Quotulatiousness

August 7, 2026

Brexit plus ten

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Nayler looks at the state of Britain ten years after the historic vote to leave the European Union. He notes that there appears to be a bit of buyer’s remorse among those who voted to leave the EU, although I would note that the political leadership, both Conservative and Labour, almost all did their level best to sabotage any positive results (although the “Boriswave” of immigrants would have swamped even a substantial economic boom all by itself).

In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership in June 2016, extravagant claims were made by both the Remain and Leave campaigns. Leaving the EU, the so-called Remainers warned, would propel the UK into recession and mass unemployment. Brexiteers, as they were dubbed, countered with promises of enhanced sovereignty, tighter borders, and liberation from Brussels’s stifling bureaucracy. The latter won the Brexit vote (as it came to be known) by 52% to 48%. But just over a decade on from that historic decision — and six and a half years since the UK officially left the bloc — it’s less clear whether they also won the argument.

This is in large part because of geopolitical turmoil since the vote. Throughout the last decade, there has been a global pandemic, Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (which, in turn, caused an energy crisis across Europe), and Donald Trump has waged a series of tariff wars across the world. The difficulty of disentangling the effects of these events on the UK economy from those caused by Brexit is formidable. One analyst has even said that “we will never know precisely what the impacts of Brexit were”.

Overall, however, the sweeping transformations predicted by both Brexiteers and Remainers — positive in the former case, negative in the latter — have not occurred. The actual changes have been less dramatic, more gradual, and more mixed than either side forecast. One also has to factor in the UK’s lack of a stable leadership since the vote: when Labor’s Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer on July 20, he became the UK’s 7th prime minister in 10 years. This, perhaps, has so far prevented the theoretical autonomy now possessed by the UK from being fully realized. According to a poll conducted in June, 57% of Britons now believe that it was a mistake to leave the EU — meaning there are a lot of dissatisfied Brexiteers out there.

Remainers forecast economic ruin for the UK if it chose to leave the EU. According to the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, “A vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy [and] that shock would push our economy into a recession”. A recession failed to materialize, although the pound suffered its biggest-ever one-day drop on June 24, 2016, the day after the vote, falling 10% against the dollar and 7% against the euro (it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit values against either currency, although Trump’s tariff wars and the pandemic are also factors here). That said, researchers broadly agree that Britain’s economy has contracted due to Brexit. According to a 2025 paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, UK GDP per capita is 6–8% lower than it would have been had the UK remained in the EU. Investment is down by 12–13%, employment by 3–4%, and productivity has been reduced by about 4%, according to its authors.

Immigration was a major theme of the Leave campaign. The UK Independence Party’s widely criticized poster showed a large group of Syrian refugees at the Croatia–Slovenia border in 2015, next to a massive slogan reading “Breaking Point” — and, underneath it, in smaller letters, “The EU has failed us all”. The center-right party was playing to concerns about a surge in migration over the decade and a half preceding the referendum, triggered by EU enlargements in 2004,when ten new countries joined, and in 2007. In 2000, migration to the UK from other EU countries stood at 6,000, but by 2015 it had risen to 330,000. In 2015 and 2016 alone, more than a million migrants arrived in Britain. According to a poll conducted on the day of the referendum, 33% of Leave voters said the main reason for their decision was a belief that leaving the EU “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”. It seems the poster had done its job.

The composition of Britain’s migrant population has changed radically since Brexit, with an increase in non-EU migration more than compensating for the reduction in arrivals from the EU. But immigration has not decreased. In fact, the UK has witnessed record levels of immigration over the last decade. In the year ending March 2023, just over three years after Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc, net migration peaked at 944,000.

Microsoft has zero incentive or desire to fix Windows

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

As ESR points out, Microsoft has a long history of not fixing issues that anger users, so Windows 11 isn’t going away and it isn’t getting fixed (in ways that users demand, anyway):

Microsoft will never fix Windows, because the features that enrage users in Windows 11 are exactly the ones that generate recurring revenue and market control. That is exactly *why* they enrage users!

Yes, you’ll get reversals of some idiotic user interface decisions. You’ll get some speed tweaks. These will be loudly hyped in hopes that they distract you from what you’ll never get.

Don’t take my word for this, look at what Microsoft is hyping as fixes in their reform program and Windows 12. Do they say a word about no longer requiring a Microsoft account to do a local installation? Or about removing the repeating nag prompts for OneDrive? Do they make any promises to end the advertising spam?

No. And they won’t. Because that’s where the money is. Windows now exists to broker your eyeballs to third parties and upsell you into Microsoft subscription services.

I’ve been warning anybody who would listen for 30 years that when you install closed-source software you’re accepting a power asymmetry with the vendor. All of their incentives say they should use the control you grant them to take more control. Induce more dependency. Lock you in.

Microsoft has been on this path for a very long time. “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run!”

You might think these tendencies would be restrained by their fear that when they increase the pain level above some threshold they can’t predict in advance, a critically large percentage of their userbase will pay the aggravation cost to escape their clutches. There are two reasons this won’t happen, one general and one specific to Microsoft.

The general problem is that corporations differentially respond to market incentives according to how easily they can be measured. Revenue from cloud services and the adtech vampires is a strong, visible signal; exit by pissed off users creates multiple signals that are diffuse and easy to misinterpret.

The Microsoft specific problem is Azure — which, ironically, mostly runs Linux instances. Microsoft now makes most of its money from Azure, which reduces its incentives to care about pissed-off desktop Windows customers bailing out.

Indeed, if I were a cold-blooded Microsoft strategic planner, I might be tempted to deliberately burn up the desktop business for short-term revenue, knowing that that’s not where my long-term fortress is. I’m not saying they’re actually doing that, but from outside the difference between this move and an over-focus on measurable revenue streams leading to accidental destruction is difficult to make and probably not very informative even if you could.

The bottom line is that it’s just not going to get any better. Ever. In fact, bailing out is doomed to get more painful over time. The more process habits you form around Windows, the harder the dependency gets to break.

The conclusion is obvious. Get out now. A lot of major tech influencers have noticed over the last 18 months that after decades of sour jokes about the year of the Linux desktop, Linux is finally ready for you. It’s time.

The History of Gumbo in New Orleans

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Feb 2026

Shrimp and crab gumbo with beef and ham hock served with rice

City/Region: New Orleans
Time Period: 1885

New Orleans is one of my favorite food cities. Gumbo, a rich, thick soup or stew (depending on who you’re talking to), is an embodiment of the many cultures that have lived there. Ingredients and techniques from Native Americans, Africans, French, Spanish, and Acadian roots, just to name a few, have a place in gumbo.

While this is a relatively simple dish, it is absolutely packed with flavor. I was blown away by how a handful of ingredients, cooked down over time, came together to make such a delicious dish. Go to New Orleans and try one of the many versions of gumbo, and in the meantime, make this historical version that is so, so good.

    Gombo With Crabs, or Shrimp
    To a pound of beef add half a pound knuckle of ham; chop up both in inch pieces and fry them brown in two tablespoons of boiling lard; add to them four large crabs cut up, or a pound of peeled shrimps, or both if desired; cut into this four dozen small okra pods, one large onion, a little red pepper, and salt to taste. Let all simmer on a slow fire for about twenty minutes; then fill up with warm water, enough to cover the contents two inches deep. Let this boil for two hours. If it becomes too thick, add as much water as required. If preferred, a chicken can be used instead of beef.
    — La Cuisine Creole compiled by Lafcadio Hearn, 1885

(more…)

QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”

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

The low IQ: I know some of y’all don’t like [Julian] Jaynes [author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind], but one of the big reasons I like Jaynes is that he really brings home just how much of our behavior is unconscious. Including quite complex behavior, including stuff that we have to believe is the product of deep thought — he cites the “three B’s” his physicist friend told him about. Those are Bed, Bathroom, and Bus, which is where big important ideas seem to just come to them unbidden. You may not agree with where Jaynes goes with that, but we all have experienced something similar.

If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.

Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving — your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms — if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.

The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.

The Dunning-Krugerrand. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.

The Artiste. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.

This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people — video people, at least — think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content — “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” — drops away.

Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.

Medicalization. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice — because they don’t need to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.

Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-13.

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

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

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:

Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.

I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.

I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.

Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.

Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.

From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.

I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.

It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.

But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.

True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.

Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.

None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.

No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.

Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.

B-29 Superfortress – A $3.7bn Trial By Fire

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 5 Aug 2026

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was the most advanced bomber of World War Two — but also one of the most troubled and expensive aircraft ever built, and was plagued with flaws.

Developed at extraordinary speed, the B-29 could fly higher, faster and further than earlier heavy bombers while carrying a formidable bomb load.

It introduced pressurised crew compartments, remote-controlled gun turrets, advanced fire-control systems and enormous Wright R-3350 engines. But it couldn’t hit a barn door with its guns, had urine in the brakelines and engines which kept exploding due to all the flammable metal in them.

This video explores how the B-29 was designed, why it cost more than the Atomic Bomb to develop and how the United States overcame these challenges to get it into the war.

And yes, this is purely an excuse for me to make videos about the bomber war in the Pacific, so yar booh sucks 😊

00:00 Introduction
01:47 MOAR, MOAR, MOAR
05:48 Origin Story
12:52 Built It And They Will Come
17:57 The Battle of Kansas
19:12 Root Causes – The Key Problems
23:59 So Wright It’s Wrong
32:39 Conclusions

Sources

1. Pace, S., Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Crowood Press, 2003 p.53
2. Werrell, K.P., Blankets of Fire, US Bombers over Japan during World War II, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996, p.82
3. Werrell, K.P., p.68
4. [Deleted Section]
5. Pace, S., p.23
6. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940–1940, NAID: 16660414
7. Werrell, K.P., p.75
8. Le May & Yenne, Superfortress – The Boeing B-29 and American Airpower in World War II, Westholme Publishing 2007 (original published 1988 by McGraw) p.78
9. Le May & Yenne, p.78
10. Werrell, K.P., p.80
11. Le May & Yenne, p.80
12. Werrell, K.P., p.67
13. Werrell, K.P., p.67
14. Werrell, K.P., p.80

Extreme political polarization

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski sees the current extreme polarization of political views as being no longer merely ideological:

The Left and the Right are not two different ideologies. They have grown apart to become two different civilizations.

What characterizes a civilization is its relation to morality, to truth, to beauty, to wealth – and the relation of people to power and to reality itself. By this measure, the division is not political. It is civilizational. And Feliks Koneczny — the Polish scholar who mapped civilizational systems with greater precision than anyone before or since — described exactly this architecture a century ago.

The Right represents what remains of Western Latin civilization – the tradition that inherits Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Christian morality, and from that inheritance builds: individual liberty, equality before the law, orderly competition between individuals, free speech, private property, subsidiarity, classical beauty, monogamous marriage, the dual system of private and public law, and — most fundamentally — the primacy of morality over law. Not that law is the codification of morality, but that law must be consistent with morality. Power is not above ethics. What is wrong for the individual is wrong for the state.

The Left represents an amalgamation of what Koneczny called Byzantine, Turanian, and other eastern civilizational systems – characterized by centralism, the omnipotent state, the fusion of law and morality into a single power, and the subordination of the individual to the collective. In these systems, whatever power decrees becomes moral by definition. There is no external moral standard against which power can be judged. Hence the centralism, the bureaucracy, the etatism, the social justice that replaces individual justice, the family defined by the state rather than preceding it. And hence the violence, the lies, the censorship – because in a system where power is morality, opposition is not merely wrong. It is evil.

The most fundamental difference: in the Latin civilization, morality stands above law. In the Byzantine-Turanian systems of the left, there is only one law — which is simultaneously the moral code — and it is whatever the ruler decides. This is not a difference of policy. It is a difference of civilizational architecture. It runs all the way down.

Some will say a balance is needed – a yin-yang between order and creative destruction, between conservatism and progress. This was once true. It is no longer. The Left has ceased to be a force of renewal within Western civilization and has become a force for its demolition – operating not within our civilizational framework but against it, with incompatible rules and incompatible values. Different civilizations do not compete like tennis players who accept the same rules. They fight for power with no rules and all available means – violence, lies, and morally incompatible systems. Bringing a gun to a tennis match is not competition. It is conquest.

The good news: most people are not ideologically committed to either side. They are attached to prosperity, to safety, to beauty, to the life that Western civilization actually produces – and they can be brought back to it, once they understand what they are being asked to abandon. The civilizational argument, clearly made, is the most powerful argument available. Not left versus right. Not conservative versus progressive. Latin civilization versus its opponents. Freedom, morality above power, and the individual who cannot be reduced to a subject – versus the state that decides everything, including what is moral.

The good life versus the state oppression.

Once you see the civilizational map, the political map becomes legible. And once the political map is legible, the choice is not difficult.

The End of Eternity: Micromanaging History, Killing the Future

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 3 Apr 2026

Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity can be read as a tangent to his Foundation series, an artifact of the optimism that permeated the years immediately preceding the dawn of manned spaceflight, or as a critique of central planning and social engineering. It also has a bit more character development than is typical for Asimov’s concept-focused writing.

00:00 Intro
04:33 Noys and Space
09:25 Closed Loop
11:14 The Superman
16:17 Losing the Stars
20:31 Ending Eternity
(more…)

QotD: John Nicholson, a Muslim saint who really hated India

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

John Nicholson really, really hated India. This was unfortunate for him in one sense, since he spent nearly his entire life after the age of sixteen there, until he died — violently — while still a young man. But in another sense, it really worked out for him, since it afforded him the opportunity to live out his dream, which was to abuse Indian people. Clearly, he was a complicated man.

[…]

[The First Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842)] began with the British efforts to replace Afghan Emir Dost Muhammad with a more pliant leader, which in a pattern seen from the days of Alexander onward, involved an invasion, an attempt at a pacification, followed by a grim and growing awareness that the place is full of some of the most brutal and fractious people on Earth and is simply ungovernable, which terminates in a costly retreat, the country itself returning to its customary barbarism, efforts to change it having had all the effect of flinging an encyclopedia into a chimp enclosure. For the British, this meant early success, then an overwinter occupation in which their position deteriorated, then a mass uprising, whereupon they negotiated with the locals for a peaceful exit upon surrendering their arms. The retreating British were of course betrayed and massacred. One man made it out.

Nicholson, serving as an adjutant officer with a native regiment, had earlier been taken prisoner, and endured horrific conditions as such. He watched as his Hindu soldiers refused — to a man — to convert to Islam, and were executed one after the other. After having been released, he discovered that his younger brother Alexander had been murdered and mutilated by the Afghans while retreating with the rest of the army. The entire effort had been a great traumatic waste.

One might expect that Nicholson would hate the Afghans and perhaps revise upward his estimation of the brave Indian soldiers who had served under him. But while he did indeed revile the Pashtun tribesmen (“the most vicious and bloodthirsty race in existence”) he actually seems to have disliked them slightly less than the Hindus, perhaps on the grounds that no one that eager to kill Indians can be all bad. Indeed, he seems to have learned there some harsh lessons concerning what it would take to actually accomplish anything in the subcontinent, doctrines he would apply fastidiously and thoroughly. In many ways, he went a bit more native than he would have cared to admit.

After the war, Nicholson was promoted and given a series of administrative jobs, where he became well-acquainted with the chaotic political situation in the Punjab region. Mostly under the control of the Sikh Empire, the area had long been contested ground between that new faith and Islamic invasions from the Mughals to the southeast and the Afghans through the Khyber Pass to the west, not to mention restive Hindu Rajputs and Marathas to the south. The unstable (then and now) region of Kashmir lay to the north, and the whole of the region was plagued by innumerable bandits and warlords. The BEIC ruled through direct administration, client kings, and various alliances, the latter two of which its political officers (“politicals”) had to interact with on a regular basis. It was very much a situation out of George R. R. Martin’s fever dreams, constant betrayals, perversions of every kind, and even a Ramsey Bolton-esque Sikh despot who flayed men alive for amusement.

Nicholson was in charge of the Bannu area, where he rapidly made a name for himself as a local administrator. The whole of the Bannu was infested with bandits of all kinds, from jihadis to Hindu cultists to normal brigands, and the people lived in constant fear of their depredations. Nicholson had no real interest in bettering lives, but he had even less interest in allowing any Indian, anywhere, to challenge his authority. So he set about fixing the problem as only he could.

Nicholson arrested and executed scores of bandits, rapidly processing them through his very efficient court system. The idea of impartially dispensing justice without respect to person or affiliation was quite new to the area, but Nicholson made sure the locals adjusted quickly, tolerating not even the slightest hint of disrespect from anyone, no matter who he was. When a local Muslim leader casually spit on the ground in front of him, Nicholson made him kneel and lick it up. Anyone who failed to display prompt obedience to his commands he had flogged immediately, and was the bane of servants, who were often the causal recipients of hurled cups and dishes. He was a very hands-on leader, not the least hesitant to get them dirty in a quite literal sense. At one point, when his local police were unwilling to pursue a dangerous gang leader, Nicholson rode alone to the man’s village, approached him on the street, and killed him with his sword after the suspect failed to submit to arrest. Nicholson kept his severed head on his desk pour encourager les autres.

Interestingly, such draconian brutality seems to have actually made Nicholson popular. He was harsh, unyielding, and wholly indifferent to their culture, but that very indifference made him unassailable to anything but his sense of duty. He was unbribable, as the people of India had absolutely nothing he wanted, and his complete contempt for their social norms meant that Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, Brahmin or outcast, Aryan or Dravidian, all got the exact same treatment, prompt and thorough. His mad fearlessness meant that he was similarly immune to threats. Criminals, whoever they were, received savage punishment, but the law-abiding were left in peace; Nicholson had no desire to “improve” them or their society like his contemporary Macaulay. In a real sense, for the first time, the diverse people of the area were free, under Nicholson’s rule, to live as they wished without the violent misery that had previously characterized the region. It was a multicultural success story, festooned with the occasional decapitated head.

This being India, the people expressed their feelings towards him in particular ways. A body of wild Pashtun raiders, admiring Nicholson’s capacity for ruthless violence and his grim charisma, attached themselves to him as a personal guard, fedaykin to his Muad’Dib, serving without pay and loyal only to him. In a theologically fecund area with a strong tradition of syncretism and cults of personality, Nicholson naturally became the object of worship for a group of fanatical devotees. He in turn naturally despised this, having his worshipers flogged as public nuisances, but this only served to increase their devotion to their inscrutable, violent deity. In some parts of India, the Cult of Nikal Seyn survived as a Shia devotional movement, with Nicholson cast as a Muslim saint bringing justice to a war torn land. The last member died in 2004.

Librarian of Celaeno, “The Man Who Hated India”, The Library of Celaeno, 2026-05-04.

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

The Korean War Week 111 – Will Stalin’s Nightmare Come True? – August 4, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Aug 2026

The UN conducts a massive bombing raid on the North Korean capital Pyongyang this week, and in the field, the bloody fight for Old Baldy continues. Behind the scenes, though, Presidential Candidate Dwight Eisenhower’s foreign policy guy John Foster Dulles is advocating for massive retaliation — in Korea and beyond — against all Communist states, to do more than simply “contain” them.

Power corrupts, but unaccountable power attracts bureaucrats

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We used to joke around election time that no matter who you voted for, the government always got in. Gallows humour, because it’s quite literally true. Enough people can get angry about the government in power and vote out the politicians … but the politicians aren’t the one implementing the policies that get people upset. The permanent bureaucracy barely notices when the government changes because the government rarely manages to get anything done that the civil service doesn’t want to do. It’s actually worse in Europe, because the politicians are even more mere figureheads than they are in the Anglosphere:

Christine Lagarde and Ursula von der Leyen

Nobody grows up dreaming of a career shuffling directives around Brussels.

Those jobs always fill with the same type of person: people drawn to power for its own sake, the ones who crave authority without ever answering for it. Bureaucracy doesn’t attract the best. It selects for the worst, then shields them when they inevitably screw up.

Hayek named this in The Road to Serfdom. His chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top” spelled out the logic. Unchecked power appeals most to the people least troubled by wielding it.

Mises found the engine underneath. In a market, a bad decision shows up as a loss, and losses remove you. Bureaucratic management faces no such test. Fail to fix a problem and you keep your job, then collect a bigger budget and a larger staff to keep failing with. The incentive runs backwards: waste earns you more, and the machine grows on its own.

Look at the European Union. Ursula von der Leyen presides over the Commission, the body that proposes almost all EU law. No European voter ever put her there. Heads of state handed her the post in a 2019 backroom deal and waved her through parliament. Christine Lagarde runs the European Central Bank, setting monetary policy for more than 340 million people and steering the value of the money in their pockets. She faced no voters for the job either.

You can throw out your national government every few years, but nothing above it moves, the apparatus stays. The unelected keep their offices, their pensions, their power, untouched by the only check ordinary people have.

This is the design, not a flaw in it. The people with the most control over your money and your future are the ones you are not allowed to fire.

I, Claudius (MCMLXXVI). Show Me The Way To Go Rome

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

Stam Fine
Published 3 Apr 2026

Stam Fine Reviews looks at the landmark 1976 classic BBC series I, Claudius based on the books by Robert Graves. I, Claudius is a sprawling epic looking at four emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. Claudius had a limp, stammered and facial tics but was a survivor when everyone else around him was murdered.

I, Claudius is an influential series, even in places you don’t expect it (The Sopranos, Dynasty, Succession).

Note: The Romans didn’t use the letter ‘U’ at the time unless you upgraded your subscription to Roman+. I do not presently subscribe to Roman+.

Stars Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Ian Ogilvy, Simon MacCorkindale, Margaret Tyzack, Patrica Quinn, John Hurt, and many more.

0:00 Introduction
0:33 Veni, vidi, Google Translate usus sum.
1:15 Technical Difficulties.
1:34 I, Claudius Take Two.
4:09 Augustus and Livia
5:50 Claudius
8:05 Tiberius
10:55 Caligula
13:14 Emperor Claudius
16:00 From Book to BBC2
19:11 Cast
21:24 Legacy

I, Claudius
I, Clavdivs
I Claudius

QotD: “This is why English spelling is a disaster”

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

In the 1300s the Black Death swept through England and killed somewhere between a third and half of the entire population. Entire villages emptied. Labour shortages reshaped the economy. And the survivors started moving. Massive waves of migration poured into London and the southeast from every corner of the country, bringing with them dozens of regional dialects that had never been in the same room before.

And somewhere in that collision of accents and dialects, something shifted. Literally. The vowels started moving.

Between roughly 1400 and 1700 every single long vowel in the English language changed how it was pronounced. It’s called the Great Vowel Shift. Before it happened, English vowels worked the way vowels work in Italian or Spanish. The letters did what they looked like they should do. “Bite” was pronounced “beet”. “House” was pronounced “hoos”. “Name” was pronounced “nahm”. “Knight” was pronounced “k-nicht” with a guttural sound at the end like you were clearing your throat. English was phonetic. The spelling matched the sounds. It made SENSE.

And then it didn’t.

All the long vowels began migrating upward in the mouth. The tongue positions shifted higher and higher over the course of about 300 years. And the vowels that were already at the top had nowhere left to go so they broke apart into two sounds. “Ee” became “eye”. “Oo” became “ow”. A 300-year linguistic pileup that nobody voted on and nobody agreed to. It just happened. And it happened during the worst possible window of time.

William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. One of the most important technological developments in the history of communication. And it arrived RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the Great Vowel Shift.

Caxton started standardizing English spelling based on how words sounded at that exact moment. Printers needed consistency. They needed to pick a spelling and commit. So they did. But the sounds kept changing after the spelling was already locked in. The vowels were still moving. The consonants were still dropping. And the printed page couldn’t keep up.

We had ONE CHANCE to get English spelling right and we fumbled it at the worst possible moment.

This is why English spelling is a disaster. It’s not random. It’s not lazy. It’s a snapshot of a language mid-transformation that got frozen in place by a new technology and was never corrected. Every word you have ever misspelled, every silent letter that made you feel stupid, every time you stared at “knight” and thought why is there a K in this. You used to pronounce that K. You used to pronounce that GH. Those sounds died 500 years ago and the letters are still standing there like gravestones. English spelling is full of ghosts.

That’s why “food” and “good” and “blood” are spelled almost identically but sound completely different. In Chaucer’s time around the 1390s they all rhymed. In Shakespeare’s time around the 1600s they still rhymed but with a different vowel. And then sometime after that they each went their own separate way and the spelling just stood there watching like it had given up entirely.

And HERE IS THE THING. Other languages went through similar vowel shifts. German had nearly identical changes happen to its long vowels around the same period. And German just updated its spelling. They adjusted the orthography to match the new pronunciation. Like reasonable people. English looked at the same problem and said no. We’re going to keep the old spelling. Everyone will simply have to deal with it. Every person who has ever stared at “though” and “through” and “thorough” and “thought” and wondered why four words that look almost identical are all pronounced differently? Collateral damage. Five hundred years of collateral damage and we just accepted it.

Ok so that’s the vowels. That’s the background. Now we get to the accents and this is where I lost my mind.

The single biggest difference between standard American English and standard British English today is something called rhoticity. This is a real linguistics term even though it sounds completely made up. Rhotic speakers pronounce the R sound in words like “hard” and “car”. Non-rhotic speakers drop it. “Hard” becomes “hahd”. “Car” becomes “cah”. That one feature is doing like 80 percent of the work when your brain hears someone speak and categorizes them as British or American.

Here’s what nobody told you.

In 1776 everybody was rhotic. Americans AND the British. Both sides of the Atlantic pronounced their Rs. The fancy non-rhotic accent that we now think of as THE British accent, the one you hear in your head when someone says “British accent”, the one every villain in every movie has? That accent did not exist yet. It developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the upper classes in southern England started dropping their Rs as a prestige marker. A fashion statement. And then it spread downward through society and outward through the Empire.

The accent we associate with the British Empire is actually newer than the American Revolution.

I need to say that again because it didn’t land the first time I heard it either.

The accent that we think of as “British” is newer than the country that broke away from Britain. Americans didn’t lose the British accent. The British lost the British accent. Americans are the ones who kept it.

Emma, “The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)”, Past Life, Present Cleavage, 2026-04-03.

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