Category Archives: Politics

Books History Politics

Notes from Crucible: The Year that Forged our World

August 11, 2021 – 4:53 pm

“In the Philippines, which gained independence from the US in 1946 and gained $620 million aid package, despite sharp economic and social disparities, it was not until 1950 that the Communist Party decided that a “revolutionary situation” existed. Communists in Malaya did not operate under Soviet guidance and drew more support from the Chinese community’s resentments than from ideology. The British High Commissioner, Malcolm McDonald, concluded in 1948 that there was “little sign” of Soviet activity in the region, noting that “if you suppress a nationalist severely enough, you find him tending to communism”.

In the US, the state played a bigger role in helping business than free-market zealots would like to admit, while the heritage of government research during the war acted as a catalyst for peacetime technological development.”

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather

August 7, 2021 – 8:28 pm

p. 6 “Every woman easired to own one. Watever your outlay, a plume would retain its value as an investment, as well as an adornment, kept wrapped in tissue in a box, clearned and re-curled once a year, then passed down to your daughter. Working girls saved up and clubbed together for a plume, taking it in turns to wear it on their best hat”.. In the early years of the trade, each feather had come from a wild bird, hunted down and killed in the Sahar Desert. But since ‘the Exlipse’ egg incubator was patented in 1864, ostrich farming in the arid Western Cape of southernmost Africa had taken off. Birds could not be raised in their hundreds and clipped or plucked every eight months or so, flooding the western market with so many plumes that it was hard to imagine there were enough heads left”

p.6-7 As demand for ‘plumiferous’ fashion accessories soared from the 1870s onwards, importers, brokers, auctioneers, wholesalers and feather handlers grew by the hundred. Most were concentrated around one tight area in the City of London, bordered by Aldersgate, London Wall, Bishopsgate and Old Street… the feathers would be shuttled through a cascade of treatments by Abraham Botibol’s workhands. They would be strung, dyed, washed, dyed again, dried, thrashed, trimmed, finished, parried, willowed, fashioned and curled. He might sell a single item to a millinery wholesale warehouse for 7 shillings, or direct to a customer for 30 shillings. Once attached to a ladies’ hat by a milliber and displayed in a Bond Street shop window, its value could be anything up to £5 (£500 in today’s money).

p. 37 Miss Maria Umphelby’s school for girls was filled with children who needed a substitute home or family. There were children of the British Empire, children of the Raj, orphaned children, girls somehow surplus to requirements when gentlemen fathers were widowed or remarried.Unlike the newer, more academic girls schools (North London Collegiate School, Cheltenham Ladies’ College), Hill House was run along an older, family0style model with no dormitories and many “siblings”. The 30 pupils, aged 6 to 16, all called Mrs Umphelby “Maimie”. She was the cloest to a monther most of them had.. a Revivalist Evangelical: a woman of 60 who infused her curriculum with the celebration of God’s glory. Countryside walks were done at the march while shouting out Revivalist hymns… it was hoped they would go on to become indomitable women, “a band of admirably trained daughters” who would “go forth over the wide world”. Missionary work – a home or abroad – was the unspoken subtext of their education.. Etta retuned to Blackheath aged 16 and was immediately sent abroad – to a finishing school in Lausanne… she remained impervious to the fashion manuals of the day, to the absurdly time-consuming ritual of the VIctorian ladies’ toilette and to those fashionable, constructing constumes. She returned at 18, proficient in French, to face an uncertain future.”

p. 52 “Particularly high prices were paid for the skins of unuaul birds, such as the King of Saxony bird-of-paradise, with its strange head wires, or Pesquet’s parrot, with its bright red chest feathers – both from the mountains of New Guinea… If a bird wasn’t, to a British lady, remotely familiar, then it had an otherworldly, innocent, storybook quality to it. It belonged to distant parts of the British Empire, which spooled like a nrightly coloured diorama through the Victorian mind. A bird-of-paradise, ascarlet tanager or tiny viridian hummingbird had no real back story. It wasn’t perceived as a specied with mating rituals, grooming habits, a distinctive call and hatchlings to feed. It was a commodity just liek any other – leather, ivory, tortoiseshell or ostrich feather.”


p. 84 George Frederick Watts – elderly and revered Royal Academician, considered by many to be the greatest artist of his day, produced a large, emotive oil known as The Shuddering Angel, dedicated ‘to all thos who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty”. Irridescent, lifeless plumage lies in a heap on a tombstone, over which an angel weeps, head in hands. The painting was exhibited in London’s New Callery in 1899 and caused an immediate sensation – warranting a leader in The Times.”

p. 147 “As the sun rose in the far distant Florida Everglades, a wearden on duty for the Audubon Society motored his little boat over still waters to confront a norotious egret hunter and his two sons. By the time he got near, the men were climbing back into their schooner, limp snowy egrets swinging from their hands. Guy Bradley shouted across the water that he was going to arrest them – and was shot at point blank range … Bradey’s murder made international headlines: America’s first martyr for the cause of bird protection. The same week … the playwright George Bernard Shaw took his seat at the Royal Opera House in Drury Lane for Puccini’s new opera, Madam Butterfly. He found himself behind a woman who was obscuring his view. “For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its hreast, and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to hear th operation. I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person but the spectacle sickened me.”

p. 148 To many eyes, such preposterous headgear undermined the thinking woman. It made her look unconsidered, even stupid. What price emancipation if she remained enslaved by fashion. .. I was curious about the future lives of these Edwardian women, helplessly in thrall to the surface of things, and was surprised to discover that many of Fabbircotti’s customers went on to do extraordinary, brave and adventurous things, spurred on by the First World War. Of course, they were facilitated by huge private incomes. But these were not mere featherheads. On Thursday 3 May 1906, Mrs Asquith – brilliant wit and socialite, second wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer – was drawn irresistibly into the boutique on South Molton Steet and spent £2 17s (around £280 in today’s money). Two months later, she was back again, buying millinery worth £4 4s (around £415). Tall, big boned, with a long determined face, Margot Asquith understood the power of a good hat. “Clothes are the first thing that catch the eye,” she was fond of saying. Having absolutely no compunction about wearing feathers, Margot was painted by society portraitist Philip de Laszlo with a large dead bird on her head. The painting was commissioned in 1909 to mark her powerful new role as the Prime Minister’s wife.”

p. 287 “Among the many who gained from the campaign for the vote, it was particularly satisfying to discover that that Alice Battershall’s daughter Louisa, a feather worker like her mother, was also to benefit. Thanks to determined suffragist Clementina Black and her investigative team at the Women’s Industrial Council, a government trade board was created in 1919 for the oxtrich, fancy feather and artificial flower industry. A minimum wage was set, working hours monitored and basic comforts introduced. And in 1927, A Botibol and Coomapny, “the biggest in the feather trade”, was thoroughly investigated for emplower abused. Abraham’s son, Cecil, was found guilty of underpaying 27 of his 50 female employees and of keeping no wage records. Forced to pay £234 in arrears and £17 in fines (around £40,000 in today’s money), he threw up his hands and admitted that he deserved “to lose on all points”.

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Books Feminism Politics

Podcast: Women in China today

August 6, 2021 – 11:29 am

Fascinating, and oh so familiar, account of the gendered pressures on women in China today. Get a degree, get a career job – but not _too_ good a job that will make too many demands on your time, get a husband by age 27, otherwise you’re at risk of being seen as “on the shelf”.

As the writer of Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations, Kailing Xie, who’s lived this experience herself says in a fascina, this is a very narrow window. And “marrying up” is still expected, which narrows the pool of potential husbands greatly.

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Books History Podcasts Politics

Podcast: Neurodiversity Studies

August 6, 2021 – 11:16 am

Really interesting discussion of an issue of which I have only a touching acquaintance on the New Books Network.

“The neurodiversity studies paradigm is one in which autism, ADHD, dyslexia, aphantasia, and other forms of long-term neurological differences are “part of a broader spectrum of human diversity, rather than inescapably associated with deviance, disorder, or impoverished selfhood.””

A statement of the obvious, but frequently neglected: we are all neurodiverse

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

August 3, 2021 – 3:08 pm

P. 22 Abyssal plains are not simply endless flat tracks of mud.  They are intercepted by undulating hills And winding valleys,  burping mud volcanoes and fizzing jacuzzis of methane bubbles;  and dusted across the plains  stand thousands of tall volcanoes,  active and inactive.  cone-shaped or flat-topped they were worn away by waves  in past times when they reached the sea surface.  Known as seamounts,  these isolated peaks  are distinct from the ranges of mid-ocean ridges,  although they can form nearby.  the biggest mounts are generally located in the  central regions of tectonic plates,  in places where chambers of molten magma  bubble up in hotspots  through the oceanic crust.  is tectonic plates slide over these hotspots,  chains of seamounts form one after another,  like cakes being made on a factory conveyor belt. 

Journey across the abyssal plain,  skirting the seamounts and facing away from a mid-ocean ridge,  and you will pass over gradually older and older sea bed  until eventually you reach the brink of the very deepest parts of the ocean.  tectonic plates Collide at subduction zones,  with one plate gets  thrust under another.  here, as old seafloor is dragged down into the Earth’s molten interior,  to be melted and recycled,  oceanic trenches are formed,  reaching to depths of 6000 meters and more.  principally formed from 27 trenches worldwide,  this is the hadal Zone,  named after Hades the ancient Greek god of the underworld

P. 26  many consider it likely that water was imported from the outer reaches of the solar system  when icy comets bombarded  the early Earth.  traces of water detected in dust particles from a peanut shaped  stony asteroid called Itokawa  indicated that half of Earth’s water supply may have come from this common form of space rock.   Earth may also have come pre-loaded  with some of its own primordial water,  bodged deep within rocks that coalesced  and formed the planet  4.55 billion years ago…  subsequently,   is Earth cooled,  the water vapour condensed,  clouds formed,  and it started to rain –  perhaps as early as 4.4 billion years ago –  beginning to form the oceans.  the ancient history of the oceans is difficult to tell  because the geological record is continually wiped clean.  oceanic crust is thin young and short-lived,  compared to the thick, primeval continents floating above the  rest.

P. 30 a total tally of the number of  deep sea species is,  of course,  a Long Way Out of Reach  given the deep’s  vast size,   and systematic surveys have revealed glimpses of what is still to be found.  in nineteen eighty-four,  two American  scientists…  used a box corer,   a tool like a giant cookie,  to extract chunks of mud from the Deep seabed  off the coasts of New Jersey and Delaware,  between 1500 and 2500  metres down.  carefully sifting through the mud and picking out every tiny living thing –  every worm crustaceans starfish sea cucumber clam and Snail –  they identified 798 species,  over half of the new to science.  based on an average of 3 new species per 2.5 sq km of seabed…  the abyssal planes  across the planet could be home to 30 million species.  the duo acknowledge that some regions of the deep may support a lower density of Species,   so they dialled down their estimate to a more cautious 10 million

in 2019 a team of 17  lead scientists  published the results of a three-year survey of the Pacific in an area of deep sea bigger than the state of California,  involving hundreds of hours of died time using remote operated submersibles.  in all,   they photographed 347000 animals,  and only one in five of them  were known species. …  the diversity of life is prolific in the Deep,  driving the shallow familiar seas –  and maybe even life on land.

P. 56 “A global moratorium on commercial whaling came into force in 1986, but before then, in the 20th century alone, hunters killed 2.9 million whales. Of these, 761,523 were recorded as sperm whales … the number of living sperm whales … roughly 366,000. In the 20th century, humans killed more than twice the number of sperm whales that remain alive today.”

P. 144 “When scientist sequenced the entire genome of the Mariana snailfish. They found it has multiple copies of genes that adjust the chemical makeup of its cell membranes, adding more unsaturated fatty acides, which keeps them pliant and less likely to crack – more like a layer of olive oil than butter – so cells don’t burst under pressure. A mutation in a gene that normally regulates how developing bones are hardened and mineralised leaves Mariana snailfish with bendable skeletons made of cartilage (like sharks), which seem to be more pressure-tolerant than hard, fragile bones.”

P. 145 The most common inhabitants of trenches are scavenging crustaceans called amphipods. They are supremely unfussy eaters and will devour anything that falls into a trench. Amphipods have been seen at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the pressure is so high it should in theory dissolve the calcium carbonate in their exoskeletons. In 2019, researchers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology discovered that amphipods cover themselves in alumnium gel (they consume metallic compounds from deep-sea muds to creat the gel) which prevents their shells from melting away. Snailfish take advantage of the crustacean abundance in the trenches and have adapted to a diet made up almost entirely of amphipods.”

p. 161  snowfall in the deep –  formally known as the biological carbon pump –   varies across space and time.  spring Blooms of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic are triggered by warming seas and create great pulses of sinking carbon.   snowdrifts build-up on seamounts and abyssal Hills.  flurries of snow are channelled downwards by underwater  canyons.  in 2014/2015,  two massive phytoplankton blooms were detected in the Southern Ocean,  in a remote region that is normally a planktonic desert,  deprived of the vital nutrient iron. ( Continental  shelves and atmospheric dust blowing off land  are typical sources of iron for the oceans.)  Analysis of water samples revealed the iron  had welled up  from nearby  deep sea vents,  revealing for the first time the role that hydrothermalism can play in boosting the carbon pump

p. 162  sperm whales offer a similar service of fertilising the surface by bringing up iron from Down Below.  while diving in the Twilight and midnight zones,  all the whales non-essential bodily functions shut down;  there’s no digestion,  and they defecate only at the sea surface.  when they come up to breathe and void their bowels,  what comes out is a floating iron-rich slick of liquid faeces,  an ideal phytoplankton fertilizer.  every year,  sperm whales around Antarctica approximately 50 tons of iron from the Deep,  triggering phytoplankton blooms.  the resulting export of carbon from the atmosphere,  annually around  400000 tonnes,  offsets the carbon dioxide the whales exhale,   making them a net carbon sink,  although now on a much smaller scale than they once were.  before industrial whaling,  abundant Antarctic sperm whales fertilised enough  phytoplankton  to remove around 2 million of carbon  from the atmosphere every year,  equivalent to the annual carbon emissions the city of Washington DC

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Books Politics

Notes from Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy

April 22, 2021 – 10:14 pm

p. xi “In the UK, the government outsourced health contracts worth £9/2bn in 2018 alone. Over 84% of care home beds are in privately owned homes, and 50,000 are in homes run by private equity companies..The total value of the public health grant in the UK – which enables local authorities to provide vital health care and preventative services – has been declining in real terms, from £4 billion in 2015-6 to £3.2 bn in 2020/1.”

p. 11 “Between 1995 and 2013, real median wgaes in the OECD countries grew at an annual average rate of 0.8% versus 1.5% growth in labour productivity.”

p. 16 “Fire (finance, investment, real estate) is burning the foundation on which economic growth rests. In the USA and the UK only about a fifth of finance goes into the productive economy… 10% of all UK bank lending helps non-financial firms; the rest supports real estate and financial assets. In 1970 real estate lending constituted about 35% of all beank lending in advanced economies; by 2007 the figure had risen to about 60%. .. fuels a debt-driven system and speculative bubbles which, when they burst, bring banks and others begging for government bailouts. … if they failed, the entire system would come crashing down with them. So the banks got the bailouts: FIRE profits are private; FIRE losses are public. … Business itself has become financialised. … within non-finance sectors, financial activities and their accompanying attitudes have come to dominate business. An ever greater share of corporate profits have been used to boost sort-term gains in stock prices rather than provide long-term investment in areas like new capital equipment, R&D and worker training”

p. 34 if a government dares do anything ambitious, it risks being accused of crowding out private investment… Lurking deeper is the familiar conviction that only the private sector creates calue and – by extension – that government investment may destroy it. … Government investment often has the opposite effect. When structured strategically it can crowd in private investment, stimulating funding that might not have happened otherwise and expanding national outpur, which benefits public and private investors alike…. Relatively small government stakes in Airbus have helped build the world’s biggest aircrat comapny, with operations and suppliers across Europe. The history of technological breakthroughs shows that public investment, particularly when made early in the innovation process, absorbs major uncertainties and long-term risks that private investors can be reluctant to take on.”

p. 38 New Public Management “NPM led to proposals to a) privatise publicly owned companies b) decentralise and/or break up big public organisations and c) introduce metrics such as performance pay. One way to reduce the risk of government ‘doing harm’ was to outsource and privatise public services. In theory, outsourcing and privatisation would ameliorate the principal-agent problem in the relationship between government and xitiens, save money and improve services. The practice turned out to be quite different… accompanied by centralisation of the state machine, for example by weakening the pwoer of local government over housing.. Between 1980 and 1996 the UK accounted for 40% of the total value of all assets privatised acorss the OECD.”

p. 39 In total, there have been over 700 projects financed through PFI in the UK since 1998, with a capital value of around £60 billion. Under the current paymnet arrangements, these will cost the public purse a cumulative total of nearly £310 billion by 2047-8 – more than five times the original capital outlay. The UK’s National Audit Office estimates the cost of a PFI project is typically 40% higher than an identical project financed by government borrowing.”

p. 42 “Carillon’s failure led to accusations by Blackrock, the giant fund managed that was one of the company’sinvestors, that the company thought about ‘how to renumerate executives rather than what was actually going on in the business’. The institute for Government said the government had created a “corporate monster” with “low-margin, high-risk” projects – an endemic weakness of the outsourcing model of procurement, particularly for longterm projects, where contractors are tempted to underbid to increase market share and hope they can increase their margins as the prject progresses.”

p. 46 In 1970 the public sector employed 47% of arhcitects in the UK, mostly with local authorities. Today it is less than 1%. This partly reflects the sharp fall in the provision of new public housing by local authorities but it is also consistent with the outsourcing trend across government.”

p. 55 Warren Buffett once said – quite rightly – that “society is responsible for a very signfiicant percentage of what I’ve earned”.

p. 109 SDGs “the perfect starting point for considering the challenges that missions might address…. engage diverse stakeholders across the world. The idneitfy internationally agreed grand challenges that have been chosen by broad and comprehensive consultation around the world. They offer huge opporuntities to direct innovation at multiple social and technological problems to create societies that are just, inclusive and sustainable.”

p. 123 “DArPA took enormous risks in funding the invention of the internet – and it did so with a problem in mind: so that satellites could communicate. Similarly, the US Navy funded the invetion of GPS in an effort to target missiles better… recently funded two pharmaceutical companies, Merderna Inc and Inovio Pharmaceutical Inc to create RNA and DNA vaccines – technologies that many scientists and inevtors considered speculative and high-risk.”

p. 163 “When they built the cathedrals that are among Europe’s most magnificent cultural achievements, the medieval master builders took chances that would drive a modern architect out of business. Nobody knew how much it would cost to build a cathedral or how long it would take. But these were missions with a purpose – to demonstrate the glory of God through creativity – and they brought together many different sectors of society: clergy, craftsmen, nobles, rulers and ordinary people.”

p. 169 “the ancient Greeks used the term ‘idiotes’ to debote those who did not operate in the public sphere; to put it harshly, if you were only concerned with the private sector, you were an idiot.So if you were a wealthy Athenian and you didn’t want to be seen as an idiot, you funded public arts like threate festivals (as told by Xenophon, perhaps the first economist, in Hiero. Later the ancient Romans spoke of the ‘pro bono publico’, based on ethical considerations of working for the common good, not the pursuit a profit”.

p. 182 Alan Greenspan 2005 “There is nothing to prevent the government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The question is, how do you set up a system which ensures the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purcahse… It’s a question of the structure of a financial system which assured that the real reosources are created.”… in other words, the key question is whether the economy has the productive capacity to make good use of the money that is created and placed in private hands.”

p. 183 economists such as Stephanie Kelton, who belong to the economic school called modern money theory (MMT), have been trying to get gvoernments to realise that the idea they have to come up with money before they spend it is reverse logical In reality, spending itself creates money.”

p. 184 “If the government spends £10 and taxes £4m, it can be said to be in deficit by £6. But that £6 is also in the hands of people and businesses… The other side of a government deficit is a private surplus. In other words, the government’s and private sector’s balance sheets must be mirror images of each other,, a government surplus ‘sucks’ pounds off balance sheets. A sustained fiscal surplus means constant sucking, which means that he private sector is losing financial assets, as maturing bonds are not reissued. Thus, fiscal surpluses weaken private-sector balance sheets.”

p. 185 “What happens to the money government is spending when it gets into private hands. Much of it is invested in government bonds… the lynchpin of the financial system and the core of many portfolios: pensioners, who complain about government profligacy are probabli living off income partly derived from government bonds. The national debt, which so exercises many politicians and citizens, is actually the historical accumulation of money spent by government, not taxed back, and now a privately held asset. Government red ink equals private sector black ink.”

p. 199 The Philosopher Hannah Arendt developed the concept of the common good and public value – into an active participatory one with her concept of viva activa. Her idea was that citizens should engage in public affairs, as this is the only way to escape totalitarianism and alienationin mass-production capitalism: here the idea of commmon good is relctec in the idea of an active citizen … also means the need for society to be open to real debate, the contestation of ideas and explicit conflicts over values… Participation is not a silent, harmonious process.”

p. 205 “Capitalist markets are an outcome of how each actor in the system is organised and governed, and how the different actors relate to one another.. No particular kind of market behaviour is inevitable. For example, the market pressure often cited as forcing a business to neglect the long term in favour of the short term, as too many companies do today, is the product of a particualr organisation of the market. Nor is there anything inevitable in government bureaucracies being too slow to react to challenges such as digital platforms and climate change. Rather, both are outcomes of agency, actions and governance structures that are chosen inside organisations, as well as the legal and institutional relationships between them, as well as the legal and institutional relationships between them”.

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