Anti-vaxxers and yellow stars - a deliberate provocation?

 

This nonsense is not OK on any level.

 

NurPhoto/Getty Images

In any hierarchy of crassly offensive gestures, anti-vaxxers appropriating the yellow star badge used by the Nazis to mark out millions of Jews for abuse and, ultimately, murder comes pretty close to the top. But what is there to say about this, other than the obvious point that it's a self-evidently terrible, insulting, ignorant comparison?

Talia Bracha Lavin uses this wholly imagined conflation of the control of a pandemic disease and genocide as a teachable moment, in a Substack essay on the real connection between the Holocaust, disease and vaccination. In this case the disease was typhus, which tore through the crowded ghettoes and camps of  occupied Europe and the Reich. 

The connection with vaccination was the heroic and clandestine work of people like Rudolf Weigl, who created a typhus vaccine in the 1930s. When the Nazis seized Poland, he was ordered to produce the vaccine for the use of the occupiers but, at great personal risk, smuggled tens of thousands of vaccine doses into the Warsaw Ghetto. Or Buchenwald inmate Ludwik Fleck, a  Jewish biologist who the Nazis used to develop another typhus vaccine in a camp laboratory. Fleck, again at appalling personal risk, managed to deny effective batches of vaccine to his captors, while creating doses real vaccine which he reserved to inoculate his fellow prisoners.

It's a fascinating piece of history which I wasn't previously aware of, and you can read the whole thing here.

The subset of anti-vaxxers appropriating the yellow star is, from the viewpoint of anybody with any sense of proportion or historical perspective, being needlessly, horrendously offensive. But why would anyone do this? Mere ignorance might seem to be the reason, but many of these anti-vaxx groups seem to have well-funded backers (AstroTurf organisations like HART and Us For Them) and sophisticated media strategies, so my guess is that the generation of outrage is quite deliberate and calculated in this case.

It also fits in with strategies which contrarian reactionaries have already successfully used to gain attention, trip up their opponents and claim unearned victim status. There could be several ways in which such provocateurs/trolls benefit by weaponising offence. 

1. Provoke, then double down. If your aim isn't to engage in good faith argument, but to dismay and wrongfoot opponents, do or say something obnoxious. When angry people push back, don't even try to defend what you said or did. Instead, throw their reaction back in their faces and accuse them of over-sensistivity, of being "triggered." "Facts" you can say "don't care about your feelings." Claim a performative "win" because you kept your cool and made them "emotional" and "irrational":

"I triggered you, you snowflake. That means I win."

2. Use provocation to game social media algorithms and the attention economy:

By privileging posts that promote “engagement”—meaning people reading, liking or replying to posts on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram—Facebook ensured that people stayed on its platform for much longer.

What's engaging? Among other things, content that makes people angry enough to respond and get into arguments. If you can be obnoxious enough to instigate fights on social media, but not quite obnoxious enough to get yourself kicked off whatever platform you're on, you and your social media platform can enjoy a toxic, symbiotic relationship. Posting a selfie of you and your anti-vaxx buddies doing Holocaust cosplay carries a low risk of getting you kicked off a platform like Twitter, but a high probablity of attracting hostile engagement from normies who find your gesture sickening. This form of engagement mirrors the cynical old hacks' slogan about how the sensational and shocking sells newspapers or TV airtime: "If it bleeds, it leads."

3. Flip the script, play the victim. On one level, the people appropriating the yellow stars are already, playing at being victims, putting on the literal fancy dress of opression without actually being oppressed in any meaningful way. But they can also rhetorically claim victim status. The title of a book by professional contrarian Claire Fox shows how it's done. It's called I Find That Offensive:

"When I say whatever I like, that's my free speech. If you dare to push back, that's your cancel culture."

This is the "triggered" meme with a twist. Instead of merely arguing that push back against a provocateur being obnoxious is proof that the troll's opponents are weak and emotional, Fox and her fellow bad faith actors argue that, if you push back against abuse or punching down you are the oppressor, an enemy of "free speech." Obviously there's a contradiction between 1. ("You're a weak, emotional soyboy cuck") and 3. ("You're oppressing me with your cancel culture, you bully"), but bad faith actors will just ignore the contradictions in their own positions and bluster on regardless:

"The enemy is both strong and weak. 

By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."  (from Umberto Eco's essay, Eternal Fascism)

As far as I'm aware, Claire Fox herself hasn't actively supported the yellow star-sporting anti-vaxxers. She's a mainstream media personality, a former Radio 4 regular and (God help us), a member of the House of Lords and has a reputation (albeit unearned) to preserve. But she and her fellow enablers demonstrate how defending the indefensible in the name of free speech is typically done. 

A bad faith actor in her position isn't there to directly voice the worst, most divisive and abusive messages. Her role is to provide an intellectual fig-leaf for her side in the culture wars, to dog-whistle support for being able to punch down, to be abusive towards minorities, to be grossly offensive in the name of "free speech." 

She doesn't personally sit on the football terraces booing a racially diverse team of England footballers when they take the knee. Her role is to give the people who do a veneer of respectability - they're not intolerant bullies punching down at minorities and the people who dare to show solidarity with them, she insinuates, but free speech warriors who are themselves being oppressed by "cancel culture." 

From a position of apprent respectability as a public "intellectual", people like Fox actively and cynically embolden the worst among us to equate free speech with their inalienable right to say anything, no matter how hateful, divisive and, yes, offensive while dismissing any counter-argument as Orwellian "cancel culture." 

Yes, Claire I do find *that* (your unqualified support for punching down and the presumed absolute right to cause offence without consequences) offensive. 

If I was a wedding guest and started insulting and abusing the bride and groom for no other reason than me deciding that I have absolute free speech, that I'm damn well entitled to say what I like and if you don't like it, tough, facts don't care about your feelings, you'd rightly call me a jerk.

Insult the memories of six million murdered and countless more bereaved, abused and traumatised for no other reason than being themselves and you're a jerk times several million.

"Instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, and finally isolated in ghettos and murdered during the Holocaust, in order to argue against vaccination that save human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline." (From the Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter feed).

 

Our woman on Havana

Havana Syndorome has been back in the news recently.

When this story of mysterious symptoms afflicting US Embassy staff in Havana first emerged, I was sceptical of the various theories attributing the outbreak to things like microwaves or sonic pulses. So it was interesting to hear what one of my favourite science communicators, the physicst Sabine Hossenfelder, had to say on the subject.

One of the things I like about Sabine is that she's got a dryly sceptical take on things, and she's pretty good at cutting throught the hype surrounding various science-related topics, from the overblown claims being made about progress towards nuclear fusion power to terraforming Mars. So it was interesting to see that from three alternative explanations, (mass hysteria, microwave pulses and ultrasound), she sets out the reasons why she thinks mass hysteria is the least likely explanation:

It's not a slam dunk, but it's made me question whether my initial reaction - that this is clearly and obviously made up - was right. A timely reminder that sometimes we need to be sceptical even about our own scepticism.

Botany corner

I've just been having an idle flick through a copy of Complete Guide to British Wild Flowers by Paul Sterry and I'm here to remind you that common plant names are wild. You probably know that already (Love Lies Bleeding, Fat Hen, Deadly Nightshade, etc), but there are so many more:

Weasel's Snout

Yellow Archangel

Bastard Balm

Enchanter's Nightshade

Frogbit

Wayfaring-tree

Devil's Bit Scabious

Mind-your-own-business 

There's a lovely folklore/fantasy vibe going on here and none of these names would be out of place in a Tolkien/Prachett-style fantasy world. I particuarly like Melancholy Thistle (Eeyore's thistle of choice), Sticky Mouse-ear (another job for Supervet) Petty Spurge (really needs to get a sense of proprtion) and Toad Rush (OK, obviously a reed, but also probably a classic Sega video game).

Sterry's book is about flowers, not fungi, but don't even get me started on popular fungus names - the Destroying Angel alone is metal enough to tell you that there are some fungi you really, really don't want to mess with.

Raptured into the VIP lane

Remember John Nelson Darby, that very well-connected chap who came up with the idea of the godly being physically taken up into heaven in the Rapture when the End Times kick off? The Exclusive Brethren guy? Turns out the Exclusive Brethren are still a thing. And they're still extremely well-connected:

At least £180 million – and up to £300 million – in ventilator and PPE contracts appear to have been awarded to companies linked to an evangelical movement described as a “cult” by former members which has multiple ties to the Conservative Party, Byline Times can reveal.

The Exclusive Brethren is a subset of a Christian group, often described as Plymouth Brethren in the UK. It came to prominence after being investigated by the Charity Commission over whether it was delivering enough “public good” to maintain its charitable status.

The sect, whose members are subject to strict disciplinary practices, enjoys tax reliefs and rebates reportedly worth as much as £11 million a year.

 Byline Times

Apparently the movement has stayed true to its establishment roots and, ironically, these committed evangelical Christians are still doing their bit to ensure that the meek are as far from inheriting the earth as they ever were. It's also still a bit cultish, apparently.

The rapture of the elites

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here,* which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Matthew 16:28

In its original form, Christianity looks like a doomsday sect, rejecting the transient things of this world and scorning worldly power and riches, based on an explicit belief and expectation that the end of days, when the established order would be torn down and remade, was at hand. So don't accumulate wealth, don't even think about how you'll support yourself. God will provide. Consider the lilies. Sell all your stuff, give to the poor and come and follow me. The big guy upstairs gonna sock it to the Man and all you meek shall inherit the earth. 

Which sounds to me very much like the voices of alienated people keenly anticipating the destruction of an existing order that isn't doing it for them and which they're not invested in.

When The End Times self-evidently hadn't rolled around before all of those standing there had tasted of death, the belief system adapted itself, the millenarian elements retreating further into a more or less vaguely specified future. By the time Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire, the contempt for worldly splendour had been dialed down a lot and the faith had developed into a religion more palatable to those with various degrees of worldly wealth and power, not the exclusive preserve of aescetics who wanted to give it all away, embrace poverty and let the Lord provide until his imminent return.

None of this is particularly original, but it does point to an expected pattern - in general, you'd think millenarian religion and apocalyptic belief systems would appeal to the less powerful, to those with the least to lose, while more established religions and philosophies which have come to an accomodation with secular power would be more appealing to people who are more or less comforable and happy with their status and place in the existing hierarchy. 

 

In secular terms, you could almost see the proto-Christians as revolutionaries and the conventionally pious majority in the Christian Roman Empire and subsequent Christendom as conformists. I say almost, because the early Christians, unlike secular revolutionaries (and some other religious groups) weren't actively trying to engineer the downfall of the existing order. Not for them the credo of Auden's radicals:

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; 

To-day the expending of powers 

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

The overthrow of the established order was to be accomplished by God, not by Party cadres mobilising the masses.

 

We still have  people with a millenarian mindset, notably believers in The Rapture, who think that the End Times may be close at hand. In their belief system, true believers will be bodily teleported to heaven immediately before a seven-year period of strife and suffering called The Tribulation afflicts the sinful remainder of humanity. This time of troubles will end when Christ returns and establishes a thousand-year godly kingdom.

This is where the plot twist I wasn't expecting comes in. I would have expected a belief system like this to have originated with the marginalised and excluded, with people with no investment in the established order.

 

But then I happened across a radio programme** about John Nelson Darby who, I found out, was the guy who first came up with the idea of The Rapture.

 

Darby was very much not poor, marginalised or oppressed. He was born, in 1800, to a wealthy Anglo-Irish land owning (and castle-owning) family and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin. An accomplished scholar and linguist, Darby won a gold medal on graduating in Classics in 1819. Influenced in his choice of career by an evangelical tutor at Trinity, Darby was ordained as a curate and, shortly thereafter, as a priest in the established Church of Ireland. And in case you think Darby wasn't already well-connected enough, he got his middle name from the Lord Nelson who was a family friend and Darby's godfather because of course he was.

As an evangelical and Bible scholar, Darby became unhappy with the established church, but not because it was too exclusive, or oppressive. For Darby, it wasn't unbending or exclusive enough. In particular he seems to have become disenchanted with an established church linked to a state which had already taken the first tiny baby steps towards Catholic emancipication,*** something which he saw as acts of state apostasy towards his Protestant faith.

 

Coming from the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency, people like Darby, his family and peers saw any extension of the rights of the Catholic majority as a personal threat to their own status in a zero sum power game. And legislative emancipation wasn't the only threat they saw - shortly before Darby was born, the certainties and confidence of the Ascendency were violently shaken by major uprising against British rule in Ireland, the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

 

It was an echo, on home soil, of the turmoil that people of Darby's class saw all around the world. The Irish rebels of 1798 had some support from the French, whose own revolution in 1789 had terrified the established elites of Europe. Going back to the American Revolution and forward to the Napoleonic Wars which had been raging in Darby's youth (when some had explicitly identified Napoleon with the Antichrist), it seemed to people who valued order, hierarchy and their personal stake in that hierarchy that the natural order of things was being violently upended. 

If state apostasy, violent revolution and globe-spanning wars weren't enough to put Darby into the frame of mind to contemplate the End Times, in 1819 a pro-reform rally was held in Birmingham, protesting about the fact that the city had no representative in Parliament, at a time when pocket boroughs with tiny populations and controlled by landowning interests returned members to Parliament. The same year authorities in Manchester put down a similar rally in the Peterloo Massacre. These sort of demands stuck people of Darby's class as an affront to the natural order.

 

Darby broke from the Church of Ireland and went on to devise the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture in which Christ will suddenly take up the true believers (but not members of what Darby regarded as an apostate established chuch and believers in false religions) into heaven, leaving the less godly down below to endure sufferings of The Tribulation. Darby first popularised these ideas in annual meetings of Bible students organised by his influential evangelical friend, Theodosia Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt. 

 

Darby was also a co-founder of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren, where his eschatological ideas gained some traction. When the movement later split into "Open" and "Exclusive" Brethren, Darby became the de facto leader of the Exclusive Brethren, who were also known as "Darbyites." In his later years Darby undertook missionary tours of America, where the idea of pre-tribulation rapture was took hold among members of various Protestant denominations including Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists.

 

It's a bit of a counter-intuitive origin story, but it is one that resonates in the current climate, where the recent big, noisy attempts to overturn the status quo, have been elite-led and profoundly reactionary in nature. The status anxiety of Darby and his class and their wish-fulfilment dream of seeing the decadent, apostate modern order smashed feels very familiar. As they say, "When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression."

 

Bonus piece of trivia: in 1875, a few years before Darby died, a wealthy couple from Leamington Spa, who had become converts to Darby's Exclusive Brethren, gave birth to a son. The father was particularly devout and became an itinerant preacher, reading a chapter of the Bible to his wife and son every day after breakfast. It's a remarkable testament to the  power of reverse psychology that the son was none other than Aleister Crowley, later to become the notorious black magician, occultist, self-styled "Great Beast" and "the wickedest man in the world."

 

 

*My italics. 

**BBC Radio 4's In Our Time (link to BBC Sounds here also on YouTube here, also available on Stitcher).

***e.g. the Roman Catholic Relief Acts of  1778 and 1791.

Blackmail is such a dirty word

So farewell then, Matt Hancock. Caught red handed in precisely the same sort of sleaze and corruption in which Boris Johnson and the rest of his cabinet are almost certainly mired just as deeply. The Sun probably has as much dirt on Hancock's cabinet colleagues, but chooses not to release it:

Reportedly, there is a huge safe or vault in The Sun office, full of embarrassing (and in some cases probably incriminating) items on politicians and celebrities which remain (for the time being) unpublished. The Sun vault is also referred to as the "black museum" by Fleet Street hacks, and blackmail may be one of its purposes. Another purpose may be hushing up crimes committed by friends or supporters of Murdoch, including sex crimes later exposed under the police's Operation Yewtree. The retention of so much unpublished material is hard to justify: either these stories are in the public interest and should be published, or they are not and so should not be held in reserve.

Rational Wiki summary of a Byline Times piece.

Apparently there will be a (probably toothless) investigation into who leaked the incriminating material on Hancock. A more interesting investigation, which won't take place, would be into why Hancock was targeted in particular, and equally sleazy colleagues spared.

Three possibilities spring to mind:

1. Straighforward scapegoating - the government has so far managed to dodge a lot of the blame for the excess deaths and rampant corruption which has characterised their pandemic response but maybe somebody's decided they can't escape all the blame for ever, and Matt Hancock has been set up as the sacrificial example to absolve his boss and colleagues of their share of the blame.
2. Something more personal - maybe Hancock is felt not to have opened up the economy quickly enough for the Murdoch media and he's being made an example of pour encourager les autres to be even more reckless with public health.*
3. Something even more personal - something to do with a power struggle within government, involving one of Murdoch's most loyal fifth columnists in goverment, Michael Gove and his creature, Cummings.

Was Hancock thrown to the wolves at random because they just had to lighten the troika somehow, or was he the victim of a targeted character assassination because somebody important wants a change of policy or personnel? The great British public, in whose interest The Sun allegedly publishes such stories, will probably never be allowed to know the truth.

 

 *If you want a flavour of the Murdoch empire's real feelings about lockdowns and the associated public health measures, here's one of their more unmuzzled outlets, the US Fox News, describing distancing measures in the pandemic as "politicized coronavirus hysteria":

 "The riots have ripped the mask off the mainstream media politicized coronavirus hysteria. When it was politically convenient, the media shamed and attacked people who wanted to reopen their stores or even gather at the beach,” Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News. “Now that rioters and looters are gathering in large numbers, the media no longer cares about social distancing, because the media sympathizes with them.”

Brian Flood, Fox News, 1st of June 2020 - no link, because it's divisive garbage, obviously.

The road to autonomous hell

A footnote to my last post about autonomous killer drones; they're not just worrying because they're (possibly) already here. There's also a compelling military logic to keep developing such things:

...when you talk about drone systems, about remotely-piloted systems, these systems are comparatively easy to detect. I mean, it's not that easy if you actually want to build a counter-drone system, but it's still comparatively easy, and that's because of the uplink and the downlink ... the control links that go to the drone and the information links that come back to the pilot. So if you want to fly an unmanned system in a way that's as stealth[y] as possible, you want to cut these links, which means you need to give the system more autonomy.

Dr Ulrike Franke, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, (about 2'30" into this video).

Communication links are a vulnerablity, and the technology exists to get rid of that vulnerability. So the incentive to make killbots autonomous exists.

The only upside, for those of us who don't like the idea of swarms of killing machines perpetrating algorithmic carnage, is that swarms of drones which communicate and coordinate with one another retain this weakness. Maybe the take out is that it's easier to make killbots as solitary assassins than terrifying swarms, at least if the defenders have the capability to detect the swarm's chatter and use countermeasures.

History suggests that, all other things being equal, these sorts of technological constraints, rather than moral debates, tend to guide how militaries use novel ways of waging war. An interesting book review by David Fedman and Cary Karacas highlights this. They're dissecting Malcolm Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia,* a book which suggests that the savage fire bombing of Japanese cities in World War Two was the result of a doctrinal battle being won by brutal area bombing advocate Curtis LeMay over the more restrained advocate of precision bombing, Haywood Hansell.

Fedman and Karacas aren't having this over-simplification of history, though. In reality, they write, the dividing line between area and precision bombing had already become blurred over Europe and the path chosen owed more to pragmatism and contingency than to some moral and doctrinal face-off between two Great Men™:

It’s important to recognize that, by the time the COA [Committee of Operations Analysts] issued this report, the AAF [Army Air Force] was already engaged in the radar (or “blind”) bombing of German cities. While Gladwell devotes considerable ink to a frustrated Hansell contending with the challenges of the air war in Europe, he says little about the broader evolution of American bombing tactics. Hobbled by poor weather, the Eighth Air Force had come to accept that precision bombing was not achieving results. The use of radar, by contrast, appeared more efficacious, even if it meant accepting that bombs would fall haphazardly across urban areas. Under the pretext of destroying Germany’s railways, moreover, they had begun to bomb large swathes of entire cities. 

After a character from my favourite sci fi show in many years, The Expanse, kills the mad scientist who's been unleashing all sorts of horrors on the human race, he says "I didn't kill him because he was crazy. I killed him because he was making sense." 

If you're building a drone to evade detection and countermeasures it makes sense to make it autonomous, which is a pretty scary perverse incentive.

*Disclosure - I haven't read it and, after that review, I don't feel inclined to.

Slaughterbot #1

Killer drones hit the headlines recently in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, when Azerbaijani drones seem to have decisively defeated Armenian mechanised forces. The evidence that drones played a decisive role in Azerbaijan's victory seems pretty convincing (although others have denied that this really is an extinction-level event for the charismatic megafauna of the battlefield, as Charlie Stross called tanks).

Whoever's right on the state of play in the drones vs. tanks arms race, in one sense this isn't a paradigm shift. The drones being used in Nagorno-Karabakh weren't autonomous, but remotely controlled by humans. In that sense they're just another incremental step in a process of humans being able to kill other humans ever more remotely. The process had already gone far enough for George Orwell to comment on how far we as a species had anonymised killing through technology eighty years ago:

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

To quote again that old passage from Ecclesiastes, which was a favourite of Orwell's for its simple, resonant language:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 

Except, maybe there is a new thing under the sun. Remote killing where no human directly identifies a target and an algorithm decides who's friend or foe, who lives and who dies. Concerned AI researchers have been making a noise about this possibility for some time. The recent sci fi short film Slaughterbots highlighted the danger. Slaughterbots is fiction, but according to a UN report cited by Ed Nash, a Slaughterbot-style autonomous drone may have already killed without any human being directly involved in the target selection. Last year.

If you didn't already think 2020 was unsettling enough, this five minute video might change your mind:

A small miscellany

 Just some random stuff that caught my eye recently:

• Marion Stokes: the woman who recorded everything. The strangely compelling story of the former librarian and activist who spent 35 years from 1979 filling 40,000 VHS tapes with the daily TV news and current affairs programmes of the day. Madness, but there was method in it (along with a ton of footage not preserved anywhere else, which is now being digitally archived for posterity).
  
• While we're on the subject of archives and memory, the lies and broken promises that underpin the UK's current Brexit reality have been so numerous and shameless that it's exhausting to keep track of them all. Which is why the good folk at Yorkshire Bylines have produced The Davis Downside Dossier so you don't have to. 12 more or less inconsequential upsides and 178, often catastrophic, downsides spotted at the time of writing and counting. Named in honour of David Davis's infamous boast that "there will be no downside to Brexit at all, and considerable upsides."
• Brazil: the title of Terry Gilliam's absurdist dystopia in movieland, also the location and pattern of a real-life dystopia in our world. A depressing piece which argues that Brazil, the country of the (fake) future, with its intractable neo-feudalist inequalities could be the template for all our futures, if the present trajectory of elite capture of the political economy continues. 
• Bitcoin: a green disaster with, to paraphrase David Davis, no upside and considerable downsides. John Quiggin argues that the time to divest from Bitcoin is now.
• Favourite pizza topping? Back in the Sixteenth Century, when Pope Pius V was kicking back from the day job of excommunicating England's Good Queen Bess, or instituting the feast of Our Lady of Victory after the successful outcome of the Battle of Lepanto, he probably liked to chill with a rose water and sugar pizza and a Michelangelo fresco, while waiting in vain for Netflix to be invented.
  

The bro smirk, the smirk of dominance

 

In yet more Britain Trump news, Former Guy may be disappearing ever more inexorably into madness and failure but, Cheshire Cat-like, his trademark smirk lingers on, on the faces of the Trump tribute band currently governing the UK. 

Today's pound shop Donald is Grant Shapps, the über-Trumpy get-rich-quick grifter who used to pretend to be a multimillion-dollar web marketer under an assumed name. Here he is hardly even trying to justify reversing the irreversible, or being wildly inconsistent about controlling borders in a pandemic:

Portugal has been added to the "amber list" for travel just a week after thousands of English football fans flew to Porto for the Champions League final.

Grant Shapps, said it was a "difficult decision", but he was smirking at the time.

pic.twitter.com/TNzYk2ttRF

— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 3.5% 🕷🇪🇺🇬🇧🏴‍☠️🦠💙 (@g_gosden) June 3, 2021

Of course, he's not alone. 

 

From Patel to Johnson the perma-smirk of invulnerability is now as much a part of the Conservative brand as the Tory Power Stance.

 As Ophelia Benson said of the Trump smirk, back in the days of Former Guy's pomp:

It’s the bro smirk, the smirk of dominance.

It would be interesting to see if he's still smirking now that his influence doesn't even extend to being heard on his low-traffic blog (I feel your pain, Donny) and how long the smirk will persist on the lips of the Britain Trump crew who were, presumably, counting on their special relationship with Former Guy to make a success of "Global Britain."

https://twitter.com/g_gosden/status/1400542223461199875?s=20

Public to the left of him, AstroTurf to the right, stuck in the middle with Britain Trump

 

Remember when the USA was being run by that strange orange whackadoodle who used to say crazy shit about injecting yourself with bleach? Remember how that Very Stable Genius saw the world exclusively in relation to himself, and paid this "compliment" to our very own Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?

"They're saying Britain Trump. They call him Britain Trump. That's a good thing. They like me over there."

The bleach advice aged like milk, but while no literate Brit ever called Johnson "Britain Trump", except to mock the massive satsuma-faced toddler,* the comparison has resonated with people who are far smarter and more thoughtful than Trump himself. For Simon Wren-Lewis, the parallels between the two are tragic rather than comic:

One of the persistent features of Trump’s period as president was his obsession with Fox News. He preferred to get his information from Fox News than internal government briefings. In time Fox News started to understand this, and some of its journalists started directly addressing him in their shows. Why did Trump do this? Because all populists are narcissists who want to be admired their people. Most of the time, Fox News obliged...

...If we believe Cummings, Johnson too is obsessed by the media read by ‘his people’, and in particular his own paper The Telegraph. He looks to them to check he is being admired. So when this and other right wing papers started publishing anti-lockdown nonsense, it got to him. As the Prime Minister who had locked down the economy he was no longer admired by these newspapers. This overrode any ability to understand the reasons why lockdown was necessary (and quick and hard lockdowns particularly), so he became over the summer a lockdown skeptic. 

The parallels between Trump and Johnson are striking but they're not exactly breaking news. What is interesting is where the far right/libertarian pressure that drove Britain Trump to botch the lockdowns is coming from. Because the "anti-lockdown nonsense" Wren-Lewis talks about didn't come from out of nowhere.

As Wren-Lewis points out, a lot of it is being propagated by the right-wing press, presumably reflecting the agenda of its oligarch owners.

But what's behind the Covid denialists who posted photos of empty NHS wards and claimed that the pandemic's a hoax? or the celebrity bobblehead who whinged that he paid the salary of NHS staff, who should be thanking him, rather than the other way round?

Did this furious anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-NHS anti-statist intervention arise spontaneously from the grass roots? An earlier post by Simon Wren-Lewis presents evidence that this is probably not the case. Back in 2018, he blogged about where the UK public was at, and it didn't seem to be with the small state libertarian vision of freedom from the big state:

When the public are asked about who should own and run various activities, there is clear support for more rather than less public involvement....

...Note that only about 10% want privatisation of the NHS, which has continued rapidly under this government. A government that reduces ernment spending and taxes, and pushes privatisation of the NHS, seems like a government of the few and not the many.

The post-pandemic outpouring of appreciation for our very statist National Heath Service seems to validate what Simon says.Whatever you think about the claps for carers, or the media focus on Captain Tom's fundraising efforts, appreciation for the institutions we have and the people who work for them seems to be genuine. Applications for nursing courses for autumn 2021 were up nearly a third from the previous year. 

You might still argue that Brits (or at least the English majority in our fracturing Union) are socially conservative, but you'd have a way harder time arguing that they're libertarian small statists.

There's evidence that the "lockdown scepticism" that didn't come directly from the right wing press was largely the result of an AstroTurf campaign funded by people with deep pockets and the same far right-libertarian agenda as the right wing media owners. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of examples includes:

• UsforThem

UsforThem, a parents' lobbying group, appears to operate as part of a network that disseminates pseudoscience on the pandemic, for instance, around the role of schools in transmission, masks, safety measures, as well as other issues such as PCR tests and COVID-19 death certification...

...In June, UsforThem coordinated a pre-action legal letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, obtained by Byline Times under Freedom of Information, threatening the Government with a judicial review if it did not re-open schools without safety measures.

The letter was prepared by the same global multi-billion-dollar law firm, DLA Piper, which has advised the Government on its COVID-19 response. (Nafeez Ahmed, Byline Times).

• The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service, a disinformation hub apparently cooked up by individuals linked to finance, the American right and a network of right wing lobby groups. The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service's dubious claims seem to have been thoroughly debunked, but not before undermining pblic trust in public health responses to the pandemic:

The damage to public discourse has been done. Large segments of the population seem to be convinced that the scientific community is fundamentally divided on how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is untrue. (Byline Times).

This has worrying echoes of big tobacco's concerted, and unfounded, attempts to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the links between smoking and cancer. Doubt is their product.

• Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART)

HART was co-founded by Graham Hutchinson, who has coordinated the group prior to and since its inception. He was listed as a member of the group until mid-February.

Hutchinson is an active proponent of COVID-19 pseudoscience and other conspiratorial disinformation. He has claimed that “vaccination is pointless” and implied that vaccines are part of a genocidal global conspiracy: “An urgent message for those wanting a Vaccine Passport. Do you realise your passport will need to be kept up-to-date which means they could at any point, for example, say you needed to have a vaccine a week to do anything? #Cashcow #Control #Genocide.” ...

...Elsewhere, [Hutchinson] tweeted that “99% of the corona bollocks was to get rid of Trump” and praised Donald Trump for being “against climate” and “chasing paediphile [sic] rings”. (again, Byline Times)

• Then there are wealthy individuals on the libertarian right, like Simon Dolan, the Monaco tax exile who took Matt Hancock and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to court over the restrictions, arguing the Coronavirus regulations were "the most onerous restrictions to personal liberty" and furiously denounces both public health measures and any suggestion that he promotes dangerous conspiracy nonsense (which he self-evidently does). Or the property tycoon Richard Tice, who has raged against people staying away from offices for reasons which have nothing at all to do with the waning profitability of his huge commercial property portfolio, obviously.

• The Great Barrington Declaration advocating a ‘herd immunity’ approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, a product of the Charles Koch Foundation-funded American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).

• As Nafeez Ahmed's article points out, the Conservative Party’s own COVID Recovery Group (formerly the European Research Group) seems to be tied in with this shady lobbying network because of course it is.

• And then there's the Reclaim Party, fronted by that NHS-hating celebrity bobblehead. Apparently the asset manager and political donor  Jeremy Hosking, who came in at 351 in the 2019 Sunday Times Rich List, provided £5 million for the bobblehead to spend time allegedly campaigning for the position of London Mayor, while splashing his anti-"woke" anti-lockdown, anti-socialised healthcare talking points all over the front pages of compliant newspapers (it's amazing what £5 million will do for the profile of a flaky no-hope candidate). 

 

Attack of the celebrity bobbleheads.

I could go on, but you get the picture. You've got a public which is broadly OK with the idea of socialised healthcare, and have been broadly amenable to the various measures needed to get the country through the pandemic on one side.** On the others you have a few polemicists in the right wing-media, speaking out on behalf of a largely AstroTurf lockdown backlash being fabricated by a tiny clique within the economic elite, afraid of the inevitable big government element of any serious response.

And in the middle is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, paralysed by indecision, like a donkey between two hay bales.

Boris Boris Johnson GIF from Boris GIFs

***

 

*© Stuart Maconie.

** There are real people who are very much not OK with lockdown measures, but the objections are, as far as I can see, to do with individual economic circumstances, not the sort of implacable ideological opposal to the principle of lockdowns we've seen from the activists who've been trying to undermine them. If your job is the one that goes, or you're not eligible for furlough, or you're one of the left-behind self-employed who fell through the cracks, of course you're going to be desperate and angry.      

*** .gif credit.    

Cleopatra's calendar

Cleopatra VII of Egypt is a historical celebrity for a number of reasons, chiefly her fruitful political and romantic entanglement with Julius Caesar, her doomed political and romantic entaglement with Mark Antony, her subsequent suicide by asp and her status as Egypt's last Pharaoh.*

More recently, she's received more recognition as a wily and ruthless player in the Ptolemys' deadly game of thrones, a political figure in her own right, rather than the caracatured exotic über-seductress of powerful men.

All of this stuff's historically interesting, but I'd say that her most lasting legacy isn't necessarily a dramatic life filled with passion and power politics and its retelling down the ages, but something even more ubiquitous; the calendar which most of the world uses today.

So here's the argument. Most of the world today uses the Gregorian solar calendar. The Gregorian calendar was  introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, as a slightly more accurate upgrade to the earlier Julian calendar.

The Julian calendar is, of course, named after Julius Caesar, who introduced it to Rome in 45 BC, replacing the earlier Roman calendar. 

Unlike the transition from Julian to Gregorian, which was a refinement of the same basic calendrical system, the Julian reform was fundamental, substituting a new, solar calendar for the old Roman lunisolar calendar which, by this stage, had some serious issues:

 Around 715BC the twelve month [Roman] calendar was introduced, based on the phases of the Moon. It takes on average 29.5 days between one new moon and the next and so a twelve-month lunar year lasts 354 days but an extra day was added because even numbers were unlucky. The twelve months had between 28 and 31 days in each to make the year last 355 days. February was the shortest month with 28 days and every other year a whole extra month - called Mercedonius which alternated between 22 days and 23 days - was inserted after the 23rd day of February to try to keep the calendar in line with the solar year of approximately 365 days. At the end of Mercedonius the remaining five days of February were taken, so Mercedonius was followed by the 24th of February. But the arithmetic did not quite work - the system gives an average duration for the year of 366.25 days - and the calendar slowly drifted away from the seasons once more. Inserting an extra period to correct the calendar is called an intercalation.

The situation was made worse because the calendar was not a publicly available document. It was guarded by the priests whose job it was to make it work and determine the dates of religious holidays, festivals, and the days when business could and could not be conducted. Through both carelessness and abuse, the intercalations were not made even according to the flawed rules that had been laid down. By the time Gaius Julius Caesar took power in the mid 40s BC the calendar was in a mess and he decided to make a major reform. 

So where does Cleopatra fit in?

Well, back in 48 BC, Caesar, having routed Pompey the Great in battle, had pursued his hard-pressed rival to Egypt. Ptolemy XIII, in a misguided attempt to curry favour with the victorious Caesar, had Pompey assassinated, a gesture which backfired, leading an enraged Caesar to side with Ptolemy's co-ruler and sister, Cleopatra, depose Ptolemy and place his new ally (and lover) on the throne of Egypt.

In 47 BC, Cleopatra bore a son, Caesar probably being the father, while Caesar went off to do more civil war stuff. 

But this wasn't the end of their relationship. In 46 BC, Cleopatra and her little brother (and co-ruler in name only),  Ptolemy XIV, came to Rome and stayed at Caesar's villa. A few things came out of this visit, including Cleopatra entertaining Rome's great and good, Caesar declaring the Egyptian queen a "friend and ally of the Roman people" and a golden statue of Cleopatra being put up in the newly-built Temple of Venus Genetrix.

There was one, more consequential, result of Cleopatra's stay in Rome, according to Pliny the Elder, who identifies the Greco-Egyptian astronomer, Sosigenes of Alexandria, who was presumably part of Cleopatra's retinue, as the guy who actually devised the Julian calendar, proposed by Caesar in 46 BC and introduced in 45 BC. In this context, the radical move from a lunisolar to a solar calendar makes sense, as the Egyptians already used a solar calendar.

So, yeah, you could argue that without Cleopatra, Rome wouldn't have adopted the Julian solar calendar, the direct ancestor of most widely used calendar used in the world today.**

In a world without Cleopatra, the superpower of the ancient world might have refined its calendar along existing lunisolar lines and the modern world's dominant calendar might have had a lot more in common with, for example, the Hebrew calendar.

There are, of course, counter-arguments:

1. We only "know" that Sosigenes devised the calendar from one very short passage (Pliny's Natural History Book 18, 210-212) so it's not certain that Sosigenes really was the calendar guy. Aristarchus of Samos has also been credited as coming up with the Julian calendar, although there's even less direct evidence for this version.

2. If Pliny was right, and it was Sosigenes, then it would be more accurate to call it Sosigenes' calendar, not Cleopatra's, which would give my post title way less name recognition.

3. Name-checking Cleopatra might also make this a version of the questionable "great man" version of history (in this case "great woman", obviously). In a counterfactual world where Cleopatra, or Julius Caesar, or both of them, had never been born, it's likely that Rome would still have dominated Ptolemaic Egypt as a client state before absorbing it completely, so Greco-Egyptian scholarship and the eventual adoption of a calendar based on the Egyptian calendar might have been on the cards anyway.

But it's still at least plausible to think that the world's most widespread calendar might not be preeminent had chance not led to Julius Caesar meeting Cleopatra. And it's about as good an illustration of the Cleopatra's nose theory of history as I can think of.

*Roman pharaohs don't count.

**Not something I'd thought about until I came across a reference to the Egyptian influence on the Julian calendar in this video.

Paleoart: the next generation

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The deep past is so weird and wonderful it's practically another planet. I've enjoyed the sheer otherness of artists' attempts to recreate scenes from deep time since I was a kid. Here's an illustration of "early forms of life" from the pages of the Odhams Encyclopaedia for Children I was given for my 6th birthday. The artist was one John Rignall:

It's the sort of busy scene, packed with weird and wonderful detail which might appeal to a child, and it did. Looked at from a half century later it shows how far and fast reconstructions of the Mesozoic world have changed. From the kangaroo-posed therapod to the offended-looking tail-dragging sauropod to the absence of feathery dinos that aren't Archaeopteryx, the ancient creatures all have a retro look.

OK, it's an impressionistic overview for kids, including an assemblage of plants and animals most of which lived many millions of years apart from one another. But even the more "realistic" dino books I had as a kid featured reconstructions like this one by Zdenek Burian, of semi-aquatic Brachiosauruses adopting a watery lifestyle to take the enormous weight off their feet:

Some people are, apparently, a bit fed up that the dinosaurs they thought they knew as kids have been superseded by new best guesses at what these creatures looked like in life. Personally, I find a lot of the new paleoart keeps the sense of wonder I had as a child new and fresh.

For a taste of what I mean, I can warmly recommend a visit to Dr Mark Witton's wonderful paleoart-themed blog. It's full to the brim with strange, beautiful and astonishing visions of past life by Mark and many others. From my personal favourite for their sheer weirdness, the giant azhdarchid pterosaurs, to bizarre big-headed predators from the Triassic, or Diplodocus, there are wonders on every page. And also discussions of why (scientists think) these critters look the way they're illustrated. 

 There is, for example, an interesting post on lips versus exposed teeth in illustrations of extinct carnivores. That post seemed, at least to this non-expert, to make a pretty solid case for assuming lips in all but a very few cases. Interestingly, John Rignall's therapod dinosaur from my childhood encyclopaedia, although its teeth are showing slightly, looks as if it has lips. At the very least, Rignall has made it ambiguous and not as boldly and ostentatiously toothy as many lipless carnivorous dinosaur illustrations of the time:

Also interesting that, from all the big, fierce , famous, carnivorous dinosaurs he could have chosen, (T Rex, Allosaurus, Megalodon), Rignall chose the obscure Antrodemus, a contested name for what most paleontologists would call bits of an Allosaurus. Although Rignall might be up there with modern paleoart with what seems to be lips on his Antrodemus/Allosaurus, the kangeroo posture and palms-down hands is definitely retro dino - compare and contrast with this modern reconstruction of the posture of Allosaurus jimmadseni:

Image credit: Scott Hartman (Creative Commons Attribution)

The other great thing about Mark is that, although there's lots of solid science in there, he doesn't take himself too seriously and he's generous with the playful pop culture references; see What Daleks, xenomorphs and slasher movies tell us about palaeoart and here, on his Twitter feed, Mark imagines what a gorilla the size of King Kong might actually look like, (given the biomechanics of very large animals, not much like a gorilla):

"It was skeletal and circulatory weakness killed the beast. We've come up with a patch for these issues with the release of Kong 2.0."

This is fantastic (in both senses of the word), but it's worth remembering that scientist's current understading of the constraints on the size and shape of animals is built on some old and well-established principles. As Stephen Jay Gould once noted:

Galileo first recognized this principle in his "Discorsi" of 1638, the masterpiece he wrote while under house arrest by the Inquisition. He argued that the bone of a large animal must thicken disproportionately to provide the same relative strength as the slender bone of a small creature.

For more speculation on the biology of oversized apes (in this case of the human variety), this video on the biology of giants by YouTuber Trey the Explainer also has some fun with the topic of biological scale:

I'm liking this stuff very much. Almost as much as this awesome poster for the, sadly unmade, Hammer movie Zeppelins v Pterodactyls. Yes, I know I've shared this image before but honestly, just look at this thing. As Dr Johnson almost said, when a man is tired of pterodactyl-on-Zeppelin action, he is tired of life.

Props to the bros

Relative to the average YouTube vid, the one embedded below is a bit long (50 mins+), and it's quite a deep dive, but it's also worth your time for the way it unpacks an interesting tale of historical and technological contingency.

tl;dr*: the Wright brothers were the first to fly a heavier-than-air craft** and did so using an engine which was, by subsequent standards, pretty feeble (12-16hp). One innovation which helped them to translate this miserly amount of power into powered flight was figuring out how to build an efficient propeller.

On the other side of the Atlantic, aviation pioneers in France were struggling with stumpy, inefficient paddles for propellers, but building ever more powerful, efficient engines in an attempt to overcome this limitation and get their creations off the ground.

Then, in 1908, Wilbur Wright rocked up in France to demonstrate one of his aircraft. French customs unpacked the machine for some sort of check and managed to damage it in the process. Wright had to get his aircraft repaired and rebuilt with the help of locals, some of whom had been working with French aviation pioneers. This was the moment when the secret of the Wright's propeller technology stopped being a secret.

The fortuitous combination of Wright propellers and powerful French engines quickly became one of the main drivers of the aviation firsts of pioneers like Louis Blériot and Henri Farman, the early French dominance of the aviation industry and the swift evolution of the aeroplane from astonishing novelty to a useful device with practical applications.

It's an interesting tale, far more so than the abbreviated list of "firsts" in less detailed accounts and I like the way it both does justice to the Wrights' genius and the contribution of French engine makers who, in struggling to overcome the limitations of primitive propeller design turned a disadvantage into industry dominance.

*I guess the video equivalent should be tl;dw.

**Not Alberto Santos-Dumont - the video examines the claims that Santos-Dumont was the first to achieve powered flight and demolishes them pretty convincingly. What I particularly like about this video is that it treats Santos-Dumont's actual achievements with seriousness and respect, rather than dismissing him completely for not having achieved this world-changing first.

Before the Ever Given

The cost of one ship blocking the Suez Canal for a week, plus the resulting backlog is being estimated at some $1bn (£730m), according to Akshita Jain in the Independent.

It could have been worse. A lot worse. 

Imagine an event which blocked the canal for eight solid years. 

I shouldn't have to imagine, because this is an actual thing which happened in my lifetime. Until the canal came back in the news, I'd wholly forgotten that a second Suez crisis affected maritime traffic for far longer than the 1956 debacle. The canal was closed due to the Six Day war in 1967 and wouldn't re-open again until June 1975, after Israeli forces had withdrawn from the Sinai Peninsula and the Egyptians had cleared the canal of sunken ships and mines. 

Here's a nice summary of the long blockage, including the story of the ships which were navigating the canal when the Six Day War broke out and were trapped for eight years:

It's a historical event which gets comparatively little attention, which is a pity, because as a natural experiment into the effect of introducing trade barriers into places where trade previously flowed freely, this feels pretty damn relevant right now, especially here in Global Britain™.

Breaking news: Bus blocks major trading route! pic.twitter.com/K6xWDYSYIN

— MrProgressiveAlliance 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇪🇺🌍 (@MrYesWeCan) April 1, 2021

While we're on the subject of historical blunders by wannabe global powers that turned out to no longer be quite as awesome as they thought, there's one other Suez-related tale that's worth re-telling. Namely, one of history's most bizarre tragicomedies, the hellish 18,000-mile (29,000 km) journey that Russia's Second Pacific Squadron took from the Baltic to the Tsushima Strait off Japan and one of the most consequential naval defeats in Twentieth Century history. The Russians could have had a much shorter voyage had they not upset the entity which really was "Global Britain" back in 1905 and which closed the Suez Canal to the hapless Russians. 

Here's a very good telling of the whole globe-spanning organisational and logistical nightmare:

And, for the sale of completeness, the final catastrophe that ended the epic voyage:

One of the participants in this naval omnishambles survives to this day as a floating museum in St Petersburg; the protected cruiser Aurora, which, more than a decade after taking part in the Battle of Tsushima, fired the shot which signalled the attack on the Winter Palace and the start of the Russian Revolution. 

Finding Nemo (again)

 

From my blog post We all live in a retro submarine from April 2010

I just had a reminder of this photo, which I took in Brighton over a decade ago. A few things have changed since then. My son, who was just about the right size to captain this hobbit-scale sub is now as tall as me (give or take; it's hard to tell when his default posture's the stereotypical teenage slouch). 

But I'm still coming across subs out there which look like takes on Jules Verne's fictional Nautilus. A more or less unrelated search recently came back with this:

Image Credit: H I Sutton's Covert Shores blog

Although it dates from the around  same era when I took my picture, this is no cartoonishly cute sculpture, or theme park attraction, but an attempt at an actual working submarine (well, a semi-submersible, anyway), designed and built with deadly purpose by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers, in the closing days of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Like the sculpture, this is on a far smaller scale than Nemo's Nautilus (it's a midget semi-sub, probably only around a 10th of the length of the fictional 70 metre Nautilus). Interestingly, Hutton also compares it to a Nineteenth Century submersible, but a real one. That's because, like the Confederate Civil War-era sub the Huntley, the Tamil Tigers' vessel looks as if it was designed to attack ships by ramming them with a spar torpedo attached to the pole sticking out of its bow.

This isn't the only interesting oddity to be found in the Covert Shores blog, which features a compelling selection of unusual naval tech, both current & vintage. Highlights include Russia's huge, terrifying nuclear powered/armed torpedo, named "Posiedon" (Посейдон), after citizens were given a vote on the name of Russia's latest weapon of mass destruction (can't help feeling disappointed that they didn't end up with a doomsday weapon called Nukey McNukeface). Then there's quite a bit of stuff on (mainly Latin Ameican) narco subs, the use of marine mammals for naval operations, the mysterious death of Lieutenant-Commander "Buster" Crabb, a prohibition-era moonshine-smuggling sub and the James Bond-ish hardware of Swimmer Delivery Vehicles underwater "chariot" attack craft and various stealthy/low-profile vessels.

Another treat from Covert Shores is Hutton's own interpretatation of Verne's Nautilus, which is closer to a visualisation of what was described in the novel than the Harper Goff's looser, but nonetheless wonderful, visualisation. 

It wasn't a search for this iconic proto-steampunk design which originally led me to Hutton's blog, though. I was initially looking for information on another a piece of retro futurism from a later era, namely this sleek deco-looking experimental helicopter design from the 1930s:

Like the Tamil Tigers' mini-Nautilus, the  Dorand G20 Gyroplane looks like something that's sprung out of the pages of vintage Science Fiction into real life. In this case, if you ever had a mental picture of the ubiquitous helicopters which flitted around the art deco skyscrapers in Huxley's Brave New World, carrying the Alphas and Betas to and from their places of work, consumption or leisure, it probably looked like something like this.

Like the Tamil mini sub, though, this helicopter was orignally built with more aggressive intentions - there was an idea that the Dorand would replace the spotter plane which was kept on board France's massive inter-war Surcouf cruiser submarine (that's the link which originally brought me to the Covert Shores blog).

The Dorand Gyroplane isn't quite as insanely art deco as the never-flown Bugatti racing plane from the same era, but it comes pretty damn close.

Definitely at the more elegant end of the very wide spectrum of French aircraft designs from the 1930s. As somone once said:

When one looks at French aircraft of the period immediately before and during World War Two, it is evident that there were two schools of thought when it came to aircraft design! One school was to design elegant, graceful and beautiful aircraft. The other was to see just how ugly they could make the airplane and it still fly and perform the duties it was designed for.

Mon Dieu, quel bordel!

 Now there's a design that wouldn't ever make it it into fiction. Oh, hang on...

The Canadian Air Force (according to South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut).