Some light in the darkness

Quote of the Day

“Since 1945, Western Europe has enjoyed a holiday from history. That has bred an unearned sense of moral superiority vis-a-vis unluckier people.”

• Simon Kuper, Financial Times 26/27 February, 2022

That vacation has just come to an end.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news from Ukraine

Smetana | Má vlast “The Moldau” | Vienna Philharmonic | Barenboim

Link

Long Read of the Day

If you’ve ever wondered how you would cope if you suddenly had to flee your home, then this piece will strike a chord.

The night before Russia started the war, my friends and I met to come up with a plan. None of us really ever thought Kyiv, where we lived, would fall. At worst, we figured there would be some sort of staged terrorist attack in the city to get the government to capitulate, but we decided to have our most important things ready anyway: passports, marriage certificates, cash, watches, jewelry.

I got home around 1 a.m. on Thursday. At 5:30 a.m., a friend called to tell us that there had been an explosion in Kyiv and that a Russian invasion was underway.

My wife and I shot up and started packing. I grabbed my Timberland boots and sneakers, in case we’d have to abandon our car and walk through the forest to safety. We took layers to keep us warm and water bottles. I also packed my computer, phone, chargers, and my Bitcoin hardware wallet. (After becoming a successful poker player, I’d founded an eSports company, Qlash. In the past six months, we had been trying to figure out how to enter the crypto market, and I had invested a bit of my own money.)

Compulsive reading from beginning to end.

Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.

Interesting little essay by Matthew Guay which makes those of us who are relentless note-takers a bit uneasy!

We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.

Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth saving. We ascribe value to the time we spend discovering things online. Surely that time wasn’t in vain.

Then we’re burdened with our findings. It’s tough to focus on something new when you’re still holding the old in your mind.

So we write things down. Bookmark them. Add them to our reading list. Highlight our findings. Make long lists and check them twice. We need a cave, a storehouse, somewhere to stash our findings.

Ring any bells with you? It sure does for me.

Think WFH means your boss isn’t watching you? Think again

Yesterday’s Observer column:

And then, in the blink of an eye, working from home had become not just an acronym – WFH – but a cliche and Zoom, like Google before it, had become a verb as well as a noun. The tiresome daily commute shrank to padding from bedroom to kitchen to a laptop on a desk. For an initial period, utopian visions of better work-life balances blossomed. But then the new reality dawned: instead of us going to the office, the office had come to us and we were working, eating and sleeping in it.

Still, we had a bit more autonomy WFH than we had in the office under the beady-eyed surveillance of managers. Or so we thought. But capitalism – and its servant, technology – never sleeps. Those managers, who had always regarded WFH as some kind of work-avoidance scam, realised that digital technology was just the ticket for keeping an eye on their newly remote subordinates. It would make sure that they weren’t idly browsing Pinterest, or bidding on eBay, or doing private emails, or a thousand other unproductive things, on the company’s dime. And so a swarm of tech companies evolved to service those paranoid suspicions. Thus was born the new industry of little tech…

My commonplace booklet

AH 2.0 Nice piece of photoshopping by Quentin.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Tulip Mania

Quote of the Day

”All men are brothers, but, thank God, they aren’t all brothers-in-law.”

• Anthony Powell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Sail Away | Live in London, 2011

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putin has taught us a brutal lesson

By Frank Bruni in the New York Times:

What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? The Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin.

Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither.

Rueful wisdom of hindsight.

Madeleine Albright on Putin

In the piece above, Frank Bruni mentioned her recollection  of meeting Putin when he was Acting President of Russia. Here’s the money quote:

In early 2000, I became the first senior U.S. official to meet with Vladimir Putin in his new capacity as acting president of Russia. We in the Clinton administration did not know much about him at the time — just that he had started his career in the K.G.B. I hoped the meeting would help me take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations, which had deteriorated amid the war in Chechnya. Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”

And this invasion is the latest instalment of that project.

My commonplace booklet

• A Twitter stream aggregating material from Ukraine Link

• Robert Reich: Eight sobering realities about Putin’s invasion Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Two Little Horses

A Citroen Deux Cheveaux: perfect car for a Provencal summer.

Quote of the Day

“For several months, the West has been threatening Vladimir Putin with massive economic consequences should he escalate aggression towards Ukraine. In the last 24 hours, Western allies have had an opportunity to live up to this threat and have failed, instead issuing sanctions as a form of punishment, punishment that will not deter further action. The Kremlin only respects strength and the response of the West has been weak; arguing that the West needs to keep its powder dry for further action is not going to deter Vladimir Putin. We’ve taken a peashooter to a gunfight. The whole point of the sanctions has been to deter Putin and if at the first chance you get to use these sanctions you only tickle his feet, what’s the point?”

• Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institution

Much as I enjoyed the colourful turn of phrase, it’s worth remembering that RUSI is the UK military’s favourite think tank. I wonder if “taking a peashooter to a gunfight” is original. It sounds American to me.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

When I have a crazy work day, I play this in the evening.

Long Read of the Day

The US is unmasking Russian hackers faster than ever

If it’s accurate, this article in the MIT Technology Review is interesting because it suggests that there have been significant developments in the technology. Attribution has, up to now, being the biggest impediment to rapid, accurate and proportionate responses to cyberattacks.

Just 48 hours after banks and government websites crashed in Ukraine under the weight of a concerted cyberattack on February 15 and 16, the United States pointed the finger at Russian spies. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said that the US has “technical information that links the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)” with the DDoS attack that had overloaded and brought down the Ukrainian websites. “GRU infrastructure was seen transmitting high volumes of communication to Ukraine-based IP addresses and domains,” she told journalists on February 18. It’s believed that the cyberattack was meant to sow panic in Ukraine as over 150,000 Russian troops massed at the border.

EVs make it harder to quell fire on cargo ship

From Quartz:

The cargo ship Felicity Ace is aflame from bow to stern with a lithium-ion battery fire that can’t be put out with water alone.

The fire has been burning since Wednesday (Feb. 16), as the ship drifts in the Atlantic about 200 miles southwest of Portugal’s Azores Islands. Its 22-person crew abandoned ship and was rescued on Thursday.

The ship left Germany on Feb. 10 and headed for the US with about 4,000 Porsches, Bentleys and other luxury cars aboard, and some of those were electric vehicles. It’s not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place—a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires—but the batteries are keeping the flames going now. A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause.

It seems that large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process. And pouring water onto the ship wouldn’t put out a lithium-ion battery fire and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable.

The only consolation (for this EV owner, anyway) is that they were Porsches, not Teslas!)

My commonplace booklet

Donald Trump’s crowd have launched a new social media platform. It’s called Truth Social and seems basically to be a clone of Twitter — except that users will exchange ’Truths’, not Tweets. So will they be able to Retruth Truths, then?

And of course there’s the difficult question of UnTruths.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

A new map of Ukraine?

Europe’s sanctions nightmare

From Politico

In a public show of alignment with Washington, the Europeans have been talking tough on sanctions against Russia, even before Putin sent “peacekeepers” into the east of the country on Monday night. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has vowed to cut Russia out of the international banking system and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says that Russian companies won’t be able to conduct transactions in U.S. dollars and British pounds.

Imposing those financial sanctions could hit Putin hard, but the EU’s position is hazy when it comes to squeezing his all-important hydrocarbon revenues, which provide more than a third of Moscow’s budget. It remains unclear whether banking sanctions would prevent EU payments to Russia’s state-run gas company Gazprom. As things stand, the energy money looks highly liable to keep flowing to Moscow, even during a Russian war against an EU ally.

I’ll believe they’re serious if they do stuff (like cutting Russia out of the SWIFT inter-bank system) that’s effective enough to prompt retaliation Putin by throttling or shutting off the gas supply to Germany. So I’m not holding my breath.

Quote of the Day

”There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.”

• Ben Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Torelli | Trumpet Concerto in D Major | Voices of Music and Dominic Favia

Link

Voices of Music is a fine outfit trying to release one new video per week and also pay their musicians and staff. They sponsor free house concerts that pay musicians a full fee; give detailed presentations on how to take music online at music conservatories; and release videos from their extensive performance catalog. There’s a ‘donate’ link on their videos. I’ve clicked on it because I often link to their work.

Long Read of the Day

How Facebook twisted Canada’s trucker convoy into an international movement

Nice piece of analysis by Ryan Broderick of how a labyrinth of Facebook groups and right-wing media turned the trucker protest into an international story and eventually prompted a heavy crackdown by the Canadian government. If you wanted a case-study of the exploitation of Facebook by right-wing activists, ingenious free-riders and Fox News, then this would be hard to beat.

Based on Facebook metrics, the core of the Freedom Convoy was never really anything more than a small collection of local conspiracy theorists who were then suddenly given a megaphone by America’s powerful right-wing disinformation machine. Their campaign was first supercharged by Facebook’s algorithm, which currently favors content shared within local groups, and was then blasted out into every feed and screen possible by ravenous conservative tabloids. American right-wing publisher The Daily Wire, founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, latched on to the story at the end of January and published 66 articles featuring the keyword “convoy” between January 28th and January 31st. And the most popular story of theirs from this time period actually promotes a Facebook group that would eventually get shut down by the platform after barely four days for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies around QAnon.

Thanks to David Garcia for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Need to explain what a ’typewriter’ was/is to your grandchildren?

Why not try this?

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Raptor and Friend

Quote of the Day

“In baiting a mouse trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”

• ‘Saki’ (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Shaun Davey | The Parting Glass

Link

Davey’s imaginative twist on a beautiful Irish song.

Interestingly, General Martin Dempsey, the 18th Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, sang it on his retirement in September 2015. Which may puzzle some people until they realise that Dempsey is a good old Irish name!

Long Read of the Day

Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise

Interesting OpEd from May 2016 by Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson in the Los Angeles Times.

Moscow solidified its hold on Crimea in April, outlawing the Tatar legislature that had opposed Russia’s annexation of the region since 2014. Together with Russian military provocations against NATO forces in and around the Baltic, this move seems to validate the observations of Western analysts who argue that under Vladimir Putin, an increasingly aggressive Russia is determined to dominate its neighbors and menace Europe.

Leaders in Moscow, however, tell a different story. For them, Russia is the aggrieved party. They claim the United States has failed to uphold a promise that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, a deal made during the 1990 negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification. In this view, Russia is being forced to forestall NATO’s eastward march as a matter of self-defense.

The West has vigorously protested that no such deal was ever struck. However, hundreds of memos, meeting minutes and transcripts from U.S. archives indicate otherwise. Although what the documents reveal isn’t enough to make Putin a saint, it suggests that the diagnosis of Russian predation isn’t entirely fair. Europe’s stability may depend just as much on the West’s willingness to reassure Russia about NATO’s limits as on deterring Moscow’s adventurism.

This was written two years after the Russian annexation of Crimea.

The academic article on which it’s based is here.

What real transparency looks like

Molly White is one of the sharpest and technically informed critics of the current crypto bubble. She also has an exemplary ‘full disclosure’ page on her blog. It goes like this:

I strongly believe in clear disclosures by journalists and others writing about cryptocurrencies and related topics.

I own no cryptocurrencies or NFTs. I have no particular financial interest in whether web3 takes off or not, though I have plenty of non-financial interests; after all, I do have to live on this planet, and I spend enough time engaging with the tech industry and online to care about the futures of both.

I am not paid to write about cryptocurrencies or related topics, nor am I paid to create my Web3 Is Going Great project. I don’t post sponsored content on that website, its associated Twitter account, this website, my blog, my personal Twitter account, or anywhere else. A few generous people have sent money to me via Twitter tips with comments about Web3 Is Going Great; I have earmarked that money for cloud hosting costs, which I otherwise pay out of pocket. I don’t run ads or otherwise make money in any way off the project or my blog.

I hold no long or short positions pertaining to cryptocurrencies or crypto-related companies. I do have some investments in the stock market and other traditional forms of finance, which I pay someone much smarter about and more interested in finance than I am to handle.

For those who think it is crucial to have interacted with crypto to write about it: 1) you are wrong, but 2) you will be pleased to know that I went through the process of signing up for a Coinbase account and buying one popular cryptocurrency and one shitcoin towards the end of 2021, around when I was starting my deeper research into this space. I sold all of them a week and a half later and closed the account. I made a whopping profit of $16.90 off the whole endeavor (pre-tax).

I wish more people writing about this stuff were as forthcoming.

War in Europe is unthinkable — until it isn’t

Funny how complacent we’ve become. This from the New York Times…

But just how far Europe is prepared to go in shifting from a world where peace and security were taken for granted remains to be seen. For decades Europeans have paid relatively little in money, lives or resources for their defense — and paid even less attention, sheltering under an American nuclear umbrella left over from the Cold War.

That debate had begun to shift in recent years, even before Russia’s menacing of Ukraine, with talk of a more robust and independent European strategic and defense posture. But the crisis has done as much to expose European weakness on security issues as it has to fortify its sense of unity.

Ms. Franke, 34, a senior fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, is not convinced that anything short of a major Russian invasion of Ukraine will very much alter public opinion.

“We’re having in Europe and Germany a status quo problem,” she said in an interview. “We’re very comfortable with this version of European security, and most people don’t realize that to defend this status quo we need to act.”

The elite feels the cold wind from Russia, she said, but “on the level of public opinion, people want to be left alone and for nothing to touch them.”

My commonplace booklet

 How insulated glass changed architecture

Interesting 8-minute video Insulated glass shaped the look of the 20th century. Big but poorly insulated glass windows went out of fashion as electricity enabled artificial lighting. Builders needed a new way to install windows that let in natural light, but also controlled heat. Insulated glass was that solution. Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The Boss

Imagine if your boss always looked at you like this. Well, mine does.

Quote of the Day

”Not in the clamour of the crowded street
Nor in the shouts and plaudits of the throng
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.”

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones | Baby Please Don’t Go | Live at the Checkerboard Lounge

Link

Chaotic and unforgettable.

Long Read of the Day

The German Bind

Nathan Gardels, the Editor of Noema magazine, has written an interesting essay about the standoff between Russia and the West. As I read it I kept thinking of Keynes’s famous 1919 polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace — in particular his insight into what the Allies’ determination to humiliate and punish Germany would do to that country.

Here’s the passage that caught my eye:

In 1996, well before Putin’s ascent to power, Alexander Lebed, a popular former Russian general and presidential candidate critical of the bibulous Boris Yeltsin, wrote an essay for my Global Viewpoint newspaper syndicate. Already then, the resentment at being played by those with the upper hand was gestating. As he framed the issue: “When politicians and military planners, who were so used to the lengthy ‘struggle of position’ against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, found themselves in a very favorable position, it proved too difficult for them to give up the temptation to, finally, at long last, implement their former plans.”

For Lebed, this steady advance of a hostile military alliance into the space its own allied forces had just abandoned rubbed in the ignominy of defeat. “If this sense of loss and humiliation that comes with defeat is allowed to fester in the Russian mentality, it may lead to an inferiority complex that can only be overcome by gaining new victories, preferably over old rivals,” he warned, invoking the lesson of Hitler’s rise in the wake of Germany’s sense of humiliation after the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI. “Territories come and go,” Lebed wrote, “but humiliation of a nation’s dignity remains in the minds of the people. … It injects the virus of vengeance into the defeated nation.”

Presciently, he went on: “I doubt very much that pushing Russia to the backyard of Europe will increase the sense of stability and certainty, or make Russia more democratic and predictable. This approach by the West is destined, at best, to place both sides peering at each other suspiciously from across the fence, fists in our pockets.” And so it has.

Perhaps miscalculating, Putin seems to have sensed a weakness in the West relative to Russian strength and saw a chance to finally push back. He took his fists out of his pockets and moved massive military force to the Ukrainian border, in the process achieving the very opposite of his aim by fortifying the resolve of an alliance that was on its way to obsolescence.

Talk about unintended consequences.

DIY surveillance est arrivé

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, intensive surveillance was a prerogative of states. After the arrival of the internet, and especially the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook, ISPs (internet service providers) and mobile networks, it became a prerogative shared between the state and private companies – corporations that log everything you do online. Surveillance became a kind of public-private partnership. The companies do much of the work and readily cooperate with security agencies when they come armed with a warrant.

Way back in 2009 the German Green politician Malte Spitz went to court to obtain the data that his mobile phone operator, Deutsche Telekom, held on him and then collaborated with the newspaper Die Zeit to analyse and visualise it. What emerged was a remarkably detailed timeline of his daily life, a timeline that would have been readily available to state authorities if they had come for it with appropriate legal authorisation.

But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don’t have to be a tech wizard to do it…

Brexit = ‘buy from Europe’

Coruscating column by Simon Jenkins.

A massacre is occurring. More than 35,000 healthy British pigs have been slaughtered and buried on farms since September, with an estimated 200,000 languishing in a backlog.

The reason is that abattoirs lack the staff to process them, largely due to Britain’s exit from the pan-European labour market. In October, the environment department offered 800 six-month visas for foreign butchers. But it insisted they go through its laborious scheme for seasonal workers: barely 100 turned up. Whitehall also refuses to curb imports of European pork – which now makes up 60% of the UK market and rising. To the National Pig Association, Brexit means buy from Europe.

And, later,

Leaving the EU had some arguments for it. Leaving the single market had none. “Soft” Brexit within that market would have been far been easier to negotiate. Leaving it has meant wrecked supply chains and terminated scientific collaboration. It has undermined recruitment patterns and destabilised Northern Ireland. It has crippled the fish industry and impeded billions of pounds of UK trade. Its consequences have wavered between nuisance and disaster.

So is Brexit a ‘success disaster’? Actually no: a success disaster is where something is so successful that it overwhelms its creator. Brexit is just a disaster.

My commonplace booklet

What it’s like having the Russian army around Interesting Twitter thread. Impossible to verify, though. Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Crocuses

Seen on a walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“The knives of jealousy are honed on details”

• Ruth Rendell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four Last Songs | TrV 296 – 4 | Jesse Norman

Link

I like all four, but this one is my favourite.

Long Read of the Day

The myth of tech exceptionalism

Wonderfully acute essay by Yaël Eisenstat and Nils Gilman in Noema magazine.

Silicon Valley in recent decades has managed to build an anti-regulatory fortress around itself by promoting the myth — rarely stated plainly, but widely believed by tech practitioners — that “tech” is somehow fundamentally different from every other industry that has come before. It is different, the myth says, because it is inherently well-intentioned and will produce not just new but previously unthinkable products. Any micro-level harm — whether to an individual, a vulnerable community, even an entire country — is by this logic deemed a worthwhile trade-off for the society-shifting, macro-level “good.”

This argument, properly labelled “tech exceptionalism,” is rooted in tech leaders’ ideological view both of themselves and government. This ideology contributes to the belief that those who choose to classify themselves as “tech companies” deserve a different set of rules and responsibilities than the rest of private industry.

Exceptionalism is a strategy for avoiding regulation and it’s based on two rhetorical strategies.

1. Whatever harms technology creates, it is more than outweighed by the good in the present.

2. The claim that hypothetical future innovations will more than offset any harms of today’s technology.

This fine piece provides a useful antidote to tech BS, and is worth your time.

How many words does it take to make a mistake? 

Characteristically thoughtful LRB essay by Will Davies on the mechanisation of learning.

In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual ‘learners’, but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.

Among other things, the pandemic seems to have speeded up the neoliberal conquest of education.

My commonplace booklet

The best riposte to those who are rude to, and dismissive of, people who believe in fairies is that since 1970 particle physicists — those archetypal sober citizens — have been devout believers in the existence of neutrinos — subatomic particles that are so small that they can pass right through the earth without pausing.

Not only do physicists believe in these blighters, but they are now claiming to be able to weigh them. Exhibit A is this article, ”How Light is a Neutrino?”, which has appeared in Nature, no less. It doesn’t actually come up with an answer, though — just says that the latest effort to weigh the elusive particle produces a more precise estimate of its upper limit. And apparently this is progress.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

PJ O’Rourke RIP

Even when one disagreed with him about politics (which I certainly did), he was great fun and often a joy to read.

The NYT ran a good Obit. Sample:

He was a proud conservative Republican — one of his books was called “Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke” — but he was widely admired by readers of many stripes because of his fearless style and his willingness to mock just about anyone who deserved it, including himself. In “Republican Party Reptile” he recalled his youthful flirtation with Mao Zedong.

“But I couldn’t stay a Maoist forever,” he wrote. “I got too fat to wear bell-bottoms. And I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire.”

In 2010, The New York Times invited him and assorted other prominent people to define “Republican” and “Democrat.” He offered this:

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crab grass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.”

They (the Republicans) don’t make them like that any more.

Quote of the Day

”A spin with P. J. O’Rourke is like a ride in the back of an old pickup over unpaved roads. You get where you’re going fast, with exhilarating views but not without a few bruises.”

• Signe Wilkinson, reviewing PJ’s Parliament of Whores in the New York Times.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush | Don’t Give Up

Link

Extraordinary duet. It’s had more than 40m views on YouTube, so they’re doing something right.

An obituary for coal

Every year at this time, subscribers to The Economist (of whom I’m one) get sent a copy of The World Ahead — supposedly looking forward to the coming year.

Given that 2022 is the year when burning coal in a domestic fire will be outlawed, Anne Wroe, the Economist‘s Obituaries editor, contributed “Ashes to Ashes”, an elegant Obituary for the natural resource that made Britain great. I read it aloud to a friend who was busy doing something else at the time and thought that readers who are not Economist subscribers might enjoy it. So here it is:

Link

Everything you need to know about that Andrew Windsor business

Can’t imagine anyone bettering this dispatch in yesterday’s edition of Politico’s London Playbook newsletter.

SHAMING OF PRINCE ANDREW

ROYAL WRONG ‘UN: Queen Elizabeth II will help her son Prince Andrew pay an out-of-court settlement of more than £12 million to a woman who accused him of raping her when she was a child, in exchange for her silence and to prevent him from facing a jury trial. The sordid deal is the final disgrace for the queen’s third child and ends his prospect of ever salvaging his reputation or returning to public life. It raises searching questions about why Britain’s monarch is funding a settlement that saves Andrew from having to defend himself against Virginia Giuffre’s sexual abuse allegations in court. Andrew always claimed he had never met Giuffre and only weeks ago vowed to prove his innocence at a trial. Instead, he got his mum to pay her off. There is also the grim reality that since the queen, Andrew and the royal family derive much, if not all, of their wealth from the British public, it is essentially us who are paying for Andrew to buy his escape from justice. All in all, Tuesday was probably the most humiliating and damaging day for the royals in their recent history.

OUR NOBLE QUEEN: The story splashes most of today’s newspaper front pages. The Telegraph’s Victoria Ward and Josie Ensor report the queen will “partly fund” the settlement, which they are told “exceeds £12 million.” They say the terms of the deal require both Andrew and Giuffre not to discuss the case or the settlement in public. The Times’ Charlotte Wace, Will Pavia, Jonathan Ames and Mario Ledwith hear Andrew settled after pressure from Prince Charles as the case threatened to overshadow this year’s Platinum Jubilee. Playbook is not sure the queen paying off an alleged sexual abuse victim so she can have a party is as good a look as the royals think. The Sun’s Tom Wells say Andrew will never return to the front line of public life. The Mail calls it his “final humiliation.”

Long Read of the Day

Peter Thiel, the Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker

Long, long piece by Ryan Mac and Lisa Lerer in the New York Times on the current political plans of Silicon Valley’s most disruptive libertarian. There’s no good news in it, except for Republican extremists and maybe Trump supporters. And it provides further confirmation of the extent to which dark money and personal wealth are destroying American democracy.

Realism about Quantum computing

Given that our entire digital world increasingly depends on strong and virtually unbreakable encryption, there have been lots of doomsday conjectures about the computational power that will supposedly be provided by ‘quantum’ computers — i.e. those that work with Qubits rather than binary bits. The belief is that quantum machines will be so powerful that they will do in minutes calculations that would take conventional machines millions of years.

This interesting paper seems to throw cold water on this. Here’s the Abstract:

Note the number of physical Qubits required: 317 million to break the Bitcoin encryption in a time period small enough to be operationally useful.

Reality check: At the moment, the biggest working quantum computer (IBM’s) has the princely number of 127 physical Qubits.

Tentative conclusion: Conventional encryption looks a good bet for the time being.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Harbingers of Spring?

Seen on a woodland walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of the war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.”

• Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22

Drone manufacturers have the same idea.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Mr E’s Beautiful Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

The case for defending Ukraine

A counterweight by Natia Seskuria to the essay I posted yesterday asking (sceptically) why the US was so bothered about Ukraine and Putin. Ms Seskuria is an Associate Fellow at the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Since the tensions appear to be easing as I write this (late Tuesday evening), maybe all this stuff will be moot in a week. But here’s a sample.

The current crisis is not only about Ukraine’s sovereignty. It is about protecting the values that the U.S. stands for against Russian attempts to erase the rules-based international order. By issuing non-starter ultimatums on the U.S. and its allies—demanding that they take Russia’s so-called security concerns into consideration and change long-standing NATO policies—Russia is directly challenging America’s influence in Europe.

Until now, the West has largely underestimated or turned a blind eye towards the Kremlin’s malign activities. In many instances this approach has been motivated by the economic benefits of cooperation with Russia: the German government is still reluctant to scrap the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, despite Russia’s use of its energy resources as a geopolitical weapon. American leaders have done little better. Barack Obama held off on providing some lethal weapons to Ukraine to avoid provoking Putin. Although his successor Donald Trump ultimately authorized the purchase of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine and Georgia, his ambiguity and reluctance to criticize Putin further encouraged the Kremlin to play the game by its own rules.

Interesting piece but basically it’s the same argument ever since Chamberlain signed the deal with Hitler about Czechoslovakia. Giving in to bullies only encourages them.

Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook. Here’s a Photo of You and Your Ex

Lovely piece by Emily Kling.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Just logging in for a quick scroll? Take your time.

You’re not on here as much as you used to be. Still, we’ll never forget you. In fact, we at Facebook love celebrating the moments and people you’ve worked really hard to forget. So now that you’re here, please enjoy this picture of you and your ex-boyfriend from five years ago.

You really loved that wine bar. Look at how happy you were. And is it just us or is your body snatched in this pic? Do you still own that blouse? Oh, right, it doesn’t fit anymore. Just like your ex, it’s gone now.

What happened anyway? I mean, we’re Facebook; we, of course, know what happened. We’ve read the private messages between your ex-boyfriend and your best friend. Pretty steamy. But also, what happened to you? Bummer that you never fully moved on.

Lovely satire. Do read the whole thing. And then delete your account.

How a journalist used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch her husband’s every move

(with his permission, btw)

Kashmir Hill is a terrific journalist who has been covering the tech industry for a long time. A few years she conducted a remarkable experiment to see whether she could live a normal life without using the services of the tech giants. You can guess the result, but it made an interesting and sobering story.

Her latest investigation involved putting various consumer tracking devices on her long-suffering husband to see how effectively he could be tracked.

In mid-January, my husband and I were having an argument. Our 1-year-old had just tested positive for Covid-19 and was occasionally grunting between breaths. I called urgent care and was told we should take her to the emergency room. But, because I had been up all night with her, I was too exhausted to drive.

“I’m worried,” I told my husband. “I want you to take her to the hospital.”

“Doctors always tell us to take the baby to the E.R. whenever we call about anything,” he replied, exasperated. (This was true.) “She is fine. She is eating and playing and happy. This is not an emergency.”

He eventually caved and set out for the hospital a half-hour away. Knowing he was already annoyed by me, I did not want to pepper him with questions about how it was going.

Instead, I turned to the location-monitoring devices that I had secretly stashed in our car a week earlier.

I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket; a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket; and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment.

It’s a fascinating story, well told. And sobering if you’ve bought Tiles or AirTags. I have one of the latter, but it’s only attached to my house keys. (Thinks) Hmmm… But since I never leave home without my keys doesn’t that mean…?

My commonplace booklet

• Nissan is going to stop making internal combustion engines (ICEs) Link. I’m not surprised. With the Nissan Leaf they were early into the EV game.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!