Book Review of The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

 

Book Review of The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Translated by Louise Heal Kawai

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A teenage adventure and the power of truth.

If this novel was intended only for teenagers, then they probably don’t know when they are being spoiled.

A thrice-bereaved High School boy, Rintaro, comes to terms with the death of his grandfather who has looked after him since the death of his parents, by going on alarming adventures with a strange talking cat. The cat is, by Japanese standards, really quite rude and blunt, but that’s just what Rintaro needs. Each adventure is a fable giving a different perspective on the meaning and nature of books. The adventures take place in “labyrinths”, created either by the personality or the will of the character whom Rintaro is going to confront, but all are sustained by the power of truth. The way, the only way, for Rintaro to resolve issues is to find a way in which the character in that labyrinth is lying (perhaps to themselves) or under a misapprehension. If he can get his “adversary” to recognise and correct the lie, then the process immediately becomes non adversarial: things resolve themselves and books are freed. The last labyrinth, though, is created by someone far older and far more powerful than the others. And there is much more at stake than Rintaro’s own existence or happiness. He has to show how books give hope even if their power is waning in the modern world. And he needs all the insight and understanding he has gained from his adventures to answer that one.

Truth is the key, not just for the successful execution of Rintaro’s missions but also for his love-life, because Sayo, whom he doesn’t even see as his friend to begin with, sees through everything and is completely unimpressed by the High School’s star pupil and sportsman, whom even Rintaro loves a bit.

This novel was translated by Louise Heal Kawai.

The Cat Who Saved Books is published in the UK by Picador on the 16^th of September 2021.

Book Review of Thorneycroft to SA80 by Jonathan S. Ferguson

 Book Review of Thorneycroft to SA80 (British Bullpup Firearms 1901-2020) by Jonathan S. Ferguson.

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The Author is Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries. 

The original photography for this book was by N.R. Jenzen-Jones.

It is published by Headstamp Publishing (Nashville) 2020 and copies are available for commercial sale internationally. This review is based on a Backer’s Kit Edition, which does not differ in editorial content from the commercial edition.

This book sets out to be an authoritative history of bullpup firearms in Britain, and starts by defining what “bullpup” means (effectively a firearm where the barrel begins behind the trigger) and exploring the American origins of the term, which seems to have been coined two decades after the first British rifles meeting the definition. The production values of the book, normally a superficial matter, are excellent and this makes a genuine difference in a history of this kind, because the original photographs are crisp and clear and show exactly the things the text is seeking to convey, whilst archive drawings and diagrams are reproduced well-enough to be clearly readable and understandable. The author and his photographer enjoyed access to relevant firearms in the Royal Armouries collection and to various archive material and seem to have been mindful that not everyone would have such access. They have made the most of it so their readers can benefit.

The author shows some museum-curator’s bias in letting the guns speak for themselves rather than by paying too much attention to the oral tradition about them, but where opinions of actual people come from material with a provenance, they are included. The story is told largely in chronological order, and as far as British bullpup firearms are concerned that story starts with late Victorian inventors seeking to create a .303” service rifle to take the place of a cavalry carbine, which would also be capable of delivering accurate fire at longer ranges. With the propellant technology of the time, this demanded a longer barrel in a weapon which was not much longer than a carbine. This is where the 20^th century concept of the military bullpup rifle came from, even if the weapons concerned never saw service. The bullpup was the only way to have a rifle-length barrel in a carbine-length weapon. The definition of rifle-length barrels lost about eight inches around that time, (the “propellant technology of the time” having already changed without the bullpup inventors apparently noticing) and so the Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle was sufficient to meet the needs of both infantry and cavalry for two world wars.

Towards the end of the second world war the British Army knew it needed at least a self-loading rifle, but there was no enthusiasm for adopting (as some wanted) the American M1 Garand rifle, not least because it already looked old-fashioned compared to some captured German weapons, such as the FG42, the design of which suggested a bullpup without actually being one. This cued a succession of Anglo-Polish attempts to develop the working concepts of the FG42 into something shorter and perhaps even lighter. As Britain began to emerge from postwar austerity and it became obvious that the end of the Second World War had not ushered in an era of global peace and security, the idea of adopting some kind of bullpup multi-purpose weapon for the British Army took hold and has never really gone away.

The two most famous examples of this are the EM2 rifle of the 1950s and the SA80 rifle in British service today. The stories of these are told in detail, but also in the context of what went before and what was going on elsewhere during their development. John Garand, for example, designed a bullpup rifle to replace his own M1 design as the US army’s service rifle, but retired before it could be developed for trials, and this was not the only American bullpup design being put forward. Other, notably successful bullpup rifles have served in other countries -and, in Australia, they still do.

The book deals with the problems encountered by British small arms development programmes in some detail, but if one reads between the lines many of these come down to the discipline of materials science being largely ignored by those taking the decisions. This problem is actually endemic to British defence projects in general and a cynic might say that it’s the one way of sabotaging projects that senior officials know they can get away with (they certainly succeeded in sabotaging the Valiant bomber). It’s certainly not that Britain as a country lacks materials scientists or that learning about materials science is unpopular with the general population: J.E Gordon’s eminently accessible materials science book “The New Science of Strong Materials” (Or Why we Don’t Fall Through the Floor), first published in 1968, went through several new editions throughout the seventies. Mr Ferguson’s book details how an attempt by Cranfield University to lighten the design of the SA80 by adopting wonder materials such as carbon fibre and titanium saved a total of four ounces: this may have disappointed the University of Cranfield but it will have surprised no-one who has read Professor Gordon’s book, which teaches the distinction between strength and stiffness. In any case, many mechanical firearms components come with a minimum weight, below which they will not work. This is one of several concepts which decision-makers seem not to grasp.

This is a well-researched book, exploiting a rich supply of factual material and actual weapons to the full. It will, therefore, be disappointing to those seeking to use it to promote one strongly-held opinion or another. But as a way of understanding what actually went on, it is perfectly fit for purpose.

Review Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2021, all rights reserved.

Book Review of Traitors by Alex Shaw

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This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk

A fast-paced spy thriller with a charismatic (French) heroine.

This novel is set in places and involves the sort of (Ukrainian) people and politics which the author knows about and this makes it a palpable improvement on his earlier works. Those tended to be set mainly in American settings, perhaps to appeal to an American readership, and also featured highly-technological super-weapons, which are a trap for an author who does not fully comprehend the fruits of his own research. The author, wisely, approached this novel with the premise that a grenade in a modest apartment is dramatic enough.

Although this is an action thriller and the pace rarely slackens, there are layers and twists to the plot and it is a battle of minds as well as muscle. The international politics are more convincing than before (especially as this review was written the day after what the press are already calling “the Black Sea Incident”) and Russian intelligence officers are portrayed as sufficiently intelligent to hatch plots which pay off even if the heroine does her best to thwart them. And that brings us to Sophie Racine, the best thing about this book. The late, great Leslie Thomas once introduced one of his female characters with the line “you should have seen her throw a grenade” and the ability to use a grenade wisely is what sets a truly charismatic female action heroine apart from the AR-toting also-rans.

The supporting cast is mainly a British SIS officer and former SAS trooper who supplies the heroine, not with muscle (which would be superfluous) but restraint and the occasional less-violent solution, such as asking nicely. This, too, represents an improvement on the author’s previous work. At the time of the Yugoslav Civil War, when Western peacekeepers went in, it was pointed out that the hallmark of the SAS was actually subtlety and if what you wanted was an enemy base utterly pulverised, you sent in any line infantry regiment of the British Army.

Traitors by Alex Shaw is published by HQ on the 23^rd of July 2021

Institutional Incomprehension: How Modern Education Fails at the Margins

 Relevant Quotes:

Education, Education, Education! 

(Tony Blair)

 

Educational achievement is THE route to better jobs. 

(Practically everyone who tries to sell modern education to the marginalised.)

Now brothers are kindred but hard times betray,

and so we stumbled on the old changing way.

We never agreed to divide our tin,

and when you're out of love with your brother, 

your hard times begin.

(Richard Thompson, "The Old Changing Way" (song lyric))

What this is all about:

This morning, the UK Parliament's Education Select Committee published a report blaming the term "white privilege" for the undeniable fact that poorer white pupils do relatively badly in British schools. It is also apparent from their figures that Afro-Caribbean pupils also do quite badly compared to British Asian pupils or British African pupils. The committee is basically saying that poor educational achievement is not really a colour issue, but perhaps something less superficial. Most of the reaction to this report has, of course, been entirely woke superficial Tory-bashing. But that's not to say that the committee have really thought long enough or deeply enough to have the real answers.

The Harsh Truth:

The BBC report on the Parliamentary report makes it painfully obvious that low educational achievement by poor white (and almost certainly also Afro-Caribbean) pupils and students is caused by an instinctive rejection of the sales message of modern education encapsulated by the first two quotes, above. Even the BBC is unable to comprehend exactly why this is so, but in comprehending at least that it is so, they are somewhat ahead of the politicians.

Modern Education is being sold to us on an entirely materialistic basis, aimed solely at our self-interest and our self-gratification. Even if people aspire to be educated so as to join some caring or public-spirited profession, the necessary qualifications are sold to us on the basis that the will "allow you to fulfill your dream." You are not even allowed to do good to others without a broad streak of self-interest. And the reason Modern Education is sold to us on this basis is quite simply that it has nothing else to offer. Nothing is allowed to be objectively good or bad, so Modern Education cannot be sold on the basis that it is good in and of itself. Classical Education could be and was sold on the basis that it was good in and of itself, but whether it really was is perhaps a matter for debate and it's not the point which needs to be grasped here: the materialistic self-interest sales-pitch for Modern Education is not selling to the marginalised and we need to understand why it is being rejected. And this bring us to the third quote, above.

If you have grown up in serious disadvantage or oppression, and even more so if your family has had to live with disadvantage and oppression for generations, that third quote is a statement of your deepest knowledge: your primary survival instinct. "If you're out of love with your brother, your hard times begin." Some people in disadvantaged communities may reject this ethic and join criminal gangs in consequence. These are not the survivors: they are the ones that kill others; the ones who get killed. You survive oppression by sticking with those close to you and those like you, you survive by brotherly love. And if you are doing that, then a Blairite sales pitch for higher education that seems to be telling you to break free of those around you and leave them behind, sounds unwise if not wholly evil. (And so does the Marxist message that you can break free of oppression by turning the tables and becoming the oppressor. A boot on the other foot is still a boot in someone's face.)

The marginalised are not rejecting education because they are misinformed, deranged, deluded, dull, ignorant or stupid, but because the fact that they have virtually nothing of material value enables them to make non-materialistic judgements. "I'll stick with my mates." or "my Dad or Uncle will get me a job" or even "I don't really want to be quite like that Tony Blair." 

Learning used to be something of intangible and almost unlimited worth and during and after the Reformation it was highly prized by the poor: it was often literally true that a ploughboy would know more about the Bible than a Bishop. Education should be something of unlimited worth! But in the past few generations the intelligentsia, whose crass stupidity made George Orwell despair of them, have reduced education to nothing more than a tool for climbing the greasy pole.

Education needs to get back to being the kind of learning that has value irrespective of any self-interest or immediate material outcome.

Like rooks and ravens, human beings are born to learn, all their days. We do not learn solely to get a better job and have a career, but to make a better job of our whole lives and not just at our place of employment. By learning we enjoy what's around us more because we understand what's happening: if it is good we can take quiet pleasure in that and if it is not good, we can change it. We learn to make better decisions, we learn to take better care of others. We even learn just for the sake of learning. We learn to recognise when we are being helped and when we are being bullied and manipulated. We learn to do justice as well as to seek justice for ourselves. And all of this learning is inconvenient to those who would manipulate us. But if we can achieve an education system that genuinely prizes learning for its own sake, there is hope for us. We can exchange manipulation for free and steady progress towards what is objectively good. And if we persist for long enough, fewer and fewer people will be marginalised: learning will be accepted because it will be seen to be good.

Book Review of Girls Who Lie by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (Translated by Victoria Crib.)

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Absorbing Icelandic Murder Mystery

This a competently-written novel made accessible for the English reader by a translator whose first language appears to be English English rather than “American” or “International” English. This is actually done so well that the author appears to have an English voice, which is obviously not the reality. It is nice to be flattered, though, and this is not going to happen with a novel written in any EU-member language anytime soon.

The plot concerns single mothers and how different their place in society can be, dependent on small differences of privilege and, to be honest, luck. (A few decades ago, many Icelandic men earned a dangerous living at sea and single mothers were not unusual. The same would have been true in much of coastal Britain, too, a generation or two earlier. “Old fashioned” prejudices against single mothers may, in fact, be 19^th or 20^th century innovations depending on how far North you are.)

The heroine, Elma, a small town female police detective, has to navigate a lot of assumptions, many of them false, and omissions (because it took several months for her missing person case to become a murder case) to get anywhere near the truth. The reader, too, is led into false assumptions to teach them a lesson. There is tension and excitement as the novel approaches what seems to be a traditional Icelandic happy ending, which allows life to go on without the exact truth becoming generally known or “justice” really being done.

Girls Who Lie by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir is published in the UK by Michael Joseph 2021.

Book Review of If You Were There by Francisco Garcia

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This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk

 

This book tells the story of a personal journey whilst exploring the viewpoints and experiences of those the author meets along the way. This includes those left behind by someone who went missing, just as the author’s father left him behind; professionals and volunteers dealing with the missing from various different directions and even one person who intentionally went missing and was found “safe and well”. There are important issues with even that outcome, because the mentality of going intentionally missing isn’t always far from that of suicide and this is why there’s a need for the police and other agencies to tread more carefully than most people realise. People going missing through an accident, such as falling in a canal and not being found for some time is dealt with and at least this kind of disappearance is amenable to energy being put into safety measures to prevent accidents near deep water in cities. There is no other side of the coin with stopping someone from drowning, as there is with finding and bringing back someone whose circumstances drove them to flee. Cases of people who have gone missing almost certainly as a result of a criminal act are mentioned, but the author does not get to grips with this and it’s hard to see how he could, because victims of kidnap and murder cannot speak and the perpetrators will very probably utter only lies.

The decision the author finally takes when he travels to his father’s home city in Spain would be surprising for anyone who hasn’t read the book through to that point, and the book appears to have been mostly written as the author went along with his search so readers see the decision as it happens. But the thoroughness of this book in the way it identifies and deals with as many relevant issues as it can, allows the reader to fully understand the decision when it comes. It’s a useful book for people to read, because none of us will have any advance warning if someone we know chooses to go missing. There are avoidable mistakes which tend to be made in such situations and it’s no good trying to learn how to react while it’s all happening. More than a hundred thousand people go missing in Britain every year and everyone has some responsibility to develop an understanding of the issues.

I haven’t encountered a lot of other non-fiction on this particular theme, but Abbie Greaves’ novel “The Ends of the Earth” has a similar conclusion.

If You Were There by Francisco Garcia was published by Mudlark on the 13^th of May 2021

AI and the Economics of Tyranny

 

Background

Today is the thirty-second anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre and also the day on which a panel chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC starts to hear evidence, in London, of alleged genocide by the Chinese Communist Party against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, not that essentially the same thing hasn't also happened in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. A vote in the UK Parliament has already defined what's going on as genocide, but assorted nit-pickers and hair-splitters claim that "only a court can make such a determination" whilst simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop the matter coming before such a court.

Looking Beyond the Obvious for a Change

It really should have been obvious well before June the fourth, nineteen eighty-nine that "mainland" China was a totalitarian state whose rulers would use any force (or falsehood) necessary to maintain and increase their power. And since that date no honest person has been able to deny it. Yet for those thirty-two years Western, especially American, high-technology, businesses have fought and won political battles with their own governments, shareholders and sceptical opposition politicians to continually pour money and intellectual property into Communist mainland China. As soon as one asks "why", loud but unthinking voices respond by saying "it's a huge market, dummy!" which is the equivalent of the people who air their great wisdom by saying that conflict in the Middle East, or the Falklands, is "all about oil". It isn't: strategic battles over the Middle East predate the industrial exploitation of oil reserves by many centuries. The Middle East is strategically important because it's in the middle.

China is a "huge market" that constantly attracts investment of money, intellectual property (not even counting that which it steals), effort and attention from the West, without allowing any non-Chinese, non-communist entity to benefit in any significant way. Most of the "consumers" in the Chinese market have no disposable income at all by any standard that applies in Taiwan or Malaysia for example: what they eat each evening is what they earned that day. That still leaves a few hundred million middle-class consumers with a disposable income of a sort, but they are subject to tight social control by the Chinese Communist Party and if the CCP tells them to boycott a given company or country's products, they do so within hours. Every factory or laboratory in China built with Western money and know-how cedes control of both to the CCP at the outset and forever. The Chinese market is one where inwards investment has been proven over decades to never really pay dividends to the investor -and still the inwards investment keeps coming! There must be more to it than a fool's gold-rush driven by the greed of key individuals for the same thing to keep happening for so long. Einstein defined madness as repeating the same action over and over again and expecting something different to happen. If it's madness, it must be multi-generational. Or there must be some factor other than the shareholder's best interests at work here. If the West's business leaders are true capitalists, then furthering interests other than those of the shareholder is idolatry. So, if they are not mad, what's their idol?

Artificial Intelligence

In engineering terms "Artificial Intelligence" is very different from "Automation" but the latter comes close to being an economic model for the former. The remaining difference is that while automation replaces labour, most profitably skilled or semi-skilled labour, whilst creating a potentially-powerful class of persons capable of managing the technology (what C.S. Lewis called "the conditioners"), AI replaces the conditioners themselves and puts power either into the hands of a much smaller cadre of human rulers, or into its own hands. Now, C.S. Lewis was trying to make a point about the importance of objective reality standing apart from the political issue of tyranny, hence his use of a very neutral word, "conditioners," for the governing class in a largely-automated world. But in any situation where ethnic minorities are being subject to genocide at the same time that the ethnic majority are subject to such tight social control that most members of the ethnic majority have no choice about anything and own nothing, not even their own vital organs, then words like "tyranny" have to enter the conversation because it's not possible to describe the situation without them.

This article was sparked by a chance remark, this week, from one of the author's engineering colleagues. He had been engaged in a discussion with an American friend, about the fact that up to about nineteen-seventy, improvements in wages in America had tracked improvements in productivity, but since that date wages have fallen further and further behind. The friend held that this was because "different types of capital were being invested" (this may be a way of saying "it's the damned liberals/neo-cons") but my colleague was adamant that, having worked in factory automation ever since nineteen seventy and in several parts of the world, it was automation replacing mere mechanisation that had broken the link between improved productivity and improved wages. (Automation only replaces skilled labour if you have skilled labour in the first place. This places skilled Western economies at a disadvantage because they have to maintain living standards for the skilled, especially if they have a vote.) 

 

The American friend wasn't going to accept a non-American observation, of course, so they agreed to differ. But my colleague kept on thinking and he started to read around the issue, and especially reading about whether Artificial Intelligence was doing the same sort of thing, economically, as automation. And what he found was, that in America it wasn't. The improvement in American productivity due to AI is quite modest, just a few percent, and it's nothing like enough to justify all the hype. Especially when compared to alternative (and cheaper) ways of improving productivity, such as genuinely-improving education for as much of the population as possible, with an emphasis on nurturing free and creative thought.

The impact of automation and more especially AI on the Communist Chinese economy was much more profound: AI has improved productivity in China by more than fifty percent. It is the main driver of productivity. Because it is "replacing" something that has never really existed there in the first place, there are fewer economic or social costs involved in using AI to the full. And a tyranny will tend to perceive the "social costs" of AI as benefits, because those social costs weaken the power of the entire population save for a tiny elite cadre much too small to be called a social class.

There are other considerations, too: a heavily AI-based economic model is the only kind that can tolerate anything like a Chinese Communist-style education system which trains workers to think little and remember less whilst conditioning the middle classes to instinctively keep even their innermost thoughts within "patriotic" bounds which get narrower every year. All the economic alternatives to AI require free and creative thought to be liberally scattered at random throughout the masses in order to work sustainably. AI wasn't available in time to save the USSR,  so it choked and died. But because a tyranny like the CCP cannot tolerate anything happening at random and it cannot tolerate free and creative thought at all, an AI-based economic model is the only kind which offers a tyranny indefinite sustainability

The American and other big-tech companies and oligarchs haven't just invested time, money and intellectual property in AI: they have made a massive emotional investment in AI too. For most of the key players, AI being seen as a boon to mankind is the only thing which allows them any self-esteem. Placed on top of the more tangible investments they have made, that emotional investment draws them towards the only system willing to revolve around AI and make their work significant. And that system to which they are being drawn, is tyranny. The people behind AI need it to be needed and it's tyranny that needs it most. Because tyranny has no purpose other than to sustain itself and therefore it has to try and exist forever.  AI is tyranny's only chance.