… I don’t speak Russian, but as an amateur Sovietologist I’m aware of the KGB’s rich lexicon of “information warfare”. Disinformation is, of course, either a loan word or a calque, depending on how you want to look at it — dezinformatsiya. (A loan word comes over directly, like “concerto”; a calque is a literal translation of a foreign term, like “flea market”). And then there’s the maskirovka, a whole class of specifically military deceptions. No nation poured more resources into this stuff than the Soviets. A KGB defector named Golitsyn wrote a study, New Lies for Old, that’s interesting. A general in the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, named Ion Mihail Pacepa wrote another, called Disinformation. Good stuff.
Looking at the “news” these days is a fraternal socialist experience, comrades. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between disinformation and propaganda. As we know from Theodore Dalrymple, propaganda is designed to humiliate you. All the “Biden won” stories, obviously, are pure propaganda — we know they’re not true, they know they’re not true, but by shoving them down our throats, they emphasize the almost total power differential between them and us. This is obvious, therefore uninteresting.
The dezinformatsiya, though, that’s fun. You know it’s a lie — is it in the Media? then it’s a lie — but the purpose of the lie is often opaque. For instance, this new variant of COVID supposedly making the rounds in England. You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to find the timing of that pretty damn suspicious. After all, we’re all supposed to have our “warp speed” mandatory goop shots here in a month, which means no more masks, no more lockdowns, no more of the führer-iffic fun our Glorious Leaders are jonesing for. We can’t be having that, and so hey, whaddaya know, just in time for Christmas, a new pox …
[…]
The problem with any disinfo op, of course, is that you have to pitch it at not just how smart the enemy actually is, but how smart he thinks he is. The KGB used to use two-stage deceptions all the time. There was a clumsy, obvious ploy that was designed to fail. The counterintelligence people would sniff it out, then congratulate themselves for seeing through those goofy commies and their hilarious misunderstandings of the free world. Meanwhile, the second caper sailed right through, because the counterintel boys stopped looking after busting the first one.
Severian, “Stojak”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-22.
April 30, 2023
QotD: Propaganda, dezinformatsiya, and maskirovka in the Current Year
April 24, 2023
Even fighter pilots and gunners have love lives
In The Critic, John Sturgis reviews a new book by Luke Turner titled Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, which considers the myths and reality of wartime relationships during the Second World War:
Spitfire pilot Ian Gleed shot down five enemy aircraft in just a week in May 1940 — the fastest time in which this had ever been done, making him an official “ace” who would be quickly promoted to Wing Commander.
Gleed had become a poster boy for “the few”, the hero pilots of the Battle of Britain to whom so many would owe so much. He lived up to the popular image with his talk of “a bloody good show” and shooting down “damned Huns”, after which he’d sink a few warm beers and spend some “wizard” free time recuperating with his girlfriend Pam, whom he “loved now more than ever”.
Gleed’s luck finally ran out over Tunisia in April 1943 when his plane was hit by a German fighter and crashed into dunes. Gleed was killed. He was just 26.
It would only emerge decades later that much of the popular image he had cultivated simply wasn’t true. Gleed was gay. Pam was an imaginary character he had invented as a cover to keep his double life as a sexually active homosexual firmly secret.
Gleed’s story is one of many similar vignettes in this alternative history of the Second World War. Its author Luke Turner’s previous book was a memoir about his own grappling with issues around his identity as a bisexual. Here he takes up the question of how this would have played out for him and other sexual non-conformists in 1939–45.
Turner grew up obsessed with the war — everything from Airfix kits and Dad’s Army to Stalingrad and the Berlin bunker — and here he examines what it was to live through that period as a sexually active person of whatever hue. It proves a particularly rich subject matter as sex seems to have been everywhere in war time: everyone was sleeping with everyone else, apparently. It’s a perennial truth that you or I might be hit by a bus tomorrow — but make that bus a bomb, and suddenly this seems to create a sense of urgency which frequently manifests itself sexually, lending daily life what Turner calls “an aphrodisiac quality”. As Quentin Crisp put it when describing the shenanigans in blacked-out, Blitz London: “As soon as the bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed.”
Whilst war may see an explosion of sex of all kinds, the establishment was not always comfortable with this. A Home Office report on public behaviour in London during the Blitz noted, “In several districts cases of blatant immorality in shelters are reported; this upsets other occupants of the shelters.”
One contemporary account suggests, “In wartime a uniform, whether of the Army, Navy or Air Force, to the average girl ranks as a fetish.” This had consequences in the field: Dear John letters from home could be a real problem in this regard. As an Army report in 1942 put it, morale is often damaged by “the suspicion, very frequently justified, of fickleness on behalf of wives and girls”.
Amongst all this sex was, of course, sex with Americans. Turner cites George Formby who captured this mood in the song “Our Fanny’s Gone All Yankee”: “She don’t wait for the dark when she wants to have a lark/In a bus or train she does her hanky panky.”
Then in a dark reversal of this two-nations-colliding-sexually motif, we get the horror of the Red Army’s organised rape of as many as 1.4 milllion German women during the Russian advance on Berlin, whose residents would later refer to the city’s grandiose monument to Soviet war dead as “the tomb of the unknown rapist”.
April 21, 2023
The bigger the government, the worse it does everything
Sarah Hoyt wants you to see the illusions that the government and the legacy media have invested so much time and effort to make you believe:
The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.
Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.
Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?
Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.
Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control”.
This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.
In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)
The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.
But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)
April 14, 2023
The trust deficit is getting worse every day
Ted Gioia provides more evidence that the scarcest thing in the world today is getting ever more scarce:
Here are some news stories from recent days. Can you tell me what they have in common?
- Scammers clone a teenage girl’s voice with AI — then use it to call her mother and demand a $1 million ransom.
- Millions of people see a photo of Pope Francis wearing a goofy white Balenciaga puffer jacket, and think it’s real. But after the image goes viral, news media report that it was created by a construction worker in Chicago with deepfake technology.
- Twitter changes requirements for verification checks. What was once a sign that you could trust somebody’s identity gets turned into a status symbol, sold to anybody willing to pay for it. Within hours, the platform is flooded with bogus checked accounts.
- Officials go on TV and tell people they can trust the banking system—but depositors don’t believe them. High profile bank failures from Silicon Valley to Switzerland have them spooked. Over the course of just a few days, depositors move $100 billion from their accounts.
- ChatGPT falsely accuses a professor of sexual harassment — and cites an article that doesn’t exist as its source. Adding to the fiasco, AI claims the abuse happened on a trip to Alaska, but the professor has never traveled to that state with students.
- The Department of Justice launches an investigation into China’s use of TikTok to spy on users. Another popular Chinese app allegedly can bypass users’ security to “monitor activities on other apps, check notifications, read private messages and change settings.”
- The FBI tells travelers to avoid public phone charging stations at airports, hotels and other locations. “Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices,” they warn.
The missing ingredient in each of these stories is trust.
Everybody is trying to kill it — criminals, technocrats, politicians, you name it. Not long ago, Disney was the only company selling a Fantasyland, but now that’s the ambition of every tech empire.
The trust crisis could hardly be more intense.
But it’s hidden from view because there’s so much information out there. We are living in a culture of abundance, especially in the digital world. So it’s hard to believe than anything in the information economy is scarce.
Whatever you want, you can get — and usually for free. You can have free news, free music, free videos, free everything. But you get what you pay for, as the saying goes. And it was never truer than right now — when all this free stuff is starting to collapse in a fog of fakery and phoniness.
Tell me what source you trust, and I’ll tell you why you’re a fool. As B.B. King once said: “Nobody loves me but my mother — and she could be jivin’ too.”
Years ago, technology made things more trustworthy. You could believe something because it was validated by photos, videos, recordings, databases and other trusted sources of information.
Seeing was believing — but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays.
For example, people who consult Wikipedia to understand the economy might be surprised to learn that the platform’s write-up on “recession” kept changing in recent months — as political operatives and spinmeisters fought over the very meaning of the word. It got so bad that the site was forced to block edits on the entry.
There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack.
Trust used to be a given in most western countries … it was a key part of what made us all WEIRD. Mass immigration from non-WEIRD countries dented it, but conscious perversion of trust relationships by government, media, public health, and education authorities has caused far more — and longer lasting — damage to our culture. Trust used to be given freely, but now must be earned. And that’s difficult for organizations that have proven repeatedly that they can’t be trusted.
April 2, 2023
Ozempic versus the make-believe world of “Healthy at Every Size”
Poor Americans are being propagandized that being fat — even to the point of being unable to carry on ordinary tasks — is “perfectly healthy” at the same time that the glitterati, the wealthy, and the mediagenic are getting thinner thanks to diet, exercise, and (it’s an open secret) drugs and cosmetic surgery. Along comes an antidiabetic drug that was found to have an interesting off-schedule property:
If you, a commoner, encountered a feudal lord in the year 1200, the latter would likely be wearing fine armour, carrying a well-polished sword, and riding a horse. Upon seeing these visual cues, you would address him properly, lest he punish you for failing to show proper deference. But as the centuries passed, particularly in the years following the American and French revolutions, this notion of privilege faded; the rich might be a class apart, but at times they might be dressed much like you, even if their apparel was slightly better-made.
Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction.
Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.
Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi.
In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.
March 20, 2023
QotD: The world of “Plum”
The maestro also knew a thing or two about politics. This is strange, for few of his nearly one hundred novels, short stories or plays betray more than a nodding acquaintanceship with the great upheavals of the 20th century. Enquiring deeper, the connoisseur will find that his eternal creation, Jeeves — the discreet, silent, valet-cum-butler extraordinaire — was named in honour of a popular English cricketer who died on the Somme in 1916. The subject himself, in a post-1945 volume, admitted to his employer Bertie Wooster that he had “dabbled somewhat in the Commandos” during the Second World Conflagration.
War and turmoil are there, lurking in the background, if successfully banished from much of his writing. Sadly, Pelham Grenville (forenames he hated, so adopted the moniker “Plum” instead) was naïve. Loafing professionally in France when the Wehrmacht knocked on his door for tea and crumpets in 1940, he and his wife were interned as enemy aliens. In 1941, Plum agreed to record five broadcasts to the USA, then neutral. Entitled How to be an Internee without previous Training, they comprised playful anecdotes about his experiences as a prisoner of the folk in field grey. I’ve read them. They are rib-tickling and harmless, and his American readers lapped them up. Alas, his British fan club took a different view.
The devotees of Bertie Wooster, Reginald Jeeves, the Earl of Emsworth, Sir Roderick Glossop and Co. were at first stunned, then vexed and finally branded the poor author a traitor. Although a post-war MI5 investigation exonerated him, a hurt Wodehouse thereafter lived in exile on Long Island. Fortunately for us, the flow of humour continued unabated, but Plum’s hard-earned Knighthood for conjuring up the essence of Bottled Englishness was long delayed until the New Year’s Honours of 1975. He died soon after, on St Valentine’s Day, aged ninety-three.
This lapse of judgement was all the more extraordinary given his ability to spot a scoundrel at one hundred paces. Threats to the serene, ordered nature of English society in which he resided — indeed helped to create — were few. In Wodehouse’s Garden of Eden, there is a definite hierarchy of earls and aunts, bishops, baronets and young blades, stationmasters and policemen.
The majority of his tales are set in country houses, replete with conservatories, libraries, gun rooms, stables and butler’s pantries. Letters arrive by several posts a day, telegrams by the hour. Trains run on time from village stations. Other than the pinching of policemens’ helmets, there is order and serenity. Necklaces are filched, silverware is purloined, butlers snaffle port, chums are impersonated, romances develop in rose gardens, but nothing lurks to fundamentally reorder society.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Coups and coronets”, The Critic, 2022-12-13.
March 9, 2023
“… the French Resistance effect is beginning to appear: After the Nazis leave France, everyone says they were always with the Resistance”
Chris Bray notices what we’re not supposed to be noticing:
French women accused of collaborating with the Germans are paraded through the streets by members of the French Resistance after liberation, Summer 1944.
Original photo from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons.
Almost two years ago, with a moral panic still consuming the world and the narrative shift far in the future, the journalist Laura Dodsworth published a tough, concise, well-argued book describing the very deliberate efforts of the British government to create a widespread state of fear — that’s the title of the book, by the way — that would paralyze ordinary people and compel them to comply with harsh and repressive public health measures. You’ll be shocked to hear that she was attacked and vilified; one prominent review called State of Fear “an outrageously dumb book selling conspiracy hooey”.
Then, in 2023, Isabel Oakeshott gave us the halfwit government minister Matt Hancock’s pathetic whatsapp messages — in which he clumsily babbles about creating a state of fear to get the public to obey the government — and the rest is history. Laura Dodsworth was demeaned and defamed, and then she was vindicated.
Moral panics always fade. Manufactured crises always crack and collapse. Propaganda always has a “sell by” date, and then it turns rancid. The effect is comparable to what Warren Buffett says about a recession: When the tide goes out, you can see who’s been swimming naked.
This is where we are with the January 6 narrative, as the most horrible attack on Our Democracy™ since the Civil War collides with the image of a dork in Viking horns calmly wandering the hallways with a police escort. The political class is taking it well.
This image speaks:
That’s violent insurrectionist Jacob Chansley walking calmly through a crowd of police officers who aren’t making the slightest effort to stop him. That’s what happened. Other things also happened, and some of them involved violence and broken windows, but this is the act in the center ring of the circus. Now, the lawyer who represented this violent insurrectionist says plainly that Jacob Chansley was the victim of Brady violations, and other January 6 defendants are racing to raise the same point in court. The tide is going out.
[…]
And it seems possible to me, or rather it seems likely to me, that the French Resistance effect is beginning to appear: After the Nazis leave France, everyone says they were always with the Resistance. As narratives shift, and the moral meaning of an act during a moral panic is recoded, people may begin to remember their choices differently. We’ll see.
February 14, 2023
Are you not a PATRIOT? Do you hate FREEDOM?
I sometimes wonder if any bill ever gets passed in the United States without a catchy acronym anymore. Rob Henderson notes the anti-patriotic PATRIOT act and the anti-freedom FREEDOM act as examples of bills named in a way to almost exactly invert the true purpose of the legislation:
Many fully-grown adults have never developed the ability to think beyond words. Others are keenly aware of how easily people fall for this language game. And tactically exploit this mental weakness.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. William Shirer, the American journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, described his experiences as a war correspondent in Nazi Germany:
The strangest variant of this way of thinking is the belief that just because a word or a term sounds good, the reality behind it is also unquestionably good.
In October of 2001, the Bush Administration famously decided to expand state surveillance. This allowed federal agencies to monitor domestic telephone conversations, online activity, email, and financial records, among other intrusions, without a court order.
And what did they call this decision? The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.
USA PATRIOT Act.
Better known as the PATRIOT Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?
In June of 2015, the PATRIOT Act expired. The Obama Administration then restored most of the provisions under the title Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.
USA FREEDOM.
Better known as the FREEDOM Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?
There’s a country in which the first three names are “Democratic”, “People’s”, and “Republic”. The first and third words essentially mean the same as the middle — this state belongs to the people, and represents them.
In the modern era, government legitimacy is derived from this concept — representation of the people.
So the name of this particular country basically begins: “Legitimate Legitimate Legitimate”. Officially it known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Sounds like a lovely place. It’s more commonly known as North Korea.
The Soviet Union was officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
China today is officially known as the “People’s Republic of China”.
Who could be against entities with names containing words like Republic, Democratic, People’s, and Union? They sound so nice. Even socialist is cleverly named — who could be against anything with the word “social” in it?
There’s a violent organization that calls themselves Antifa. Short for antifascist.
There are people who will say with a straight face that if you criticize Antifa, then you are a fascist. Or they will imply that you harbor fascist sympathies.
Interestingly, as William Shirer notes in the book referenced above, Antifa collaborated with the Nazis to help elect Adolf Hitler. Antifa has its origins in Germany, and, as a communist organization, their primary goal was to accelerate the forces of history. Antifa in the 1930s aimed to bring forth the revolution. They partnered with the Nazis to overthrow the Social Democrats who controlled the Weimar Republic. Antifa supporters believed that a fascist regime was a necessary step to end capitalism and usher in a communist utopia.
During this period, fascist was used as an epithet against capitalist society and anyone opposed to communism. They used this term to describe the center-left party in control of the Weimar Republic. As Stalin put it, “Fascism and social democracy are twin brothers, social democracy is only a wing of fascism.”
February 10, 2023
Hitler’s Jazz Band – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 9 Feb 2023Does Adolf Hitler like Duke Ellington? No, and nor do many National Socialists. But the story of the music in the Third Reich is more complicated than you might think. What if we told you that Joseph Goebbels has tried to create a Nazi-approved swing band tasked with bringing the Jazz War to the Allies?
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February 8, 2023
“Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s”
Christopher Snowden asks whether we should believe the consistent claims of public health advocates on how much things they disapprove of (smoking, drinking, etc.) “cost” the taxpayer:
If smoking costs the taxpayers £173 billion, then how much does widespread forced feeding of office pastries cost?
If you say that a certain activity costs society £10 billion a year, most people would assume that if that activity disappears, society will save £10 billion a year.
They might have different ideas of what “society” means. Some will assume that the £10 billion is a cost to taxpayers while others will assume that some of the cost is borne by private individuals and businesses. But the majority will, quite reasonably, assume that the cost is to other people, i.e. those who do not participate in the activity.
And nearly everyone will assume that the £10 billion is money in the conventional sense of cash that can be exchanged for goods and services.
But when it comes to estimates from “public health” campaigners about the cost of drinking/smoking/obesity, all these assumptions would be wrong. Most of the “costs” are to the people engaged in the activity and they are not financial costs. Taxpayers would not pay less tax if they disappeared. In general, they would pay more.
Last month I mentioned an estimate of the “cost” of gambling in the UK and said:
These studies have no merit as economic research. They are purely driven by advocacy. The hope is that the average person will wrongly assume that the costs are to taxpayers and agitate for change.
The main aim of these Big Numbers is to convince the public that heavily-taxed activities place a burden on society that exceeds the tax revenue, thereby justifying yet more taxes and prohibitions.
In the case of smoking, this has become more and more difficult. Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s. Today, as the smoking rate dwindles and tobacco duty rises ever higher, anti-smoking campaigners have got their work cut out duping non-smokers into thinking otherwise.
Tobacco duty brings in about £12 billion a year. For years, groups like Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) used a figure of £13.74 billion as the “cost of smoking”. This came from a flimsy Policy Exchange report which included £5.4 billion as the cost of smoking breaks and £4.8 billion as the cost of lost productivity due to premature mortality. Neither of these are costs to the taxpayer. They are not even external costs, i.e. costs to non-smokers.
Last year, in a review commissioned by the Department of Health, Javed Khan came up with a figure of “around £17 billion” as the “societal cost” of smoking. This included “reduced employment levels” (£5.69 billion) and “reduced wages for smokers” (£6.04 billion). Again, these costs fall on smokers themselves and are not external costs. They are, in other words, none of the government’s business.
Last week, a report commissioned by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) pulled out all the stops and announced that the cost of smoking to Britain was now — wait for it! — £173 billion. Go big or go home, eh?
January 31, 2023
The Allied Flying Aces of World War Two – Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 30 Jan 2023Young, daring, and handsome, the Allied fighter aces of World War Two have captivated the public with their thrilling exploits. Join us as we take a look at the top scorers! Thanks to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring today’s video.
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January 30, 2023
“… say what you want about the good old Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but at least its crappy clock is behaving like a clock these days”
Colby Cosh congratulates the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for at least getting their clock moving in the normal direction once again:
Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.
On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (really a foundation that publishes a famous magazine by that name) announced that it would be scooching the minute hand of its renowned “Doomsday Clock” forward. The clock will now read 11:58:30 p.m., midnight minus 90 seconds. The Bulletin does this once a year — at a time, by pure coincidence, when newspaper editors are notoriously starved for copy.
The Doomsday Clock was originally (in 1947) a one-off magazine cover design by Martyl Langsdorf (1917-2013), a landscape artist who was married to one of the Manhattan Project physicists. She happened to set the clock at about seven minutes to midnight, but the visual metaphor was irresistible. As the arms race and nuclear proliferation began, the editors of the Bulletin started rearranging Langsdorf’s clock face as an index of the danger from nuclear exchange.
Even by saying this much I am intruding somewhat on the turf of a colleague, Tristin Hopper, who is eternally preoccupied with the pure stupidity of the Doomsday Clock. As T-Hop never tires of pointing out, you have really lost track of the clock metaphor if you manually wiggle the minute hand backward or forward annually.
Moreover, the face of the clock can at best be considered a lagging indicator. The year 1947 was probably the moment at which the danger of a pre-emptive nuclear strike was greatest. Intellectuals and strategists needed a few years to think through the implications of nuclear weapons: the logic of a first strike was compelling, and might have won the argument in any country that developed nukes until the equilibrium of mutually assured destruction was both established and theorized.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock closer to midnight as the world was learning to live with nukes and nuclear proliferation. Eventually the hand was moved backward in 1960 — practically in time for the frightening Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Royal Marines at War: Rough Weather Landing
Royal Marines
Published 31 Aug 2012Rough Weather Landing is a secret film recording of “an experiment by No4 Commando” demonstrating their ability to launch a surprise attack on a seemingly impregnable coastline.
From the comments:
ogdiver
8 years ago
“That’s right lad, you’re going to land from a boat with all the reserve buoyancy of a digestive biscuit onto a rocky shore, in a pounding surf, with a 3″ mortar base plate strapped to your back and tackety boots for swimming. But don’t worry, we’ll give you the the inflated inner tube off an Austin 7 to cling to and we’ll be doing it in daylight for the cameras.” Those blokes were nails.
January 28, 2023
QotD: Allied anti-semitism in WW2
The following leaflet (printed) was passed to an acquaintance of mine in a pub:
LONG LIVE THE IRISH!The first American soldier to kill a Jap was Mike Murphy.
The first American pilot to sink a Jap battleship was Colin Kelly.
The first American family to lose five sons in one action and have a naval vessel named after them were the Sullivans.
The first American to shoot a Jap plane was Dutch O’Hara.
The first coastguardsman to spot a German spy was John Conlan.
The first American soldier to be decorated by the President was Pat Powers.
The first American admiral to be killed leading his ship into battle was Dan Callahan.
The first American son-of-a-bitch to get four new tyres from the Ration Board was Abie Goldstein.The origin of this thing might just possibly be Irish, but it is much likelier to be American. There is nothing to indicate where it was printed, but it probably comes from the printing-shop of some American organization in this country. If any further manifestos of the same kind turn up, I shall be interested to hear of them.
George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1944-12-08.
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
January 27, 2023
The return of the revenge of the bride of the Doomsday Clock
It’s amazing how much free publicity you can get by pulling out the hoary old Cold War propaganda tools, as Andrew Potter explains with the re-re-re-introduction of the Doomsday Clock bullshit:
Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock ahead by ten seconds, to 90 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the clock has ever been to midnight, and, according to the press release announcing the move: “Never in the Doomsday Clock’s 76-year history have we been so close to global catastrophe.”
If you’re under, say, 40 years of age or so, that paragraph is probably pure gobbledygook, the written equivalent of the squawk of a 2400 baud modem going through its handshaking protocols. But for those of us in the ever-dwindling cohorts of Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers, hearing about the movement of the Doomsday Clock is to be jerked back into a time marked by both profound moral clarity and deep existential anxiety.
A bit of background on the Doomsday Clock might help. It was a creature of the Cold War, founded in 1947 by some of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project to raise public awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons. As the Bulletin puts it, the clock uses “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet”. The decision to move or leave the minute hand of the Clock in place is made each year by the various trustees of the Bulletin, based on their evaluation of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe.
The clock was initially set at a nice and relaxed seven minutes to midnight, and over the following few decades it was moved closer in response to clear nuclear threats, things like ramped-up testing of new bombs, nuclear proliferation, or rising Cold War tensions. During periods of detente or after the signing of arms reductions treaties, the minute hand would retreat. In 1991, it was moved back to 17 minutes to midnight after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Doomsday Clock was a healthy reminder of the most salient geopolitical fact of the era, which is that two superpowers were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at one another.
But like many Cold War relics, the demise of the U.S.S.R. left it scrambling for a raison d’etre. In a bit of clever PR entrepreneurialism, the executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned the clock into a more generalized warning against war, climate change and other ecological or technological threats. The nadir of this shift in mission came on January 23rd 2020, when the Bulletin moved the clock’s hands to 100 seconds to midnight.
As the press release accompanying the ticking of the clock noted at the time, this put humanity “closer than ever” to catastrophe. Given that the clock had kept watch over our drive for self-destruction through the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sabre-rattling Reagan administration, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it makes one wonder just what happened in early 2020 to merit such a fearful move.
