Down With Left Deviationism

How dare you!

Stop killing us with your Glooobal Warning💀💀

Stop totally killing us with your coronavirussy Glooobal Warning 💀💀

How double dare you with knobs on! there I said it move over Saint Greta

Citizens are reminded that until November Orang Man Bad

is the sole cause of all sabotage, espionage, persiflage, frottage, spoilage, umbrage and 
Viral Pwnage.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Monday: It is only four and a half years ago that I was mocking Maduro for eliminating the toilet roll from Venezuela.

What goes around comes around, and the roundabout of Fate turns at a dizzying speed.

What mortal can stand steady on this relentless centrifuge? Nay, we fly helplessly off into the sandpit or away at that slide that looks like a cerise elephant.

Merry Christmas!

Apparently I have been void of mental fight since 6th June, as that is the last time I wrote a post.

Has nothing perturbed me in the last six months? Has no question come to plague, no issue to vex me? Is there nobody on this planet of, near enough, 7,752,579,101 shit-for-brains who has disturbed my equipoise? Not even one contra-Brexiteer, however wily and mendacious?

It is not the case that I have become in some way a... vegetable. I value my new-found serenity, yes, but this is not to be confused with placidity, as if the intellectual and spiritual

Readers: Vegetable.

Blog: Merry Christmas one and all.

Have We Gone Yet?

This paper (Stanley Brodie QC, 3rd June 2019) argues that we left the EU at 23:00 on 29th March 2019:

(5.1) ...The conclusion, I would suggest, is that the Agreement used and implemented by the Prime Minister, Mr Barnier and President Tusk was unlawful and ultra vires Article 50. 

The first extension proposal, on 14th March to extend to 30th June, was lawful but was rejected by the EU. Subsequent shenanigans, which leave us with 31st October as the latest deadline for the apparat to ignore, were unlawful and skullduggerous:

(5.4) ...the civil servants responsible for briefing parliament to enable an informed debate to take place, themselves were misleading it. The alteration of the text of Article 50, and of the proviso to paragraph 3, must have been deliberate. 

The beneficiary of this misconduct was the Prime Minister, who could and did arrange for extensions of time without hindrance.

Thus we left on 29th March absent any lawful alternative. An interesting case, though I suspect that lawfulness is not a consideration.

Birth of the EU

Jean Monnet's Mémoires (1976) open on the 10th May 1940, the day German forces invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France and Churchill became PM.

Monnet hears the news from General Ismay as he arrives at his office of the Anglo-French Co-Ordinating Committee at Richmond Terrace. Pausing only to note that he, Monnet, was alone in having expected the attack at Sedan while the brass hats, politicians and everybody else got it completely wrong (even Hitler, who had only adopted Manstein's high-risk plan on 17th February) he goes on to survey his work for a similar outfit in WWI and regret that this time round, too, the alliance's economic and logistic co-ordination is slow-moving:

Les mécanismes de coordination et de coopération plus étroites que nous mettions en œuvre étaient trop lents. Il n'avait pas fallu moins de quatre mois pour obtenir de nos administrations nationales le simple bilan du potentiel aérien, et ce bilan était indispensable pour convaincre les États-Unis d'intensifier leur production de moteurs d'avions.

He had already discussed his solution, ever closer union, with Neville Chamberlain and apparently got short thrift. But he kept at it:

Dans une nouvelle lettre personnelle à Churchill, je proposai, le 6 juin, une fusion des deux forces aériennes dont j'avais fait faire, non sans difficulté, un inventaire permanent.

Two days after the end of the Dunkirk evacuation, a day after the Germans started their assault towards Paris, it was clear to him, as he wrote, that the air forces must be combined into one

si les forces des deux pays ne sont pas traitées comme une seule, nous sommes condamnés à voir les nazis acquérir la maîtrise de l'air en France... Bref, la victoire ou la défaite peuvent dépendre de la décision immédiate d'utiliser dans la bataille présente nos forces en matériel et nos pilotes comme une seule force

but as he notes it was already too late (Dowding wrote his letter advising against sending any more fighters to France ten days later). The practicability of combining the two forces at the drop of a chapeau in the midst of this catastrophe is not a problem that occurs to him. And so:

Paradoxalement, à mesure que les décisions les plus logiques, les plus simples coordinations échappaient à notre pouvoir, nous étions conduits à placer plus haut nos objectifs et à tenter de reprendre au niveau politique le contrôle des événements qui nous échappaient sur le plan militaire. Quand il devint inutile d'espérer combiner des états-majors, la perspective s'ouvrit à une fusion des souverainetés.

and he got to work with his pal Arthur Salter on a proposal "Anglo-French Unity":

Le 13 juin, nous mîmes la dernière main à un texte de cinq pages examinant les hypothèses qui se présentaient alors  : toutes nous amenaient à la conclusion que seule l'union totale de la France et de l'Angleterre sauvegarderait les chances de la victoire finale.

The day before the Germans entered Paris, this is a

projet d'une déclaration d'union indissoluble. Chaque Français, chaque Anglais jouirait dans chacun des deux pays de tous les droits de citoyen. Une union douanière serait créée ainsi qu'une monnaie unique.

Common citizenship, a customs union and a single currency: the simple and obvious counter to the Nazi hordes.

Over the next few days they worked to get their plan put up to Churchill and de Gaulle. It went to Cabinet on the 16th, the day the French government collapsed and Pétain sued for terms:

Nous comptions, non sans de bonnes raisons, que les deux hommes seraient sensibles à la grandeur du geste dans l'absolu et à son efficacité pratique dans l'immédiat. Mais il était clair que chacun d'eux, par son hérédité, sa croyance mystique dans la souveraineté nationale, rejetait les dispositions du projet qu'il jugeait inconcevables et inapplicables.

It is this pesky "mystical belief in national sovereignty" that stymied Monnet's highly practical plan. Inconceivable, inapplicable? Clearly Churchill and de Gaulle had no notion of the "quick fix":

C'est sans romantisme que j'envisageais la fusion de deux pays et la citoyenneté commune de leurs habitants appelés à se dresser contre le même péril. J'étais également sans doctrine et ne rattachais ce geste à aucun projet fédéraliste. Bien qu'il y eût là l'ébauche d'une construction institutionnelle durable, je ne pensais pas, je n'avais pas le temps de penser en ces termes abstraits. Seule la nécessité de résoudre une grave situation de fait m'inspirait.

Monnet is dismissive of Winston:

Je le revois dans un costume gris à rayures roses, le cigare à la bouche, sortant du conseil pour venir nous parler, traitant de toute cette affaire d'un air négligent – et assurément tout était négligeable dans l'idée qu'il se faisait du monde. Telle était sa manière d'être supérieur.

and thus this superficial and supercilious buffoon is left to the business of saving Britain, defeating Germany, other trifling matters of that sort.

The difficulties our own Mrs May is encountering in her attempts to liquidate Parliament and Democracy are nothing by comparison. Really, there is no excuse.

Dunning Kruger: The Biter Bit

The Dunning Kruger Effect seems so pleasing a finding that it surely must be true...

If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

...the Hard of Understanding are incompetent to understand that they are incompetent, while the intelligent and learned tend to underestimate their own competence, assuming that many people must be able to understand what they understand.

Most of one's life experience in a nutshell, plus American politics, nearly 97% of Twitter, slebs, "artistic" avant-gardists, &c, explained.

Alas

Two unique papers in Numeracy reveal problems with the graphic introduced in the 1999 Kruger and Dunning paper. Subsequent researchers used it, (y − x) versus (x) scatter plots, and related variants for nearly two decades. The authors show how a major part of the body of literature that used these approaches seems to have mistaken and interpreted mathematical artifacts as the products of human behavior.

 Whether this disproves the DK Effect (a false theory built on the mathematical incompetence of the researchers) or proves it (the researchers being incompetent to understand their errors and ploughing on regardless) I am not sure.

Please Don't Learn to Code

Coders: Please don't learn to code. Really, we've got it covered.

Management: We need people with brains like Alphabetti Spaghetti who can bluster copiously at all levels of the organisation.

Coders: Very well, here is your mainframe...


The Darwin-Coxe Machine or  Narrenturm, on which the insane were swung to calm them (Vienna early C20th).