force is kept up in those islands […]

    Add to which, our civil expenditure, and the charges at the Colonial Office […]; and we find […] that our whole expenditure, in governing and protecting the trade of those islands, exceeds, considerably, the total amount of their imports of our produce and manufactures.

If imperialism was a loss-making activity – why did Britain and other European colonial empires engage in it for so long?

Smith and Cobden explained it in terms of clientele politics (or Public Choice Economics, as we would say today). Somebody obviously benefited, even if the nation as a whole did not. And the beneficiaries were politically better organised than those who footed the bill.

This proto-Public Choice case against imperialism was not limited to political liberals. Otto von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia and future Chancellor of the German Empire, hated liberals in the Smith-Cobden tradition, but he rejected colonialism in terms that almost make him sound like one of them:

    The supposed benefits of colonies for the trade and industry of the mother country are, for the most part, illusory. The costs involved in founding, supporting and especially maintaining colonies […] very often exceed the benefits that the mother country derives from them, quite apart from the fact that it is difficult to justify imposing a considerable tax burden on the whole nation for the benefit of individual branches of trade and industry [translation mine].

In his writing about the economics of imperialism, even Michael Parenti, a Marxist-Leninist political scientist (who is, for obvious reasons, popular among Twitter hipsters), sounds almost like a Public Choice economist:

    [E]mpires are not losing propositions for everyone. […] [T]he people who reap the benefits are not the same ones who foot the bill. […]

    The transnationals monopolize the private returns of empire while carrying little, if any, of the public cost. The expenditures needed […] are paid […] by the taxpayers.

    So it was with the British empire in India, the costs of which […] far exceeded what came back into the British treasury. […]

    [T]here is nothing irrational about spending three dollars of public money to protect one dollar of private investment – at least not from the perspective of the investors.”

This leads us to a curious situation. Today’s woke progressives disagree with their comrade Parenti on the economics of empire, but they do agree with Britain’s old imperialists, who argued that the Empire was vital for Britain’s prosperity.

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