Author Archives: Tim Newman

Spiritual Alignment

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The other day I was talking to a friend about how the homepages of corporate websites tell you very little about what the organisation actually does, instead displaying some woolly guff which could mean anything. To demonstrate this I looked at two random companies, having no idea what their websites looked like in advance. Here’s KPMG’s:

Here’s Accenture’s:

I didn’t bother looking at any others. Whereas a corporate homepage might not tell you much about what the company does, it leaves you in no doubt as to what they are selling. As I’m fond of pointing out, the academic research is very much ambivalent as to whether gender diversity results in better corporate performance, which means they’re doing it purely for ideological reasons and lying about it. Then again, McKinsey’s commissioned a non-academic study to show that gender equality makes firms more profitable, but I also hear Daz washes whiter than any other powder.

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Banana Splits

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It looks as though the game is still on to thwart Brexit by any means possible; in theory the UK is supposed to leave on Friday, but whereas withdrawing Article 50 requires an act of parliament, as does any deal agreed with the EU, apparently extending the 29th March deadline required only a letter. No doubt the shenanigans played out in the commons yesterday are aimed at either forcing Brits to accept a leave-in-name-only agreement or cancelling Brexit altogether. At this point, I’d be very surprised if either of these is not the final outcome; leaving with no deal looks almost impossible from here, as MPs and Bercow simply move the goalposts every time it looks imminent.

So what we have is rock-solid confirmation that the political classes are happy to ignore voters, break promises, circumvent laws, and generally make things up as they go as if they running an island nation with little industry except bananas. Furthermore, there is a sizeable section of the country – mainly the urban professional classes – who are quite happy with this, and genuinely believe their position is morally sound. From what I can tell, most believe the referendum was rigged and the vote should never have been held; they also think if Britain doesn’t leave the EU, it will be as if the whole thing never happened except the oiks will now be aware of their own stupidity.

So what will happen? The first thing is the Conservative party will implode, because the number of ordinary people willing to tramp the streets knocking on doors will plummet. Canvassing for the Tories is hard enough as it is; what’s a volunteer supposed to reply when a householder says “Why should I vote for you? I voted for Brexit and you cancelled it.” Leave-voting Tories will simply stay at home, and combined with defections to The Independent Group they’ll be incapable of forming a government outside a coalition ever again. Traditional Labour voters will abandon their party, and seek a new home. Into this vacuum will spring all sorts of new parties ranging from half-sensible to insane, none of which can form a government but together can do enough to prevent either of the major parties doing so either. Labour may be the first to recover by ejecting Corbyn and installing a centrist leader, but the damage will be done.

Disgruntled leave voters will take every opportunity to punish the ruling classes, casting their vote in whichever way will make their lives more difficult. Single-issue parties will attract protest votes, and some candidates offering some rather unpleasant policies might gain a seat or two, throwing coalitions into chaos. The European elections will be entertaining affairs where leavers turn out in droves to send the most rabid anti-European parties to Brussels in order to embarrass the politicians back home. So just from a political standpoint, Britain will become a lot harder to govern and it’s not like the current crop of politicians were competent beforehand. They’ll no longer be able to blame the EU without their constituents hurling them into a void, which is probably what’s terrifying a lot of them right now.

I said things will get ugly, and I stand by that. I don’t think we’ll see mass protests and violence like we’ve seen with the gilets jaunes in France, most Brits don’t have the stomach for that and will get slaughtered in the streets by riot police who have no qualms about laying into the citizens on behalf of the ruling powers. But ugliness can take many forms, and one of the things which made Britain a lot prettier than most countries is the degree of social cooperation. In the main, Brits like to do the right thing, to do whatever’s necessary to help everyone and everything rub along as best as possible. This means obeying laws, not acting in an anti-social manner, and generally cooperating with the authorities. In some levels of society this never happened, and thanks to the importation of millions of foreigners from quite different cultures, social trust and cohesion has already been severely eroded. I expect we’re going to see this process accelerate, and really take hold among the middle classes. Passive aggression, indifference, and acts of spite will become far more prevalent among people who could previously have been relied upon to make small sacrifices and do the right thing.

For example, I’d be willing to bet fly-tipping increases, along with vandalism. More people will abuse the system, particularly the NHS. Citizens calling in to report crimes will fall, and policemen and other obvious representatives of the government will say levels of abuse have increased. Which won’t actually be the case, it will just seem like it because fewer people will have a kind word and they’ll be ignored more frequently while the underclasses carry on as normal. Tax fraud will increase, people will feel less guilty about cheating the VAT man by paying in cash, more people will see the government as an authority to be opposed and outwitted rather than cooperated with for the good of society. In other words, Britain will become more like Spain, Greece, and Italy. I expect we’ll also see instances of vindictive legislation being passed; the complaining from the City of London when the EU finally passes its financial transaction tax will be music to the ears of many Leavers. We can expect wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, removal of the charitable statuses of private schools, and other class-based laws proposed out of sheer spite by minority parties who know such moves can win them votes from people who feel let down by the professional classes.

If Brexit doesn’t happen, I think we’re going to see a tough few years in Britain as social cohesion erodes and politics fragments. Getting anything meaningful done will be nigh-on impossible, despite desperate calls from Westminster about “unity” and “moving on”. I suspect it will become a rather unpleasant place to live, especially London which will be the main battleground between the professional classes, the EU, and the rest of the country. Banana republics are rarely success stories, and Britain will be no different. What will probably surprise the professional classes when the effects start to bite is how nonchalantly they chose to go down this path.

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Parallel Lies

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So Trump has been cleared of conspiring with Russia to seize the 2016 presidential election in a manner so emphatic that even the BBC has been forced to run it as a front-page headline; when the news broke over the weekend they were doing everything they could to keep it buried on page 2. Not that they couldn’t resist putting a negative spin on it:

But Attorney General William Barr’s summary is inconclusive as to whether Mr Trump obstructed justice.

Meaning, there is no evidence he did so.

In a sane world, this ought to bring to an end two years of what I expect historians will see as an immensely damaging episode in American history when the ruling classes and their media mouthpieces decided to fabricate charges of near-treasonous activity against a sitting president simply because they didn’t like that he won a free and fair election. Worse, many of those accusing Trump actually did conspire to throw the election using every means available short of assassination. For all the hysteria that Trump is trying to re-establish the Third Reich, if this were true he’d be embarking on a mass trial right now which would make Nuremburg look like the small claims court. Hell, the behaviour of certain politicians and FBI directors would have seen them jailed for life or executed by past governments which fell way short of being dictatorial. As I’m fond of saying, America is lucky it was Trump who stumbled into the job back in November 2016. Had it fallen to a smarter more ruthless man who didn’t show his cards, he’d have been gifted a strong excuse to start handing down lengthy prison sentences to his enemies now – including newspaper editors and even owners. The way America is going, this chap may well yet appear.

I’ve said before, there are many parallels between the 2016 election of Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union the same year, and the reactions from the ruling classes to both have been strikingly similar. In each case, they have refused to accept the result and done everything to subvert the democratic wishes of the population simply because they don’t like the outcome. It’s a titanic shift, not just because it paves the way for future skulduggery (which will now become the norm, a la tin-pot basket-case countries) but also because the old left and right designations, which were already severely worn, have finally been destroyed. In the USA, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans joined forces to unseat Trump via fabricated charges of collusion while proper conservatives and the blue collar workers traditionally courted by Democrats wanted him to get on with building walls and bulldozing the EPA with everyone inside. In the UK it’s the same thing: the Metropolitan professional classes who voted for both Blair and Cameron attempting to thwart the expressed democratic wishes of those they consider beneath them. Worse, neither Americans nor the British seem to understand the damage they’re doing to their countries. People honestly think if Trump is impeached, or Article 50 simply withdrawn, everything will go back to normal. It’s hubris and self-delusion on a scale I’d not have thought possible only ten years ago.

The ZMan is fond of pointing out to members of the dissident right that there is no voting their way from where they are now to where they want to be. As is being proven, voting does not change anything and no the odd occasion it does, those in charge simply ignore the vote or attempt to reverse it. Instead, they’re going to have to reframe the entire argument and reject most of what passes for contemporary politics. In practice, this means adopting a pretty ugly sort of tribal-based politics. If that scares you, ask yourself what we’ve got right now.

UPDATE

This long piece by Matt Taibbi is an excellent summary of Russiagate. It’s worse than you can imagine.

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Holdin’ on for a hero

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A few days ago an Italian of Senegalese origin attempted to set fire to a bus full of schoolchildren in retaliation for the government’s immigration policies. It took a while for the mainstream media to get around to reporting on it in any depth, presumably because it took time to identify the sort of hero they’re after:


No, not that sort of hero. This sort:

It’s funny how the media always finds the right sort of hero when covering these events, isn’t it? And when do we all dress up as pizza slices?

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Pink or brown?

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I’ve written before about the battle lines being drawn between LGBT campaigners who want laws granting them access to primary school children, and Muslim parents who don’t want their children learning this stuff (at any age). A reader sends me the link to this story, which suggests the front has widened somewhat:

Four more schools in Birmingham have stopped teaching about LGBT rights following complaints by parents.

Leigh Trust said it was suspending the No Outsiders programme until an agreement with parents was reached.

Earlier this month the city’s Parkfield Community School suspended the lessons after protests were held.

Campaigner Amir Ahmed said some Muslims felt “victimised” but an LGBT group leader said No Outsiders helped pupils understand it is OK to be different.

The LGBT campaigners claim all they’re doing is explaining to children that some boys and girls are different and they should not feel bad if they are one of them. I’d believe it were this innocent if the modern LGBT movement didn’t have a history of intolerance, compulsion, and threatening anyone who didn’t actively celebrate their way of life. Following the Twitter threads on this, even parents who meekly suggest maybe primary school children are a little bit young to be taught about homosexuality are denounced as homophobes. When some opine that perhaps this is best left to the parents, the response is that intolerant, bigoted people should not be permitted to deny their children the opportunity to hear correct, state-approved views. In its current form this is not about helping children but ensuring fanatical views are imposed on every child in the land, backed by the full weight of the government. Genuine conservatives should be denouncing this, but we don’t have many of them any more and those that are left have been cowed into silence. However, the Muslim community has no qualms about opposing these schemes as incompatible with their conservative values, because they’re playing the same game as the LGBT campaigners only better.

What we’ve got here is one bunch of intolerant campaigners with state-approved victim status going up against another bunch of intolerant campaigners with state-approved victim status. Given how ludicrously incompatible these various victim classes are this was inevitable, and given how obviously the victim hierarchy is arranged there is only going to be one winner. I have some sympathy with the moderate LGBT campaigners, but if their spokesman are going to smear every conservative parent as a bigot for not wanting political campaigners access to their young children, I’m happy to sit back and let them get a harsh lesson in what happens when you abandon principles in favour of identity politics.

For my part, I’ve always thought sex education should begin at the start of secondary school when children start to hit puberty in large numbers, and it should focus more on heterosexuality than homosexuality (but both get covered). If that makes me an intolerant bigot so be it, but don’t expect me to leap to your defence when some real prejudice comes knocking. As I’ve asked before, who will you run to? I’d like to think the majority of British parents as well as British gays are sensible about this, but they’re unable to make themselves heard. As usual, the fanatics are drowning out everyone else.

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Insecurity Theatre

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Commenter Widmerpool makes a point regarding the Kiwi headscarf campaign which I ought to have done:

Bunch of kids playing dress up to make themselves feel better.

I’ve written about this before, of course:

An awful lot of what passes for women’s politics these days is just a big game of dress-up.

David Moore posts a link to this picture:

And this morning on Twitter:


That’s all it is, isn’t it? A big game of dress up. I’ve pretty much abandoned hope of any adults – of either sex – turning up to put a stop to it.

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The Ardern of Good and Evil

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In the wake of the massacre in Christchurch, the New Zealand government led by 38 year old Jacinda Ardern has been doing everything it possibly can to disprove the oft-repeated mantra that terrorism will not change us. Before the echoes of the shots had faded completely they’d decided to impose new restrictions on the ownership of firearms, consistent with the knee-jerk reactions of other governments in the wake of a shooting spree. Within days the image of Arden wearing a headscarf was splashed across the pages of the global media, followed by campaigns encouraging all women to get with the program. Tomorrow, the Islamic call to prayer will be broadcast across the whole of New Zealand in a sign of solidarity. Meanwhile, a New Zealand bookshop has pulled Jordan Peterson’s bestselling book from the shelves, the police are arresting people for sharing the video, and ISPs are now blocking 4chan. All this within a week, but apparently terrorists will never change us.

Overseas things aren’t much better, with everyone clambering over the corpses of those massacred in Christchurch to justify what they’re doing anyway. The British police are doing their usual thing of arresting people for nasty words on the internet, US Democrats are blaming Donald Trump, Brits are blaming Brexit, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using footage of the attack to fire up the crowds at public rallies in Turkey, and the usual bunch of lunatics have come out and said all white men are the problem.

The opportunism doesn’t bother me so much; activists and politicians have been doing this since time began. What I find more interesting is people’s opinions of Jacinda Ardern. Her reaction was one of a mother who’s infant son has just fallen over and grazed his knee: endless soothing words, sympathetic grimaces, lollipops, and promises of a safer world in which knees don’t get grazed. I’m not likening a gun massacre to a grazed knee, rather I’m saying a prime minister should display the characteristics of leadership not motherhood. That is, a calm, rational analysis of what is certainly a highly complex issue covering mental illness, drug use, religion, racism, disenfranchisement, immigration, and gun control. We didn’t get that, and we’re not going to.

Unfortunately, as the gushing media shows (and social media comments) the chattering middle classes don’t want leading, they want mothering; that they celebrated Arden being New Zealand’s first prime minister to get pregnant in office should have served as a warning. It’s easy to see why women like her: she’s basically the president Mumsnet would have if it were a country. That men are on board with this shows how feminised society has become, despite the claims that women live under the jackboot of toxic patriarchy. If people don’t want to be infantalised by politicians they’re going to have to quit electing women who run on a platform of being mothers before anything else.

Whats going on here is a morality play, not too dissimilar to those you see on Mumsnet where women describe a domestic situation in the hope others endorse their moral stance. Arden and her worshippers are signalling that they are the Good people, and over there are the Bad people. If this massacre hadn’t occurred they’d have just waited for the next one: the virtue signaling never stops, only this time it’s amplified for a global audience. By choosing who to sympathise with, who to demonise, and who to ignore the middle classes and their elected priesthood can demonstrate to each other how morally virtuous they are. This explains the staggering difference in reactions to an Islamic terrorist bombing children in Manchester – “don’t look back in anger” – and a white lunatic shooting up a mosque in New Zealand. It also explains why the story of a man of Turkish extraction murdering three people on a tram in Utrecht in broad daylight this week didn’t get much attention. Apparently the fact it might have “only been an honour killing” is reason enough to downplay it, as if that’s unrelated to issues surrounding alien cultures, immigration, integration, and violence – the sort of things the Christchurch shooter took an interest in, as it happens.

Proving one’s moral virtue to one’s peers used to be the purpose of attending church on a Sunday; everyone saw you, and it showed you were a good person. As I’m fond of pointing out, while the western middle classes stopped going to church they never lost  the innate desire to show their peers how virtuous they are. This part of Arden’s biography didn’t surprise me one jot:

Raised as a Mormon, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ardern left the church in 2005 because, she said, it conflicted with her personal views; in particular her support for gay rights. In January 2017, Ardern identified as “agnostic”.

She’s not so much left the church as joined a new one, this confused jumble of sacred cows such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, and poor brown people which must be worshipped while denouncing temptations like conservatism, tradition, and pride in one’s culture (if you’re of European stock, anyway).

So my view is this. Most people clearly want mother figures ruling over them rather than leaders, and they want comfort and lollipops instead of being forced to grapple with serious issues requiring tough decisions. Which is fair enough, and why not? A mother figure like Arden will preside over a much more pleasant society than that of, say, Attila the Hun. The trouble is, as I’m fond of saying, I’m not sure societies run by mother figures will last very long. If New Zealand over the past few days is any guide, I very much doubt it.

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Masters of Business Awareness

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So now I’m two thirds of the way through my MBA, not counting the dissertation. Have I learned anything? Yes, I have. I wrote previously about how useful I found the class on statistical analyses, but I’ve also now got a good appreciation of accounting and finance. By way of a benchmark, I didn’t even know the difference between accounting and finance before, nor sales and marketing for that matter. Now I probably haven’t learned much more than the basics, but it nevertheless allows me to look at companies quite differently. I also understand a lot more of the terminology which gets used in financial reporting.

I’ve also completed a good class on strategy, something I didn’t think I’d find very useful for some daft reason. I found the difference between commodities and other goods interesting, as well as the different strategies companies pursue in attempting to gain competitive advantage. We did a lot about competitive advantage, and how some companies do well and others fail. Underpinning all of this was a Capsim strategy simulation we played over the term which involved selling electronic sensors while balancing R&D, sales and marketing, production, and financing. I was skeptical at first but once I’d figured out how it worked I got stuck right in, and I came out the other end knowing an awful lot more about competitive advantage and how commercial enterprises work at the strategic level. Alas my team didn’t win the competition; we had in our class a young Ukrainian who was extremely gifted at figuring this stuff out and he left us for dust, but we easily came second.

What this has shown me is how unusual the oil industry is. For a start, there’s just so much money kicking around. I’m studying cases regarding the financing of investments of around $5-10m, which in Exploration & Production represents the money wasted because a manager didn’t want to change a wrong decision because he’d look bad in front of his boss. The first big oil project I was involved in, Sakhalin II, started off with an $8bn budget, it rose to $12bn and eventually came in around $20bn. Nobody really knows. I don’t know what the original budget of Kashagan was, but the main dispute now is whether the final price was $50bn or $80bn. Again, nobody really knows. If any other industry outside of government spent money this way, they’d go bankrupt within weeks.

The oil industry is also unusual in that the main players are partners as well as competitors. In any oil and gas development there is one operator and several partner companies. In the North Sea ExxonMobil often had an equal share of a development alongside Shell, who would operate the thing. This is done to reduce risk and make raising capital easier, but it’s equivalent to Boeing and Airbus teaming up to develop a new fighter for the US Air Force. When we studied flat and tall corporate structures and the characteristics of each, it was obvious which category my former employers fell into. I knew this already of course, but I didn’t realise quite how hierarchical oil companies are compared to other major corporations (one or two readers might find it interesting that the companies most often used to compare tall versus flat organisations were IBM and Intel).

The other thing which struck me about the oil industry is how unbelievably slow and bureaucratic the decision-making process is. In my previous place of work, decisions would take months and sometimes years, involving endless meetings up, down, and across the organisation. There may be good reasons for this, but most commercial operations don’t have this sort of time to waste. During one of the seminars I spoke to a chap who worked for a big pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, and he showed me the app he uses for processing and submitting his expense claims. He scans the receipts, clicks send, and it’s automatically approved within hours. Hotel bookings, flights, and ground transport work much the same way. If someone brought that into an oil company they’d summon witchdoctors to cast out the demons within. Booking tickets and processing expenses in my last place of work involved dozens of people, umpteen signatures, and half a forest for each trip.

Sixteen years in the oil industry has sheltered me from a lot of things, and my MBA is making me see the world in a different way. I’m also beginning to sniff out potential opportunities here and there. That was the primary purpose of doing it, of course.

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Boeing down the pan

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I can’t say I’m overly surprised by the troubles Boeing is having with its 737 Max aircraft, which is now grounded until they can figure out how to stop it crashing. While the problem ultimately sounds technical (see also this post at the Continental Telegraph), this is the sort of thing which in the past proper business processes and management would have ensured didn’t happen.

I can’t claim to know how Boeing is run, but if they’re anything like most modern corporations they’ll prize unwavering loyalty to management diktat over and above competence, experience, honesty, courage, and character. Decision-making is likely to consist of bright young things in nice clothes giving PowerPoint presentations to their bosses telling them what they want to hear, and those bosses will do the same for their bosses right up through the hierarchy. If an engineer pipes up that something is badly wrong, he’ll be told in no uncertain terms to get with the program and realign his attitude or his career will suffer. In addition, it’s likely that as Boeing’s business became more about buttering up government and lobbying the FAA to turn a blind eye, they got worse at making planes which didn’t crash.

Back when I worked for an oil company they failed to deliver an expansion project in Russia on the third attempt. Twenty years before, when doing business in Russia was an order of magnitude harder, they’d managed to get the original facility built. Somewhere in the intervening period the company had lost substantial capability, not that anyone would admit it. I suspect the reason was experienced people retiring and being replaced by yes men and power skirts molded by a modern system of management which rewards aesthetics and compliance over getting stuff done. In other words, as companies increasingly obsess over process, diversity, and values they forget how to do their core business. On their corporate website Boeing boasts of:

Diversity Councils are integrated groups of site leaders, managers and employees, who work to improve employee engagement, provide learning and leadership opportunities, increase communication, and facilitate implementation of organizational diversity plans. Diversity councils are supported by a local executive champion. Boeing has more than 40 Diversity Councils.

40 diversity councils, and 2 catastrophic accidents of a new aircraft in the space of 5 months. Now air crashes are nothing new, but I can’t help feeling these two statistics are related. I also don’t think this is the last time we’ll be hearing a household name with a long history of excellence grappling with disasters that were wholly avoidable.

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Queen to Bishop

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A few days ago a 17 year old Australian walked up behind a politician and planted an egg on the back of is head, filming as he did so with his phone. He promptly got filled in, firstly by the politician and then his mates. Due to the politician being right wing and having said nasty things about Muslims, and also because women these days think a 17 year old is a child, otherwise sensible people are leaping to the defence of Egg Boy. Here’s the founder of Quillette, for example:


If the new rule is we can make physical contact with people we don’t like if our intent is not to wound, merely humiliate, things are going to get interesting indeed. Where this will leave women I have no idea: I can think of a dozen ways a man can utterly, appallingly humiliate a woman if the only restriction on physical contact is that he must not wound her. Has anyone asked the #MeToo lot about this? Can men go around egging women or not?

I suspect what we’re seeing here is Lehmann making sure she and her publication are positioned within the boundaries of polite society, edgy enough to upset the SJWs but not enough to cause the polite middle classes to start wringing their hands. Note the I’m not a fascist, but he is gambit. As Quillette grows in stature and comes under increasing attack from the hard-left, we’re going to see a lot more of this. These days if you’re anywhere to the right of Lenin and you want to keep being invited onto podcasts and TV shows, it’s important to signal you’re not an SS officer on a regular basis.

Speaking of signaling one’s morals, here’s Oliver Kamm:


The irony is this kind of moral pronouncement and surety of one’s righteousness would be quite at home in the houses of any religion. As I’m fond of saying, religion never went away, it was just replaced with other dogmatic belief systems complete with preachers, true believers, heretics, witchfinder generals, and those constantly passing moral judgement on anyone who disagrees with them. What’s amusing is their practitioners consider themselves progressives.

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