Smedley Butler – Wikipedia

In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, he served from 1935 to 1937 as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism.[67][68] In 1935, he wrote the exposé War Is a Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the following passage from the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:[15]

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was an American major general in the United States Marine Corps, writer, anti-war activist, and whistleblower.

Ralph Towner, March 1, 1940 – January 18, 2026, died in Rome.

I first came across Ralph Towner’s name in an interview with Larry Corryell in NME, who described him —wait for it— as the world’s greatest guitarist! The interviewing journalist had never heard of him, so Coryell directed him to Weather Report’s 1972 album I Sing the Body Electric where Towner delivered an acoustic guitar solo on the track The Moors.

The first Towner album I bought was Diary, in around 1974. A track, called Icarus, featuring Towner playing both piano and guitar, got me hooked. Throughout his career he mainly played nylon-strung classical guitars and steel strung acoustics, but he was something very special with a 12-string— and he played it with the fingers. His ability to play against louder instruments has always shocked me.

Then there was the album Solstice (on ECM) in 1975. Jan Garbarak on saxophone, made other ’jazz’ seem dull and parochial, Jon Christensen on drums with a minimalist kit, and Eberhard Weber on double and electric bass (I once saw Eberhard play in a primary school one evening in Vienna). Two tracks, Oceanus and Nimbus demonstrate what I think were Towner’s unique set of musical and technical skills. Different style and genre, but it was like listening to Hendrix for the very first time.

Monday 12 December, 2026 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

This below is from John Naughton’s blog and links to an interview in La Monde

JN: “This is a huge topic so I’ll be writing quite a lot on it in the next few weeks (JN writes). But for starters, here’s a pretty sobering account by one of the ICC judges who was sanctioned by Trump because the Court indicted Netanyahufor war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Judge:“It goes far beyond simply being banned from US territory”, he says. The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit any American individual or legal entity, any person or company, including their overseas subsidiaries, from providing me with services. All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed. For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent me an email canceling the reservation, citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you do not know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.

Q: (La Monde): Is access to the banking system still possible?
Judge: Sanctions are even more intrusive in this area. There are banks, even non-American ones, that close the accounts of sanctioned individuals. Any banking transaction involving an American individual or company, or conducted in US dollars, or in a currency that uses the dollar for conversion, is prohibited. In practice, you are effectively blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system. On top of that, all payment systems are American: American Express, Visa, Mastercard. Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. American companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who serve justice in contemporary armed conflicts. These sanctions can last over a decade or even longer. Putting someone under sanctions creates a state of permanent anxiety and powerlessness, with the intent of discouragement.

JN: And all this can be done on the whim of an elected tyrant in Washington . Our world has changed radically: we now need a realistic appraisal of how that seismic shift affects us. En passant, a reader of Quentin’s blog wrote to him, quoting a Draft EU report which says that “92% of the West’s data are stored in the USA [and] 69% of Europe’s cloud market share is held by US companies”.

Lorin Lakasing is not convinced the glut of maternity inquiries will make services safer.

The terms of reference are too narrow and the investigators keep asking the wrong people the wrong questions. The Care Quality Commission widely regarded by frontline healthcare professionals as ‘completely unfit’ for purpose remains the ultimate judge and jury. We have major problems in relation to teaching, training, teamwork, mentorship, clinical autonomy, clinical risk management, implementation of safety strategies freedom to speak up and regulation. (Quoted in Private Eye 1666 page19 (2026) Medicine Balls.)

Maternity is where meaningful medical statistics began in the 19th century: maternal death rates, neonatal death rates and infant mortality rates. My rule of thumb is that maternity services are likely better than the rest of medical care — it is just we are more aware of theme. Shocking, I know, but NHS clinical care is frequently awful. The inquires are just play acting. ”The Purpose of the System is What It Does”

I wish I had said that

‘As Edward Thurlow, lord high chancellor of Great Britain, did when he said

“Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?” ↩

Science works.You have to stop, pinch yourself, and remember.

“..The exact and the applied sciences with their inbuilt axiom of progress. Isn’t it fantastic that we will know something tomorrow that we don’t know today. Think of that for a moment. ..the escalator of science is always moving upward”

George Steiner on YouTube

FT link

No one wants to go in there [Venezuela] when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country,” said one private equity investor who specialises in energy.

Why humans should be more like hedgehogs

We used to know all this; 19th-century novels are full of ailing heroines wafting about in nightgowns, delicately sipping broth. A Wellcome Collection online exhibition about the history of convalescence shows how the well-off travelled far and wide to find sun and respite from the horrors of tuberculosis before antibiotics. It also illustrates the stunning profusion of convalescent homes built by the Victorians to fit Florence Nightingale’s prescription of light, air and nature. These elegant, sunny buildings are a world away from today’s clanging, soulless hospitals. You don’t rest in modern hospitals: for a start, they need your bed back. While it’s healthier to get away from infection, there are few equivalent homes today offering true respite except hospices. One result is that readmissions to hospital are higher than they ought to be. [emphasis added]

Robert McNamara: tearful architect of the Vietnam war

It was not meant to have been this way. McNamara became secretary of defence under President Kennedy in 1961, having been a “Whiz Kid” at the Ford Motor Company, where he was remembered as having a “phenomenal IQ and a steel-trap mind”. In the Kennedy administration, McNamara was the quintessential member of “the best and the brightest”, as David Halberstam termed them in his book of the same name. “He was intelligent, forceful, courageous, decent,” describes Halberstam, “everything, in fact, but wise.”

McNamara’s worldview was in accord with those heady years of American power. South Vietnam mattered because its fall, he believed, would send communism cascading across Asia as far as Japan and India, even imperilling American interests in Turkey. As early as November 1961, he urged Kennedy to dispatch 200,000 men to fight the North Vietnamese, adding that even if the Chinese invaded, the US would still be able to defend Berlin from the Soviets

A comment on the article from Proclone.

He reduced the world to Linear Programming; calculating optimal output per inputs.

Paul A Myers, an astute commenter in the FT, wrote, with respect to Proclone’s comment on linear programming

If so, McNamara did not complete the analysis. I studied linear programming in grad school after coming back from Vietnam and noticed that some solutions involve three constraints whose lines never intersect to create a solution space. The answer is a Null set. That was Vietnam. It is also today’s American Middle East policy.

Economists and those fellow travellers who claim that only spreadsheets can lend intellectual rigour to the counting of souls never listen.

The ever magical writing of Katherine Rundell in the Xmas FT.

We are unlikely to be offered robust peer-reviewed evidence of a unicorn being present at the birth of Christ. But the duchess was not being whimsical; an educated woman of the 16th century would have believed in the existence of unicorns in the same way that she believed in the existence of giraffes; exotic, far away, surprising, true.

If Costanza had wished it, she could have traced the unicorn back through 2,000 years of history. It would have been worth her time, because to follow the lineage of the unicorn is to encounter the meeting point of science, natural history, generously lunatic myth and human desire.

The earliest reference comes, probably, from Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician living in the fifth century BCE. Ctesias is the author of the lost book Indica, an account of the peoples of India; in it, he was said to describe a land of men with one leg, where each man has a foot so large he could lie down and shelter under it like an umbrella. It also contains a description of a unicorn: “Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is one cubit [about a foot and a half] in length . . . The base of this horn, for some two hands’-breadth above the brow, is pure white; the upper part is sharp and of a vivid crimson; and the middle portion, is black.” He reports that the Indian unicorn can hold sickness at bay: “Those who drink out of these horns, made into drinking vessels, are not subject, they say, to convulsions or epilepsy.

Katherine Rundell on the secret history of unicorns