Unsurprisingly the history featuring here reflects my history, the history I have studied and that of those I have come in contact with. It is therefore specific, subjective as to topic, perhaps eclectic and ever changing. History is another window to look through in the search for understanding and explanation....

Sinking into the ‘great stagnation’
By Martin Wolf

The future is not what it used to be. Nor is the present. This is the theme of The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. This is an influential, albeit depressing, little book, first published on the internet.* Its theme is in its subtitle: “How America ate all the low-hanging fruit of modern history, got sick and will (eventually) feel better.” The book is a model of popular writing: lucid, brief and provocative. But is the argument also true? If so, what might it imply?

» Read More

The recent outcome of the most recent of the serial "crisis" summit series over the EU may well signal the construction of a European equivalent of the United States of America. With budgetary control of the 26 (the UK has said "Nein merci") member countries in the hands of euro bureaucrats and politicians, countries would be subject to a loss of sovereignty never experienced before, potential penalties never experienced before (although the record on enforcement in the EU makes most countries record on jay walking laws look totalitarian) and intrusion into everyday fiscal affairs including taxation, something to look forward to.

"Interesting" doesn't begin to describe the possibilities. A country writes a budget according to the wishes of its voting community, its economic health, and the aspirations of its people - Nek Minnit - Germany says "No quite - a little more of this and a little less of that thank you" while France runs its ruler over the proposed budget and disagrees with Germany just as Lativia is lining up to "have a go" - times 26. If it all tips over - worry not - the ECB, the EU attempt at a central bank will be there with 500 large units of prop up money scavenged from the members. At 501 of course its all over, i.e. its time to hold another Summit.

Little wonder than that all serious corporate already have plans well in hand should the Euro fly to pieces - meanwhile, long sterling mightn't be a bad place to be.

Some evidence of the worth of some values embodied in a longstanding British notion....

Note: password "keepcalm" is needed.

The description of the East India Company's transport arrangements as set out in Wikipedia....

An East Indiaman was a ship operating under charter or license to any of the East India Companies of the major European trading powers of the 17th through the 19th centuries. In Britain, the Honourable East India Company itself did not generally own merchant ships, but held a monopoly granted to it by Queen Elizabeth I of England for all English trade between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, which was progressively restricted during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. English (later British) East Indiamen usually ran between England, the Cape of Good Hope and India, often continuing on their voyages to China before returning to England via the Cape of Good Hope. Main ports visited in India were Bombay, Madras and Calcutta.

Note that even then, owning shipping assets was evidently not seen as an area of core competency for the company.

Flashman (George Fraser MacDonald, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.24, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991 ) here reflects some common views of the British Empire.....

"You’ll have heard it said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind — one of those smart Oscarish squibs that sounds well but is thoroughly fat-headed. Presence of mind, if you like — and countless other things, such as greed and Christianity, decency and villainy, policy and lunacy, deep design and blind chance, pride and trade, blunder and curiosity, passion, ignorance, chivalry and expediency, honest pursuit of right, and determination to keep the bloody Frogs out. And as often as not, such things came tumbling together, and when the dust had settled, there we were, and who else was going to set things straight and feed the folk and guard the gate and dig the drains — oh, aye, and take the profits, by all means."

His Finest Hour: A Brief Life of Winston Churchill - Christopher Catherwood, Constable & Robinson, London 2010.

The point of this book for me at least is less to do with Churchill and the historical events he featured in than the methods and skews various historians and commentators put on the man and the interpretation of his role in the events.

There seem to be roughly three approaches:

The Derring Do Hero - which I was brought up with. This version sees Churchill, his value set and all he stood for as irreproachably "good" and "worthy", as embodying the hero in all events and as someone to utterly aspire to. Traditional "hero values" if you will - courage, energy, bravery, self before others and supremely triumphant.

The Oversold Blunderer Saved by Chance - This a Revisionist style appraisal in which Churchill is seen as frequently drunk, having made serious mistakes which cost vast numbers of lives, unerringly and harmfully right wing in the worst possible sense and filling a false image created at least in part through his own hand.

The Flawed But Nonetheless Heroic Human - Adopting this approach is more demanding than it looks if a consistent and plausible assessment is to emerge. It involves more than a "middle position" relative to the other stances. Instead the assessment requires what has been termed a "warts and all" look at events and an attempt to see decisions and behaviour in the inevitably more messy, blurred and untidy bundle which most of us are familiar with in our own lives. Lives which, like Churchill's, are not well characterised as romanticsed norms.

In this endeavour the author succeeds. Both good and bad moments are discussed. The disaster which was the Dardenelles and the ANZAC expedition along with the stubborn refusal to accept Indian input into the government of India are not glossed over but instead treated as evidence of flaws in the hero. The greatest hour gets the full treatment as well if in a conventional sense.

Neither is Churchill spared the ignominy of having been likely the only politician, certainly in recent times, to have been paid a small fortune to write what is essentially his autobiography and in the process fashion much of the image he would have the world ascribe to him.

Perhaps the sharpest insight offered is the recognition that the very brilliance which had Churchill see that the US was indispensable to winning the war was also to lead to Churchill's (and Europe's)inability to significantly influence the shape of post war Europe.

It is in some senses painful to have to dismantle romantic visions, either overly heroic or micheviously revisionist, in favour of the more prosaic reality which even history's most dramatic events produce. This sample suggests however, that the result may well be a more authentic portrayal of what most likely took place and the role of central characters such as Churchill.

Theodore Dalrymple
A Man of Letters
Denis Dutton, R.I.P.
29 December 2010

Denis Dutton, who has died at the comparatively early age of 66, will be sadly missed by all who knew him, for to know him was immediately to form a strong and lasting affection for him. Dutton had a profound and beneficial effect on political and cultural debate in the entire English-speaking world.

Born in California, where he studied, he was for many years a professor of the philosophy of art at Canterbury University at Christchurch, in New Zealand. His intellectual curiosity and energy were formidable. He was the editor of the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature, from whose editorial seat he insisted, against the current of the times, that accessibility was not the opposite of scholarship or profundity but rather the sine qua non of work of genuine worth. Under his editorship, the journal ran a widely noted annual bad-writing award, in which pretentious academic gobbledygook was held up to the public ridicule that it so richly deserved. The examples that won (the field was extensive, needless to say) were hilarious and auto-satirizing; but though no commentary was necessary, Dutton’s remarks were exemplary for their concision, accuracy, and deadliness. He skewered some of the most celebrated charlatans of our time. Dutton also wrote one book, The Art Instinct, possibly the only treatise by someone with a Darwinian approach to philosophy that a non-Darwinian can read with pleasure and instruction.

But it was for founding and editing the influential website Arts and Letters Daily that Dutton will perhaps be best remembered. Arts and Letters Daily was not so much a digest of the English-language press of the world as a compendium of articles taken from it that seemed to Dutton to be of intellectual interest and worthy of an intelligent person’s attention. Many articles that first appeared in City Journal found a second life on Arts and Letters Daily.
A major achievement of the website was revealing to the world of the bien-pensant liberal that there existed a realm of conservative thought containing, not bigotry or morally corrupt apologias for the rich, afraid for their fortunes, but serious reflections upon the human condition. After Arts and Letters Daily, it became more difficult to dismiss conservatism with crude ad hominem jibes. In that sense, like several new media outlets, it has rendered service to those on the left as well as on the right.

The agenda of the English-language press, upon which the sun never sets, was driven to a startling degree by Arts and Letters Daily, produced in Christchurch. I once published an article in an excellent cultural journal of limited circulation about a subject of interest to few of my compatriots. I had forgotten about it; but suddenly, a frenzy of interest erupted in it. In the space of a few hours, at least 20 radio stations contacted me, wanting to talk about the article. I found this utterly mysterious until I discovered that Arts and Letters Daily had posted it shortly before.

A man, however, is not to be measured wholly by the quality of his achievements. I wish only that I were able to turn as fine a compliment of Denis Dutton as Doctor Johnson turned of Sir Joshua Reynolds: that he was the most invulnerable man that he knew, for if he should quarrel with him, he should find the most difficulty how to abuse him. Denis Dutton was of that ilk.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The last testament of Flashman's creator: How Britain has destroyed itself
by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
Last updated at 00:13 05 January 2008


When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue - the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.
In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

» Read More

The US is heading the welfare route begun in the 1930s in places like N.Z. and cemented in the 1970s with ACC.... expect the impact to be much the same except that they will have to pay the piper rather sooner than NZ.

Washington (CNN) -- President Obama won a historic victory in the struggle for health care reform Sunday as the House of Representatives passed a sweeping bill overhauling the American medical system.

The bill passed in a 219-212 vote after more than a year of bitter partisan debate. All 178 Republicans opposed it, along with 34 Democrats.

The measure, which cleared the Senate in December, will now go to Obama's desk to be signed into law. It constitutes the biggest expansion of federal health care guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid more than four decades ago.
A separate compromise package of changes expanding the reach of the measure also passed the House over unanimous GOP opposition, and is now set to be taken up by the Senate.

The overall $940 billion plan is projected to extend insurance coverage to roughly 32 million additional Americans. It represents a significant step towards the goal of universal coverage sought by every Democratic president since Harry Truman.

Most Americans will now be required to have health insurance or pay a fine. Larger employers will be required to provide coverage or risk financial penalties. Total individual out-of-pocket expenses will be capped, and insurers will be barred from denying coverage based on gender or pre-existing conditions.