Andrew Milbourn

“I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” — Thomas Sowell

Today, a man ran through Golders Green, a Jewish neighborhood in London, stabbing Jews outside a synagogue in broad daylight. The UK PM called it "utterly appalling." Here's what's actually appalling: For two years, Western streets have hosted marches calling for the elimination of Israel. Universities have celebrated it. Politicians have legitimized it. The media has normalized it. You don't get to spend two years mainstreaming the idea that Jews and their state have no right to exist and then act shocked when someone takes the message literally. Words have consequences. "From the river to the sea" isn't poetry. "Globalize the intifada" isn't a metaphor. When you spend years telling the world that Jewish presence in the Middle East or in Golders Green is a problem to be solved, don't be surprised when someone shows up with a knife to solve it. The ideology and the blade are the same weapon. One just has a longer handle.

Hello Julia, sans aucune ironie, c'est top que tu prennes le temps de te renseigner. Mais le problème quand on lit Marx aujourd'hui, c'est qu'on prend pour acquis sa prémisse de départ, alors qu'elle a été démontée scientifiquement il y a plus de 150 ans. Toute la pensée de Marx repose sur la théorie de la valeur-travail. L'idée que la valeur d'un bien vient de la quantité de travail nécessaire pour le produire. Si tu acceptes cette prémisse, alors oui, tout son raisonnement tient. Le capitaliste "vole" la plus-value du travailleur, l'exploitation est mathématique, la révolution est inévitable. Sauf qu'en 1871, trois économistes (Menger en Autriche, Jevons en Angleterre, Walras en Suisse) découvrent indépendamment la même chose : la valeur n'est pas objective, elle est subjective et marginale. Un verre d'eau dans le désert vaut une fortune. Le même verre à côté d'une rivière ne vaut rien. Le travail incorporé est identique. Donc le travail ne détermine pas la valeur. C'est le consommateur qui valorise un bien selon son utilité marginale dans un contexte donné. Exemple concret : tu peux passer 1000 heures à tricoter un pull moche que personne ne veut. Selon Marx, ce pull a énormément de valeur (beaucoup de travail incorporé). Selon la réalité, il ne vaut rien. Parce que personne n'en veut. À l'inverse, Bernard Arnault crée des milliards de valeur non pas parce qu'il "exploite" mais parce qu'il a su anticiper et organiser des désirs humains à grande échelle. La valeur est créée par la coordination, pas extraite par le vol. Cette découverte (la révolution marginaliste) a invalidé tout l'édifice marxiste. Pas pour des raisons idéologiques, pour des raisons scientifiques. C'est pour ça que plus aucun département d'économie sérieux au monde n'enseigne Marx comme un cadre d'analyse valide. On l'enseigne en histoire de la pensée. Maintenant, le truc important. Si ton intention en lisant Marx c'est d'aider les pauvres (c'est une intention noble), alors tu vas être surprise par ce qui suit. Regarde les chiffres de la Banque mondiale. En 1820, 90% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Cette chute historique ne s'est PAS produite dans les pays qui ont appliqué Marx. Elle s'est produite dans les pays qui ont libéralisé leur économie. Chine post-1978, Vietnam post-1986, Inde post-1991, Pologne post-1989. À chaque fois qu'un pays libéralise, des centaines de millions de gens sortent de la pauvreté en une génération. À chaque fois qu'un pays applique Marx (URSS, Cambodge, Corée du Nord, Venezuela), c'est la famine et les goulags. Ce n'est pas une opinion, c'est l'expérience la plus massive jamais menée en sciences sociales. Plusieurs milliards de cobayes humains, sur un siècle. Donc paradoxalement, si tu aimes vraiment les pauvres, la position la plus cohérente n'est pas d'être marxiste. C'est d'être pour la liberté économique. Parce que c'est empiriquement la seule chose qui a jamais sorti massivement les gens de la misère. Pour creuser, je te recommande trois lectures qui vont changer ta vision : "La Loi" de Frédéric Bastiat (court, lumineux, gratuit en ligne) "La Route de la Servitude" de Hayek "Économie en une leçon" de Henry Hazlitt Bonne lecture, et vraiment chapeau de chercher à comprendre plutôt que de rester dans tes certitudes. C'est rare.

What a letter

Yesterday's edition of the Financial Times carried a lengthy interview with Lord Hermer KC, the present Attorney General of the United Kingdom. If you haven't seen it: oh, boy. The interview was part of the FT's fluffy "Lunch With" feature, a sympathetic profile format whose previous subjects have included most of the 'grown ups in the room' of the British establishment over the last 40 years. The Hermer instalment was, by the FT's own pitch, an opportunity for the Attorney General to "open up about the Keir Starmer people don't see," and to explain the merits of the Chagos deal. The piece appeared. The comments section opened. And in those comments, you could see a country on the precipice of major change. The Financial Times's readership is not, to put it as politely as the situation will allow, known for its raucous lower-class anger. It is the readership of senior partners at City firms, central bankers, retired civil servants, retired ambassadors, and the broader metropolitan managerial caste of Britain at the fatter end. It is, on almost every available political question, the most reliably establishment-tarian readership of any newspaper in the United Kingdom. The comments, before they were closed, were so brutal that readers were openly asking for the article to be withdrawn and threatening to cancel their subscriptions in numbers the FT had not seen before. When the FT readership turns on a Labour Attorney General, the Labour Attorney General has a problem. If you were wondering what caused such an outbreak of fury from the terribly polite class, here's a summary of the last three decades of Lord Hermer's career. Lord Hermer, before he became Attorney General, made his name and his living as a human-rights barrister whose principal practice, for a meaningful slice of the relevant period, was the prosecution of civil claims against the British state. Suing his own country. He got particular mileage out of pursuing claims against the British armed forces, on behalf of foreign nationals alleging mistreatment by British servicemen and women in the field. The most notorious of these matters is the Al-Sweady litigation. Lord Hermer was lead counsel for eight Iraqi claimants who alleged that British soldiers had murdered, mutilated, and tortured Iraqi prisoners after the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004. The claims occupied the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Military Police, and a public inquiry for the better part of a decade. The inquiry, at its conclusion, found the claims to be "wholly without foundation," and the result of "deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility." On 22 April this year, the Daily Telegraph published more than 25,000 pages of contemporaneous emails and legal documents from Lord Hermer's chambers' handling of the Al-Sweady litigation. Among the documents was an internal communication in his own writing, advising on how to "get the big story out there" and noting the need for "wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen." Today's edition of the same paper carries further documents from the same info dump showing Hermer privately criticising serving British soldiers, in correspondence with his legal team, while praising publicly the Iraqi lawyers whose own clients the inquiry had found to be lying. Hermer has, rightfully, been formally referred Lord Hermer to the Bar Standards Board for serious professional misconduct. Lord Glasman, a Labour peer who knows him personally, has called him "an arrogant...fool." Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, has said directly that Hermer "aided false war crimes claims against British troops." (Fancy losing a moral high-ground to Boris Johnson...) This is the Attorney General. He is the chief legal officer of the Crown. The man whose entire constitutional function is to ensure that the legal interests of the British state are properly defended in the highest forums is a man who, before assuming the post, made his career attacking the British state on behalf of liars, liars whose lies were specifically calibrated to destroy the reputations of British servicemen and women. There is a word for this kind of legal practice when it is done at scale and in a particular direction. The word is "lawfare." The deployment of judicial mechanisms as a substitute for politics by other means. The systematic use of human-rights frameworks, judicial review, and aggressive litigation to constrain the actions of one's own state, to attack one's own armed forces, and to advance a worldview that the elected institutions of one's country have repeatedly declined to advance through the ballot box. It is, at its outer edge, a form of treason that wears a wig. And Hermer, who practices it, is an enemy of our state.

@WestHam Thought the Everton fans showed some class by joining in the r hand clap for the full minute - thanks to all of them and respect to them

Remembering Dylan Tombides in the 38th minute 🕊️

MPs' wages have risen. £81,932 to £98,599 in 5 years. 5 pay rises. Targeting £110,000 by 2029. While your bills rise. Your life gets harder. Your tax goes up. And they tell you to have "broad shoulders" and bear the brunt. Dissolve Parliament. We have been betrayed.

@thebmstand We just sat back and invited them onto us for 15 mins after we scored - so obvious they would score

Nuno did what he could to surrender the lead - terrible choice of sub in Potts for a striker. But. I do not care about that now, we nicked a win, celebrated like nutters and we are still out of the bottom 3. That will have hurt Spurs. COYI.

@WestHamPlace I nearly had a coronary when they scored - watching West Ham is a health hazard #COYI

That was honestly so stressful After that winner, it took me about 30 seconds to even celebrate I just stood there in disbelief that we had done it This is such an emotional rollercoaster ⚒

Just look at what ISRAEL has built to keep Palestinians out! 7 layers of border wall, and they’ll shoot anyone who tries to cross. … Oh wait. This isn’t Israel. This is EGYPT. This is the Egypt-Gaza border. But if we say “Israel,” maybe you’ll care.

It suddenly struck me as odd, that at a time when the world is totally fucked by massive male egos, we are all being told of the advantages of a religion which glorifies and inflates and enables the male ego and protects it from any criticism

@jk_rowling @campbellclaret I haven’t seen a murder like this since Dr Kelly

How did "racism" become seen as worse than "letting little girls get stabbed to death"? Also, what even is racism? We've got the concept of "diversity", which means people have different cultures and backgrounds - but those differences are only ever positive? It's perfectly acceptable for Amal Rajan to mention his children's Indian “civilisation that’s in their blood”. But if someone suggests a lack of civilisation could be in someone's blood, they're committing a racist hate crime. Well, which is it? Are traits carried in people's blood or not? We've seen fear of "racism" lead to young people's deaths: - At the Manchester Arena bombing ,where a security guard didn't stop the killer because he was afraid of being called racist; - In Nottingham, where authorities released Valdo Calocane to kill because they thought that detaining a black man would be racist; - In Southport, where a teacher who raised Axel Rudakubana as a risk was accused of being racist. Our society has been captured by communists. They enforce a fanatic religious belief in diversity and multiculturalism. This is reinforced through culture and legislation. If diversity and multiculturalism is such a strength, why didn't it increase societal harmony in Lebanon, the Balkans, Syria? Diversity isn't a strength. It's a weapon used by communists to weaken the nation state so that communists can implement their communist utopia. The communists don't want harmony. Anyone who genuinely wanted to improve social harmony would want Axel Rudakubana's parents to be dealt with swiftly and harshly, to simmer down the righteous fury of British people. They'd want grooming gangs to be deported. They'd want border controls to be enforced. They'd want people like Valdo Calocane to be detained, and they'd want security guards to question Muslim men with big backpacks when they walk into a pop concert full of little girls. But they don't. The left use accusations of "racism" to ensure such crimes happen. Killing and raping British children is a feature, not a bug. They want it to happen. It demoralises the British people and weakens our country, and brings their communist utopia a step closer. Question the motives of anyone who accuses anyone of "racism".

As someone on Spirit of Shankly pointed out, this is just the original concept for the Premier League being delivered. The vision was to move football up a couple of social classes, which to me means price out the less wealthy and encourage a "better" class of clientele with more disposable income. They focused only on the vast riches the PL would bring and they were right. However that model only works long term with regeneration of new fans. It works if you are never gonna get relegated because the group of die hards whose loyalty and love for the club could not be quantified on a balance sheet, have already left and they are now doing something else with their match days. Most of them likely realise that it's quite useful getting the time back and similar to when you break up with an ex, there is rarely any going back. Without the diehards, who indoctrinated the next generation into being obsessed with the team, where does the next generation of fans come from? Good luck convincing a young person to spend what little they have left after paying their rent and other increasing costs, to allocate a big chunk of what's left for an overpriced season ticket. Not happening, football is not high on the importance scale when you can watch every game on telly. As for the "better" clientele they attracted, they will abandon ship as quickly as they arrived come any form of hard times. What the clubs are doing right now with ticket price rises is simply ensuring that they have no loyal die hard fanbase left in 10-15 years. These changes will be forever. No more capacity crowds for just playing in the PL, owners will be forced to try and actually win stuff. If they don't, goodbye fans. If they do, those fans will demand they do it again. I'm from an era that did not place expectation on clubs, we just handed over our money and went to football, because that is the way it was. I'm still clinging on but with next year being my 50th watching West Ham and having been banned this season for breaching health and safety, I'm pretty sure it will be my last one. Unless the owners who fucked my club up completely, finally get the message and fuck off back to their mansions. The people who own clubs know the square root of fuck all about the generations of fans who helped build that club to be the thing it was before they demolished everything they inherited. They do not comprehend love or loyalty because in their world, those things are cash transactions. Football as we knew it is on life support, but the owners won't realise until one day they look around that vast stadium and see a handful of fans watching the latest pile of average they decided to serve up. #BSOUT

Chelsea announce £300M losses . Man City still facing 115 charges. But somehow… nothing happens. West Brom? One alleged breach… EFL: “Points deduction incoming.” Game feels different depending on who you are 👀 #WBA

Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about… The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly. They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever. THAT is the single most important fact in British public life. The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing: - School - PPE or adjacent - Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role - Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,” - Then a safe seat and a red box before 40 At no point has the market ever called them a moron. At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit. The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world. This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences. In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department. The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable. Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured. The think tank ecosystem makes it worse. IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit. This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors. The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth. A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome. The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch. Bad companies go bust. Bad traders get sacked. The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible. The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now. You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance. Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves. We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur. Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out. That’s how we win. Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible. He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort. Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order. He couldn't remember a single item. She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention. Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why. The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all. But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone. Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology. Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed. She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups. The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones. Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running. She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all. This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism. In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention. Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished. The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale. But television is not where this gets dangerous. Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing. The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process. The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards. David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down. The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion. Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it. Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention. Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it. The café in Vienna is long gone. The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time. Every "to be continued." Every unread notification. Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow." All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished. Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927. A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media. And nobody taught it to you in school.

@BillyBondsStand @_JarrodBowen Must be playing for England this summer

Great stat Dan @_JarrodBowen on 🔥 for 6 years ⚒️

Goodness me! 👇