This video comes via the Guardian: “Rare unrest in Chinese city of Guangzhou as people protest over Covid restrictions” Is unrest such as this really so rare? Would we know if it were not rare? Related posts: “Riding the Covid tiger” and “Sci-Fi dystopia or real world?” | Continue reading
The Autumn Statement was a tragic miscalculation, the final failure of a project to undo the gravest mistakes of the New Labour era and shift the UK in a more dynamic, more conservative direction. Lacking any meaningful plan for economic growth, and postponing many of the most di … | Continue reading
The brutal demise of the Truss administration following the mini-budget has been widely attributed to the market’s reaction to the expectation of unfunded borrowing occasioned by tax cuts and the fuel price cap. To the contrary: the market’s behaviour was quite clearly a response … | Continue reading
“Today’s Autumn Statement was the latest confirmation that at some point British politicians replaced the idea that ‘people should be able to live well’ with ‘pensioners should be able to live well, and damn the rest’. You are expected to scrimp, save, forgo the pleasures of yout … | Continue reading
As he announces his candidacy once again, Trump can boast of the impressive feat of being just as unpopular as the dreadful Joe Biden. A recent poll suggests that 65 per cent of Americans do not want Trump to run again; the exact same number do not want Biden to run again. – Tom … | Continue reading
“Almost unbelievably, nearly a quarter of our working age population is reported to have some form of long-term illness or disability that in most cases prevents them from working. The numbers are more alarming still among younger cohorts, which theoretically should be the health … | Continue reading
In the 1480s, complaints lodged by Casimir’s envoys accumulated in Moscow: “thieves” from Muscovy were raiding across the border, burning, and pillaging villages, sowing terror. Ivan professed ignorance and claimed innocence, but clearly the raids had his backing. They were part … | Continue reading
The participants in our study, as well as those mentioned in the introduction and many others not included in our sample, are not fringe scientists. Most of them are leading figures: researchers and doctors who prior to the COVID-19 era had a respectable status, with many publica … | Continue reading
The even interesting Perun has another very interesting talk titled: How lies destroy armies – Lies, coverups, and Russian failures in Ukraine. Highly recommended. | Continue reading
Kazakh expat Azamat Junisbai has some very interesting observations seeking to explain wide support in Russia for the war against Ukraine. Russian society famously underwent extreme upheavals in the 20th century. Revolutions, World Wars, emergence and collapse of the USSR – the d … | Continue reading
This is climate imperialism. Rich nations are only agreeing to help poor nations so long as they use energy sources that cannot lift themselves out of poverty. Consider the case of Norway, Europe’s second-largest gas supplier after Russia. Last year it agreed to increase natural … | Continue reading
This photograph from today’s Times shows a sign put up at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in north London. The sign reads: ZERO TOLERANCE What is a TERF? (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist” ideology is a specific form of tra … | Continue reading
Seen on a friend’s Facebook page: I’ve regularly said that Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil types are the most ridiculous people in society right now – their combination of intellectual ineptitude and ethical irresponsibility makes both a mockery and a disgrace of them as h … | Continue reading
There is an unintentionally insightful article in Unherd by Will Lloyd called Meet Britain’s radical New Right, written from what seems to be a predictably wet Tory perspective. We are told conservatives with what are fairly conventional conservative views are radical apparently, … | Continue reading
I received this email from the estimable Free Speech Union the other day. So far as I can tell, it is not available as an article on their website. It should be. (UPDATE: Fear not, the FSU are getting the word out. Go to “The Critic” for a very slightly different version. Hat tip … | Continue reading
Why leave Albania – parts of which are beautiful – for an unprepossessing bedsit in a dispiriting London borough? The experts I sounded out, friends and a friend of a friend, interestingly don’t focus primarily on the economy to explain the exodus – because it really is an exodus … | Continue reading
In 1647 Colonel Thomas Rainborowe said, “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the p … | Continue reading
Today’s Guardian warns: Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster Internal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content. The mass layoffs at Twitter, that diminis … | Continue reading
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot I see no reason why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot Interesting how the significance of those words changed over the years to be less about the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605, and more about attitudes … | Continue reading
“Don’t talk to me about Partygate. Don’t talk to me about Suella Braverman’s emails. Talk to me about the fact that a 28-year-old man with devastating injuries was left in unimaginable pain and terror as fire engines drove in the other direction and ambulances stayed away. Talk t … | Continue reading
A hundred years since its founding, the Beeb is now a preachy HR department with some TV channels attached. – Gareth Roberts | Continue reading
Mesmerising My fav bit was “I do not have a single constructive proposal!” | Continue reading
Samizdata can now legally drink in any state in the USA | Continue reading
As Madeleine Grant in the Daily Telegraph (£) notes today, it is a bit rich for people who dislike the fiscal austerity measures of the UK government to focus on the “mini-budget” tax cuts (now mostly reversed) of the recent Liz Truss administration, or Russia’s attempted conques … | Continue reading
“The globalisation of Hallowe’en, however, is a bit of a problem. Unanchored from any cultural connection, it has now become a gigantic exercise in mass scariness. I wonder if this contributed to the tragic crush in South Korea on Saturday night which killed more than 150 people. … | Continue reading
There is no doubt that Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives has been the victim of a vicious assault. There is no doubt that the person who carried out this attack was David DePape. There is widespread doubt about many other aspects … | Continue reading
“The irony of Xi’s Ahab Quest is that Taiwan has never been a part of China. ‘China’ today is a recapitulation of the old Qing Empire (which, to add irony to irony, was not Chinese but Manchurian). Tibet, East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria are in no historical sense remotely … | Continue reading
Much has been written about what underpins the current war in Ukraine; how Russian revanchism is driven by Russkiy Mir ideology, the concept of the ‘Russian World’. This means all parts of what was the Russian Empire must once again be ruled from Moscow (the ‘New Rome’) for Russi … | Continue reading
“The bird is freed”, says Elon Musk after buying Twitter. “In Europe, the bird will fly by our 🇪🇺 rules”, replies Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Market. | Continue reading
I think the headline is self-explanatory. A new US report delivers what looks like a devastating verdict. (It was from a Republican committee; I am unclear what the Democrats might have said.) For me, the refusal of the Beijing regime to allow independent inspections and its bull … | Continue reading
“I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme po … | Continue reading
It is easy to understand why those who are not fully down with the whole Green alarmist agenda are annoyed at the fracking ban under Rishi Sunak’s new administration. (In reality, local authorities could and would still try and stop it, even if it was legal at the national level. … | Continue reading
“Restoring the fracking moratorium would be an error. To rely on imported gas when we have 50-100 years’ supply under our feet is not a stance rooted in science or economics, but political weakness in the face of militant protest groups and anti-development campaigns. This decisi … | Continue reading
Dear Noah, thank you for your last contribution to this discussion. I particularly appreciate the title of your last piece given how neatly it maps onto a similar phrase about how “Real Communism hasn’t been tried”. The thrust of your position, which is shared by a surprising num … | Continue reading
“Since the country [UK] seems to be heading back very rapidly to the 1970s it is worth asking: just what is keeping people in Britain, especially young people?” – Ross Clark. He’s clocked the fact that far from net immigration being an issue, the challenge over the next few years … | Continue reading
“Boris Johnson pulls out of Conservative leadership race”, the BBC reported a few minutes ago. Yes, there has been time for several thousand people to make the joke about this being the first time Boris has pulled out of anything. Turning to media news, “David Tennant returns to … | Continue reading
Two years ago, a post of mine looked at why people were falling for the BLM narrative about Floyd and Chauvin – not just the usual suspects who’d already fallen for the ones about Zimmerman and Wilson, but people like this guy, eloquently aware that Floyd was simply “a violent mi … | Continue reading
UK Prime Minister Recruitment Advertisement © Larry & Paul, Recruitment Consultants Added later: I see that Paul Marks has made a very pertinent suggestion in the comments, “As there is no minimum time requirement for the (very large) pension a former Prime Minister gets, I propo … | Continue reading
Russia has always been a colonial power in denial. While conquering and ruling multitudes, it insisted that—in contrast with violent Western conquests—the indigenous peoples themselves sought Russian protection and that Russian rule was benign. This gap between rhetoric and reali … | Continue reading
The Tory party has become ‘culturally inbred’ and started to resemble the deranged Hillbillies of Hollywood myth, just with shirts from Jermyn Street and a better wine list. People like Crispin Blunt et al seem to believe they have a natural right to be in charge because… well, j … | Continue reading
“….it is more useful to see Liz Truss’s rise and fall as symptomatic of an identity crisis among free-market policy-makers across the West, as they wake up to a world in which can exist neither as competent technocratic administrators nor as a radical liberalising movement. This … | Continue reading
More recently, Western experts have talked back military reforms, stating that they have been less successful than previously claimed. As the war in Ukraine has shown, reforms have had limited if any influence on Russian military’s operational effectiveness. In many ways, the Rus … | Continue reading
It is often said the Conservative Party is a ‘broad church’ and not just a party of free marketeers. This was certainly true back when Margert Thatcher was party leader, given she had to endure the likes of Michael Heseltine et al. But the de facto coup d’état by ‘Wets’ (better d … | Continue reading
“The Tory vision of the country is, or should be, one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives. It involves building things and going places. It involves houses and factories, roads and cars, ports and airports, as well as parks, co … | Continue reading
“The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15 per cent, to over $300 billion, in the first nine months of this year, from the same period in 2021, accordi … | Continue reading
They wanted Sunak; Tory members wouldn’t have it. The media, the political and civil service establishment, the City, were all out to get her. They acted against her (and Kwarteng). The Tory backbenches panicked; Sunak’s supporters saw the opportunity, and in effect we have now h … | Continue reading
A couple of months ago John McGuirk asked that question: Landlords have fled the market. They are selling up at an unprecedented rate, or finding other uses for their accommodation. There has been an explosion, meanwhile, in institutional landlords: Big companies and pension fund … | Continue reading
“Politics latest: Liz Truss set to sack Kwasi Kwarteng”, reports the Times. Liz Truss is poised to sack her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and announce plans to raise corporation tax as she abandons key parts of her mini-budget in a bid to reassure the markets. The chancellor is due t … | Continue reading