All right-thinking global citizens know that the greatest threat to world peace is American nationalism. This is especially true of our neighbors to the north, who have borne the brunt of recent threats and insults. However, instead of wringing their hands, they could decide on a bold course of action: the existing Canadian provinces could offer to become American states. (OK, Prince Edward Island is too small, so it would need to join with New Brunswick first.) By creating 9 new states whose politics are to the left of Massachusetts (Alberta perhaps excepted), Canadians could permanently prevent all future electoral victories by conservatives, populists, and other deplorables. But would they have the courage to sacrifice their nation to save the world? Let’s not hold our breath…
Anglosphere
The Vanished World
I read the various news stories about the latest Islamic-inspired mass murder in India with a mixture of odd emotions. One of them being ‘Oh dear, radical Muslims again, behaving in that manner which we have come to expect,’ the second being a degree of sadness for a place and a time that I have never been a part of, but am sort-of-acquainted with, and the third being straight-out nostalgia for a vanished world. Or several vanishing worlds. I was moved to take down and re-read a murder mystery from the collection in the hallway segment of the home library – M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kashmir.*
The mystery is set in the mountains in the first chapters, and then in a garrison town on the plains, and finally on Kashmir’s Lake Dal, all described most lovingly by a writer who knew them well, eight or nine decades ago. It takes place in 1947, as the British were packing up to leave India for good and all. M. M. “Mollie” Kaye’s family had served the so-called ‘Raj’ for generations; father to son, to son, to mother, to daughter, serving and doing their bit, spending their lives there, in various capacities. Military, missionary, civil service, the railway network, overseas banking, industry, trade – generations and decades spent in the Far East in various capacities.
Quote of the Day
Dominic Cummings:
The EU has kneecapped itself and is failing in all important areas: productivity, debt, public order, immigration, defence, technology, political extremism. Brussels chose self-sabotage on advanced technology. Unlike Britain which at least has DeepMind here, the EU has none of the leading labs. As the Commission said, we will be leaders not in AI but ‘trust in AI’! Mission semi-accomplished comrades! Brussels can kneecap itself and other countries that choose to follow its regulations but it will not compete with US and PRC or shape the global struggle over AI. Valley companies have already made clear they will simply not release models in the EU rather than follow EU regs. Taliban today can download new models now blocked for Brussels elites. Those who think AI will be like aspects of post-war car regulation are wrong. AI is ultimately about power and Great Powers will not let Brussels set the rules. I’ve watched SW1 repeat soundbites from the EU for 25 years on ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘now we’re going to get serious on technology’. They’ve always been hollow. I said in 2022-4 that covid predicted that not even wanting to prevail in Ukraine would force either the MoD or Brussels to stop the delusions. They babbled and watched. They left defence industry and procurement a farce. They encouraged deindustrialisation and sabotaged industrial production while babbling about net zero. Thanks to Brexit and the work we did in 2020 with the secret part of the Integrated review exposing the disaster zone of the MoD and agreeing a plan for radical change, we could have sorted ourselves out. Instead, 2021-4 the Tories worked with the worst parts of the MoD to continue the lies and delusions and followed the EU into escalating a dumb war which could have been avoided. The latest defence review is a disaster and the UK and EU will be humiliated month after month.
Thoughts:
1. There but for the grace of God go we.
2. UK and EU politics and culture are farther gone than ours. However, as in the 1970s with Thatcher and perhaps now with Trump, political and cultural course reversals are possible given gifted opposition leaders and a preference cascade or two.
3. The British establishment, by criminalizing dissent, insure that even more than our Democrats they will not see the political wave coming that turns them out of power.
4. It’s never over.
At Long Last…
… and probably too late for the largest portion of the British ruling cadre (such as it is, and to include their national establishment media, political and intellectual class) to emerge with any honor and credit – now that the industrial-scope sexual trafficking and abuse of mostly white lower-class British girls at the hands of Moslem and Pakistani men has blown up into an international concern. Abuse which was enabled and hastily buried away from attention because .. well, musn’t hurt the delicate feewings of a favored minority class by pointing out rampant lawlessness on their part. One mussent point anything so infra dig, don’tcha know, because they are an essential and obedient voting bloc for the Ruling Cadre … and the segment of the population that they prey upon are so … (shudder) deplorable. I mean, one just doesn’t! It would be so raaacist…
Reaching for the Alien Shore
So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.
NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:
- this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
- lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
- not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.