Two-camera selfie

One of those silly experiments that photographers do.

I was going to call it “bicameral selfie” but then realised that wouldn’t be quite right.

Quote of the Day

“Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you”

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | I Fought The Law | Live

Link

Vivid evidence of my misspent youth. One of my favourite numbers by my second-favourite band. Note how long it takes them to get going. They were the first band to really understand tech. A colleague of mine who was the entertainments officer for the Students’ Union at his university in the 1960s managed to get the Dead to do a concert in a local football stadium. He was astonished when the 40-page contract arrived beforehand. It specified that an acoustically optimal location in the arena should be roped off for Deadheads to make bootleg recordings.

Long Read of the Day

The Mafia hires good accountants

Bracing blog post by Cory Doctorow about a strange paradox. On the one hand, journalists pay increasing attention to the giant consultancy firms, fancy law firms, economists and other elite enablers who pimp for kleptocrats and oligarchs in London and elsewhere. But on the other hand the accounting profession itself is rarely named when scandals erupt. Which is a mystery, since the keeping and auditing of financial ledgers is so key to corrupt practices. Strange, isn’t it? In fact the only accountancy firm I can remember being destroyed by a scandal is Arthur Andersen, the firm that did the Enron accounts.

Great read. I’ve often been puzzled about how partners in the big four auditing firms have escaped gaol.

Chart of the Day

Source: Axios

Crypto and capital gains tax

Interesting snippet spotted in the nearest thing the Financial Times has to an agony aunt.

 Q:I jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon early on for a bit of fun and without particularly high hopes. I have benefited from a price rise post-lockdown and now have a fairly high-value portfolio. I’ve used my holdings to fund some one-off purchases and exchanged between currencies. I recently received a letter from HM Revenue & Customs claiming that I may owe tax. I’m worried I’ve done something wrong. If I have never cashed in my portfolio, am I still liable for capital gains tax on the potential sterling profit on my original investment?

A: in most cases where someone has invested in crypto assets, those “assets” will be subject to capital gains tax (CGT) when sold, if the gain realised is above the £12,300 threshold.

CGT is due as a result of disposal, so if you’ve made no disposals, no CGT would be due. However, if you have exchanged crypto direct for other goods, or even to acquire new cryptocurrency, then it is likely that you will have made some disposals and potentially triggered CGT.

HMRC’s approach is to apply the same rules as for shares and equities. The tax authority has been securing data in relation to coins and tokens held by individuals from a number of crypto exchanges, and it is this information that it is largely using to identify holders of crypto and sending them letters.

So if you have cryptocurrency (I don’t) be sure to keep good records. And if you do decide to cash in, remember to set aside enough to cover the whopping tax bill!

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Ulysses @ 100

Photo credit: Geoffrey Barker under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

This is a big day for those of us who are fans of the writings of James Joyce — the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. (Footnote: If you’re not of that persuasion, this might be the time to take the day off, and no one will think the worse of you for that. Normal service will be restored tomorrow.)

As Kevin Birmingham observes in his fascinating study, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, so much has been written about what’s exceptional within the pages of Joyce’s epic that we have lost sight of what happened to Ulysses itself. It’s a great story and Birmingham tells it well.

The book was banned as obscene, officially or unofficially, throughout most of the English-speaking world for over a decade. And the fact that it was forbidden is part of what made the novel so transformative. Ulysses, says Birmingham, “changed not only the course of literature in the century that followed, but the very definition of literature in the eyes of the law”.

Joyce wrote all of it by hand in notebooks, on loose-leaf sheets and on scraps of paper in more than a dozen apartments in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. A portion was burned in Paris while it was still only a manuscript draft, and it was convicted of obscenity in New York before it was even a book (parts of it were published in instalments by a small magazine). Joyce’s difficulties inspired Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running a small bookstore in Paris, to publish the book when everyone else (including Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press) refused.

Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic confiscated and burned more than a thousand copies. Most of the surviving copies of the first edition came from Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach’s shop, where, as one writer remembered, “Ulysses lay stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar.”

Joyce was, by all accounts, an utterly exasperating man, but his contemporaries saw his genius clearly. He was perpetually broke and living on the charity of friends and supporters (while also living it up whenever he had money to burn). He also suffered from terrible bouts of iritis (a swelling of the iris), which in turn brought on bouts of acute glaucoma and often left him close to blindness, and he underwent traumatising eye-surgery without anaesthetics.

His grevious health problems and feeble eyesight, writes Birmingham,

made him heroic and pitiable, inaccessible and deeply human. The images of Joyce wearing eye patches and post surgical bandages or reading with thick spectacles and magnifying glass gave him the aura of a blind seer, a twentieth-century Homer or Milton. Illness was taking away the visible world only to give him an experience whose intensity was too deep for others to fathom. Ernest Hemingway once wrote to Joyce after his son’s fingernail lightly scratched his eye. “It hurt like hell,” Hemingway said. “For ten days I had a very little taste of how things might be with you.”

Yet he persevered. The book, Birmingham thinks,

reads like s desperate, beloved labor, a work of uncanny insight behind thick spectacles… It is the book of a man who, even in a hospital bed — even with both eyes bandaged — would reach for a notebook and trace phrases blindly with his pencil so that he could insert them into his manuscript when he could see again. It’s no wonder that Joyce’s fiction explored the interior world. Beyond his family, it was all he had.

Spot on. And there are many among us who are very glad that he persevered.

Quote of the Day

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

• Ulysses, p. 31 (Bodley Head, 1937 edition)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Il mio tesoro from Don Giovanni | Sung by John McCormack

Link

Joyce had a fine singing voice and came close to winning first place in the singing competition at the 1904 Feis Ceoil, an annual celebration of Irish musical talent held in Dublin. The previous year the top prize (a year-long scholarship to study in Italy) had been won by John McCormack, who was friendly with Joyce and had advised him to enter the 1904 competition. But Joyce won only the bronze medal, possibly because he didn’t stick to the rubric: he refused to sight-read a musical score. He was as cussed as hell even then.

McCormack went on to a brilliantly successful career as a Bel canto tenor, while Joyce became a great modernist writer. It’s tantalising to think that we might not have had Ulysses if he had adhered to the rubric. But he was fascinated by music all his life — as you can see if you consult Ruth Bauerle’s amazing James Joyce Songbook, an astonishing (and vast) compendium of all the music to be found in his writings.

Long Read of the Day

Heeding James Joyce

Nice essay by Chris Hedges in Counterpunch.

One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a 732-page novel she had published, “Ulysses” by James Joyce…

Read on.

Karl Jung’s letter to Joyce on finishing the novel

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,

C.G. Jung

The 11 things missing from Sue Gray’s report on ‘Partygate’

Nice commentary in openDemocracy.

TL;DR version: basically, everything that’s important is missing.

The only question is whether (as I mentioned yesterday) the Met’s investigation is capable of leading to criminal charges.

I always suspected that the report would be a damp squib — partly because the Westminster bubble (and its associated media obsession) was making so much of it.

Only time will tell if that hunch was correct. In the meantime, Johnson is safe until the May elections.

In trying to wriggle out of its responsibilities, Spotify is making a category mistake

The company’s CEO Daniel Ek vowed to provide greater transparency around Spotify’s content rules and said he wanted to support “expression while balancing it with the safety of our users.” And just like Facebook, Spotify will be labelling content with warnings and directing users to a Covid-19 information hub with input from scientists and world health experts.

There are two things wrong with this:

1. As various people have pointed out, attaching warning messages to content (dodgy or otherwise) about controversial matters effectively gives all messages equal status, and often merely boosts the bad stuff.

2. More importantly, by borrowing ideas from the Facebook playbook, Ek is making a category error. Spotify, as a Sarah Frier points out on Bloomberg’s Fully Charged, is not Facebook. “The objectionable content at issue comes not from a video or politician that happened to go viral, but from The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast Spotify paid for the privilege of distributing exclusively on its service, in a licensing deal worth about $100 million”.

Moreover, as Frier goes on to observe,

Spotify executives are not shocked at the nature of Rogan’s pandemic content; the podcast deal was inked in May 2020, when Rogan was already a highly controversial figure. And critically: Spotify isn’t a user-generated content company, it’s a curator and publisher of selected media. Rogan is the cornerstone of its podcasting business.

(Emphasis added.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

My commonplace booklet

• Celebrate the publication centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses in a two-day conference at The Huntington.  Hmmm… Reading the blurb suggests that it’s above my pay grade. For example: “Joyce’s Ulysses uses Dublin as map as well as palimpsest upon which to inscribe his vision of worlds past and present. This conference will explore approaches to literary study that make clearer the verbal and nonverbal coordinates of Joyce’s literary terrain and their global expressions. Topics will range from forms of visualization (schemas, maps, charts, word indexes) to decolonization, intertexts and intermedia, mapping as metaphor and places as texts, in an effort to open up new ways of reading.”

• Teenager seeks $50k from Elon Musk to delete Twitter bot tracking private jet Link And now the lad is going after the private jets of other billionaires. One’s heart bleeds for the poor dears.

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The lane in sunlight

Little St Mary’s Lane — one of my favourite streets in Cambridge. In the early 1970s Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane lived at No. 6 and I would sometimes meet them in the morning, Jane wheeling Stephen in his wheelchair to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics (DAMPT), which was next door to my lab. Initially, I had no idea who he was, or what a significant figure he was — even then. But I found out quickly enough, because some of my friends were students in DAMTP and I would sometimes go there for the morning coffee break and notice that in one corner of the room was this chap in a wheelchair, invariably surrounded by a small group of animated graduate students and post-docs. One of the latter was Nathan Myhrvold, who later became Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer. There’s a story that when Bill Gates decided to set up a global scholarship fund on the lines of the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, Nathan steered him in the direction of Cambridge. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but Cambridge now has an annual cohort of Gates Scholars. I’ve worked with a few of them in recent years, and they have been, without exception, remarkable young people.

Quote of the Day

”I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

• Evelyn Waugh, Prelude to Decline and Fall.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Radu Lupu & Murray Perahia | Brahms Haydn Variations, op. 56b

Link

Longer (18 minutes) than usual, but worth it. I just started it off when I was writing and let it roll. And when it got to the end, I played it again!

Long Read of the Day

Luxury at the top, privation at the bottom: Britain is becoming feudal in its disparities

(An advertisement in a recent copy of the Financial Times.)

Good John Harris column in the Guardian. My only quibble is with the word ‘becoming’. The fact that so-called ‘liberal’ democracies have become comfortable with inequality levels that are now at pre-1914 levels is what leads increasing numbers of their citizens to ask why that kind of ‘democracy’ is such a big deal. Which is one reason why its survival is in doubt.

Makes for uncomfortable reading.

There are good reasons why the Met may want a redacted version of the Gray report

Informative piece by Parm Sandhu in the Guardian:

If criminal proceedings go ahead, the matter must be proven beyond reasonable doubt for each named individual. Using the gathered evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service would consider using tests of sufficiency of evidence and public interest in determining whether to prosecute. The process on the whole is held to a much more robust standard than the publishing of a report, and could go some way to explaining the Met’s requests.

Conspiracy theories about the Met and the Sue Gray report are entertaining (and might even be true) but adhering to the rule of law in a criminal inquiry requires different standards to those which guide a civil service inquiry. This piece by a former cop provides a useful corrective to the current hoo-hah about Johnson and his various ‘partygates’.

Dominic Cummings says it is his ‘duty to get rid’ of Boris Johnson

While we’re on the subject of Johnson, another Guardian piece pointed me to an interview his nemesis and former adviser, Dominic Cummings, gave to New York Magazine. Trying to take the Prime Minister down, he says, is “an unpleasant but necessary job. It’s like sort of fixing the drains.” The interview is larded with other entertaining quotes.

He’s particularly — and savagely — dismissive of conventional British politicians, who are, he says,

obsessed with the media and little else. “People just don’t understand the extent to which they are dominated by what’s going to appear on TV tonight what’s going to appear in the papers tomorrow,” he says. Johnson is an example of a man who governs — or performs — for the media. In Cummings’s telling, he is an imbecile. “In January 2020,” Cummings says, “I was sitting in No. 10 with Boris and the complete fuckwit is just babbling on about: ‘Will Big Ben bong for Brexit on the 31st of January?’ He goes on and on about this day after day.

Eventually I say to him: ‘Who cares? What are you talking about? Why are you babbling on about Big Ben? It’s completely ludicrous. We won the election a few weeks ago. We have an eighty-seat majority. You are literally only in this study because for six months we actually had a plan that focused on the country, not on the stupid media. And that’s why we won, despite all the pundits saying we are idiots, we didn’t know what we are doing. Now we have proved them wrong, we have an eighty-seat majority, we don’t have to worry about their babbling.’” He looks aghast: “‘Why the fuck are we sitting around having these meetings about what will the Sun do tomorrow about Big Ben?’”

What I don’t understand is why people are astonished — and even shocked — to learn that Johnson is like this. It’s been obvious for at least three decades that’s he’s a lazy narcissist with an entitlement complex.

But, in a way, it was the same with Trump when he was elected. The quasi-liberal mainstream US media were continually shocked by the things he would do, by his contempt for constitutional and behavioural norms and by his obvious corruption. Which made one wonder which planet they had been inhabiting in the previous three decades.

My commonplace booklet

My piece yesterday about James Fallows’s lovely account of how an airline emergency was handled and the convention that an air-traffic controller used the agreed phrase “Say Souls Aboard” to inquire how many passengers were on the plane. The phrase struck a chord with a reader who emailed to say:

Always remember the phrase ‘souls on board’ from the Titanic film. It appeals to me in the way it seems to place a greater value on passengers.

She included a clip of the relevant moment in the film.

The thought that sparked in this blogger is about the way a new mode of transportation (air travel) adopts approved lingo from older modes — in this case seafaring.

Which in turn reminds me of an academic symposium I attended decades ago on the challenge of devising a legal system for regulating a global system like the internet. At one point, international maritime law was proposed as a model by some of the lawyers present. At which point a very senior Microsoft executive laconically observed: “That’s fine, so long as you remember that we own all of the water and most of the ports”. He may have been joking, but somehow I doubt it.

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Return of our wild geese

Our village’s family of Canada geese have returned to the lake. Here they are the other evening, in the dusk.

Quote of the Day

”Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”

• Tom Stoppard, in a line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Neil Young | Harvest Moon

Link

Given that Neil Young has demanded that his music be removed from Spotify due to vaccine misinformation spread by podcaster Joe Rogan on the streaming service, it seems right to highlight him today out of solidarity. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” he said. Predictably, Spotify chose Rogan. They are, after all, a tech company masquerading as a music company, and they paid Rogan $100m to bring his creepy but popular podcast to their platform.

Long Read of the Day

Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his £10-a-month blog

An illuminating essay on Dominic Cummings by David Runciman, who has been reading Cummings’s blog so you don’t have to. This is a useful service to society because Cummings is both very interesting and very obnoxious, and the latter quality repels so many people that they don’t get to understand what an astute, imaginative, flawed and dangerous figure he is. David Runciman has his measure, and in this fascinating piece he lays it out.

Sample:

This is his political superpower: he takes the other side’s ideas seriously, but not the people who hold those ideas. It means he can think dispassionately about what his opponents are doing – even get inside their heads and explore how they will react to what he is doing – while retaining his unshakeable contempt for them. He likes to conduct thought experiments in which he imagines how the idiots might do their version of politics better if they weren’t such idiots. It’s what won him Brexit. When remainers wailed about his tactics, traduced his character and told him he was playing with fire, he just shrugged. He ignored the commentariat and relished the howls of outrage from the chatterati. But he also thought hard about how his campaign messages would affect theirs. By wrapping the case for Brexit in the mantle of the NHS, he not only made Brexit more appealing to many voters, he infuriated remainers who knew it was nonsense. Which meant they ended up talking about his message, Brexit = NHS, and not theirs. In politics, victory doesn’t always go to the people who work hardest. It also goes to the ones for whom outrage is a weapon, not simply an indulgence.

If you read nothing else this week, make time for this.

The metaverse is dystopian – but to Big Tech it’s just a new business opportunity

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago – until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise – the term “metaverse” was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How come? Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media, announced that he was changing its name to Meta and would henceforth be devoting all his efforts – plus $10bn (£7bn) and thousands of engineers – to building a parallel universe called the metaverse.

And then, because the tech industry and the media that chronicle its doings are basically herds of mimetic sheep, the metaverse was suddenly the newest new thing. This was news to Neal Stephenson, the writer who actually invented the term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash…

Read on

‘Say Souls On Board’: How Professionals Sound Under Pressure

An absolutely compelling blog post by James Fallows, a great American journalist who’s also a long-time pilot and flying enthusiast. It tells the story of an emergency landing of a commercial airliner shortly after it departed Dulles airport in Washington DC. Early in the flight, the crew detected a possible fault in the plane’s landing gear and requested permission to return to the airport. Fallows includes an audio recording of the radio exchanges between the pilots and the airport’s control tower as events unfold, and adds a commentary for readers who (like) are unfamiliar with the lingo. “Say souls on board”, for example, is the standard inquiry about how many passengers the plane is carrying.

It all ends well, but it’s a brilliant example of what competence and expertise is like in real life. And it led to wishful thoughts about what it would have been like if we had similar levels of competence in governments when they were confronted by the Covid pandemic.

My commonplace booklet

”Members of Congress have a lot of Big Tech in their portfolios. According to financial filings, at least 18 senators and 77 House members report owning shares of one or more of the biggest tech companies. And Nancy Pelosi disclosed that her husband has as much as $25.5 million in Apple stock alone.

(Source: Bloomberg)

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Ludwig’s corner

My late wife Carol is buried in Ascension Churchyard in Cambridge. So is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and whenever I go to Carol’s grave I also visit his grave, because visitors often leave intriguing messages and other kinds of memento there. When I checked on the day this photograph was taken, there was a one-Euro coin and a mysteriously broken mug.

Quote of the Day

”A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Ständchen | Camille Thomas and Beatrice Berrut

Link

Long Read of the Day

’Endemic’ doesn’t mean harmless

Sobering article in Nature by Aris Katzourakis.

The word ‘endemic’ has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the assumptions that people are making about it encourage a misplaced complacency. It doesn’t mean that COVID-19 will come to a natural end. It’s here to stay.

To an epidemiologist, an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling. More precisely, it means that the proportion of people who can get sick balances out the ‘basic reproduction number’ of the virus, the number of individuals that an infected individual would infect, assuming a population in which everyone could get sick. Yes, common colds are endemic. So are Lassa fever, malaria and polio. So was smallpox, until vaccines stamped it out.

In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.

Good piece. And a useful antidote to the magical thinking about the virus that one finds in some politicians — and in many of our fellow-citizens.

Chart of the Day

From Scott Galloway

4 hours and 23 minutes.

That’s how much time Americans spend on their smartphones every day. In 2010, we spent 24 minutes on our phones — that’s 3% of our waking hours. Today, smartphone usage consumes one third of waking hours.

The Next Big Thing

My conversation with David Runciman on Talking Politics about the so-called ‘Metaverse’ and related matters.

The NYT’s The Daily podcast also had a very good edition about the Metaverse madness.

My commonplace booklet

•  Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge Link
• Om Malik’s photographs Link
• Spotify had to choose between Neil Young and Joe Rogan. Guess who they chose. Link

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Nature’s abundance

Walking on a Norfolk beach at the weekend I fell to wondering how many shells we had crunched through. Hundreds of thousands, I guessed, at least. This was just a typical square metre.

Quote of the Day

”I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr Tolstoy, unless I’m crazy of I keep getting better.”

• Ernest Hemingway, New Yorker, 13 May 1950.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Shaun Davey | Free and Easy | Choral Scholars of University College Dublin | Arranged and conducted by Desmond Earley

Link

Shaun Davey’s music is wonderful.

Long Read of the Day  Why skyscrapers are so short

A fascinating piece by Brian Potter on how technology, economics and regulations determine the height of buildings.

Frank Dutton RIP

Good New York Times obituary of an heroic figure – a white South African detective who took on and exposed the crimes of apartheid policing.

Frank Dutton, whose investigations into some of the biggest criminal cases in South African history, from apartheid-era hit squads to more recent high-level government corruption, earned him a reputation as his country’s greatest police detective, died on Jan. 20 at a hospital in Hillcrest, South Africa. He was 72.

Mr. Dutton came to prominence in the early 1990s, a fraught moment between the 1990 release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the 1994 multiracial elections that elevated him to the presidency and officially brought apartheid to a close.

Mr. Dutton, who was white, and his colleague, Lwandle Wilson Magadla, who was Black, were working on a separate case when they uncovered evidence related to the 1988 killing of 11 Black South Africans in Trust Feed, a town in the province of KwaZulu Natal.

Trust Feed was dominated by the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Black activist organization. Initial investigations into the massacre had placed the blame on Inkatha’s rival, the African National Congress, and despite glaring failures by the police — they never interviewed two survivors, for example — a judge had ruled the case closed.

In a meticulous and dangerous investigation, Dutton and Magadla discovered that the murders had been a false-flag operation carried out by a police hit squad in an effort to drive a wedge between the two African parties.

Dutton went on under the Mandela presidency and afterwards to become South Africa’s leading and best-known cop.

Looking at the photograph, you wouldn’t want to mess with him.

Thanks to Ross Anderson for the tip.

How does Elon Musk get stuff done so quickly?

Interesting essay by Frederic Filloux. You may need to curb your instinctive hostility to (or scepticism about) the guy. But you’ll emerge wiser (or at least better informed) afterwards. At least I did.

The video included in the piece is fascinating, btw.

My commonplace booklet

From Private Eye (where else?)

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Tidal sinusoids

I’m reminded of the waveforms I used to see on oscilloscopes when I was an engineering undergraduate.

Quote of the Day

”If you’re going to invest in bitcoin, a short-time horizon is four years, a mid-time horizon is 10 years. The right time horizon is forever.”

• MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor talking to Bloomberg News

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Bell Bottom Blues (Live)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?

An unmissable New Yorker profile of Kim Stanley Robinson by Joshua Rothman. If you’ve never read Robinson, then can I respectfully suggest that you consider doing so. And if you want to think hard about climate change then his The Ministry for the Future would be a good place to start.

The opening chapter is set in 2025, in Uttar Pradesh in India, which is in the grip of a “wet-bulb” heat wave — a lethal combination of heat and humidity in which human sweat ceases to evaporate. In such conditions, even healthy people in the shade cook and die. The chapter is fiction but in recent years heat waves like this have occurred in Australia, India, Mexico, and Pakistan. The death toll in Uttar Pradesh appals the watching world, but little changes. Which leads to the depressing conclusion that it’ll only when the climate-change-induced catastrophes become unbearable that humankind will finally accept that what we know is coming is actually coming.

In the Victorian era, social novels, by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others, awakened us to poverty and injustice. Modern “naturalists,” like Émile Zola, took a scientific approach, following the causal chains of everyday life, which might link a kitchen stove to coal miners working underground. Robinson brings these traditions to bear on our future problems, combining them with an unusual narrative style designed to dramatize civilizational transformation. “The Ministry for the Future” contains chapters that describe the daily habits of geologists and encamped climate refugees; one chapter is narrated by a carbon atom, and another by the market—both actors in the networks that shape our world. Other chapters are oral histories of the sort one might find in the work of the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, showing how ordinary people could have their attitudes reshaped by climate disasters. The goal is to capture what the literary critic Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”—an invisible scaffold, unique to its period, on which our emotions hang. In our current structure of feeling, a narrator suggests, the order of things is experienced as “unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes.” Like glaciers, structures of feeling shift with time—that’s how we so readily distinguish between the nineteen-sixties and now.

It’s a long read, but worth it.

Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) isn’t working

If you’ve ever tried to open a bank account, or moving a non-trivial sum of money from one bank account to another in the UK, then you will have found yourself (and your lawyer or accountant) enmeshed in some very tedious paperwork, all of it ostensibly designed to prevent bad actors like, say, Russian oligarchs from laundering their ill-gotten gains by, say, purchasing houses in Eaton Place. And the strange thing is that while you and I get enmeshed in this paperwork, London is the money-laundering capital of the world.

Your accountant, lawyer or banker is obliged to go through this rigmarole because of the ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) requirement of AML. In a terrific post Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) has a nice illustration of the downside of this laudable requirement. He is reminded, he writes,

of Faruk Fatih Özer, founder of the now-defunct Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, who vanished last year along with $2 billion in cryptocurrencies from the exchange, had fled not only with customers’ cryptocurrencies, but also with their identities. As David Gerard so eloquently phrased it, Özer paid the most “painstaking attention” to money-laundering compliance and was therefore able to take detailed Know-Your-Customer (KYC) data for hundreds of thousands of users with him. This data included scans of the customers’ national ID cards, once again proving that digitising identity is no substitute for digital identity.

Now, of course, the reason why Mr. Özer had such a treasure trove of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) was because regulators had forced him to obtain it. So maybe it should be up to the regulators to fix the problem! But what are they going to do? What will happen to all of the people whose identities were stolen in this way? Are they all going to be given new identities in a vast national witness protection programme while their old identities are cancelled? Will the authorities give everyone a new name and a new number, cancel their old ID cards and send them new ones?

Well, of course they won’t. Not only is this approach to money-laundering ineffective (see London), but it’s immensely wasteful. Dave says that UN estimates for the seizure of criminal assets globally are in the region of $1.5 billon while the Lexis-Nexis estimate for the global costs of AML compliance are in the region of $180 billion.

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To Infinity and beyond

Saturday morning last.

Quote of the Day

”Candy is dandy
But Liquor is quicker.”

• Ogden Nash, Reflection on Ice-breaking

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mahler | Fifth Symphony | Adagietto | Berlin Phil | Karajan

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Not Hating the Body

A truly extraordinary essay by Martha Nussbaum on body-hatred. An unlikely topic, you might think, though if you were brought up as a Catholic you might find resonances galore in it. Plato has a lot to answer for, and she holds him to account. But she has a much longer charge-sheet than that. And such a great intellectual range.

Let us consider other highly intelligent animals. Elephants fear death, and seek to avoid it for self and others, and even, as we now know, grieve the loss of loved ones with rituals of mourning. Mother elephants even sacrifice their lives to protect their young from speeding trains. That is how vividly they see death ahead of them, and how bad they think it is. But they stop short of body-hatred. They do not adopt a distorted attitude to their potentially crumbling frames that leads to projective aggression against other groups of elephants.

Do not say, please, that it is because they are less aware. We are finding out more all the time about their communication systems, their social organization, their capacious and nuanced awareness. But we do not find disgust. That pathology appears to be ours alone. In her beautiful memoir, Coming of Age With Elephants, Joyce Poole, one of our greatest elephant researchers, describes the way in which her human community impeded her “coming of age” as a fulfilled woman and mother. The researcher group was highly misogynistic and racist. They deliberately broke up her happy romance with an African man. When she was raped by a stranger, they treated her as soiled and did nothing to deal with her trauma. In elephant society, by contrast, she observed better paradigms of inclusive friendship, of compassionate and cooperative group care. The memoir ends when she returns to the elephant group after a two-year absence, carrying her infant child in her arms. The matriarchal herd not only recognize her, they understand her new happiness. And they greet her with the ceremony of trumpeting and defecating by which elephants greet the birth of a new elephant child. No body-hatred, no disgust, no projective subordinations.

Nussbaum’s also good on the absence of body-hatred in James Joyce’s great character, Leopold Bloom. Recall that, early in the day chronicled in Ulysses, he

ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

When Mr Kernan pompously observes that the liturgical trope I am the resurrection and the life “touches a man’s innermost heart”, Leopold thinks:

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.

A long read, for sure. But worth it.

Chart of the Day

Source: Quartz, which adds the comment:

The findings go against the grain of reports of an ongoing “techlash”—a wave of hostility to technology, its numerous breaches of privacy and security, and its disconcerting pace of disruptive change. Edelman’s newest numbers suggest that tech has perhaps benefited from an overall cross-sector rise in trust. But it also follows a period in which technology has proven even more indispensable to our lives during the pandemic.

Hmmm…

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