Quotulatiousness

June 6, 2018

How to become Prime Minister of Spain without the pesky need for voter approval

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Black explains how the new Spanish leader got there without ever winning an election:

There is a big, fat, blindingly obvious problem with Spain’s new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez: no one voted for him, or indeed the Socialist Party (PSOE) of which he is leader.

In fact, 46-year-old Sánchez has never been overly familiar with the electorate. He entered congress in 2009 as an internal Socialist Party replacement because a lawmaker was leaving his seat early. He then promptly lost this seat in the 2011 General Election. Fortunately, in 2013, another Socialist congressional deputy left her seat early, meaning that Sánchez could once more return to the political fray, bypassing the electorate en route. Improbably, he was successfully nominated, thanks to the backing of PSOE grandees, as the Socialists’ general secretary in 2014, leading them to their worst-ever result in the 2015 General Elections. A few months later, the PSOE got rid of him as leader, and Sánchez, in turn, rid himself of congressional responsibilities by quitting his seat. His reason, it seems, was to have time to concentrate on becoming the PSOE leader again. Which is what happened.

His triumph this past week, therefore, was not built on anything resembling popular support. Rather, it was a feat of constitutional chutzpah. It began last week, when the corruption scandal that has long dogged Mariano Rajoy, then prime minister, and leader of the governing Popular Party, came to a momentary head (the so-called ‘Gurtel’ case is ongoing), with the jailing of one of the PP’s former treasurers for 33 years for fraud and money-laundering. The PP was itself also fined for benefitting from the kickbacks for public contracts. Sánchez saw his chance, and proposed a motion of no confidence in Rajoy, a move that under Spanish constitutional law results, if successful, in the replacement of the subject of the motion by the proposer. Congress duly passed the motion and that was that – for the first time in Spanish political history, a sitting prime minister was deposed through a vote of no confidence. Sánchez, with the Socialists in tow, had ascended to power.

But that big, fat fly in the ointment of Sánchez and the Socialists’ success won’t go away. For a start, you can see the absence of any public mandate writ large in the congressional maths. As it stands (following the 2015 General Election), Rajoy’s PP remains the largest single party, with 134 members of the 350-strong Congress of Deputies, while Sánchez and the now ruling socialists have only 84. To be able to govern without going to the electorate, Sánchez will have to strike deals with the seven other parties and regional representatives, including, of course, Catalonia’s independence-demanding cohort. Which means concessions, deals, compromises, all rich in cynicicsm and opportunism.

April 24, 2018

The Windrush scandal in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:

The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.

For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.

It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.

The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.

March 9, 2018

DicKtionary – G is for Gangster – Arnold Rothstein

Filed under: History, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost
Published on 7 Mar 2018

G is for Gambler, relying on luck,
Or insider knowledge, to make a quick buck
G’s also for Gangster, you know what I mean?
And combining the two was Arnold Rothstein.

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Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
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A TimeGhost format produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

February 24, 2018

“Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation”

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Britain — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple puts the boots to Oxfam:

It is very wrong, morally, to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but I cannot disguise from myself the intense pleasure, amounting almost to joy, with which I learned of the public exposure of the wrongdoings of Oxfam in Haiti, Chad, and elsewhere. Its workers, sent to bring relief to the acute and chronic sufferings of those countries, used the charity’s money, partly derived from voluntary contributions and partly from government subventions (the British government and the European Union are by far the largest contributors to British Oxfam), to patronise local prostitutes, some of them underage, and also to conduct orgies, no doubt at a fraction of what they would have cost to conduct at home.

Oxfam, at least in Britain, has long been one of the most Pecksniffian of organisations, much give to auto-beatification. Mr. Pecksniff, in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, introduces his daughters, called Charity and Mercy, to Mrs. Todgers, adding ‘Not unholy names, I hope.’ It is therefore of the hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff that I think whenever I pass the Oxfam shop in my small town, with its unctuous slogan, Thank you for being humankind, posted in the window. It is only with difficulty that I resist the urge to throw a brick through it.

Of course, Oxfam, like many large British charities, has long been a villainous organisation — and the sexual exploits (or should I say exploitations?) of its workers in Haiti and elsewhere are the least of it. In the moral sense, though not the legal, it has for many years been guilty of fraud, of misleading the public.

I first realised this some years ago when I found a used book dealer of my long acquaintance poring in his shop over Oxfam’s annual accounts.

‘Look at this,’ he said, but I saw nothing until he pointed it out to me.

Oxfam, in common with many other charities in Britain, runs thrift stores in practically every British town and city. Such thrift stores are now more numerous even than Indian restaurants: they allow people to give away their unwanted belongings in the belief that, by so doing, they are furthering a good cause.

My acquaintance pointed out that, despite receiving their goods free of charge, paying practically nothing for their labour (which was voluntary), and paying much reduced local taxes, Oxfam shops made a profit on turnover of a mere 17 per cent, much less than his own, despite his incomparably greater expenses. How was such a thing possible, by what miracle of disorganisation (or malversation of funds)?

Until then, I had carelessly assumed that the great majority of any money that I gave to a large charity went to serve its ostensible end, say the relief of avoidable suffering. I was not alone in this, of course. When I asked the volunteer ladies in a local shop run on behalf of the British Red Cross what percentage of the money I paid for a book there went to the Red Cross, they looked at me as if I were mad.

‘Why, all of it of course,’ piped up one of the ladies.

The real average figure at the time for Red Cross thrift stores was 8 per cent; but the volunteer ladies supposed, because the goods they sold were free to the Red Cross and they themselves were not paid, that (apart from a small amount for unavoidable expenses) all the money raised went directly to victims of earthquakes and the like.

January 28, 2018

“[A] right to due process in politics? That has never been a thing”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the weird, fast end of Patrick Brown’s career as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives:

Many women often said they got a creepy vibe off Patrick Brown. His haircut was kind of odd. In question period, he was too shrill.

The Red Bull fridge in his office put me off. I associate Red Bull fridges and their foul contents with terrible nightclubs full of muscle T-wearing jackasses on the make. In 2012, Brown tweeted a photo of himself with two friends dressed up for Halloween at a terrible-looking Barrie nightclub he was known to frequent. He’s dressed up as James Bond. He’s pointing his toy Walther at Goose from Top Gun and Joel from Risky Business. I want to reach back through time and space and slap all three of them.

These would all be bad reasons for a bank to deny Patrick Brown a loan, or for a taxi driver to deny him a ride, or for a company to fire him from a job in the legal department.

But they are precisely the sorts of often silly, unfair, perhaps totally misguided little whims that can turn people off politicians.

It’s widely accepted that Robert Stanfield’s 1974 campaign was materially harmed by his dropping of a football. John Tory’s principled stance in favour of funding religious schools in Ontario besides Catholic ones sent the Tories’ 2007 campaign rolling downhill onto a pier that then collapsed into a lake. People still can’t believe Hillary Clinton’s emails might have cost her the presidency.

In short, there is no justice in politics. Morons win, geniuses lose, people get screwed who don’t deserve it. So it has been very strange to see some commentators and correspondents portray Brown as having been horribly hard done by in the aftermath of two women’s allegations of sexual assault and coercion at his hands.

[…]

In the (seemingly unlikely) event these allegations result in criminal charges, he will have his day in court and face his accusers just like anyone else. And we do have defamation laws in this country. Brown must surely know who his accusers are.

But a right to due process in politics? That has never been a thing.

As party leader, Brown could turf from caucus any MPP who displeased him — as he turfed Jack MacLaren after a spree of idiocies. Every four years, his and all his fellow MPPs’ job prospects rest in the hands of the voters. That’s assuming they pass a party review that considers criteria as vague as “any ethical questions or concerns,” and assuming the leader is willing to sign their nomination papers. (It seems unlikely that whoever leads the Tories into the June 7 election will sign Brown’s.)

I was never a fan of Brown, but I’m not a conservative, so it only bothered me in the sense that I thought he was unlikely to be the one to turf the Liberals out of office at Queen’s Park. I’ve paid so little attention to the man that this will only be the second time his name has appeared on the blog since he was elected leader (another Patrick Brown shows up in searches, but he was an NFL hopeful with the Vikings back in 2010).

December 2, 2017

Reaching the limits of the “Burleigh effect”

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

ESR on the recent wave of news about sexual misdeeds of powerful politicians and prominent members of the media:

So, John Conyers now hints that members of Congress have been covering up widespread sexual assaults and workplace harassment from within their ranks for years, and that if he goes down lots of others will go down with him.

This is credible. We already know Congress has been paying out hush money to the tune of $17M to keep a lid on such allegations. That figure suggests that if there’s full disclosure, the carnage is going to be terrible.

But…Democrats will get hurt a lot worse than Republicans.

Why do I say this? Because Republicans have already been through a media hostility filter. The same J. Random Reporter (and Reporterette) that will manufacture chin-tugging excuses for the likes of Bill Clinton or Al Franken positively slavers at the thought of catching some old white conservative dude with his pants down. It is therefore likely that the really egregious Republican cases are already over.

Democrats, on the other hand, have been protected by what I’ll call the Burleigh effect. You remember Nina Burleigh, who said in public she’d give Bill Clinton a blowjob if it would protect abortion rights? Yeah, that.

The sewage the press has been not covering (Cokie Roberts said every female reporter in DC knew not to get on an elevator with Conyers) is likely to bust loose now. Especially because the hard-left faction of the Democrats obviously sees this as a way to purge the Clintonites.

I predict it’s going to be a grim time to be a Democrat in the next three months. Republicans will doubtless try to prolong the agony into the 2018 election season, and might succeed. In any case their campaign to stop the odious Ray Moore is looking pretty doomed,

November 27, 2017

Steve Kates on growing up in a communist home

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

At Catallaxy Files, Steve Kates reflects on how his early upbringing gave him insights into modern political discourse:

The one blessing about being brought up in a communist household is that you understand the left a good deal better than most. It also brings an added measure of concern when I see how easily a public unused to lying as a tactic is influenced by these manoeuvres which are standard practice on the left. My Dad was an expert in agit prop and I grew up understanding the role of the agent provocateur only too well. These are not well-meaning individuals who wish to investigate the truth. They are individuals whose only interest is to disrupt the communications among those on the other side through whatever lies they might find convenient and they hope persuasive.

[…] You will be lied to by the left to the furthest extent they believe they can get away with. That there is not an instantaneous scepticism amongst us on this side of politics from any unverified political story carried by a mainstream media organisation fills me with dread since most of us are so middle class that we find it hard to believe others will lie, distort, or withhold relevant information without the slightest hesitation if it serves their ends. The attitude you need to take when reading anything from an MSM report is the same attitude you might take when buying a used car. Do not trust a thing you are told and make sure you verify everything you can from a separate source.

Dishonesty is the trade mark of the left, not that they have a monopoly, but it is a specific tactic aimed at the fair minded who are seldom as aware as they need to be of the practice, and seldom think of the need to guard against the premeditated lies they tell. […] The interesting part is that for the left to succeed, they can only achieve their ends by lying. For the right, what you hear people say is almost invariably what they believe. The left often mimics the same concerns but it is tactical and never substantive unless for a change good policy overlaps what they see as tactical advantage.

The one valuable part of being on this side of the fence is that with so many out there on the left who will swarm around any genuine falsehood stated by someone on the right, the standard of probity is higher. This is part of the reason why sex scandals, to just name the issue in relation to Roy Moore, are not as common on the right as on the left. Except that when they are caught out – such as with Bill Clinton – it is no longer a scandal and is put to bed as soon as it is practical to do so. They never mean it. It is not hypocrisy, it is a policy of deceit. They are perfectly aware they are lying and just take the rest of us for fools.

September 30, 2017

Area poet exposes big-name poet for plagiarism

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bancroft is a quiet place (queue the joke about spending a week there one afternoon), and hardly the kind of place that you’d expect to be in the news for the investigative activity of a local poet:

A local Bancroft area poet has garnered international attention after inadvertently discovering and reporting alleged plagiarism by Canada’s former parliamentary poet laureate and Governor General Award-winning poet Pierre DesRuisseaux, now deceased.

“I was looking at Canada’s national poet laureate website, and I saw that some of the former poet laureate [DesRuisseaux’s] material was listed there,” Kathy Figueroa told Bancroft This Week. “I read the translation from the French for the poem J’Avance, and I was completely astounded … it was derived from Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise … I recognized it immediately. I was shocked … dismayed … incredulous.”

Figueroa then contacted the Office of the Poet Laureate to report her discovery. She noticed the poem was pulled immediately from the website. She also reported the information to Plagiarism Alert where a British investigator and poet Ira Lightman subsequently determined that other poems attributed to DesRuisseaux had plagiarized well-known poets such as Dylan Thomas and Tupac Shakur, according to CBC News. He reported his findings to the British Guardian newspaper, giving Figueroa credit for her critical part in the discovery.

As a poet herself, plagiarism is not something new. In fact, Figueroa has suffered from theft of her work on several occasions in the past.

“This is not trivial,” she said. “It is very dismaying when your work has been taken by someone else … and especially if that person has a respected name. There is a feeling of helplessness, and it impacts negatively on the person’s creativity. It can leave you disenchanted … you don’t feel like writing anymore.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

July 19, 2017

Conducting business in DC isn’t like some stagnant backwater like NYC

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s no wonder that Il Donalduce‘s squad of family members and friends are finding all the quicksand in the DC swamp — there are rules of conduct inside the Beltway that you must know and obey to get things done:

The Trump family is no doubt canny about the dog-eat-dog landscapes of the Manhattan real estate lagoon. But when the Trumps arrived in Washington, as political novices they entered an entirely new swampland, with which so far they remain unfamiliar. Their transition down the coastal corridor is sort of like leaving a Florida bog of alligators and water moccasins and thereby assuming one is de facto prepared to enter the far deadlier Amazon jungle of caimans, piranhas, and Bushmasters.

Here, then, are some Beltway Swamp rules:

1) Improper Meetings. Always meet in his/hers jets, “accidentally” nose to nose on the airport tarmac. Style mitigates unethical behavior. When caught, claim the discussions centered around “grandchildren.” In contrast, never go to any meeting with a Russian anything. If one must meet a foreign official for dubious reasons, then a revolutionary Cuban, Iranian, or Palestinian is always preferable.

[…]

3) Opposition Research. The more outlandish and impossible the charge, the more it will be believed or at least aired on CNN. Rumored sex without substantial deviancy is not necessarily compelling (e.g., urination is a force multiplier of fornication). As a general rule, ex-intelligence officers-turned-private investigators and campaign hit men are both the most lurid and least credible.

4) Leaking. Assume that those who collect intelligence also are the most likely to leak it, the FBI director not exempted. The more the deep state recalls the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover, the more it exceeds them. Expect every conversation, email, and text to show up on the desk of one’s worst enemy—at least for a few seconds before being leaked to the press. The more a journalist brags on airing a supposedly smoking-gun leak, the less the public cares. In sum, leaks are more likely to be fabrications than improperly transmitted truths.

[…]

6) The Deep State. Signing legislation into law or issuing executive orders does not equate to changes in government policy. Assume that almost any new law or reform can be nullified by cherry picking a liberal judge, serial leaking, or through bureaucratic slowdowns by careerist and partisan bureaucrats. The deep state works with those who rapidly grow the government; it seeks to destroy those who grow it slowly. The most powerful man in Washington is a federal attorney. With a D.C. jury and an unlimited budget and staff, he can bankrupt most anyone with dubious charges, on the assurance that when they are dropped or refuted, the successful defendant is ruined and broke while his failed government accuser is promoted. The more conservative the target, the more likely his lawyer should be liberal.

August 3, 2016

The scandal of the Chevalier d’Eon

Filed under: Europe, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In Atlas Obscura, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie tells the story of the French soldier, diplomat and spy, the Chevalier d’Eon (also known as Mademoiselle la Chevaliere d’Eon):

Mademoiselle de Beaumont or The Chevalier D'Eon. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ds-03347)

Mademoiselle de Beaumont or The Chevalier D’Eon. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ds-03347)

When the Chevalier d’Eon left France in 1762, it was as a diplomat, a spy in the French king’s service, a Dragoon captain, and a man. When he returned in July 1777, at the age of 49, it was as a celebrity, a writer, an intellectual, and a woman — according to a declaration by the government of France.

What happened? And why?

The answer to those questions is complex, obscured by layers of bad biography, speculation and rumor, and shifting gender and psychological politics in the years since, as well as d’Eon’s own attempts to reframe his story in a way that would make sense to his contemporary society. (Note: In consultation with d’Eon’s biographer, I have decided to use the male pronoun when talking about d’Eon before the gender shift and the female pronoun after.) Professor Gary Kates of Pomona College is one of the first modern academics to look closely at the life — or lives — of the Chevalier d’Eon, in his comprehensive biography Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman. Kates had access to d’Eon’s personal papers, a treasure trove of manuscripts, diaries, financial records, documents, and letters housed at the University of Leeds, and his work is widely considered the best place to start when considering d’Eon.

The story Kates tells is a complex narrative, involving Ancien Regime intrigue, secret spy rings, political necessity, burgeoning celebrity culture, and nascent feminism. The meaning of d’Eon’s transformation has been dissected for centuries; feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft praised d’Eon in their lifetime and contemporary trans groups have named themselves in d’Eon’s honor.

Even so, Kates cautions that the history of this fascinating figure is far from complete. “I don’t think I’ve written the definitive book on d’Eon,” he says. How could he? This is a person who lived enough for three lifetimes.

September 20, 2015

“What kind of Buddhism is this, Otto?”

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

Kathy Shaidle explains why using a movie’s worldview (even something as funny as A Fish Called Wanda) is not the best way to develop your own philosophy of the world:

From William James and Herman Hesse to the Beats and the Beastie Boys, Buddhism has long appealed to a certain type of post-Enlightenment Westerner — the one who yearns to fill his “God-shaped hole” with anything but God, that uptight, bossy old guy with all the boring rules and hang-ups (man.)

Buddhism — which looks from the outside like agnosticism but with cooler tchotchkes — is the obvious choice.

Now, Americans in particular take a lot of guff (see: “I forgot my mantra…”) for seeming to prefer trompe l’oeil religion — what Flannery O’Connor had her Hazel Motes concoct: a “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.” That’s probably not surprising considering you’re a country cofounded by deists.

But while it’s funny to witness lily-white lapsed Catholics, still supposedly stinging from Sister’s ruler, sitting in Zen meditation classes where they’re sure to be slapped with an even bigger stick, let’s remember that Buddhism was an Eastern religion first. It’s like Pearl Harbor: They started it.

And “they” aren’t all the unadulterated egalitarian Klaatus of our Big Sur wind-chime fantasies. Buddhist scandals — both sexual and fiduciary — receive only a slender sliver of the media attention and resulting popular scorn that, say, Catholic ones do. (Oddly enough!) Stand-up comics don’t crack jokes about perverted Theravada monks.

Yet lists of Buddhist big-shot malfeasance include such karma-killers as spreading AIDS and drinking oneself to death. And that’s just in America.

Over in Thailand, the “top Buddhist authority bars women from becoming monks,” but some are now insisting (stop me if you’ve heard this one) that female ordination is just the enema the nation’s corrupt and constipated religious authority needs most.

August 19, 2015

The Duffy Affair – try explaining it in just one sentence

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the Senate scandal that is convulsing the Parliamentary Press Gallery from coast-to-coast (actually, it’s more like from Gatineau to Nepean):

I wish I’d captured the exact quote from Twitter, but a paraphrase will have to do: someone said recently, “If you want to feel better about Canada, try explaining the Duffy-Wright scandal to someone from another country in one sentence.” I cannot help feeling that there is something to this. Our media have blitzed a courtroom and consumed great newspaper acreage over a very technical and complicated topic. There is no glamour in the affair, by world standards — phrases like “paid for hookers,” “hired a death squad” or “donations from the Klan” are absent.

Dubious billing procedures by politicians make for good stories. They helped bring down an Alberta government not long ago. But that news story involved using public resources for partisan purposes. In the case of Nigel Wright — as distinguished from the issue of Mike Duffy being a scurrilous, greedy trimmer, a truth we did not need a trial to tell us — the fundamental problem is what the Conservative party and Wright did to defray the questionable expenses imposed upon the treasury.

A scandal and a shame it may be, but in an upside-down way. Mike Duffy’s expense claims have not yet been found to be legally or procedurally wrong. Duffy was unwilling to pay them back. Nigel Wright tried to pre-empt the issue by making use of his personal fortune. It’s a “scandalous” donation of private dollars to the public treasury.

If I ask what is actually scandalous about this, I am guaranteed to receive several different answers. The Conservatives are charged with having considered paying Duffy’s expenses out of party funds, which, I am told, are “public” in nature because they are supported by a tax subsidy. The Conservatives did, of course, contemplate using party funds … but didn’t. And those funds, though subsidized, exist precisely to be applied ad libitum for partisan convenience.

Another theory is that Wright’s payment was, by its inherent nature, a “bribe.” The Conservatives, covering up bribery! — non-lawyers are fond of that one. Whether Duffy was guilty of accepting a bribe is, of course, one of the issues in the trial. It is even less clear that Wright is guilty of having offered a bribe: in law, a bribe does not take two to tango. Under the Criminal Code, giving a bribe means giving money to a legislator in order to get them to do something, or not do something, “in their official capacity.” There are plenty of speculative theories about what Wright had to gain from paying Duffy’s expenses: none, as far as I can see, involve Duffy’s official conduct.

February 28, 2015

Lady Hamilton

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Maggie McNeill recounts the life of Horatio Nelson’s beloved Emma, Lady Hamilton:

Emma Hart as Circe by George Romney 1782Unfortunately, Greville spent far beyond his means, and by 1783 he needed a new source of funds; he decided to acquire them by marrying the young heiress Henrietta Middleton, but since it was common knowledge that Emma was his lover he had to be rid of her. He therefore convinced his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to accept her as his mistress. Hamilton was an art collector, and no doubt viewed the now-famous beauty as a valuable find; he also wanted to facilitate his nephew’s marriage so as to eliminate his frequent requests for money. The deal was therefore made without Emma’s input or knowledge, and she was shipped off to Naples (where Hamilton was the British envoy) under the guise of a six-month holiday while Greville was supposedly away on business. She was, in other words, “sex trafficked”, sent from one owner to another in a different country.

But though Emma was furious upon discovering what was really expected of her, she eventually adapted to her situation. Hamilton’s home was beautiful and his art collection renowned, and he was a widower who, far from viewing her as an embarrassment, instead encouraged her modeling, singing and other performance. The form for which she became known was called “attitudes”; this consisted of an act in which she would wear a simple gown dressed up by scarves and shawls which helped her to evoke images from history and classical mythology by posing. The audience was then supposed to guess who she was portraying. Though this may sound a bit silly to modern ears, the effect was apparently very striking; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “The performance is like nothing you have ever seen before. With a few scarves and shawls she expressed a variety of wonderful transformations. One pose after another without a break”. Within a few years of her first performance in the spring of 1787, a number of other actresses took up the art; over the years Emma herself evolved from mere posing into acting out short pantomimes, most famously portraying Medea.

Sir William eventually married Emma on September 6th, 1791; he was sixty and she twenty-six. The match gave her the title by which she was forever known afterward, though friends still called her “Emma”. It also gave her the duties of a diplomat’s wife, among them entertaining Horatio Nelson (then a mere post captain) when he came in 1793 to request reinforcements from the King of Naples. By the time he returned in 1798 he had lost an arm, an eye, most of his teeth and the majority of his health, but had won both the Battle of the Nile and worldwide fame. Sir William invited the great man to recuperate in their home, nursed by his young wife, and it was at this time that the two began their affair.

But while one might think this a betrayal of hospitality, the truth is that Sir William definitely knew about and seems to have even encouraged the affair; he and Nelson respected and admired one another, and Emma and Nelson had similar feelings for one another. Indeed, the relationship soon developed into a ménage a trois; after the Neopolitan Revolution of 1799 the ailing Hamilton was allowed to retire and return to England, accompanied by Nelson, who openly moved in with the Hamiltons despite having a home (and wife) of his own. In fact, the arrangement became such a huge scandal that the Admiralty ordered Nelson back to sea to keep him away from Emma. The public, however, was fascinated and the Hamiltons seemed completely unconcerned with what anyone said; when Emma gave birth to a daughter on January 31st, 1801 she named her “Horatia”, flagrantly advertising her paternity.

February 10, 2015

Edmund Curll, “printer, pirate, and pornographer”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown, guest-posting at Charlie’s Diary, discuss a thoroughly awful man of letters:

Like now, there were ripoff booksellers masquerading among the legitimate ones, though today’s scammers (see Writer Beware) are rarely as colorful as the rascally Edmund Curll — printer, pirate, and pornographer. He stole material with flagrant disregard for copyright. As soon as some prominent person died, he collected gossip — it didn’t matter if it was true — for a biography, and if he didn’t have enough material, he made it up. Prominent people reportedly dreaded dying because of what Curll would do to them. A faint echo of the Curll treatment occurred a couple weeks ago, when Colleen McCullough’s obit started off by noting how fat and unlovely she’d been.

Curll churned out so much X-rated stuff under various guises that the word ‘Curlicism’ became synonymous with porn. Prison, a stint in the stocks, even being blanket-tossed and beaten by the boys at Westminster school not only didn’t stop him from theft and libel, he turned them all into marketing opportunities. Even when he was convicted of libel and forced to publish an apology and a promise to stop printing, his repentant words touted his latest books.

He’s best known for the twenty-year running duel with the poet Alexander Pope, from whom he not only stole, he lampooned under his own name and with sockpuppets. It began when he first pirated Pope, prompting the poet and his publisher to meet Curll at the Swan, where they slipped a mega dose of “physic” (think ExLax) into his drink. He turned that, too, into a marketing event, once he’d recovered from the extremes of ejecta; when Pope published a couple of triumphant pamphlets, claiming Curll was dead, Curl came right back with new material demonstrating that he was very much alive and up to his usual racket.

Their history — and there are other equally crazy-ass stories — remind me of the whoops and hollers of internet feuds and FAILS now, among writers, editors, publishers (some individuals wearing all three hats).

Aside from the Curlls, most booksellers, the publishers of the eighteenth century — like the editors working at traditional publishers now — were hardworking people who made careful decisions about what to publish because they were the ones fronting the costs of printing and of copyright.

The booksellers of Grub Street were all about copyright. For most of the eighteenth century, they met yearly, over sumptuous dinners, to hold a copyright auction that was exclusive to the booksellers. Interlopers were unceremonious chucked out.

October 17, 2014

Germany’s arms procurement plight

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Germany, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Peter Dörrie explains the German government’s current embarrassment due to the revelations about the desperate straits of all German military branches. The combination of delivery delays, cost overruns, technical faults, and low equipment availability mean that Germany could not come to the aid of NATO allies in a crisis:

The German armed forces have come clean. They’ve admitted they’re incapable of managing arms procurement — and have systematically neglected the hardware that’s already in service.

Military procurement and management in Germany have been under heightened scrutiny ever since Berlin’s attempt to buy an European version of America’s Global Hawk drone ended in miserable failure in mid-2013.

In late September, the German military sent an explosive report to parliament, confessing that half of the armed forces’ heavy equipment is unserviceable and can’t deploy in a crisis.

The German navy, for example, possesses 15 Sea King helicopters, but 12 of them are grounded. The situation is similar with respect to the naval Sea Lynx helicopter — just four out of 18 can fly — and the heavy-lifting CH-53 helicopter. Sixteen out of 43 CH-53s are functional.

The Luftwaffe can field only 80 Typhoon and Tornado fighters, out of 140 on the books. So short of equipment, at present Germany would be powerless to respond if a fellow NATO member were to ask for military assistance.

And the bad news doesn’t stop there. On Oct. 6, Defense Minister Ursula Von Der Leyen released a report by an outside consultancy analyzing the military’s nine biggest weapons purchases.

The report is damning. Every single procurement effort suffers some combination of cost overruns, delays and technical shortfalls. And owing to the ministry’s unwillingness or inability to negotiate proper contracts, the government has had to pay for the overruns itself. The arms manufacturers waltz away with their full fees.

This is sounding disturbingly similar to Canada’s military procurement problems.

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