Ecuador the recursive

Notice anything odd about the flag of Ecuador?

Apart from the busyness of the design, that is, and the now dodgy associations of the fasces. To be fair, there are a lot of cluttered flag designs featuring a coat of arms, and Ecuador's isn't the only coat of arms to still feature a fasces - there's one on Watford Borough Council's coat of arms, too. 

Watford Borough Coat of arms (image credit Heraldry Wiki contributor Knorrepoes)

 

Spooky coincidence; the fasces-bearing arms of Watford Borough Council were granted in October 1922, the very same year and month when Mussolini marched on Rome and then took power in Italy.

Anyway, back to Ecuador's flag, and the oddest thing about it (in my opinion). Look at the coat of arms in the middle.

The odd thing isn't the condor on top, the fasces on the bottom or the shield (?) depicting a sun, mountain, river and ship in the middle. It's what flanks the design; halberds from which are draped ... Ecuadorian flags. It's a flag containing little copies of itself. A recursive flag. A bit like the Droste effect, only not quite, with more than one small copy.

I'm now idly wondering whether there are any other flags which contain images of themselves. I think there probably must be some (although not necessarily national flags). My very quick web search hasn't turned any up, although it did come up with some recursive flags identified by Redditor and vexillology enthusiast Cawren. The trouble is, Cawren's definition of recursive wasn't quite what I was looking for; the flags cited are ones where you can zoom in infinitely, keeping the same aspect ratio and the flag will stay the same, i.e. a very boring fractal, as illustrated below.

 

But it's flags which literally contain pictures of themselves that I'd like to see and some time when I have more time and energy I'll devote more than a couple of minutes to looking for more examples. Or maybe I won't. Who knows?

 

Watch this space. Or don't.

 

Anyhow for no other reason than it seems appropriate, here's my favourite remix of that 1997 banger Ecuador, originally a hit for the DJ and record production team Sash!* (it got to number one in Flanders, Romania and Scotland). 

 

Enjoy.

.

*I should point out, for those too young or old to be aware, that the exclamation mark is part of Sash!'s name, like Westward Ho! But the asterisk isn't. Obviously.

Secrets and spies

So the Pentagon leaker, turns out to have been (apparently) an immature nerd trying just to impress a bunch of teenage boys with his edgelord antics,* rather than a guy who sold secrets for money, or a Philby/Maclean-style sleeper agent recruited by ideological fellow travellers from abroad.

The aspect I find more interesting than the confused motivations of a messed-up 21 year old was raised in this piece by Daniel Drezner. Drezner lists the material that we know has been leaked and concludes that it seems pretty "meh":

You know what? I’m not seeing much in these reports that I find particularly surprising or shocking. All of these assessments mirror the takes one would get on each of these questions from analysts with zero access to classified intelligence.

In other words, the Kremlin could have deduced most of what Teixeira leaked from open source intelligence (OSINT), so having a mole in the other side's camp doesn't necessarily give an opponent that big an edge.

Coincidentally, John Quiggin has reacted to the leaks by reposting a piece he wrote in 2003, in which argues that the effectiveness of spies and spying in general is very much over-rated.

 

The basic lesson of game theory for a game of bluff like that of espionage is that, as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct. If the defence plays optimally, the spymaster can never have any reason to believe one piece of information produced by spies and disbelieve another.

The biggest problem isn't, though, that spying is mostly ineffective, but that it provides the justification for having an intrusive intelligence apparatus which ends up being deployed against the state's own citizens rather than against hostile foreign powers:

The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents.

Quiggin's critique of intelligence services over reach seems as relevant to me now as it was when he wrote it in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. Perhaps it's even more relevant now when the organs of the state are partnering up with hugely well-resourced surveillance capitalists to keep an ever closer watch on their own citizens.

*If Teixeira had been a 51 year old billionaire, rather than a 21 year old national guard, he could have just bought Twitter to impress his teenage fanboys.

 

 

Halloween photoblogging: post-apocalyptic holiday resort

Here's some spooky photoblogging just in time for Halloween. I'm just back from a week's break in Croatia, at a small resort near Dubrovnik. One bay up from where we were staying was another bay with a wide curve of beach and a massive hotel complex ... all of it abandoned and crumbling, with some of the facades pockmarked by gunfire. It was properly creepy after the zombie apocalypse stuff.

If this has been the in the UK the whole site would have been closed off with stern warning signs, fencing and barriers to keep the curious out, but this lot was just left open for the curious to wander round and explore. I figured it was atmospheric enough to be worth a few photographs, so here they are. On first visit I had no idea what had gone on here, or why the whole complex had been abandoned. A quick internet search uncovered the back story, as told by the good folk at Atlas Obscura - click the link here for details of the abandoned hotels of Kupari and how they came to be abandoned.

 

"Anti-wokism" - back to the bad old days

According to Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson "wokeism" is a "mind virus". Before stepping down as Conservative party chairman, Oliver "the privet hedges of a free people" Dowden dunked on "wokeism" at greater length (but with no greater clarity) in a speech to the hard right US Heritage Foundation:

“Rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order. And at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest, a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our societies...

...It goes by many names. In Britain, its adherents sometimes describe themselves as ‘social justice warriors’. They claim to be ‘woke’, awakened to the so-called truths of our societies. But wherever they are found, they pursue a common policy inimical to freedom.”

The use of "woke" as a catch-all snarl word in the right's culture wars is relatively new. The substance of the fight they're picking isn't. I was reminded of this when I came across an old Daily Express cartoon that somebody had posted on Twitter. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll repeat what I tweeted just to hammer home what's wrong with this picture: 

The Conservatives picking a fight over Culture War talking points is nothing new. See this Express cartoon from the 80s which did the same thing back when people could openly attack things like anti-racism without even hiding behind the euphemism of being "anti-woke".

I think a lot about this cartoon. Especially the upside-down figure labelled "council power". What does that even mean? Vampiric local authorities sucking honest Tory ratepayers dry? And hammers & sickles to label everything they don't like Marxist. Batshit then & now.

There's not much to add to this - the war against "wokeism" is a war against social justice, solidarity, equality and inclusiveness. It's a war fought for the attitudes encapsulated in this cartoon, a war for division, for othering, for punching down and keeping the designated outgroups firmly in their place. 

The war starts with words and memes, with mockery and humiliation. The end point is action. And, if you still haven't joined the dots between images, words and action, remember the Heritage Foundation, the "think tank" (lobby group) that Oliver Dowden crafted his "anti-woke" talking points for? 

 

Since its founding, the Heritage Foundation has become “inextricably intertwined” with Republican administrations and lawmakers in Washington. Heritage brands itself as a beacon of the intellectual conservative establishment; in reality, it is an organization that regularly spouts hateful ideas on par with organizations like the Family Research Council (FRC), which has earned designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Much like its peer groups, Heritage dedicates significant energy to extremist policy recommendations that hinder access to abortion and birth control and promote discrimination against LGBTQ individuals...

...Kay Coles James became president of The Heritage Foundation in the beginning of 2018; she had served as a Heritage board member for over a decade. James previously worked in the George W. Bush administration and as Virginia’s secretary of health and human services. James has compared LGBTQ people to “drug addicts, alcoholics, adulterers, or ‘anything else sinful,’” and has also tweeted that “abortion is a form of discrimination,” attempting to paint her anti-abortion work in the same vein as fighting racism.

Pro-Lies.org
 

It starts with words. It ends with action. It ends with reversing decades of hard-won progress overnight. Goodbye Roe vs Wade, it was nice knowing you...

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).

 

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.

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.

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.
  

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.

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).