Biography

The Vanished World

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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.

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Schadenfreudelicious

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Two weeks and a bit more after election day, and the meltdown, panic, and dismay among the progs, the establishment media, and the entertainment world continues. I’m taking an unworthy pleasure in reading reports of panic and back-biting among partisans of the Harris/Walz camp and the noisy laments of their cis-gender or bi significant others. I’m also taking a savage pleasure in reading about or viewing evidence of the dismayed realization among the managerial class in certain industries dependent economically on the choices of the general public – that conservatives and Trump voters buy shoes, too. Also movie tickets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions and other consumer goods.

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Quote of the Day

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Dominic Cummings:

…Hopefully DOGE learns: nothing will happen without fast purges, like Twitter in week 1. And government is a SYSTEMS problem: it’s people, ideas, institutions and tools in that order but executed together.
 
Some places need rebuilding, some places need closing, some things need startups. E.g do not try to ‘reform’ USAF to do drones properly, incentives force the senior people to sabotage intelligent action – set up a new Drone Force outside USAF with new legal authority and totally outside existing procurement, HR, budget etc rules, with incentives to focus on engineering and saving $$, not DEI and cost-plus rackets for Boeing!
 
The core disaster in western states is the creation of PERMANENT BUREAUCRACIES — as Palmerston said to Queen Victoria in 1830s, this alien European system would be a disaster in England, making responsibility of ministers FAKE.
 
That’s what we have: FAKE meritocracy, FAKE responsibility, FAKE Cabinet government
 
But a vibe shift is coming fast across the west – covid & Ukraine & the old system’s pathological failures are pushing people to face fundamental change is needed. SW1 is being forced to confront the Vote Leave agenda coming to DC because the old regime is imploding everywhere…

Controlling the Archives

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There is news that Jay Bhattacharya may be appointed to run NIH. Bhattacharya has a history with that agency:

“Bhattacharya teaches medicine, economics, and health policy at Stanford University; he became a national voice in 2020 as one of the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The open letter- signed by thousands of health professionals- called for an end to mass lockdowns and focused efforts on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the rest of society get back to living. The statement was met with harsh criticism from leading health officials at the time, including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who privately described the authors as “fringe” and was urging a quick rebuke of their message, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.”

The suppression of Bhattacharya went even further with revelations that the Biden Administration coordinated with social media to censor him.

There have been times when, upon the fall of a regime, there is a scramble to control that regime’s archives. After all, while a regime may lie to you, it won’t lie to itself regarding certain things. In 1944 Parisians knew their liberation was on hand when they saw the Gestapo burning its papers.

Not only does the opening of archives reveal corruption, it also leads to a reconsideration of history. Journalism (especially these days) is often merely the reporting of what other people have said or is pure conjecture, while historians who later go through primary source material have a much better grip on what went on. The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s led to a re-evaluation of many parts of Soviet history as well as past US-Soviet relations. Next time you want to evaluate a historian’s work, take a look at their bibliography and see if they did any original research, or if they are merely replicating the methodology of journalists by quoting other historians or engaging in conjecture.

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On Rustication

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Forty-five years ago today, I was “rusticated”—which is to say departed the University for a metropolitan area eight hours’ drive to the southwest, at that time less than one-fifth the population of Chicagoland and only one-eighth its density, which would certainly seem like being sent to the countryside to anyone who grew up within a forty-mile radius of the Loop. Recent events have conspired to cast my mind back to that event and reflect on its meaning.

Warning: autobiographical details ahead; and while acknowledging a certain Conradian truth quoted just below the jump, I must insist that those details are the least important. If there is anything worth pondering here, it is the lessons for our time, and the finding of a way to avoid utter catastrophe, which must include avoiding idealizing our past. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I went to the University of Chicago, and I put away childish things.

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