Sir Humphrey: I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice in government service as we approach the terminal period of the year — calendar, of course, not financial — in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One — and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation — indeed confidence — indeed one might go so far as to say hope — that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant factors have been taken into consideration, susceptible to being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having been by no means unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and, in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect to have been significantly higher than the general average.
Jim Hacker: Are you trying to say “Happy Christmas,” Humphrey?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, Minister.
December 25, 2019
QotD repost: Sir Humphrey’s bureaucratic holiday wishes
December 23, 2019
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm
December 15, 2019
Policing London – The Bow Street Runners – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published 14 Dec 2019Henry Fielding was a dangerous man … with a pen. He had a razor-sharp wit and created the page-turner novel, but that’s not what we want to focus on here. Because Henry Fielding is also responsible for assembling London’s first organized police force. The Bow Street Runners were inspired by Wilde’s operation just … not corrupt. But Fielding quickly found that in London’s justice system, corruption was the assumed default, not the exception. He certainly had his work cut out for him!
Henry Fielding – Everything Wilde did but you know… without the whole… being morally bankrupt bit.
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December 14, 2019
History of Space Travel – Guided by Starlight – Extra History – #6
Extra Credits
Published 12 Dec 2019What happened after we touched down on the moon? And where are we going in the future? While we may have lost the glitz and glamor of the Space Race, we have continued to make incredible progress in reaching the stars. We’ve come together to build space stations while in space, create the international space station, and started developing new technologies that could take us to Mars and beyond.
Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe
The English Civil War Explained
Royal Armouries
Published 20 Dec 2017The Royal Armouries’ English Civil War collection boasts an array of infantry and cavalry arms and armour from the 1640s. Delve into this turbulent historical period with our resident Royalist, David.
Where to find us:
⚔Website: https://royalarmouries.org/home
⚔Blog: https://blog.royalarmouries.org/
⚔Twitter: https://twitter.com/Royal_ArmouriesThe Royal Armouries is the United Kingdom’s national collection of arms and armour. On this channel, discover what goes on behind the scenes at the museum and to see our collection come to life. From combat demonstrations to jousting coverage to behind the scenes tours with our curators, we’ve got it covered.
Have a question about arms and armour? Feel free to leave us a comment and we’ll do our best to answer it.
December 12, 2019
Explaining the decline in library usage
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall refutes the claims that it’s the evil right wingers (in this specific case, British Tories) that are driving the library out of business:
“Nottingham central library” by JuliaC2006 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Despite spending more money, library use, measured in terms of at least one visit per year, fell from 48.2% of adults to 39.7% of adults. I make that as roughly 1/5th of the adults that were using them not doing so in 5 years. 17% sounds slightly on the conservative side.
And if this was about “austerity”, you’d expect visits to be rising, rather than falling from 39.7% to 32.9% since the Conservatives/Lib Dems took over. Because the thing with libraries is that they suit the time rich and cash poor. If you’ve not got much else to do, you can spend time walking to a library, getting a book, walking home and easily finding time in the fortnight to read it. And 9-5 hours don’t bother you. There’s areas of the country, like Weston-Super-Mare, stuffed full of retired people and libraries are popular.
If you’re working all week you have to get to a library in your day, park your car, pay for parking, same on return, and make sure to set aside the time to do the reading, you might decide libraries aren’t that convenient.
The decline of libraries is a success story for us. We created them because books were very expensive once. Owning a giant library was the mark of a rich man. Paper was expensive, printing was expensive, binding was expensive. Over the decades, we figured out how to do this cheaper. Then we figured out how to do retailing cheaper. And then we got e-books which take production costs to near zero. Books are cheap. Cheap enough that most of us don’t want the faff of libraries. So, close some of them.
December 7, 2019
Bryan Donkin, 19th century inventor, amateur public relations whiz and independent lobbyist
In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention newsletter, he recounts the story of Bryan Donkin and his efforts to save innovators from excessive government interference:
One of the major arguments of the book I’m writing is that inventors’ talent for public relations and lobbying was one of the main reasons that Britain — rather unexpectedly — was the place that experienced an unprecedented acceleration of innovation.
The greatest of these lobbyist-inventors has to be Bryan Donkin, a nineteenth-century mechanical engineer. As an inventor, Donkin improved threshing machines, dredging machinery, and a variety of other tools. He invented the steel pen, dabbled in chemistry, as well as phrenology, and was one of the key people responsible for mechanising the production of paper. He became best known for improving and commercialising tin cans for food. Mechanised paper-making and canned food, having both been invented in France, were perfected in Britain by Donkin. He was the archetypal tinkerer.
Bryan Donkin (1768-1855).
Photographer unknown via Wikimedia Commons.But it’s as a lobbyist that I think Donkin was truly exceptional. His experience has important lessons for all would-be supporters of invention today.
In April 1817, Donkin read in his newspaper that there had been a disaster in Norwich: the boiler aboard the steamboat Telegraph had exploded. Of the boat’s twenty-two passengers, eight had died immediately in the blast, and another six had eventually succumbed to their wounds. It was a shocking tragedy. And for Donkin, doubly so: in addition to the human death toll, the explosion threatened to kill off one of the era’s newest and most exciting inventions.
Although some of the first trials of steamboats had taken place in the 1780s, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that they began to be practical. By 1817, the first commercially successful steamboat service in Britain, Henry Bell’s Comet, had been chugging its way up the River Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock for only five years. And Londoners like Donkin had only just seen their first steamboat, Margery, when she puffed her way into the Thames in 1815 (the following year, after becoming the first steamboat to cross the Channel, she reinvented herself in Paris as Elise). Thus, by the time of Telegraph‘s explosion, the passenger steamboat had only just been born. There was a very real risk that it would be banned.
Fortunately, however, the steamboat had Donkin in its corner. His immediate reaction upon reading about the explosion was to gather some of his engineer friends — Timothy Bramah and John Collinge — and set off for Norwich to view the explosion site for themselves. As the first expert engineers on the scene, they then took control of the narrative about the explosion. Donkin and his friends went straight to Norwich’s MP to ask him to set up a parliamentary select committee to look into the disaster. And while they waited for the politicians to be assembled for the committee, they held a series of public meetings about the disaster at the Crown & Anchor Tavern — a favourite haunt of London’s engineers. There, they had a chance to rally the rest of the profession and get their story straight about what must have caused the explosion.
December 6, 2019
Mikhail Gorbachev and the “third generation”
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was doomed to fail:
US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland during the Reyjavik Summit in 1986.
Official US government photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
Perestroika‘s what happens when you turn the reins over to the third generation — the generation that didn’t come up hard, and thus wasn’t forced to deal with objective reality. For all his faults, and for all the debate over whether Stalin was “really” a Communist (hint: he was), the Boss knew what it takes to hold onto power in a one-party state. He learned his craft in the hardest school — maneuvering against Lenin and Trotsky, two of the coldest, most ruthless sons-of-bitches ever to draw breath. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, survived both the Great Purge and the Great Patriotic War for the Motherland — an achievement, as you can imagine, that pretty much no one else of consequence could boast.
Mikhail Gorbachev, by contrast, was born in 1931. His childhood was affected by the war — as was every Russian child’s — but his grandfather was a kolkhoznik from way back; Mikhail was wired in to the Party from birth. Stalin died in 1953. Gorbachev was 22 — in an earlier generation he could’ve been a serious player at that age, but the postwar generation didn’t start rising until their 30s, or more usually their 40s. He was still at university when the Boss kicked the bucket; he didn’t start his official political career until 1955, and wasn’t recognized as a bona-fide comer until the late 1960s.
What this meant was that Gorbachev grew up in the kinder, gentler Soviet Union — the one where Khrushchev released a whole bunch of folks from the Gulag and denounced cults of personality. This is not to say that Gorbachev wasn’t a sincere Communist; he was. In fact, that was his problem — he was too sincere. The earlier generations faced the stark choice between hewing to orthodox Marxism, or hanging on to power. They chose the latter, of course, and that’s why Trotsky had to go — he kept on claiming to be the only true Marxist of the bunch (which he was, of course, but that’s a story for another day). Gorbachev, though, got to see Communism “working,” and from this he deduced — not unreasonably for someone who didn’t come up hard — that Communism’s manifest failures were due to not following Marx and Lenin more exactly. Marx and Lenin talked a great game about “openness” (glasnost), “democracy,” and all that “improving the lot of the People” jazz.
So he did all that, the fool, not realizing that Communism “worked,” such as it did, only through repression. Take your foot off The People’s neck enough to let them breathe, by all means — that was Comrade Khrushchev’s great insight — but if you ease off any further, they’ll try to wriggle out … and eventually kill you, their tormentor. Having never seen The People at close range — as everyone in the previous generations had — he couldn’t understand this, and so crashed the system.
December 4, 2019
Defund the BBC? Well, if you can’t just sack, burn, and salt the earth it stands on, defunding might help
Hector Drummond wonders if the Overton Window has moved far enough that the BBC might lose its sacred status:
In a notorious talk given to Conservative Future in 2009, Sean Gabb made the following radical recommendation:
On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street … You must shut it down – and shut it down at once.
I have for many years been torn between thinking this a good idea, and thinking that it would result in such uproar that the government would immediately fall, and be replaced by a new government who would restore the BBC. But the question was purely abstract anyway, because no Conservative government would even contemplate doing such a thing. No Conservative government was even going to contemplate taking away the licence fee.
But finally, after three years of disgraceful conduct — well, extra disgraceful conduct — the future of the BBC is finally an issue that that can be broached. It’s finally an issue that can be talked about without people throwing up their hands in horror and demanding you be thrown out of wherever you are. People will listen sympathetically if you suggest that the BBC can’t go on like it has been. People will join in enthusiastically if you say that Channel 4 is a disgrace that should no longer be state-funded. Well, not if you’re in the common room. But in the ordinary pubs around the country they will. They will at the dinner parties that are being held outside the M25. And even some inside it.
So what should be done? The conventional conservative/libertarian idea is that the BBC should be moved to a subscription model. The more radical Gabb idea is not one that has ever been talked about much. In fact, it’s an idea that until recently would have shocked most people, even most conservatives. (If you read to the end of the Gabb article, you’ll see that the young conservatives were themselves outraged by Gabb’s idea). But actually it’s a very good idea. Because here’s the thing. If you privatise the BBC, it may do very well for itself, and then it would be free to spin the news far more outrageously than it currently does.
More recently than Dr. Gabb, Richard Delingpole made a suggestion that I stole for my headline:
Call me a Radical, but I wouldn’t just stop the licence fee. I’d close down the BBC. Sack everyone. Demolish the buildings. Salt the ground.
— Richard Delingpole (@DickDelingpole) November 24, 2019
So the idea is no longer so alien. Particularly amongst younger people, who just don’t watch the BBC any more. They generally don’t watch much TV at all, they prefer YouTube and TikTok (which are filled with rubbish, it has to be said, but that’s another story), but they especially don’t watch the BBC (or channel 4). So most young people won’t even notice if the BBC is closed down, although about thirty sociology undergraduates will eventually tweet about it once their lecturers tell them what’s happened, and then the Guardian will have a fit and try to make it a big story, but there’ll be no BBC to amplify that, so it won’t be that effective. And the other channels are unlikely to shed too many tears over the shutdown of a subsidised rival (although I expect that the news staff will as they’re all lefties now).
November 29, 2019
Revolts, civil wars, and revolutions
Severian offers his taxonomy of protest with examples from English history:
King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.
- A revolt is a large-scale, semi-organized riot. It aims, at best (e.g. Wat Tyler’s Rebellion), at the redress of specific grievances. At worst, it’s violent nihilism (e.g. the Jacquerie).
- A civil war aims to replace one leader with another, leaving the underlying civil structure intact — e.g. any of the Roman civil wars post-Augustus.
- A revolution‘s goal is total social transformation. We’re stipulating that it’s violent, because while stuff like the Industrial Revolution is fascinating, we’re not looking at peaceful change here in the Current Year. Revolutions are necessarily, fundamentally ideological.
I realize this can cause some confusion, as events I’d classify as “revolutions” are called civil wars in the history books, and vice versa. But the difference is important, because it sheds light on the development, course, and outcome of events.
The paradigm case is the English Civil War, 1642-51. This was clearly a revolution, as it aimed at — and achieved — the near-total overthrow of existing society. When Charles I took the throne in 1625, his kingdom was very much closer to a Continental-style divine-right monarchy than most Britons would like to admit. While the English had succeeded in clawing some of their liberties back from the crown after Henry VIII’s death, the fact remains that the Stuart state, like the Tudor state, was despotic. But by 1625, the despot was completely out of step with his people, and his times.
By 1642, the first revolutionary prerequisite was in place: No clear alternative. There were lots of revolts against Henry VIII, and one of them, the Pilgrimage of Grace, had the potential to turn into a civil war, or even a revolution. The revolts against Elizabeth I didn’t quite rise to that level, but the Northern Rebellion, and Essex’s Rebellion certainly imperiled her government. See also Wyatt’s Rebellion against Queen Mary, the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion against Edward VI, etc. In all of these, the alternative was clear — return to Rome, replacement of one court faction with another, or return to the old ways.
November 28, 2019
It’s time for the ever-popular Game of Budget Leaksmanship for the British military
Sir Humphrey wants to encourage all defence-minded readers not to panic unduly at the all-too-predictable tactics used by all sides in the next round of British government defence planning:
It’s that time again, a period theoretically seen every five years or so, but occasionally more recently than that. A group of people who it seems cordially loathe each other spend months leaking, shouting, briefing and making grandiose pledges that don’t always get fulfilled. This whole, and at times, unedifying, process is, of course, the latest iteration in a Strategic Defence Review.
The Sunday Times leads with a story today that the Army is facing cuts to its manpower, and that in return they want the Navy to be forced to lease or mothball one of the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers. The article talks about a range of debates going on, and the latest news about what may or may not be scrapped or cut in any future budget settlement. Is this something to worry about, or is it merely the opening salvos in what is likely to be a long and painful campaign of attrition?
Defence reviews are driven from the very centre of Government – they occur usually with the Prime Minister of the day’s blessing, and they are now run centrally – usually via the Cabinet Office, and not by the MOD. This reflects the fact that modern national security requirements means the need to bring all departments together in a consensus and not isolated pockets doing their own thing.
He also provides a helpful list of the specific “the-sky-is-falling!” predictions you can expect to see through all stages of any given defence review process:
What is clear is that the new season of “Game of Planning Rounds” has begun. We can expect plenty more leaks like this to a variety of sources and papers which will be intended to achieve effect. If past performance is anything to go by, you can expect to see a “greatest hits” collection of some variants of the following options leaked in the next 12-18 months:
a. Parachute regiment to merge with Royal Marines
b. White elephant carriers are all to blame
c. The nasty MOD civil service did it …
d. SAS to merge with SBS
e. RAF to take control of all F35 and scrap FAA
f. Army has more horses than tanks
g. Army to no longer have enough troops to deploy a Division
h. Cranwell, Sandhurst and Dartmouth to close / merge in one location
i. RN to scrap X number of frigates or other ships
j. Naval Infantry Division to return …
k. Army to scrap Y number of tanks
l. RAF to dispose of Z aircraft fleetsAll of these have appeared in the past, but how many of them actually happened or were true? The above links are just a snapshot in time (based on a quick google) but demonstrate that in the build up to a review, we’ll see a lot more articles like this one (which predicted cuts, many of which never happened) and a lot of rumours, angst and predictions.
Humphreys honest advice is simple – DON’T PANIC! Until the review is finalised, and has gone to the Prime Minister of the day for approval, nothing is set in stone. There will be leaks aplenty, rumours aplenty and very little in the way of actionable outcomes. Until the final package of measures is approved, everything is to play for, and anything can happen. It is just not worth getting worked up about because unless you are on the inside track as part of the Review team, you don’t know what is going on.
“The chickens are coming home to roost … but they are, actually, Pierre Trudeau’s chickens”
Ted Campbell looks at Justin Trudeau’s plight — needing to focus on policies that will increase his party’s chances of winning more seats in Quebec — with increasing demands from south of the border to get the Canadian commitment to higher military spending moved from “aspirational goal” to actual policy:
Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Many in the media are saying, and I agree, that Justin Trudeau’s agenda for the next couple of years is about 99.9% domestic and focused, mainly, gaining seats in on Québec and holding on, at least, in Atlantic Canada and in urban and suburban Ontario and British Columbia. The overarching aim ~ the ONLY aim ~ of this government is to be re-elected with a majority.
As I mentioned a week or so ago, Donald J Trump is about to rain all over Justin Trudeau’s parade.
As Murray Brewster reports, for CBC News,
The Liberal government is facing renewed political pressure from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to increase defence spending to meet the benchmark established by NATO [… and …] Robert O’Brien, the new U.S. national security adviser, said it is an “urgent priority” to get allies across the board to set aside military budgets that are equal to two per cent of the individual country’s gross domestic product [… while …] Speaking with journalists at the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday, O’Brien rattled off a list of the world’s flashpoints, including Iran and Venezuela, as well as traditional adversaries such as Russia and China [… saying …] “There are very serious threats to our freedom and our security [… and adding that …] Canada made a pledge at [the 2014 NATO Summit in] Wales to spend two per cent. We expect our friends and our colleagues to live up to their commitments, and Canada is an honourable country; it’s a great country.”
Note the choice of words by Mr O’Brien, who is “a lawyer and former U.S. State Department hostage negotiator.” He doesn’t say that President Trump and the USA “asks” Canada to keep its word (although the Harper government said that spending 2% of GDP on defence was an “aspirational goal,” rather than a firm commitment) nor did he say something like “the US hopes Canada will change its ways and spend more on defence.” He said that Donald Trump’s America “expects” Canada to live up to its “pledge.” As I mentioned before, when President Trump negotiates with friends and allies he usually has both fists in the air and his knuckles are often reinforced with unfair trade tariffs and the like. Right now he is, for example, asking Japan and South Korea to pay much, much more to support American forces in their countries because, in his mind, he (America) is providing a “service” which is all for the Asians and is not, in any way, in America’s self-interest and, therefore, he wants to be reimbursed. It’s a very Trumpian notion. I am sure he sees NATO and NORAD in very much the same light.
[…]
The issue that worries some analysts is that while Canada is, in the final analysis, protected by the US because it is in America’s best interests to protect us, NATO provides a useful counter-balance and, in effect, helps us to at least pretend to be a little less than just another American colony. And that, having the status of being little better than a US colony, is what Pierre Trudeau willed upon Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he wanted to leave NATO, entirely and saddled Canada with his, juvenile, nonsensical, neo-isolationist “Foreign Policy For Canadians” white paper in 1970. Although Brian Mulroney wanted Canada to be independent – think standing up to President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher on South Africa – and Stephen Harper did, too, the cumulative impact of Trudeau-Chrétien-Trudeau for 30 of the last 50 years has been too much to change. When our political leaders don’t care about Canada being a leader amongst the nations and don’t, in fact, even care about Canada being a truly sovereign state then we will sink, inevitably, into the status of an American colony.
November 27, 2019
The Deep State versus the President
David P. Goldman reviews a new book by Andrew McCarthy on the ongoing conflict between the elected President of the United States and the permanent bureaucracy:
Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
America’s Central Intelligence Agency in concert with foreign intelligence services manufactured the myth of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, argues Andrew McCarthy, a distinguished federal prosecutor turned public intellectual.
A contributor to Fox News and a prolific writer for The National Review and other conservative media, McCarthy well knows how to build a case and argue it before a jury. His latest book Ball of Collusion should be read carefully by everyone with an interest in American politics. It is exhaustively documented and brilliantly argued, and brings a wealth of evidence to bear on behalf of his thesis that an insular, self-perpetuating Establishment conspired to sandbag an outsider who threatened its perspectives and perquisites.
From my vantage point as an American, the constitutional issue is paramount: The American people elected Donald Trump, and it is horrifying to consider the possibility that a cabal of unelected civil servants supported by the mainstream media might nullify a presidential election. That is why I support the president unequivocally and without hesitation against his detractors.
But this sordid business has deep implications for America’s allies as well as her rivals. Trump is not a popular president overseas, except in Poland, Hungary, and Israel. In the eyes of polite opinion, McCarthy writes, “Donald Trump was anathema: a know-nothing narcissist – as uncouth as Queens – riding a populist-nationalist wave of fellow yahoos that threatened their tidy, multilateral post-World War II order.” China (and not only China) views Trump as a bully who presses American advantage at the risk of disruption to the global economy.
Donald Trump has one quality for which the rest of the world should be grateful: He really does not care how China, Russia, or any other country manages its affairs. By “America First,” he simply means that he cares about what happens in America, and is incurious about what happens outside America unless it affects his country directly. That stands in sharp contrast to view of all the wings of America’s political Establishment – progressive, “realist” and neoconservative – who believe that America should bring about the millenarian End of History by bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, by expanding NATO into a giant social-engineering project, by pressing China to transform itself into a Western-style democracy, and so forth.
McCarthy reports in persuasive detail how the spooks set up the president. There is more to be said, though, about why they did it. I will summarize McCarthy’s findings, and afterward discuss the motivation.
November 25, 2019
QotD: The origins of the state
L. Neil Smith, “What Would Real Tax Reform Look Like?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2017-10-29.
