Mandatory, government-sponsored fun has been on the European Left’s agenda practically since the Estates General. All of that stuff — hiking clubs, guitar clubs, model this-and-that clubs — falls under “building Socialism”, and the idea is either to totally replace a community’s organic ties with State-mandated bonds, or to restore a community’s organic ties via State-mandated bonds, depending on whether the “Socialism” you’re building is of the Soviet or Nazi variety.
The Soviets, at least, went so far as to organize an entire massive government bureaucracy around the idea of Proletkult, which aimed at replacing “bourgeois” art wholesale with the “proletarian” version. You’re free to slog through the novels of guys like Maxim Gorky to see if it worked or not; for now I’ll simply note that the first head of Proletkult, Anatoly Lunacharsky, officially carried the title “Enlightenment Commissar”. […]
The other way the European Left built socialism was with sports, of course, and though it will never happen under the current dispensation, I’d love to read a solid academic history of the USSR’s Olympic teams. Viktor Suvorov (of the famous “Suvorov Thesis” of the Ostfront) insisted that pretty much all Soviet travel teams were comprised entirely of Spetsnaz commandos, and while I don’t doubt this is largely true, there were, on the other hand, “military” teams that were almost entirely civilian. To take one famous example, NHL legend Sergei Fedorov came up with CSKA Moscow, which — for some mysterious reason — you have to dig a bit to learn was the official Red Army hockey team. As in, Fedorov — though only sixteen — was in the Soviet Army, specifically to play hockey, and he wasn’t the only one. There was such a thing as “pro” hockey in the USSR, and it was very popular, but all the best “pros” played for Armed Forces teams, because anyone good enough at hockey to go “pro” would find himself drafted …
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (an ongoing series)”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
June 11, 2024
QotD: Mandatory fun
June 10, 2024
South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” falters
Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup included a lengthy section on the recent election results in South Africa and what they might mean for the nation’s short- and medium-term stability:
Being a teen, the issue of South African Apartheid didn’t really fit all that well within the overarching Cold War paradigm. Unlike most other global issues, this one didn’t break down cleanly between the “freedom-loving West” and the “dictatorial, oppressive communist bloc”, as the push to dismantle the regime came from western liberals who were in agreement with the reds.
This slight bit of complexity did not faze most people, as Apartheid was seen as a relic of an older world, one to be consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history. It’s elimination did fit well enough into the Post-Berlin Wall world, one in which freedom and democracy were to reign supreme. This was more than enough reason for almost all people to cheer the release of Nelson Mandela and applaud South Africa’s embrace of western liberal democracy.
In the early 1990s, men once again dared to flirt with utopian ideas, and South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” was to be its centrepiece: out with authoritarianism, racism, ethnocentrism, etc., and in with multiracialism, multiethnicity, democracy and individual liberty. We could all leave the past where it belonged (in the past) and live in peace and harmony, as democracy would defend it, secure it, and preserve it. South Africa would lead the way, and would in fact teach us westerners how it is to be done.
Oddly enough, South Africa quickly fell off of the radar of mainstream media in the West when it failed to live up to these lofty goals. Rather than living up to the hype of being the “Rainbow Nation”, it instead was quickly mired in the politics of corruption and race, showing itself to be all too human, just like the rest of us. South Africa had failed to immediately resolve its inherent internal tensions, whether they be racial, economic, ethnic, or ideological, and by extension it had failed to deliver its promise to western liberals. “Out of sight, out of mind” became the best practice, replacing the utopianism of the first half of the 1990s.
Granted, a lot of grace was given to South Africa by western media so long as Nelson Mandela remained in office (and even after that), but the failures were plainly evident to see: an explosion in crime and in corruption were its most obvious characteristics, ones that could not be brushed under the carpet. The African National Congress (ANC), the party that would deliver the promise of the Rainbow Nation, was instead shown to be little more than a powerful engine of corruption and patronage. Luckily for the ANC, it was fueled in large part by the legacy of Mandela and the goodwill that he had accumulated over the years while he sat in prison.
The post-Mandela era has not been kind to the ANC (nor to South Africa as a whole), as the party could no longer hide behind his fading legacy, and could no longer cash in on the goodwill that came from it. It could “put up”, and would it not “shut up”. The ANC over time became a lumbering beast, too big to slay, but too slow to destroy its opposition when compared to its nimble youth.
What has the party delivered in its three decades of power? It did help dismantle Apartheid, but it did not deliver economic prosperity and opportunity to all. Instead, it simply swapped out elites where it could, preferring to keep the new ones in house. An inability to tame crime and to keep the national power grid running has turned the country into a bit of a joke, especially when it is lumped into the BRICS group alongside Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Despite its abundance of natural wealth, South Africa has been economically mismanaged.
South Africa is an important country to watch for the simple reason that there is so much tinder lying around, ready to be set ablaze. Luckily for South Africans, dire projections of widespread civil strife have not come to pass. Unluckily for South Africans, their national trajectory is headed in the wrong direction. Last week’s national elections saw the ANC lose their parliamentary majority for the first time ever, and the only way to read the results is to conclude that no matter how one may feel about this very corrupt party, it is an ominous sign.
Elite contempt for democracy is fuelling anti-immigration “far right” sentiment in the west
Even for people who are generally happy with robust immigration, the numbers being recorded (or, more likely, under-recorded) in Canada, the United States and Europe are far too high to pretend that the new arrivals will quickly integrate into their new countries, and they are generally not being encouraged to do so anyway. Complaints to the people who have enabled these massive inflows — at best — are waved off or ignored, but often are seized upon as examples of hateful far-right xenophobia to be punished and suppressed:
Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.
Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.
The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.
Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.
If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?
This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grâce, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.
Biden, of course, is now desperately scrambling to salvage something from this disaster. This week, he contradicted himself by saying he has the unilateral capacity as president to shut down the border, and attempted to blame the GOP for the problem. Yes, the GOP was unhelpful and cynically political earlier this year — but that won’t muddy the waters for most voters who have been conscious for the past three years. But I am grateful nonetheless to hear the president echo what the Dish has been saying for years now, and for which I was routinely called a racist:
To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.
Now that didn’t hurt, did it? But why did he keep telling us there was no crisis for the last three and a half years? And why would anyone trust a re-elected Biden to enact this if he had a Congressional majority? I sure don’t.
Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory“!
The FDA has a jaundiced view of psychotherapy involving the use of MDMA (aka “Ecstasy”)
Colby Cosh indulges in a minor “I told you so” after the FDA’s expert panel recommended against the agency permitting any medical use of MDMA, despite some experiments indicating it does have therapeutic value:
Ball-and-stick model of the 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine molecule, also known as MDMA, or ecstasy, a well-known psychoactive drug. Based on the crystal structure of MDMA hydrochloride, as determined by X-ray diffraction.
Color code: Carbon, C: black, Hydrogen, H: white, Oxygen, O: red, Nitrogen, N: blue.
Image by Jynto via Wikimedia Commons.
Hopes for research into therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs received a setback last week, one that your correspondent saw tripping (geddit?) up the road in advance. An expert panel published its official advice to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on permitting medical use of MDMA, the synthetic nightclub enhancer that we’re afraid the kids probably still aren’t calling “ecstasy” or “molly”.
There is long-recognized potential for MDMA to be combined with classical psychotherapy in treating emotional disorders, notably post-traumatic stress (PTSD), and now there are some small, limited studies showing evidence of positive effects.
But the FDA’s scientists weren’t very impressed with this evidence, and they voted almost unanimously against creating a therapeutic exception to the illegality of ecstasy, which the U.S. Controlled Substances Act classifies as a “Schedule 1” drug, right next to heroin. The panel’s advice isn’t binding on the agency, which is crawling in somewhat good faith toward recognizing the understudied medical potential of psychedelics. But the vote emphasizes the inherent problems that drugs face, once they are defined in law as “recreational”, in winning over skeptical scientists.
Reason magazine’s great drug-war correspondent Jacob Sullum has a thorough discussion of the issues. The existing research, despite some impressive headline results, has garden-variety issues with dropout rates, follow-ups and occasional researcher shenanigans. But the big problem, which defies easy technical solution, is with scientific blinding of the research subjects.
Scientific trials of the modern kind are predicated upon separating illusory placebo effects from genuine treatment effects. Researchers expect that a high-quality study will have a control group that receives sham treatment or none at all, and good practice requires that experimenters and their guinea pigs are both blind to who is in what group.
News flash: most people can tell whether they’ve been really given a psychedelic drug. Indeed, most doctors can tell whether they’ve given a patient a genuine psychedelic drug, and how much of it. Many placebo-controlled trials on psychoactive drugs, perhaps most of them, thus suffer from an alleged problem of broken blinding. (Have a glance, for example, at Table 2 in this review of blinding procedures in psychedelic studies.)
Bigger Isn’t Always Better: A1E1 Independent | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published Mar 1, 2024A bigger tank is a better tank, right? Wrong.
Meet the Interwar Vickers A1E1 Independent: a failed prototype, a prototype that proved bigger isn’t always better. Impractical and expensive, it was never accepted into service – but it is said to have inspired equally cumbersome designs including the German Neubaufahrzeug and the Soviet T-35.
Join David Willey, The Tank Museum Curator, as he examines one of the more unusual vehicles in the collection – and discover how it became a focus for political espionage in the early 1930’s.
00:00 | Introduction
02:56 | Tank Design & Vickers
03:28 | Heavy Tank Requirements
05:38 | Initial Blueprints & Prototypes
11:08 | Test-bed Vehicle
14:50 | Myths, Issues and Life after Trials
19:25 | Does it lead to anything?This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum #davidwilley #Interwar #heavytanks
QotD: The British sweet tooth
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
June 9, 2024
Rishi Sunak “promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.”
Christopher Gage pokes a bit of goodnatured fun at British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s awful start to his re-election campaign:
This week on the campaign trail might just enter the political history books. Rishi Sunak, the man who themed his cheese-melting campaign on national pride and security, slipped off home early from the D-Day commemorations in France.
World leaders gathered at the event on Thursday to honour the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. You know, the one attended by a dwindling platoon of demigod veterans in what might be the final year graced by their presence. To riot in understatement, this Irish goodbye was inadvisable. Sunak might as well have fed Dame Judi Dench to a ravenous gang of XL bullies.
Our prime minister is one of life’s thoroughbred winners. From one of the most exclusive schools in the country, Sunak went on to Oxford and then to Stanford university. Cultured in our meritocratic petri-dish, Sunak has never failed a thing in his 44 years. Until now.
Twenty-odd points behind Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, Sunak is on course to finish third in a two-horse race.
It gets worse. This week, Nigel Farage announced he would stand for election as the Reform Party candidate in Clacton. That Essex seat is the living, breathing symbol of pissed-off, left-behind, white-working-class, fucking furious Great Britain.
The polls have broken Tory brains. Clamped around the Conservative Party’s noodle neck is Reform’s roid-head paws. The right-wing upstarts trail the Tories by just two points. And that was before Sunak committed the social equivalent of tarmacking over the Princess Diana memorial garden on Mothering Sunday.
Sunak is a one-colour pie chart of hubris. After losing the Tory leadership election to the ludicrous Liz Truss, Sunak got handed the top job by knowing the right string-pullers.
Breathless commentary from back then christened Sunak as a Silicon Valley start-up guru, furnishing the boy wonder with LinkedIn adjectives such as “brilliant” and “dynamic”.
Sunak parrots the pediculous babble beloved of that skulk of Babbitts. With blue-sky thinking, and by sticking to core competencies, Sunak has a plan to deliver. He promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.
What went wrong? Sunak’s indulgent reboots have crashed his operating system. Not so long ago, he was an anti-woke culture warrior reeling off tiresome jibes about trans people. Then came spartan Sunak, trusted centurion of the Telegraph comment section.
Too late. For the best part of two years, Sunak has circulated in meme-form around this teetering island, his existence a boundless source of second-hand embarrassment and ridicule.
With each reboot, Sunak sunk further. Ordinary people have a radar for bullshit. They don’t see such shapeshifting as necessary brand correction to meet market demands. They see duplicity and serpentine salesmanship bordering on fraud. In the plain English of my council-estate youth: Sunak is full of shit.
With his wings smeared in beeswax, Rishi Sunak is Icarus. And Nigel Farage is the sun.
Farage is more than the sun. Farage is Wetherspoon Man.
A quick image search for “Nigel Farage beer” provides lots of evidence for “Wetherspoon Man”During his visit to Clacton, Farage fittingly visited a Wetherspoon pub. For the unfamiliar, Wetherspoon pubs owe their undeniable success to their reliability and recognition. Wherever you may be in Britain, you know what you’ll get in one of Wetherspoons’ 800-odd cavernous boozers: A decent burger, chips, and a pint for half an hour on the minimum wage, alongside cheap, cheap booze.
Critics scoff. But they’ll never find a Wetherspoon empty at any time of day or on any day of the week.
Farage announced his plans and doubled the Reform vote in Clacton. His appeal relies on the Wetherspoon model. Farage is the same wherever he may be and to whomever he may talk. Dressed like a hobbyist gamekeeper, he sinks pints, smokes fags, and cracks jokes. “Nigel” says what a sizeable swathe of left-behind Britain thinks and wants to hear.
His many detractors don’t get it. How can a privately educated former metals trader claim to speak for the people? For the same reason that populist parties are lapping at the walls of power across Europe: their erstwhile champions are too busy peacocking their pronouns in their Twitter bios.
Operation Downfall: 2 Million Men to Invade Japan – WW2 – Week 302 – June 8, 1945
World War Two
Published 8 Jun 2024The plans to invade the Japanese Home Islands in the fall grow ever more concrete, with the main issue being not just how to transport men by the millions around the world, but where to put them once they get there. On land the fight continues in Okinawa and the Philippines, and at sea the American fleet is savaged by a typhoon for the second time in six months.
Chapters
00:34 Recap
01:22 The Allied Control Commission
02:29 Okinawa
03:50 The War in the Philippines
06:22 Halsey and another typhoon
09:13 Operation Downfall
19:07 Summary
19:24 Conclusion
20:28 Dedication to Donald Wilson Round
(more…)
Microsoft’s latest ploy to be the most hated tech company
Charles Stross wonders if Microsoft’s CoPilot+ is actually a veiled suicide attempt by the already much-hated software giant:
The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of “AI” (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It’s the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.
Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren’t in there enough, so now we’re into the silly season with Microsoft’s announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.
CoPilot+ is Microsoft’s LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000’s Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF … THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on “help the users get stuff done”. Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they’re asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it’s a truthful answer or not.
Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don’t want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel’s share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they’ve been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as “Macbook Air killers”, largely because they’re playing catch-up with Apple’s M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.
Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.
First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they’ve released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there’s on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There’s a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can’t read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.
Microsoft Recall is not that.
Men In Armour (1949) – The origins and operation of tanks
FWD Publishing
Published Feb 18, 2024Lengthy documentary made in 1949 about the men and tanks of the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC).
QotD: The biological importance of salt to humans
A population deprived of salt was thus one that was weaker and more prone to disease — and at a time when the vast majority of the economy’s energy supply came from the straining of muscle, both human and animal, that weakness in effect meant a severe energy shortage. Although the main fuels for muscle power were carb-heavy grains like wheat, rye, oats, and rice, the indispensable ingredient to getting the most out of these grains was salt — just as how nuclear power uses uranium as its fuel, but also requires a suitable neutron moderator. A population deprived of salt would quite literally be more lethargic and sluggish, making it less productive and poorer too.
Salt’s unique properties made it a serious tool of state. In 1633 king Charles I’s newly-appointed Lord Deputy for Ireland, Baron Wentworth, advised controlling its salt supply as a way to make the Irish utterly economically dependent on England. Given salt was “that which preserves and gives value to all their native staple commodities” — herrings, butter and beef — then “how can they depart from us without nakedness and beggary?” Salt would be a method of control, and a profitable one too, being “of so absolute necessity” that it could be sold to the Irish at inflated prices without much dampening demand: salt “must be had whether they will or no, and may at all times be raised in price”.2 Much like economists today, Wentworth saw revenue-raising potential in taxing goods with such unresponsive or “inelastic” demand.
Wentworth’s scheme to control the Irish never came to be. But a great many other countries did choose to tax it. Given a minimum amount of salt had to be consumed by absolutely everyone, monopolising its sale — and levying what was effectively a tax by inflating the price well above the costs of importing or producing it — could function as kind of indirect poll tax, levied more or less per head of both people and livestock, but without any of the administrative hassle of taking and maintaining an accurate census in order to impose such a tax directly.
When compared to other necessities like grain, salt did not need to be traded in especially large quantities either, meaning that its supply could be monopolised with relative ease. And it could not be produced everywhere. Salt tended to be lacking the further you got from the sea coast, unless there happened to be some relatively rare inland sources like salt lakes, brine springs, or rock salt mines. And it could even be lacking on the sea coast where it was either too humid or too cold to get salt cheaply by evaporating seawater using the sun, or where there was insufficient fuel for boiling the brine. These places were thus prone to being charged inflated prices, while the states that controlled places where the costs of production were low — in warmer and drier climes where the salty water of coastal marshes could cheaply be evaporated using only the heat of the summer sun — could extract especially large monopoly profits from the difference. The revenue from controlling solar salt thus became the basis of many kingdoms, some unusually powerful republics, and even empires.
Anton Howes, “The Second Soul”, Age of Invention, 2024-03-08.
1. Roy Moxham, “Salt Starvation in British India: Consequences of High Salt Taxation in Bengal Presidency, 1765 to 1878”, Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 25 (2001): p.2270–74.
2. George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century (Maunsel and Company Limited, 1919), p.244, which has the transcription of Wentworth’s proposal
June 8, 2024
El Loco, Argentina’s “skunk at the garden party”
In The Free Press, Bari Weiss talks to Argentinian President Javier Milei (through a translator) about his first six months in office:
At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America”.
A lot can happen in a hundred years.
Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago, it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent — one of the highest in the world.
Why? What happened?
Argentina’s new president says it’s simple: socialism.
When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state. During his campaign, he made his views clear: “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it”. In case the chainsaw he wielded on the campaign trail left any question about his intentions, during his victory speech last year, he reiterated his vision: “Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures.”
There is nothing gradual about what Milei is now doing.
He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out-of-control inflation.
This is why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving for the country — even if it meant short-term economic pain.
But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.
Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: He says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesn’t appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children“, and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic, but studies the Torah. (He even quoted a Midrash during our conversation.) He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.
But that’s all the superficial stuff. What really makes Milei unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he doesn’t represent either side. He is ultra-liberal on economics, but right-wing and populist on rhetoric. He is anti-abortion, but favors the legalization of prostitution. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize the organ trade.
He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes”. Essentially, he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. Or at least, not theoretically.
In January, Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is traditionally a place where people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrived, flying commercial, and blew up that comfortable consensus: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”
All of this is why I was eager to talk to Milei and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to improve in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: He loves it.)
And despite having called journalists “extortionists”, “liars”, “imbeciles”, “freeloaders”, and “donkeys”, for some reason, he agreed to sit down with me.
Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada
Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:
“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.
Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.
The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.
When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.
I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.
His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.
Battlefield Normandy – The battles for Norrey, Bretteville & Putot
The AceDestroyer
Published Jun 27, 2019Hello, welcome to The AceDestroyer and welcome to the third and final episode of the Battlefield Normandy Series. In this episode we follow the Canadians defending Putot-en-Bessin, Bretteville-L’Orgueilleuse and Norrey-en-Bessin. In the two days of heavy combat with the 12th SS Hitlerjugend, the 7th Canadian Infantry brigade managed to hold on to all three towns. Find out how in this episode …
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QotD: Teaching military history
At the same time, in the context of the discipline of history, this complaint is patently absurd. No Roman historian has ever bought garum at the market with sestertii, nor voted in the Roman comitia centuriata, or any experienced any of a nearly infinite number of the daily activities of life in ancient Rome. The same is obviously fundamentally true of literally any history that takes place before living memory. The closest we can ever come is something like experimental archaeology, trying out historical methods and objects and while that method is an important tool, especially for the pre-modern period, it is far from the only way to do history and not necessarily the best. So of course historians study things they have no personal experience of. That’s what history is.
Teaching military history to students either bound for the military or who have military experience is actually one of the most rewarding things I have gotten to do as an academic. In this sense I have been remarkably fortunate in a lot of my teaching, which has been at large state universities in North Carolina and Florida. Both states are well above the United States population-adjusted average for the percentage of veterans in the state and I get the sense that – though I have no hard data on this (so I may be wrong) – veterans tend to matriculate through public universities at higher rates than at smaller private liberal arts college. Moreover, every university I have taught at this far has a significant ROTC program.
Consequently, I am pretty accustomed to having both veterans back from abroad in my class, as well as students who expect to commission at the end of their college experience, along with some students who are active-duty military personnel while they are taking my classes. This is especially true (no surprise) in military history classes, as one might guess. It was not uncommon, in a 45 or 55 student section of a Global Military History survey to have the complete military-career-cycle present (though of course the ROTC students would be commissioning as officers, while the active-duty and veteran students were enlisted personnel and that is a meaningful difference). Of course those students were then side-by-side with students who have no plans to ever be in the military.
It is true that there is sometimes a higher bar of “proving” yourself to the students in those situations before they begin to trust you (as anyone who so much as looks at me knows I have never served in a military), though I would note that the hardest students to reach in this regard have always been the ROTC students (rather than active duty or veteran students), who ironically have no more experience of combat than I do. At the same time, those students are choosing to be in your class because they think you have something to say on the topic and clearing the bar of “this guy knows what he’s talking about” has never been a real problem for me. If you know your business and show that you take the subject seriously, the matter resolves itself.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.
