The Cliff and the White Shore, 1913 by Felix Vallotton

The Cliff and the White Shore, 1913 by Felix Vallotton

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

By-the-wind sailors are like living flowers on the ocean's surface: these jellyfish relatives are ringed by bright blue tentacles, like petals, surrounding a central mouth frilled by white reproductive structures. They sway and pulses in rhythm, but why is a mystery.
Vid © Me pic.twitter.com/MD4SoLvJgi

— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) March 23, 2020

The Highlanders knelt down on being taken into the building and 'took a Highland oath that for every one of our poor creatures who were thus slain, 100 of the enemy should bite the dust, and I need not add that they kept their vow'

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 211.

'No doubt this is strange law,' Neill commented, 'but it suits the occasion well, and I hope I shall not be interfered with until the room is thoroughly cleansed in this way ... I will hold my own with the blessing and help of God. I cannot help seeing that His finger is in all this.'

The 'strange law' - which operated against those who had no direct connection with the murders, as well as those few who might have had and could be found - continued in force for over three months. During this time piteous messages - such as 'Dear Jesus, send us help today, and deliver us not into the hands of our enemies' - were inscribed on the walls in order to increase the fury of the soldiers who were marched through Bibighar, on their arrival in Cawnpore, to witness the scene of their countrywomen's massacre. The floors of the house were left as Neill had found them. Private Wickins of the 90th Light Infantry, who passed through Cawnpore in October, said the buildings still presented 'a most horrid spectacle':

There were little children's socks and shoes and dresses of every description all covered with the blood and brains of the innocent. Even the trees in the neighbourhood bore evidence of the fiendish cruelty of the Asians, and outside the building, strewed upon the ground in many places, there was a quantity of females' hair, and I would have preserved some of it, but it was too rotten owing to its being exposed to the weather.

Private Metcalfe of the 32nd said that the Highlanders knelt down on being taken into the building and 'took a Highland oath that for every one of our poor creatures who were thus slain, 100 of the enemy should bite the dust, and I need not add that they kept their vow'.

Officers, too, took this oath. Garnet Wolseley, a captain in the 90th, who confessed on arrival in Calcutta that his sword was 'thirsty for the blood of these cursed women slayers', told his brother that after walking through 'that slaughter house at Cawnpore where all the marks of the late atrocities were still fresh', he made the vow that 'most soldiers made there - of vengeance and of having blood for blood, not drop for drop, but barrels and barrels of the filth which flows in these n*****s' veins for every drop of blood which marked the floors and walls of that fearful house'. Wolseley subsequently asked his company for a volunteer to execute a mutineer said to be implicated in the Cawnpore massacre. A similar request had been made in the Crimea where not a single man would agree to act as hangman though offered a discharge home and twenty pounds bonus. On this occasion, however, every man in the company stepped forward to offer his services.

He who loves an old house

House
by Isabel Fiske Conant

He who loves an old house
Never loves in vain,
How can an old house,
Used to sun and rain,
To lilac and to larkspur,
And an elm above,
Ever fail to answer
The heart that gives it love?

Its neglected garden
Only waits to start
In answer to the tending
Of some homeless heart…
A new house, maybe,
For its first tenant longs,
But not till it's an old house,
Can it sing old songs.

A city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 86.

“It was not a long walk to Warrender Park Terrace, which lay just beyond the triangle of park at the end of Bruntsfield Avenue. She took her time, looking in shopwindows before finally strolling across the grass to the end of the terrace. Although it was a pleasant spring evening, a stiff breeze had arisen and the clouds were scudding energetically across the sky, towards Norway. This was a northern light, the light of a city that belonged as much to the great, steely plains of the North Sea as it did to the soft hills of its hinterland. This was not Glasgow, with its soft, western light, and its proximity to Ireland and to the Gaeldom of the Highlands. This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.

The last blow of the war actually took place a few weeks later

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 362.

The last blow of the war actually took place a few weeks later, a half a world away. Master Commandant Lewis Warrington, the aggressive-minded commander of the American sloop of war Peacock, refused to believe the hail from the captain of an East India cruiser he approached June 30 near Sumatra that the war was over, and ordered him to strike his colors; when the British ship refused, he fired a broadside into her. The British commander, Lieutenant Charles Boyce, was seriously injured and had his right leg amputated two weeks later. It had been five months since the ratification of the “Treaty of Peace and Amity between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.”

Best of the Bee

To be fair though, this more about media incompetence than it is about narrow domain experts.

Scientists Who Didn't Predict A Single Thing Accurately For Last Two Months Confident They Know What The Weather Is Going To Be Like In 100 Years https://t.co/tmVQaedjRy

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 29, 2020

Click

Spin, Strangeness, and Charm

This seems a very interesting, catholic, and relatively free of hobby horses biases sites that I have come across. Spin, Strangeness, and Charm. He is a scientist and a fiction writer. Much of his recent posting has been a widely cast net on Covid-19, focusing on the research and emerging evidence rather than strongly held opinions (most other sites).

Content free radio

Fascinating ten minute snippet from NPR this morning on my drive over to the office.

It seems to reflect ideological distress, intellectual bankruptcy, financial distress, and Mandarin Class distress.

In straight order.

First thing I hear about when I get in the car and turn it on is that NPR has had to postpone its spring fundraising and does not know when or if it will happen. This isn't news, it a request. Please give money.

Next is the teaser for a later segment in which they will discuss just how Trump has failed to show global leadership on the Covid-19 pandemic. Their bubble prevents them from making the connection that Trump was to a material degree elected by voters wanting the president to focus on America rather than spending time and money on the rest of the world in ways that never seem to make a difference. This isn't news, this is an advertisement for their own content and the content being advertised is opinion.

Next is the news reader speaking on behalf of a sponsor (forfend an "advertiser", NPR doesn't do crass things like advertising). She wants to inform us that WhiteHouse.com (or some such) is not affiliated with the White House but sells memorabilia. Right now they have two mint coins commemorating the Covid-19 pandemic. Each can be had for the low sum of $100.

When NPR starts running "Wait but that's not all . . . " advertisements more commonly seen on 1am rerun TV channels, then I am guessing that the financial squeeze is beginning to hurt. They would rather embarrass themselves with such advertising than improve the quality of their reporting so that it is accurate and useful for the whole nation rather than just the fringe left Mandarin Class. This isn't news, this is advertising.

Next is a "news report" interviewing some Dean or President at Brown University. She is concerned that they will not be able to open in the fall. In fact, she is desperate to reopen. She is concerned that in all the talk about sectors in financial distress, there isn't enough attention being paid to billion dollar endowment universities.

For the first time we are dealing with some possible news. It is pretty retreaded news at this point. The financial distress and operational stress on K-12 schools and universities has been widely reported for the better part of a month. A real issue but a well established one.

It quickly becomes apparent that though this is in the form of factual reporting and an interview, this is actually NPR offering an advertising and advocacy platform. The Dean is doing a pitch to politicians for special financial treatment and to future students to please come back to campus. It is a sales pitch in polysyllabic words.

The Dean goes through the motions of "its all about the students." Interestingly though, the doesn't really talk about education and learning. It is about the experience. About the experience of being together. Students need to come back to campus in the fall so they can experience being together and going to events and discovering each other.

Oh, and as a secondary issue, yes, some universities are going to go bankrupt if students don't return.

Hard to tell whether learning and education is a tertiary issue or perhaps doesn't rank at all as important to the Dean of Brown University. It isn't mentioned.

It is clear that their recruiting for next year has been hobbled and she said many students are reluctant to return to residential campuses. So the Mandarin Class Brown University costing $75,000 is facing the prospect of losing bright students to local non-residential colleges and universities. Demand has evaporated for their product and as a paid up member of the Mandarin Class, NPR is doing the best to help the privileged to get their message out that they are suffering as well and need handouts from the public.

This also reflects an odd fracturing of the Mandarin Class agenda. Most of the mainstream media left are deeply skeptical and dismissive of early reopening and reduction in quarantining. In their bubble, government control of everyone and everything is a good thing and they are sad to see the reversion to freedom. All dressed up in precautionary principle concern for the well-being of people of course.

Also, conservatives, libertarians and the moderate middle are all clamoring for a return to normal. The mainstream media is deeply invested in the fact that there will be no return to normal and that there should be no relaxation until a vaccine might be invented in a year or two. Oh, and First and Second Amendment rights are really more suggestions rather than inalienable.

But if the MSM continue with that position, then universities cannot reopen. And if the feeder farm for postmodernist marxism is closed down, then just where will they be? The MSM is stuck with an awkward Schrödinger's paradox. They want everything open for government workers and academia but not for the actual citizens and producers of the nation. We are fast entering Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B territory at this point.

It has long been forecast by those in the center and on the right that universities were riding for a fall. Their cost has risen faster than almost any other product or service in the past forty years and the relative value of the degrees have fallen. The learning engine has been hobbled by reducing the number of full professors and their replacement by impoverished adjunct professors on tentative contracts. And overall the conveyor belt of education has been gummed up by bloated administrations, experiential luxuries and indulgence of luxury beliefs such as, well, you know the long litany.

And the fall was indeed coming. But like many sectors which lose productivity, effectiveness and relevance, sometimes the end comes with a bang not a whimper. They got bloated and precarious and a global pandemic has wrecked their model. Will they recover? Sure. Some will. Some won't. But it likely is going to accelerate the point where parents and the tax paying public are no longer willing to countenance the absurdities which have been indulged for the past couple of decades. Become an integral part of the productive system or swim on your own. Dip into your endowment before you dip into the pockets of the public. There is no room for destructive and unproductive parasites. That is my guess of a future attitude. Maybe.

And it won't be because of anti-intellectualism. It will be because of bloat, inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

So was the interview with the Dean from Brown news? No, not really. It was a sales pitch to students and Mandarin Class influencers of NPR. It was a special plea for help, amidst the impoverishment of individuals and the financial losses of other sectors.

Ten minute drive and zero news out of four reports. A zero percent value add rate is not much of an endorsement for their business model.

Silliest stuff

From A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.

This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

On critical theory.

Family Outing, 1913 by Eero Jarnefelt

Family Outing, 1913 by Eero Jarnefelt

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

When you're sheltered in place
Without much personal space
That's a moray pic.twitter.com/XPHL9pUvaV

— Monterey Bay Aquarium (@MontereyAq) March 23, 2020

As though vying with each other to earn their General's approbation, the regiments sprang forward in turn and gradually drove the enemy back.

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 207.

General Havelock found Nana Sahib's men, five thousand strong, drawn up in a crescent outside Cawnpore, evidently expecting a frontal attack. He decided, however, that he 'would not oblige them', but, 'like old Frederick at Leuthen', attack them on their left flank. This involved a long march through mango groves and ploughed fields in the intense heat of the afternoon. It was 'one of the most severe marches ever made in India', a gunner officer thought. 'The sun struck down with fearful force. At every step a man reeled out of the ranks and threw himself fainting by the side of the road - the calls for water incessant all along the line.'

The men had not gone far when they came under heavy fire, the crashes of the shot through the trees being accompanied in the distance by a sepoy band playing what sounded like - and was no doubt intended to be - Auld Lang Syne. At the turning point, the infantry wheeled into line, then lay down while Maude's cannon endeavoured to silence the enemy fire. But his guns were too light; the rebels' pieces too well sheltered; and the Highlanders were ordered to charge. It was the first of several charges bravely carried out that day, as Havelock, who to Major North seemed as 'gifted with ubiquity as scornful of danger', rode about the field, giving orders, shouting encouragement: 'Well done, 78th! Another charge like that wins the day! . . . Well done, gentlemen volunteers, I am proud to command you! . . . Come, who'll take this village, the Highlanders or the 64th? . . . The longer you look at it, men, the less you will like it. Rise up. The brigade will advance!'

As though vying with each other to earn their General's approbation, the regiments sprang forward in turn and gradually drove the enemy back. For a time the rebels rallied under the urgent commands of their leaders. But a final, desperate charge, in which Havelock's son and aide-de-camp took a prominent part, broke the rebels' line. Nana Sahib galloped away towards Bithur, while thousands of people from Cawnpore fled from the city into the surrounding countryside to avoid the vengeance of the British soldiers.

How arid it must be to be a man

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 77. An extended setting and rumination.

“They moved through to the music room, a small room at the back of the house, furnished with a restored Edwardian music stand and her mother’s baby grand piano. Jamie opened his music case and extracted a thin album of music, which he handed to Isabel for examination. She flicked through the pages and smiled. It was exactly the sort of music that he always chose, settings of Burns, arias from Gilbert and Sullivan, and, of course, “O mio babbino caro.”

“Just right for your voice,” Isabel said. “As usual.”

Jamie blushed. “I’m not much good at the newer stuff,” he said. “Remember that Britten? I couldn’t do it.”

Isabel was quick to reassure him. “I like these,” she said. “They’re much easier to play than Britten.”

She paged through the book again and made her choice.

“‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes’?”

“Just so,” said Jamie.

She began the introduction and Jamie, standing in his singing pose, head tilted slightly forward so as not to restrict the larynx, gave voice to the song. Isabel played with determination—which was the only way to play Gilbert and Sullivan, she thought—and they finished with a flourish that was not exactly in the music but that could have been there if Sullivan had bothered. Then it was Burns, and “John Anderson, My Jo.”

John Anderson, she thought. Yes. A reflection on the passage of the years, and of love that survives. But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo. There was an ineffable sadness in this line that always made her catch her breath. This was Burns in his gentler mood, addressing a constancy that by all accounts, including his own, eluded him in his own relations with women. What a hypocrite! Or was he? Was there anything wrong with celebrating qualities one lacked oneself? Surely not. People who suffered from akrasia (which philosophers knew all about and enjoyed debating at great length) could still profess that it was better to do that which they themselves could not do. You can say that it is bad to overindulge in chocolate, or wine, or any of the other things in which people like to overindulge, and still overindulge yourself. The important thing, surely, is not to conceal your own overindulgence.

“John Anderson” was meant to be sung by a woman, but men could sing it if they wished. And in a way it was even more touching when sung by a man, as it could be about a male friendship too. Not that men liked to talk—still less to sing—about such things, which was something which had always puzzled Isabel. Women were so much more natural in their friendships, and in their acceptance of what their friendships meant to them. Men were so different: they kept their friends at arm’s length and never admitted their feelings for them. How arid it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in the desert. And yet how many exceptions there were; how marvellous, for example, it must be to be Jamie, with that remarkable face of his, so full of feeling, like the face of one of those young men in Florentine Renaissance paintings.

“John Anderson,” said Isabel, as she played the last chord, and the music faded away. “I was thinking of you and John Anderson. Your friend John Anderson.”

“I never had one,” said Jamie. “I never had a friend like that.”

Isabel looked up from the music, and out the window. It was beginning to get dark, and the branches of the trees were silhouetted against a pale evening sky.

“Nobody? Not even as a boy? I thought boys had passionate friendships. David and Jonathan.”

Jamie shrugged. “I had friends. But none I stuck to for years and years. Nobody I could sing that about.”

“How sad,” said Isabel. “And do you not regret it?”

Jamie thought for a moment. “I suppose I do,” he said. “I’d like to have lots of friends.”

“You could get lots of friends,” said Isabel. “You people—at your age—you can make friends so easily.”

“But I don’t,” said Jamie. "I just want . . . "

“Of course,” said Isabel. She lowered the keyboard cover and rose to her feet.

“We shall go through for dinner now,” she said. “That’s what we shall do. But first …”

She turned back to the piano and began to play once more, and Jamie smiled. “Soave sia il vento,” may the breeze be gentle, the breeze that takes your vessel on its course; may the waves be calm. An aria more divine than anything else ever written, thought Isabel, and expressing such a kind sentiment too, what one might wish for anybody, and oneself too, although one knew that sometimes it was not like that, that sometimes it was quite different.

Though it was only clear in long hindsight, America had in fact gained a significant point even in fighting a war to such a formally inconclusive end

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 359.

But there were consequences of the war so lasting that they would become apparent only when seen across distances of time measured in a century of more. The fact was that regardless of Madison’s ignominious abandonment of America’s positions on impressment and free trade in the negotiations at Ghent, the British never again attempted to press an American seaman and never again attempted to hinder American neutral trade on the high seas. The American legal position that both neutral vessels and neutral goods were immune from seizure by a belligerent slowly became the accepted international norm, and was adopted by Great Britain and other major European powers in the Treaty of Paris in 1856. (Other countries were invited to join as well; the United States ironically refused, objecting to another provision of the treaty abolishing privateering, for fear that this would give large naval powers an advantage over countries such as the United States. But the United States in fact never issued a privateering commission again. The United States also was holding out for the complete abolition of the right of belligerents to capture or destroy enemy civilian property at sea, arguing that the same principles of international law that protect noncontraband civilian property on land should apply on the oceans. That position never has been adopted; international law to this day allows a combatant to capture and take as a lawful prize an enemy’s merchant ships.)

Though it was only clear in long hindsight, America had in fact gained a significant point even in fighting a war to such a formally inconclusive end. Henry Adams implicitly acknowledged as much in noting the cost America had succeeded in imposing on Britain. As a result of trying to maintain her traditional maritime policies, Great Britain had spent £10 million a year waging an ultimately unsuccessful war with a tiny upstart naval power one-hundredth its size. As Adams noted, that meant Britain was spending something like $50,000 a year for each of the impressed Americans it detained in its service. For half as much the Royal Navy could have tripled the pay of all its sailors and obtained the manpower it needed without resorting to impressment at all.

While no one in Britain ever seemed to have made so explicit a calculation, there was widespread recognition that the cost of continuing the fight had indeed become intolerable by late summer and early fall of 1814, largely as a result of the adroit attacks on British seagoing commerce by the American navy and privateers. In the end, the British were as eager to end the war as the Americans were; at Ghent they soon dropped one after another of the “nonnegotiable” demands they had insisted on when the negotiations began. The British had been particularly adamant on retaining northern Maine and establishing the Indian buffer in the northwest. By November 1814 they had conceded both points, and the remaining month of negotiations was spent mainly reducing the agreement to its final wording. The British had been forced to learn a lesson that the United States would later have to relearn for itself in the seemingly one-sided fight it would find itself in a century and a half later in Vietnam: that a determined enemy facing a vastly superior military force can win simply by not losing.

For better or worse, the war’s other great enduring consequence was to end the last real challenge to American sovereignty over North America by its native inhabitants. The Indian tribes who allied themselves with Britain were the war’s greatest losers; the confederacy that united under Tecumseh’s leadership collapsed after his death on the battlefield, and never again would the Indians be able to organize such unified or broad-scale resistance to the relentless press of American western expansion.

Is this a fiscal "don't throw me in the briar patch" moment?

A particular thought keeps recurring to me.

I am a deficit hawk and long have been. I am comfortable with emergency driven deficit spending but think that across the years the budget should broadly be in balance or slightly negative (growth and inflation enables some small degree of deficit spending.)

What I object to most strongly is the spending of money today on speculative policies, nice to have policies and consumption policies. And we do a lot of that.

Among the many dangers I see in sustained material deficit spending during good times is that it constrains necessary spending during emergencies.

My particular view is clearly not a consensus view among the chattering Mandarin Class. Both establishment parties are deeply culpable.

The only time in my adult life when we came anywhere close to a balanced budget was under Clinton. Clinton loved deal-making and the contest of politics and working with a Republican Congress, together they got to a balanced budget for a year or two. But only because of the windfall in savings from demilitarization and base closing following victory in the Cold War under Reagan.

All the other years, fiscal rectitude in Congress has been as common as moral rectitude in a Nevada cat house.

So while I endorse some of the emergency aid, all deficit, I am still anguished by the accumulating debt.

I am 95% certain this gargantuan deficit spending is pure political expediency.

But every now and then, I am reminded of leverage buy-outs in the 1980s and 1990s. The architects of those buy-outs had a relatively straight-forward strategy. Acquire well-established businesses which had become slack and undisciplined, strip their assets, load their balance sheet with debt and then let the debt payments become the taskmaster to force management to manage the business much more tightly.

Leveraged buyouts was a cruel business with a wrenching human cost. But the underlying problem was real. Many companies which were already financially dead and unlikely to be resuscitated. By loading them up with debt, the private equity firms and venture capitalists created a model that forced dramatic improvements in productivity and financial performance.

There were many buy-outs which went belly-up. But there were plenty for whom the shock therapy dramatically improved management and productivity.

The thought which keeps flitting across my mind is whether Trump is playing a deep game.

Trump is no deficit hawk. He had a few head nods in that direction during the 2016 campaign but it was clear that deficit reduction was not a priority. Nor has it been evidenced in his subsequent budgets.

Democrats were eager for deficit spending during this partially self-created emergency. I don't think Trump was especially motivated to demur.

At this point, we are on track for the deficit to expand an additional $4 trillion.

But is there a deeper game afoot? Doesn't this look like a leveraged buy-out where the burden of debt is so great that it forces decisions and actions which were necessary but postponed? Is it not the case that most Democratic items are already big ticket? There really wasn't room for them in the budget before the Covid-19 emergency. There really won't be room afterwards.

I think the probability that this is a deliberate strategy is slight. But its an intriguing idea none-the-less.

A lot of substance over at Althouse at the moment.

Woof. Ann Althouse is on a roll this morning.

"'Haters keep saying they hate Diamond and Silk, but you can’t hate what you ain’t never loved!' the sisters, whose real names are Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, wrote..." - A dissection of the aphorism alluded to in the title. Is it a prerequisite to have loved in order to hate? An interesting discussion in her post and then in the comments.

Biden promised to pick a woman VP, but because they are women, the possible choices are all under special pressure over the Tara Reade allegation against Biden. - An exploration of paradox that affirmative action is by its nature an affirmation of incapability and second-class status. "This is the trouble with affirmative action. You get advanced to the front, but it comes with a catch. Biden wants a woman partner to help him out with woman things. Where's the feminism in that?" Again, good observations and robust discussion in the comments.

"New documents suggest that Flynn ‘was set up by corrupt agents’ who threatened Flynn’s son and made a secret deal with Flynn’s attorneys." - discussion in the comments about the apparent, and increasingly document, effort by the FBI to falsely accuse a political appointee and then extract a guilty plea by extortion.

Tediosity and disinsanity

From The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare.

Fie, fie, what tediosity and disinsanity
is here among you!

On academics proffering policy opinions.

Best of the Bee

At a press conference this morning, President Trump said "Good morning."
Here are the headlines covering his controversial statement from twelve different news outlets:https://t.co/Lzg8ytpAa4 pic.twitter.com/QN1U2lK4bB

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 28, 2020

Click for full view.

They are the new paper of record and it is fitting that they are mocking themselves at the bottom of the list.

Unknown title by Tishk Barzanji

Unknown title by Tishk Barzanji

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

Majestic rare White Moose 😊💗 pic.twitter.com/EXDGUKLudw

— Scott Hefti 📓 (@Havenlust) March 23, 2020

Despite their protestations, however, the execution of all the hostages was decided upon.

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 206.

The proposal to kill the hostages seems to have been strongly condemned by the women of Nana Sahib's household who. threatened to throw themselves out of a high window if any further murders were committed and who, in the meantime, refused all food and drink.

Despite their protestations, however, the execution of all the hostages was decided upon. First three Englishmen from Fatehgarh, who had been placed in the house a few days previously, together with the merchant Greenway, Greenway's son, and a boy of fourteen, were brought out and shot dead by a squad of sepoys. Then it was announced that the women would also be shot. But the sepoy guard protested; they would not kill the memsahibs. And when the order came to shoot the prisoners, they appear to have put their muskets through the windows of the various rooms and fired them into the ceilings. Exasperated by their behaviour, 'the Begum' went to fetch some less fastidious men who would not shrink from the necessary task of executing Christians. She returned with five, two Hindu peasants, two Mohammedan butchers, and a man wearing the red uniform of Nana Sahib's bodyguard who was said to be her lover. These men entered the house from which shrieks of terror and screams of pain were presently heard. One of the butchers came out with a broken sword, went over to the hotel and returned with a new one. By nightfall the screaming had stopped but groans continued long after the executioners had left and the doors had been closed.

'The hotel where Nana had his quarters was within fifty yards of this house,' J. W. Sherer wrote in his official report, 'and I am credibly informed that he ordered a nautch and passed the evening with singing and dancing. Early next morning orders were given for the Beebeegurgh to be cleared.'

'The bodies were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head,' according to one witness. 'Those who had clothes worth taking were stripped. Some of the women were alive. I cannot say how many; but three could speak. They prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings.'

Most of the dead bodies were thrown into a well, and so, Sherer thought, were some of those still living. Sherer also believed that, when the well was full, the rest of the corpses were dropped into the Ganges.

A plaint - when a noble tradition collides with crass deceit and ignorant progressivism

I am a multigenerational National Geographic subscriber. They were in my grandparent's homes, in my parent's homes, in my home, I have given subscriptions to the kids. NG is in the genes. Or used to be.

I love their history of exploration and discovery. I have even enjoyed, to a lesser extent, their emphasis on artistic photography. I wholly endorse the art but wish it more frequently adorned articles with facts and discoveries and stories from which I could learn.

In recent years, regrettably, like so many of the mainstream media, they have drifted away from their core audience - People who want to discover the world and begun to focus on people who want to change the world. No longer pitching to the great middle class, now focusing on the unrepresentative and small minority Mandarin Class with their advocacies, cognitive pollution and luxury beliefs.

Today, I received a survey from NG. I am dubious. Is this just a pitch for a donation? I scan the cover letter. No, no pitch there. All the nice words about wanting you opinion, how do we deliver to our readership, etc.

Ok. I'll invest a few minutes on them. As I work my way through the survey, there is very obviously a bias towards how do we improve the world rather than how do we reveal the world. I make some judicious amendments, make some select comments.

And then I get to the last question - "Will you support the future of National Geographic Society's work?"

Fair enough. They fooled me, slipping in a crass commercial solicitation under the guise of wanting my opinion. Shame on me for being so gullible.

And shame on them for betraying member trust just that little bit more. No, I won't support more happy clappy Mandarin Class sexism, racism, white knightism, classism, and other destructive irrational and non-empirical luxury beliefs. I'll resubscribe from force of habit when the time comes. But the habit wears thin as they continue to erode their wonderful history and mission and become yet one more hat-in-hand begging organization pedaling cognitive tripe.

As much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 41.

John Liamor gathered about him a salon of acolytes. These were students who were as much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas. It was the seventies, and the frothiness of the previous decade had subsided. What remained to believe in, or indeed to mock? Ambition and personal gain, those heady gods of the following decade, were in the wings, but not centre stage, which made a brooding Irishman with an iconoclastic talent an intriguing option. With John Liamor it was not essential to believe in anything; all that was required was the ability to mock. And that was where his real appeal lay; he could sneer at the sneerers themselves because he was Irish and they, for all their radicalism, were still English and therefore, in his view, irretrievably part of the whole apparatus of oppression.

Isabel did not fit easily into this circle, and people remarked on the unlikely nature of the developing liaison. John Liamor’s detractors, in particular—and he was not popular in his college, nor in the philosophy department—found the relationship a strange one. These people resented Liamor’s intellectual condescension, and its trappings; he read French philosophy and peppered his remarks with references to Foucault. And, for one or two of them at least, those who really disliked him, there was something else: Liamor wasn’t English. “Our Irish friend and his Scottish friend,” one of the detractors remarked. “What an interesting, interesting couple. She’s thoughtful; she’s reasonable; she’s civil; he’s a jumped-up Brendan Behan. One expects him to break into song at any moment. You know the sort. I could have cried with pride at the way he died, and so on. Lots of anger about what we were meant to have done to them back years ago. That sort of thing.”

Many Britons were left sputtering and incredulous at American assertions of victory in the war

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 357.

Like the Federalists, many Britons were left sputtering and incredulous at American assertions of victory in the war. William James, a British admiralty court lawyer who was detained for part of the war in America and became almost unhinged over the American gloating he witnessed, quickly produced a popular account of the war that picked up where the editorials of the Times left off, belittling American naval triumphs and concluding that Americans were simply scoundrels who “will invent any falsehood, no matter how barefaced, to foist a valiant character on themselves.” In 1817 James’s book A Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States of America appeared, and he followed that with a huge six-volume history of the Royal Navy. The books contained a breathtaking number of inaccuracies regarding the size, force, armament, and character of the American navy but were most notable for the dripping anti-American sarcasm that filled page after page, all in the service of showing not only that the British navy had really won the war, but that in every instance when an American vessel had prevailed in battle, it was only as a result of superior force, cowardly tactics, and the employment of inhumane weapons such as bar and chain shot.

Needless to say, the only thing such attacks succeeded in persuading Americans of was that the British were not only as arrogant as ever but sore losers as well. A deep-seated Anglophobia would be one of the most enduring legacies of the war in America; among American naval officers the tradition of antipathy and suspicion of the British that stemmed directly from the War of 1812 could still be seen as late as World War II.

But British navy men on the whole took a more collected and detached view of the war’s consequences, and saw the writing on the wall better and sooner than most. The war had heralded the rise of not only a new naval power but a new kind of naval warfare, more professional and less chivalric, based more on technical mastery and less on heroics. The old world, in which indignant remonstrations like James’s over who had the better of points of honor still mattered, was rapidly slipping into history, like it or not. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” declared the Naval Chronicle’s Albion in one final letter he wrote March 12, 1815, to “take my leave of the American contest” and offer a few measured observations:

An inglorious, unsuccessful, war must naturally end in such a peace as America chose to give; for assuredly we have now done our worst against this infant enemy, which has already shewn a giant’s power. Soon will the rising greatness of this distant empire … astonish the nations who have looked on with wonder, and seen the mightiest efforts of Britain, at the era of her greatest power, so easily parried, so completely foiled.

Who the devil knows?

From The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people — like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords — broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?

There is no paradise other than the one we choose to create for ourselves and those with whom we commune.

Data Talks

Very interesting.

Main finding: there is a disconnect between the donors and voters in each party, but it varies by party. Republican donors are fairly aligned with Republican voters on social issues, but *way* to their right on economic issues. pic.twitter.com/ZvuFC2D3pE

— David Broockman (@dbroockman) April 28, 2020

Click image to enlarge.

I am reading this to say that the donor class among Democrats is markedly to the left of Democratic voters on economic, social and global issues, particularly on social issues and global.

In contrast, Republican donors are almost completely aligned with Republican voters on social issues and very closely aligned on global issues. They are markedly to the right of the voting Republican public on economic issues.

There are thirteen specific topics measured. If you take a deviance of 0.1 between donor and voter class for each party as acceptable, the Democratic donor group is markedly to the left (beyond 0.1) of Democratic voters on ten of the thirteen issues. Republican donor class are to the right of Republican voters on only four of the thirteen topics.

For spending on the poor, the Democratic donor group is much closer to their voting base than are the Republican donor group to their base.

On every single social issue (abortion, gun control, capital punishment, and same sex marriage), the Democratic donor class are much further from their base than is the Republican donor class from theirs.

On global issues, (immigration, free trade agreements, focusing on US jobs over foreign jobs, focusing on US problems over foreign problems) the two donor classes are much closer to one another on average compared to the other nine issues. Republican donors are pretty close to the average republican voter on three of the four issues as well as reasonably close to Democratic donors on three of the four global issues.

On six issues (universal healthcare, abortion, gun control, capital punishment, primacy of American jobs, and primacy of American interests) of the thirteen, Democratic donors are greater than .2 to the left of their voting base. Only on spending on the poor is the Republican donor class 0.2 to the right of the Republican voting base out of the thirteen issues.

Lots more to contemplate.

Click to enlarge.

And do import Some misadventure

From Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

Your looks are pale and wild, and do import
Some misadventure.

On "The Squad" in Congress.

Let them eat cake

The inherent classism of the Mandarin Class, particularly those in the mainstream media, has been harshly on display during Covid-19.

The perfect reply. pic.twitter.com/YS8elU65Yx

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) April 27, 2020

Click for full view.

Face, 1971 by Ola Billgren

Face, 1971 by Ola Billgren

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

One person's mistake can affect us all.

Be responsible.

Practice social distancing.#COVID19pic.twitter.com/dYOIJOnrxp

— Jenan Moussa (@jenanmoussa) March 21, 2020

A regiment of tough, hard-drinking Europeans, several of them gentlemen whose debts or misbehaviour had led them to consider service in the ranks in 'Neill's Blue Caps' preferable to more public disgrace.

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 203.

Havelock was quite as busy and just as frustrated as Neill, knowing that, in spite of all his efforts, his impatient critics were blaming him for being 'so slow in getting on to Cawnpore', complaining that Neill would not have been 'such a dawdler'. It was not until a week after his arrival at Allahabad that he felt able to move on, leaving Neill in command there and sending on a message to Renaud to halt where he was, to burn no more villages unless they were actually occupied by insurgents.20 And even then Havelock had not received all the summer clothing for which he had asked: most of his men as they marched out of the city in the stifling heat of the overcast afternoon of 7 July, watched by crowds of sullen, resentful Muslims, were still wearing their heavy woollen tunics. It was a pitifully small force - an assorted collection of about a thousand British troops from four different infantry regiments, less than 150 Sikhs, six guns, a detachment of native irregulars, and no more than twenty volunteer cavalry composed of officers whose regiments had mutinied, shopkeepers whose premises had been burned, and indigo-planters whose workmen had run away, 'in short of all who were willing to join'. All the force's forage caps, including the General's, were covered with white cotton to protect the neck, except those of the Madras Fusiliers, a regiment of tough, hard-drinking Europeans, several of them gentlemen whose debts or misbehaviour had led them to consider service in the ranks in 'Neill's Blue Caps' preferable to more public disgrace. The 'Blue Caps' and a few others carried the new Enfield rifle; the rest had to make do with muskets. Behind the column followed the inevitable, seemingly endless, straggling crowd of animals and carts, servants and camp-followers, both men and women, that always accompanied an Indian army on the march.

“Which was which?” she had asked.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 14.

Grace looked at her employer over her cup. “Did he jump?” she asked.

Isabel shook her head. “Nobody has any reason to believe that.” She stopped. She had not thought of it at all. People did not kill themselves that way; if you wanted to jump, then you went to the Forth Bridge, or the Dean Bridge if you preferred the ground to the water. The Dean Bridge: Ruthven Todd had written a poem about that, had he not, and had said that its iron spikes “curiously repel the suicides”; curiously, because the thought of minor pain should surely mean nothing in the face of complete destruction. Ruthven Todd, she thought, all but ignored in spite of his remarkable poetry; one line of his, she had once said, was worth fifty lines of McDiarmid, with all his posturing; but nobody remembered Ruthven Todd anymore.

She had seen McDiarmid once, when she was a schoolgirl, and had been walking with her father down Hanover Street, past Milnes Bar. The poet had come out of the bar in the company of a tall, distinguished-looking man, who had greeted her father. Her father had introduced her to both of them, and the tall man had shaken her hand courteously; McDiarmid had smiled, and nodded, and she had been struck by his eyes, which seemed to emit a piercing blue light. He was wearing a kilt, and carrying a small, battered leather briefcase, which he hugged to his chest, as if using it to protect himself against the cold.

Afterwards her father had said: “The best poet and the wordiest poet in Scotland, both together.”

“Which was which?” she had asked.

Is this the reception given to men who have endured sufferings and privations unutterable

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 354.

Two days before, tensions had risen alarmingly when a dispute over the bread ration led to a stampede of prisoners out of all the barracks; they burst open the iron gates into the market square, and an alarm bell rang as soldiers from Princetown rushed to join the guards, who were now threatening to fire on the prisoners if they did not disperse. “Fire away!” the prisoners taunted back. Again an uneasy peace was restored.3 On the evening of the sixth the inevitable explosion occurred. Again some trivial incident was the trigger—a ball kicked into an adjoining yard by the prisoners, who then tried to retrieve it—but at around five o’clock in the afternoon the alarm bell rang, the guards turned out on the parapets, and before the prisoners could get to their barracks they began firing. Some of the prisoners later claimed that Shortland had engineered the entire episode, others that he was in the midst of the melee, raving drunk, shouting at the troops to fire, but in the chaos the truth would never be known for sure. Seven Americans were killed and thirty-one wounded.

The incident finally shocked the British and American bureaucracies into action. Much of the delay in releasing the prisoners was due to the British government’s insistence that each side should supply the ships to return its own prisoners, which obviously was to Britain’s advantage given the imbalance in numbers. Now the British agreed to get the prisoners home as quickly as possible and work out the costs later. All Americans able to provide for themselves were released at once. Every day a contingent of freed prisoners could be seen on the road to Plymouth, marching with banners and flags inscribed “Remember the Sixth of April, 1815,” “Revenge Our Murdered Countrymen!” “Dartmoor Massacre, 1815,” and “Free Trade and Sailors Rights.”

More than one group of returning American sailors commandeered the ships taking them home when the captain tried to sail to a port far from where most of their homes were, redirecting the ships from Norfolk to New York or other ports.6 Most arrived home without money and barely with clothes. One recalled the “deep, burning indignation” he and the two or three hundred of his fellow released prisoners felt upon arriving in Boston and, after appealing for help from the town’s authorities, were given a dollar each and a certificate reading:

This is to certify that ____________, having been a prisoner-of-war, has returned to this country destitute, and is anxious to get home to his family. We therefore recommend him to those upon whom he may call for assistance while on his journey.

“Is this the reception given to men who have endured sufferings and privations unutterable,” the man indignantly observed, “who have fought their country’s battles, defended the fire-sides which these functionaries now enjoy in peace and security?” He scornfully tore up what he called the “begging-ticket” he had been offered and found his way home as he could, arriving there feeling “like Rip Van Winkle” awakened from his long and troubled sleep.

In reading histories of the Revolution and the War of 1812, but especially the Revolution, I am always astonished at how men't terms of enlistment might expire 1-2-300 miles from home. They simply walked back from the war.

Thou issue of a mangy dog!

From Timon of Athons by William Shakespeare.

Away, thou issue of a mangy dog!
Choler does kill me that thou art alive.

On telemarketers.

Mockery, humor and resourceful productivity are the best antidotes to capricious repressive, and coercive governance

Well that's good news. And I didn't get it from the news. In the past week or so New York City's Mayor de Blasio launched a system for New Yorkers to report on each other when they saw people contravening the increasingly capricious and draconian quarantine laws. State Security is always a short journey to Stasi.

Then some local autocratic state Puritans decided in California that it was not enough to close the local skateboard park. They had to disable it so that nobody could use it in defiance of their quarantine orders. So they buried it in sand.

I saw some of this reported in the mainstream media. I saw the derision in the more libertarian sectors of conservative and libertarian blogs and news sites.

I did get wind that the NYC institutionalized snitching system got off to a rocky start with abuse and mockery. Apparently Anthony Wiener was incensed because they were inundated with, uhm, Wiener pics.

But while the mainstream media was in a celebratory mood about these statist actions to coerce and control Americans, I never saw the denouement in their pages. From Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom by Sgt. Mom.

And in other places, like New York. I must confess to snickering nastily at New Yorker’s response to Mayor OBlah-blah’s unveiling of a system to nark out your neighbors for not obeying every jot and tittle of the Wuhan Corona-crud restrictions. Said system was immediately swamped in an unstoppable rising tide of rude pictures, pictures of rude gestures, and sarcastic references to Hitler, as well as crude personal jibes regarding the Mayor himself – to the point where the system was taken down entirely. Well, good for New Yorkers, I say – and a very good thing that such a thing wasn’t tried in a Texas city; seriously, the receiving server would have melted down into a radioactive puddle of goo. And California skateboarders industriously clearing out their skate-park of the sand dumped into it by officious authorities and making a dirt-bike track out of the excess sand? That’s just freaking awesome. We have not forgotten how to cock a snook at overweening authority; a tradition has been passed on to a new generation…

Well good. The spirit of America is alive and well out in the wild, beyond the confines of the NYC/Washington, D.C. hothouse.

Closing down morally bankrupt coercion like snitching systems with Wiener pics is a far preferable ending than any other way it could have concluded.

Diligent slacker skateboarders not only cleaning up the mess of their local autocrats but then using it for productive purposes by building a new dirt track - beautiful. I love this country.

Lots to be worried about in terms of the number of coercive statists in our deep state government, about our statist media, and about our statist academia. But the spirit of freedom and democracy blows hard on such autocrats. And not violently but with mockery, humor and resourceful productivity, making a bad situation better.

Stay tuned for updates

From Why the worst fears about Florida’s Covid-19 outbreak haven’t been realized (so far)by Dylan Scott.

Red States and of course red states in the South are the butt of much mainstream media reporting. The ignorance of, and disrespect for the region is pervasive. It doesn't help that so much of the reporting is driven by prejudices and ignores the facts.

This has been on display during the Covid crisis when red states are mocked for policies too late or too early, too much or too little, and for policies based on ignorance of science. In the latter case, it is almost never about the science, much of which is not yet in play owing to absence of good data and good methods, but rather about politicians acknowledging the importance of citizen rights, the emergent order of social customs, and the fact that there is not a singular goal, but multiple goals which have to be balanced and harmonized among each other. How do we respect constitutional freedoms and proper authority of initiatives, how do we sustain economic activity, especially for those living paycheck-to-paycheck, how do we flatten the curve, and how do we address the special needs of the most vulnerable.

All in an environment completely riddled by bad and/or insufficient data.

The mainstream media has shifted the goal posts from flattening the curve to death obviation - a desirable but unachievable goal and certainly one not achievable while giving due recognition of the other equally valid objectives.

The news has been full of mockery of all the Floridians at the beaches. Mockery of Georgia beginning to open the economy beginning with tattoo parlors, bowling centers, gyms, and hair salons. Mockery of, well, just about everything.

This article by Scott is a cut above the average. You cannot help but perceive a glimmer of, what? Disappointment? No, it is not that bad. Perplexity perhaps. "Florida is doing everything we media journalists say is wrong to do and God is not punishing them. Our darling of governance, New York, is doing everything we think should be done and is suffering."

But whatever sotto voce vibe you pick up, it is unexpectedly reasonably straight reporting. He called experts on the ground, not just in his preferred New York (or Washington, D.C.) rolodex. He appears to be accurately reporting what they said. Refreshing in its own way. Wish we had more of this.

Because there is a legitimate mystery here. Florida is a major tourist destination and logistical hub. They have a lot of transient movement of people and goods. It is a big state with a major international city. It has a disproportionate number of elderly. I suspect it has a disproportionate percent of the population with known co-morbidities such as obesity, lung diseases, diabetes, etc.

Given what we know, even though we really still don't know much, Florida's low incidence rate is reasonably surprising.

In raw totals, Florida had the eighth-most coronavirus cases as of April 24. It has the third-most people, so if you adjust for population, Florida slides all the way down to 18th in Covid-19 cases per capita, according to tabulations from USA Today last week.

The important indicators — daily new cases and deaths — haven’t totally taken a turn for the better yet, but they don’t appear to be getting dramatically worse either.

“It looks to me like we are not really declining at this point, but we’re on a plateau,” Hladish said, adding the Florida outbreak was “clearly not growing exponentially.”

To account for some of the lag in reporting delays, let’s go back a couple of weeks to see how Covid-19 is trending in the Sunshine State.

On April 13, there were 995 new cases reported. On April 20, there were 763. There were 41 deaths on April 13 and 38 on April 20. The high point for new cases was April 3; for daily deaths, it was April 6. Even allowing for imperfect reporting, Florida does not seem to be experiencing exponential growth as seen in New York City. It is testing at an average rate, ranking 20th in tests per million people. So while a fair number of cases could be being missed, the state is not an outlier by any means in its ability to track the disease.

Jerne Shapiro, a lecturer at the University of Florida’s epidemiology department, summarized her feelings like this: “I am optimistic when I’m looking at those trendlines.”

So why haven’t the worst fears for Florida come to pass? With one more caution that things could still break bad in the coming days and weeks, let’s run through a few of the theories I went over with public health experts in the state.

The mainstream media policy preferences have evolved diametrically over the past few months but are currently pretty aligned with what you might expect from a world-view which is statist, prescriptive, deterministic, and coercive. Confinement in homes; shut down the economy; suspension of constitutional rights; over-reliance on fallible forecasting models; over-dependence on "experts" with narrow domains of expertise; anti-democratic disrespect for the desires of citizens; sustained shutdowns; precautionary principle approach; monomaniacal focus on singular outcomes in multi-variable, multi-party, multi-goal, complex systems, etc.

Florida has done little or none of that and seems to have escaped.

My position is that none of us understands nearly enough to make accurate predictions. Singapore looked to be an example and now seems to be succumbing. To a lesser degree Japan and South Korea. We are discovering that some of the earlier success were lucky, some of the earlier manifest failures were unlucky, and that every causal model is so far incomplete and not especially useful.

Some of the things which seem to have helped Florida are the inverse of what has made outbreaks elsewhere worse.

Much better voluntary social distancing earlier - More people practicing social distancing more effectively without coercion.

Much greater reduction in non-essential trips - Fewer extra-residential trips.

Effective subsidiarity and federalism - While the state acted later than federal guidelines, individual counties and municipalities, where they thought it appropriate acted earlier than the state and sometimes earlier than the federal recommendations.

Low density of the state - Low density of housing. Better access to the outdoors without proximity to others.

Single car transportation over mass transit - Infection rates in cars being materially smaller than in subways.

Few high-rises - Less common infrastructure of surfaces by which to spread.

Scott actually is pretty fair even though all the shibboleths and assumptions of the mainstream media are turned upside down and even though Florida's success to date is an indictment of the states with more coercive and statist approaches.

Scott takes pains to point out that this still might reverse. He isn't explicit but it is hard not to acknowledge that we don't really know what is going on.

Indeed. Perhaps all reporting ought at this time (if not always) lead with:

Everything reported in this piece may be untrue. Stay tuned for updates.

Office at Night by Phil Lockwood

Office at Night by Phil Lockwood

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

Waved albatrosses breed primarily on Española Island in the Galápagos archipelago and number around 35K nesting pairs. Their courtship ritual includes rapid bill circling and bowing, wide beak opening and clacking https://t.co/oxgOjlr1wQ pic.twitter.com/5IARa03N1z

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 19, 2020

'God grant I may have acted with justice,' Neill wrote on 17 June. 'I know I have with severity'

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 201.

Neill lost no time. Although utterly exhausted and so weak that he could swallow nothing except water and champagne and had to be carried on a litter into the batteries, he issued orders for the bombardment of the town and for the retaking of the bridge which the rebels had captured; he bought up or destroyed all the liquor in the fort; he asked Brayser to persuade the Sikhs that they would have better chances of plunder if they camped outside the walls, and he sent out fighting patrols to intimidate the surrounding countryside into submission. Eagerly responding to his orders, European volunteers and Sikhs descended upon the town, burning houses and slaughtering the inhabitants, old men, women and children as well as those more likely to be active rebels who were submitted to the travesty of a trial. 'The gallows and trees adjoining it had each day the fresh fruits of rebellion displayed upon them,' admitted E. A. Thurburn who was appointed Deputy Judge Advocate General. 'Hundreds of natives in this manner perished and some on slight proofs of criminality.'13 'Every day ten or a dozen niggers are hanged,' Lieutenant Pearson of the 84th told his mother. Their corpses hung 'by twos and threes from branch and signpost all over the town . . . For three months did eight dead-carts daily go their rounds from sunrise to sunset, to take down corpses which hung at the cross-roads, and the market-places, poisoning the air of the city, and to throw their loathsome burdens into the Ganges.'

'God grant I may have acted with justice,' Neill wrote on 17 June. 'I know I have with severity, but under all the circumstances I trust for forgiveness.' The next day cholera broke out in the fort. There were no medicines to treat the symptoms or alleviate the pain, no punkahs to cool the sufferers in the appalling heat. Twenty-eight men died within two days. The screams of the sick were so terrifying that two women occupying a room over the hospital were said to have died of fright.

This suited Isabel, who disliked Wagner.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 5.

She laid aside the opera glasses and sat back in her seat. It was a perfectly competent orchestra, and they had played the McCunn with gusto, but why did people still do Stockhausen? Perhaps it was some sort of statement of cultural sophistication. We may come from Reykjavik, and it may be a small town far from anywhere, but we can at least play Stockhausen as well as the rest of them. She closed her eyes. It was impossible music, really, and it was not something a visiting orchestra should inflict on its hosts. For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more … apologetic. This suited Isabel, who disliked Wagner.

Most versatile meme of all time?

Click to enlarge.

A Treaty of Peace

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 350.

By then there was news that made any hairsplitting over the circumstances of one frigate’s surrender barely worth notice. GLORIOUS NEWS read the headline of an extra edition of the Commercial Advertiser that hit the streets of New York early on the Sunday morning of February 12, 1815: “A Treaty of Peace was signed by the American and British commissioners at Ghent, on the 24th of December.” The previous evening at eight o’clock a copy of the treaty had arrived in New York aboard the British sloop of war Favorite. When the news reached Hartford two days later, cannons were fired and bells rung throughout the night in rejoicing. In Albany 130,000 lights lit up the public buildings and fireworks filled the night sky. An express rider galloped to Boston in a record thirty-two hours, and schools closed, businesses shut, the legislature adjourned, and a parade of citizens with the word PEACE on their hats wound though the city. The Senate unanimously approved the treaty on February 16, and the next night at 11:00 p.m. Madison formally exchanged ratifications with the British envoy who had arrived to accept them. The following day in Washington the British and American flags flew side by side, and that night the impromptu celebration included the firing of a number of rockets, “some of them made, by one of our citizens, in imitation of the British Congreve.”

[snip]

Only Federalist newspapers had the temerity to observe, in reading the actual terms of the treaty, that it offered nothing about free trade, sailors’ rights, or any other compensations for an expensive and bloody war.

Yep!

Click to enlarge.

Sponge

From Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Take you me for a sponge, my lord?

On parents to university administrations.

John Anderson, my jo, John

Double click to enlarge.

John Anderson, My Jo
by Robert Burns

John Anderson, my jo, John,
When we were first acquent;
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snaw;
But blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a cantie day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.

Die Donau Beigreifenstein Im Frühling, 1942 by Anton Filkuka

Die Donau Beigreifenstein Im Frühling, 1942 by Anton Filkuka

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

Mind blowing 🤯 pic.twitter.com/MUum0dreoM

— CCTV_IDIOTS (@cctv_idiots) March 19, 2020

'Thank God,' said the sentry who opened the gate for Neill, 'you'll save us yet.'

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 201.

Neill had restored order with equal promptness and severity at Allahabad where the 6th Native Infantry, a previously loyal regiment, in terror at his approach, had murdered most of their officers including seven young cadets just arrived from England; and, joined by hundreds of the town's inhabitants, had then broken open the gaol, plundered the shops, torn down the telegraph wires, destroyed the railway lines and sheds, bombarded the railway engines which they had not dared to approach, and massacred those native Christians who had not run off for the fort. The fort itself, which was garrisoned by about a hundred European volunteers, a few invalid artillerymen, a company of sepoys of the 6th and a detachment of Sikhs, might also have fallen had not Captain Brayser of the Sikhs, formerly a private soldier and once a gardener, persuaded his men to assist in the disarming of the sepoys. By the time that Neill arrived, however, the Sikhs had discovered huge stores of liquor in the cellars of the fort where everything, as a missionary said, was as badly managed as could be. The Sikhs had poured as much of the liquor as they could down their own throats before selling the rest to the European volunteers who were soon so drunk that they could not stand up, let alone fire their muskets. 'Thank God,' said the sentry who opened the gate for Neill, 'you'll save us yet.'

I was talking to a friend and the boy fell out of the sky.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 3.

“Isabel Dalhousie saw the young man fall from the edge of the upper circle, from the gods. His flight was so sudden and short, and it was for less than a second that she saw him, hair tousled, upside down, his shirt and jacket up around his chest so that his midriff was exposed. And then, striking the edge of the grand circle, he disappeared headfirst towards the stalls below.

Her first thought, curiously, was of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_des_Beaux_Arts_(poem)
on the fall of Icarus. Such events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going about their ordinary business. They do not look up and see the boy falling from the sky. I was talking to a friend, she thought. I was talking to a friend and the boy fell out of the sky.

The “explosion” was expected to come from New Orleans

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 347.

“The Federal Republican, as vehemently anti-administration as ever, predicted in early January 1815 that there was “an explosion at hand; that the President would be called on to resign; and there must be peace by that or a future Administration.” The “explosion” was expected to come from New Orleans: for weeks there had been reports of a huge British naval and military force assembling in Jamaica preparing to launch an attack there. Cochrane had included the city as a likely target back in July in a long list of options he had sent to Melville, and in mid-September approval had come back from London. Whoever controlled New Orleans would control the Mississippi River, and once again Cochrane was convinced the decisive blow was at hand.

On December 16, 1814, after sweeping aside five American navy gunboats guarding the entrance to Lake Borgne, a British invasion force that would eventually reach 6,000 began disembarking at Isle aux Pois, about thirty miles from New Orleans. An advance column of 1,600 men reached the mainland a week later, and three small battles were fought over the ensuing week as the British force probed the defenses around the city.

Andrew Jackson, now a major general in the regular army and in command of the entire district of Louisiana, had chosen his defensive position well. The Mississippi River held his right flank, a cypress swamp his left, and an earthwork parapet protected by a four-foot-deep ditch sheltered nearly five thousand American troops. Seven artillery batteries spaced at fifty- to two-hundred-yard intervals supported the entrenched position, and before the American lines lay a broad open plain that the British would have to traverse to reach them. The British plan was to begin with a night attack to seize two guns that Jackson had unwisely placed in a weakly guarded position across the river, then turn the guns on the main American line as the major British assault began at dawn. But as the Battle of New Orleans began on January 8, 1815, the British attack fell disastrously behind schedule. It was not until daylight that the two guns were seized, and then it took an hour and a half for the main British force to begin its advance toward Jackson’s breastworks. At first a heavy fog shrouded their movement, but it suddenly lifted as the British were still hundreds of yards from their enemy, and the grape and canister began cutting them to pieces. The British commander, General Edward Pakenham, was eviscerated by a blast of grape three hundred yards from the American line as he rode ahead trying to rally his men forward. In half an hour the British lost 2,000 men, including nearly 200 killed and 500 taken prisoner. Total American casualties were 70, and nearly all of those were among the men in the exposed position across the river; the Americans behind Jackson’s breastworks lost 6 killed and 7 wounded. It was one of the most lopsided battles ever fought.

Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

From Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by James Clear

I have long argued that the single fastest mechanism to success, regardless of circumstances is to exercise self-control and decide which habits to cultivate. Habits allow you to free your mind of mundane clutter and focus on more complex tactical issues and more fundamental long term issues. But you have to have the basic habits in place first. They not only free your mind but there are, on average, an immense source of improved productivity.

Which is why I also set great store on language and culture. Adages, aphorisms, and maxims are memetic means of establishing fundamental good habits - "Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today"; "Don't judge a books by its cover"; "Look before you leap"; "A house divided cannot stand". All subtle memes introducing cultural coding to inform habit formation.

Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss.

But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.

The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.

Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. If you’re a millionaire but you spend more than you earn each month, then you’re on a bad trajectory. If your spending habits don’t change, it’s not going to end well. Conversely, if you’re broke, but you save a little bit every month, then you’re on the path toward financial freedom—even if you’re moving slower than you’d like.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

It is not rocket science and it is pretty common wisdom but not even close to universal.

Wrangling pirates

From Richard III by William Shakespeare.

Hear me, you wrangling pirates, that fall out
In sharing that which you have pill'd from me!

On politicians having passed 1,000 page, trillion dollar "rescue packages".

Strategic, non-domain-specific, complex, chaotic, loosely coupled systems

Both points well taken but I think there is a much larger issue here.

Thanks to Robert Higgs for bolstering my point that "listen to the epidemiologists!" is actually not the entirety of what we should be doing pic.twitter.com/p1lCF1kTTd

— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) April 24, 2020

Click for the thread.

One of our challenges is that we still, in our national conversations, tend to be speak deterministically, tactically, and as if there are singular answers. I refer to these as tactical, domain-specific conversations about tactical, domain-specific problems for which there are identifiable solutions. It is part of the very DNA of media to think and report in this fashion. Their whole history is asking “who,” “what,” “where,” when,” “why” and “how.” If you ask those questions about tactical, domain specific problems, you get useful answers.

Why won't my car start? Who voted for this legislation? When was that equipment available? - tactical, domain-specific questions, the answer to which has specific value. And because they are tactical, domain-specific questions, not only are the answer knowable, but they are known by single individuals. You co to the mechanic about your car. You go to the secretary of the legislature for who voted. You go to the supplier or receiver for when the equipment was available.

When we lived with simple technology in small communities with few logistical or other ties to others - the world was dominated by tactical, domain-specific questions.

In contrast, the world we live in is dominated by issues which are strategic (long-term, future oriented) and products of complex, chaotic, loosely coupled systems. In a pandemic you can't go to an expert for an answer. You have to go to the epidemiologist, the economist, the logistics executive, the business leaders, the finance experts, etc.

You can get hundreds of answers couched in contextual constraints and hindered by probabilities. But you can't get an answer. There is no such thing.

Further exacerbating the challenge is the problem of consensus objectives. It is challenging to reach consensus about facts among participants within a domain. It is even harder to reach consensus on goals within a domain. And virtually impossible to reach consensus among stakeholders across domains. They have different understandings of different facts based on different assumptions and different projected probabilities against different goals.

But the press wants simple answers.

We see this playing out right now with Covid-19. There is no single reliable forecasting model. Our data is still grossly inadequate. We see patterns of manifestation that are not only inconsistent with one another but inconsistent with what we thought normal. Not only is there no deterministic, empirically valid answer, there isn't even a consensus within individual domains as to what the answer ought to be much less across those domains.

The mainstream media is desperate for experts or scientists to provide straight-forward answers. But when we deal with issues arising from strategic, non-domain-specific, complex, chaotic, loosely coupled systems, there are no experts, there is no "right" answer. This is not a rejection of science. Science is there in each of the domains. This is an observation that we do not yet have the norms and standards for dealing with complex, multi-domain issues in environments of uncertainty.

And yet the MSM keeps trying to force fit complex, multi-domain, probabilistic issues into the simple, tactical, domain-specific world of “who,” “what,” “where,” when,” “why” and “how.”

Economic growth, innovation, global climate, pandemics, human migration, national economic development - all these are complex, multi-domain, probabilistic issues. They dominate our attention. And we keep trying to understand them by asking “who,” “what,” “where,” when,” “why” and “how.” We have to do a lot better in having those conversations.

Gentle is the wind

Double click to enlarge.

Cosi fan tutte 'Soave sia il vento'
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Soave sia il vento,
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri {vostri) desir.


[Gentle is the wind,
Calm is the wave,
And every one of the elements
Answer warmly
To our (your) desire.]

Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956 by Edward Hopper

Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956 by Edward Hopper

Click to enlarge.

Promotion came to him slowly, for he was repeatedly passed over 'by three sots and two fools'.

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 198.

The British Army now approaching Cawnpore was commanded by Brigadier-General Henry Havelock. Early impressions of Havelock could be misleading. There were those who found him rather absurd, 'an old fossil dug up and only fit to be turned into pipe clay'.1 Scarcely more than five feet in height, he walked as though he wore iron ramrods in the back of his jacket and never dined without his sword together with such a quantity of medals, like rows of five-shilling pieces, that Lady Canning thought he looked 'almost ridiculous', 'as if he carried his money tied up in a bunch on his shoulders'. But she, like most others, soon grew to respect him. He was, she said, deemed by many to be too outdated for words; 'but all the same we believe he will do well. No doubt he is fussy and tiresome, but his little, old, stiff figure looks as fit and active for use as if he were made of steel.'

He was sixty-two years old. His hair and moustache were white; his brown, leathery face deeply lined; his firmly set mouth fringed by a beard of extremely old-fashioned cut. Born in Sunderland, the son of a rich, opinionated shipbuilder who had moved south to a large country house in Kent which he was obliged to sell when his business failed, Henry Havelock had not wanted to be a soldier but a lawyer. After leaving Charterhouse he had for a time trained in a special pleader's office; but, having quarrelled with his father, who refused to continue paying his allowance, he was obliged to accept the offer of a commission in the army made to him by his elder brother, an officer whose conduct at Waterloo had so aroused the admiration of General von Alten that he had been promised a commission for anyone he cared to name.

Once in the army, Havelock displayed an eager determination to succeed in it, so exasperating his fellow subalterns who found him laboriously studying the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great that they would throw his books out of the window and jump on his head. And when his father lost the little money he had salvaged from the wreck of the shipbuilding business - a misfortune which persuaded Henry he would have to go out to serve in India where poor officers stood a better chance of promotion - he immediately enrolled at the Oriental Institute in Leicester Square so as to become proficient in Persian and Hindustani.

In India his diligent studies were continued, and his reputation for earnestness and industry increased. When other young men in his regiment amused themselves with racing, drinking and nautch girls, he preferred the company of Baptist missionaries under whose influence he was persuaded that it was his 'solemn Christian duty to devote his time and attention to the spiritual welfare of his men', to hold religious meetings, to preach sermons, to give Bible lessons, to take part in the singing of hymns, to persist in his attempts to win friends for Jesus 'in the very teeth of ridicule and opposition'. Aloof, argumentative, ambitious and censorious, he concealed a deep need of affection behind a manner at once reticent and ruminative. Promotion came to him slowly, for he was repeatedly passed over 'by three sots and two fools'. But in a series of campaigns in which he displayed coolness and great courage, he gained the reputation of a reliable soldier. Yet he had never achieved his main ambition, which was to command an army in the field.

Amateur Philosophers by Jack Vettriano

Amateur Philosophers by Jack Vettriano

Click to enlarge.