DUFF & NONSENSE!

Consider the atom!

Oh, go on, give it a try!  I know it's Sunday morning and you're sitting slumped there regreting opening that extra bottle last night, but try it, just think about atoms.  Pesky little critters, ain't they?  So simple and yet so unbelievably complex.  I am moved to these ruminations because, yet again, I have fallen foul of that little imp - coincidence.

Yesterday I was re-reading Michael Frayn's superb play Copenhagen because there is just a tiny chance that I may be able to direct it next year.  The play concerns the 1941 meeting which took place between Neils Bohr, the Danish-Jewish 'Godfather' of quantum physics, and his favourite 'pupil' and supreme genius in his own right, Werner Heisenberg.  The play takes place in the spirit world because the particpants, including Bohr's wife, Margrethe, are all dead.  They meet to try and agree on the nature of the meeting which took place at such an ominous moment in history.  Ominous for both Bohr living as a Jew in occupied Denmark, and for Heisenberg who worked under the baleful eye of the German authorities who could not forgive him for having taught 'Jewish science' at university.  Ominous for the rest of us because 1941 saw the first moves in the race to develop the atom bomb - and Heisenberg was the team leader on the Nazi side investigating atomic possibilities.  Frayn is far too intelligent not to enjoy the irony that the participants of this meeting are unable to agree on what was actually said because they are all beset with uncertainty!  An excellent play and worth reading even if reading play scripts is not your usual litarary fare.

The other half of my 'atomic coincidence' was re-reading part of David Bergamini's WWII history book Japan's Imperial Conspiracy in order to prepare my talk on "How Japan Lost WWII in the First Six Months" which I am thinking of recording for those of you having difficulty in sleeping at night!  It reminded me of the little known fact that the two bombs employed used totally different mechanisms for splitting the uranium-235.  In the first bomb, small particles of uranium were held at one end and at the due moment were fired down the 'tube' to a larger piece of uranium at the other end thus setting off the chain re-action.  Hence its nickname of "Thin Boy".  The Nagasaki bomb, on the other hand, employed a different means in which the large piece of uranium was surrounded by smaller pieces which were driven inwards by explosive force to set the chain re-action going.  Hence its nick name of "Fat Boy".  This is the sort of totally useless information for which this blog is famous the length and breadth of my attic!

The other little-known fact of which I was reminded concerned the A-bombing of Nagasaki.  Not too many people know that Nagasaki was not the original target, that was to be the intended fate of Kokura, which lay in a conglomoration of industrial towns in the southern-most island of Japan, Kyushu.  It is a delicious irony that will be completely missed by any 'Greenies' that the thing that saved Kokura was pollution!  President Truman had laid down strict instructions that the A-bombs were to be dropped under visual rather than radar observation in order to avoid mistakes.  The smoke from all the factories around Kokura hid the specific aiming point for 'Fat Boy' and after several efforts it was decided to go for the secondary target of Nagasaki.  Bergamini reckons that if Kokura had been hit the death toll would have been at least 300,000 of the 600,000 who lived in and around the area.  As it was, the plane turned for Nagasaki and at this point yet more 'atomic uncertainty' enters the picture!

As the crew approached Nagasaki they saw considerable cloud formations and an argument began as to whether or not to disregard orders and use radar to identify the target - they were running low on fuel and time was of the essence.  Reluctantly permission was granted but suddenly Bombadier Beahan sighted a distinctive stadium through a gap in the clouds and he shouted to the pilot that he would take the plane in.  He asked for a slight alteration in course and then, at 10.58 am he released 'Fat Boy'.  But, Bombadier Beahan made a mistake and dropped his bomb more than two miles off target!  Directly beneath the bomb the destruction was total but because of the geography of the surrounding hills large parts of the city were shielded and only - only? - 40,000 perished, perhaps half of what might have been.  Yet more uncertainty arises as to whether or not Bombardier Beahan deliberately made his 'mistake' or whether perhaps he had been given a nod and a wink from higher up the chain of command.

Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle seems to apply to history as much as it does to sub-atomic particles.

 

So what's wrong with bimbling along in the middle?

This particular "tedious tale" follows on directly from my previous post in which I repeated the fact that 68% of eligible voters couldn't be bothered to exercise their 'cherished'(?) democratic right to vote.  Cue: sundry media wiseacres tugging their beards and muttering, "Shockin', shockin', I tell you!"  But is it?

To tell the truth, I am not sure either way and part of my reason in writing this is to clarify my own mind.  It seems to me that the politicians are right when they sense that the political waistline of the electorate has grown enormously since the 'Days of Thatch'.  You can safely ignore Left-wing rhetoric to the effect that 'The Thatch' ruined Britain.  Just the opposite, she made it very, very comfortable, thank you very much, even if a dim and uncomprehending mass in the middle waistline of the population cannot bring itself to recognise the fact.  This central mass which far exceeeds the extremities, now acts like a drag anchor on the ship of state.  Blair was shrewd enough to spot this and ensured that the Labour party remained anchored firmly in the middle even if he was unable, or unwilling to clamp down entirely on the megalomaniac actions of his Chancellor.  Today, Cameron is attempting to do the same and I suspect that no matter how much the Right-wing of his party squeal he will not allow himself to be budged from the centre.  That, in a nutshell, is why he likes a coalition arrangement with the Lib-Dems.

This inertia on the part of the bulky centre of politics will remain until such time as a real emergency arises.  It is then, and only then, that the British turn to 'extremist' politicians; like Margaret Thatcher in 1979 when the country was brought to its financial and industrial knees; and Winston Churchil, the maverick's maverick, in 1940.  Until then, they are more or less happy to let the wretched politicians squabble over the minutae of this or that policy whilst they, The People, just get on with their lives.

Again, I'm not sure that their instinct isn't sound.  Quite apart from one's friends, whose political views are mostly at kindergarten level, a brief stroll round 'Blogdom' will reveal a range of political opinions that, were you to know the bloggers concerned, might lead you to call for nursie!  So at least I can comfort myself with the belief? hope? that the ignorant, slothful, uninvolved middle will keep the crazies at bay.  Also, I can comfort myself with yet another thought, that if the chances of the emminently suitable John Redwood becoming our prime minister are equal to the mythical snowball in hell, then so too are the chances of a political huckster like George Galloway.

Here is a final thought.  I referred earlier to my friends, most of whom are 'well educated' (whatever that means) as having political opinions of a kindergarten level.  Rather sneery, even for me, but it is a fact.  (I should add in all fairness that their views of my politics are usually indicated by open-mouths and/or snorts of derision!) Politics is a devilish complex business, a bit like three dimensional chess.  Like warfare it is comprised of two levels, the tactical and the strategic.  To formulate the strategic you need to have studied widely and deeply and come to some firmly based conclusions on your fundamental philosophy.  Having done that, you need to have a deep understanding of the political milieu in which you operate in order to achieve your desired aims.  This will require considerable skill in lying, cheating and breaking promises which is yet another reason why the broad mass of the population will avoid you like the plague (unless they want something!)

So I suppose that, on the whole, I am happy that my fellow subjects have the political inertia of a lump of lead, but I just hope and pray that when the warning signals become deafening they will awake in good time.

 

What would you give?

I'm not sure if this is the version that sold at Sotheby's yesterday for - wait for it  - $120 million!  Edvard Munch painted four versions of it.  Assuming a $100 million was neither here nor there to you, would you pay that much to own it?

 

Well, I would!  Irrespective of any other consideration I think it is a great image, one that I could look at for the rest of my life.  There is a tendency with such iconic images  to overload them with meaning that was almost certainly not in the artist's mind at the time.  For Munch, according to his own words quoted on the BBC News site, it was an entirely personal experience that he captured:

"I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.

"My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

With one very brief exception I am unfamiliar with psychotic feelings.  Even so, that one event which lasted no more than a few minutes is vividly etched in my memory so that I can still remember when and where it happened and what I was doing when suddenly, with no warning and for no reason that I could think of, I plunged into a deep, deep depression almost like a physical blow and I felt myself sag under the pressure.  I can remember telling 'it' to fuck off and leave me alone and fortunately it did. But the experience really shook me.  That is why I read the blog of my e-pal, Louise, with enormous sympathy which is only exceeded by my admiration for her guts.

Returning to Munch and his painting, it might only have been a deep and visceral inward feeling that he captured in that image but we, in retrospect, can set it in a time and place and 'see' it as a harbinger of things to come.  And nor does it stand alone.  The deeply subversive plays of Ibsen were already begining to eat like acid into the public consciousness of the late Victorian age.  In music, the stately 'oom-pah-pahs' of Elgar's tribute to empire were about to be blown away by Stravinsky's score for Rite of Spring.  Thus art preceded politics but eventually the guns of the western front blew away the remnants of the British empire, the world would never be the same and this tired, battered old globe of ours took yet another new turn.

So, yes, I would pay zillions, if I had them, to own that picture.  It would hang alongside another anxiety-inducing painting, a reproduction of which is in my sitting room, to the constant irritation of the 'Memsahib' who, along with all of our visitors, cannot abide it!  Needless to say, the more they bridle at it, the more it confirms my opinion that the artist, Paul Klee, succeeded beyond his hopes:

Who said art was supposed to be comfortortable?

 

The Sunday Rumble 29:4:12

Jock prelate spouts BLX:  I'm feeling a tad grumpy this morning.  First of all my swimming pool is closed for the day so I missed my morning swim, and second, I awoke to the keening whine of some Jock prelate spouting 'A1 blx' as he accused Cameron of "immorality" because he wasn't stealing enough from the rich to give to the 'poor'.  Have matters deteriorated to such an extent that even Cardinals nowadays sound like spotty 'stoodents' in a demo?  Why do we not hear them thundering from their pulpits on the subject of real immorality of the simple, straightforward type that Jesus Christ would have understood?  Truly, the Pharisees have taken over the temples of the Lord!

Gutless Cameron missed his chance:  You may enjoy all sort of vices as a political leader but the one you must avoid at all costs is cowardice.  Cameron lost his nerve before the election and failed to go for a strong, unambivalent Right-wing set of policies which, in my opinion, would have given the Tory party an over-all majority.  Instead he has the dreadful 'il-Lib-non-Dems' hung round his neck like a dead albatross.  I suspect that to begin with he was fairly happy because it shielded him from, using what I suspect to be his words, ' those dreadful Right-wing oiks' in his own party.  At the end of last year Europe was a total shambles and there were more than enough disagreements of real substance between 'us and them', and between Tories and Lib-Dems, for him to have backed Clegg into a corner forcing him to break the coalition and thus engender an election earlier this year.  Now his chance has gone and all the sins of omission and commission have caught up with him and his useless gaggle of ministers.  For the past week the MSM, of all colours, have been writing his political obituary.  The quicker he goes the better but God only knows who will take his place. 

"Oh what a tangled web we weave ...":  When first we practice picking and choosing which nice, cuddly, furry or feathered things to preserve!  Thus, the State of Oregon is in a bugger's muddle because some-one talked the Government into protecting sea lions who promptly grunted something in 'Sea-Lionese' to the effect of, "Thanks, buddy, now where're all those salmon?" before they lumbered off to kill and eat zillions of them.  This forced the authorities to rescind the Federal protection law and the sea lions learned the hard way never to trust what governments say because thousands of them were shot!  Now it is the turn of the double-breasted cormorants.  They, apparently, have grown so fat on baby salmon trying desperately to reach the ocean that they can barely fly!  Hitherto a protected species they are now set for one last dive!  My thanks to Drudge.

Total incompetence knows no barriers:  It is a sort of relief to know that the Chinese, who we all credit with being "damned clever little devils, don'cha know" are, in reality, as clod-hoppingly useless as us!  Apparently, a blind - repeat blind - political dissident who was under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance which included dozens of not-so-secret policemen and the use of searchlights on his house at night, managed to escape with his immediate family and reach sanctuary at the American consulate.  This raises a fascinating question - do Chinese blush?  Aha, I bet you never thought of that one before!

Now I know the real reason:  The old friend and fellow thesp who pleaded an absolute and unbreakable prior appointment which prevented him from playing Abhorson the executioner on Monday night, and which resulted in me being dragged reluctantly, darlings, back onto the stage for (yet another) final farewell performance, has been found out!  On Monday night United are playing City to decide who wins the Premier League.  I have just spoken to him and hoped that his conscience pricks him as he sits in his armchair watching the match whilst  I suffer for his art!  He denies it all, of course.

"Oh, the horror, the horror!":  I just went downstairs to make a cup of tea and as ususal Sky News was running on the 'telly'.  It was a newspaper round-up programme and I took one look, and then another to be certain, and seeing that I was right - the panelists were the "fat, black clown" and Max 'spank me quick' Mosley - I fled upstairs unable to face it.  Where do they find these people?  And even more pertinent, why don't they ever ask me?

Are Europeans imitating Lear?  According to Roger Kimball at PJMedia they are beginning to sound like him:

“No, no, no, no!”  Thus quoth Lear to Cordelia near the end of the grimmest play Shakespeare wrote.

As my friend John Allison observes,  Europe is acting a lot like Lear on his way to prison.

“No” said the Italians on November 12, 2011. They sent away Silvio Berlusconi who served on and off for a cumulative 10 years from 1994 through 2011 and was Italy’s longest-serving Prime Minister ever.

“No” said the Spanish on November 20, 2011 to the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, two-term Prime Minister from 2004-2011, replacing him with the conservative People’s Party led by Mariano Rajoy.

“No” said Geert Wilders, Party for Freedom leader on April 21, 2012 to his coalition partner, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Liberal Party, sending Holland to a likely caretaker government and election on September 12.

Ditto the French and the Greeks. And this procession of negatives means —what? [My emphasis]

Our rulers would answer with another Shakespearean quote: "A question not to be asked"!

Must I go to night school to order a coffee?  This is a late addition but I need to go and make a coffee and it reminded me of my increasing irritation - oh, alright then, grumpiness - over the problem of ordering a coffee these days.  "Black coffee, please", I say to the Polish/Latvian/Czech/Estonian girl behind the counter.  She then reels off a list of names - in perfect English, I should make clear - none of which mean a thing to me.  My polite good humour vanishes and I lean across the counter placing my nose a few inches from hers (poor thing) and snarl, "Just give me a strong, black coffee!"  Well-trained and inherently courteous she smiles and asks, "Large, medium or small?" Cue: snapping, snarling, grumpy, old sod jumping up and down with mouth opening and closing, fists clenching and unclenching and  . . . a highly intellectual and philosophical discussion on the essential Platonic meaning of 'large' and 'small' does not ensue!

 

Bringing home the Bacon #1

Sorry about the corny headline, it's a weakness and I throw myself on the mercy of the court!  However, I have rediscovered one of my old 'Favourites'  - Sir Francis Bacon.  What a wise, shrewd , old cove he was.  You can read him for yourself at the excellent Bartleby Books which might be a good idea because in paraphrasing him I am more than likely to set the old boy spinning in his grave with my misunderstandings.  Even so, for those of you 'working stiffs' without too much time on your hands, perhaps my occasional synopsizes will intrigue you enough to encourage you to look him up later.

In Essay VI, Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Bacon considers these behaviours particularly as they appear in the conduct of politicians:

There be three degrees of this hiding and veiling of a man’s self. The first, closeness, reservation, and secrecy; when a man leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken, what he is. The second, dissimulation, in the negative; when a man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not that he is. And the third, simulation in the affirmative; when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not.

Oh yes, several contemporary names instantly spring to mind in all those three categories!  He investigates each of them in greater depth:

For the first of these, secrecy; it is indeed the virtue of a confessor. And assuredly the secret man heareth many confessions. For who will open himself to a blab or a babbler? But if a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery; as the more close air sucketh in the more open; and as in confession the revealing is not for worldly use, but for the ease of a man’s heart, so secret men come to the knowledge of many things in that kind; while men rather discharge their minds than impart their minds. In few words, mysteries are due to secrecy.

Next, he moves onto dissimulation:

For the second, which is dissimulation; it followeth many times upon secrecy by a necessity; so that he that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage between both, and to be secret, without swaying the balance on either side. They will so beset a man with questions, and draw him on, and pick it out of him, that, without an absurd silence, he must show an inclination one way; or if he do not, they will gather as much by his silence as by his speech.

Finally, simulation:

But for the third degree, which is simulation and false profession; that I hold more culpable, and less politic; except it be in great and rare matters. And therefore a general custom of simulation (which is this last degree) is a vice, rising either of a natural falseness of fearfulness, or of a mind that hath some main faults, which because a man must needs disguise, it maketh him practise simulation in other things, lest his hand should be out of [practise].

In his final paragraph he sums up the pros and cons of these essential political and social 'arts and crafts':

The best composition and [temperament] is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.

There you have it - Politics 101!  

 

     Lord Edmund Blackadder                        Sir Francis Bacon

 

The Sunday rumble 22:4:12

TV review:  Those bloody Vikings are invading again.  Not with axes and spears but with the very best of their Scandinavian TV output.  By now everyone knows about The Killing unless you have been living on Mars.  Then there was Borgen which various TV critics praised up to the hilt but which I dropped after about four episodes.  It's bad enough following the antics of real politicians without having to watch fictional ones.  And anyway, the problem with modern political drama is that you are bound to upset someone.  Thus, in Borgen, the female lead was a soppy leftie and my sympathies, natch, were with the rather ghastly Machiavellian Right-winger.  Last night, on BBC4, we had the first two episodes of The Bridge, a combined Swedish/Danish production.  This very definitely has the makings so if you haven't seen it, look out for a repeat sometime during the week or cancel the dinner party next Saturday and watch.  Finally, leaving Scandinavia for America I have to report that I gave up on Homeland.  It wasn't just that the wife never answered my letters but the unfortunate fact that the whole thing became more and more ludicrous.  There was a distinct lack of attention to detail in the production which added to my disbelief in the whole thing.

Bookaholic woes:  Well, I reploughed my way through part of David Bergami's excellent and comprehensive history, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, to assist me in the subterfuge that I actually know what I'm talking about when I give my presentation on the subject!  Actually, I feel rather sorry for the Japs.  They were quietly minding their own business, enjoying their medievil life style when that impertinent American naval officer ordered them to open up to the world.  Why couldn't he just mind his own business?!  Well, of course, they came out of their frozen society not like greyhounds but like the dogs of war.  It took WWII, zillions of dead and two atom bombs to knock some modern sense into them.  I also finished Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England - an absolute must buy!  My admiration for my ancesters is now boundless.  Never was the lottery of life more cruel and arbitrary than then.  Be born right, preferably with a bit of land, and you were in with chances.  Born wrong, and if you were lucky (or do I mean unlucky?) enough to dodge the childhood infections that killed so many, you faced a life of starvation, criminality and abuse by all and sundry but especially the authorities.  And yet ... and yet ... it was the time of Shakespeare and Bacon and the renaissance.  But now my problem is what next?  Recently I saw the film of Lawrence of Arabia for the first time in decades and it made me realise that I knew absolutely nothing of Allenby's campaign in Arabia.  Blow me down, I walked into the closing down sale of our local bookshop - a sign of the times - and the first book I saw was Eden to Armageddon: World War I in the Middle East by Roger Ford which now totters uneasily on my pile of waiting to be read books.  But, there is a challenger which I will tell you about in the next item.

Allan Bloom, an anniversary:  I hadn't realised it but it is now the 25th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's gallant assault on the treachery of intellectuals, particularly university intellectuals, to the high-minded principles of true intellectualism.  I describe it as a "gallant assault" because it has all the hallmarks of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, courageous but futile!  His book, The Closing of the American Mind, a slightly dog-eared copy of which sits on the book shelf to my left, caused a sensation.  To begin with it attracted some rave reviews but when the (so-called) intelligentsia(!) recovered from their shock the counter-attacks began.  Needless to say, nothing much has changed in the Humanities Departments of universities in the west (I include ours!) but Bloom's book lives on.  Two excellent essays on the man and his book here and here.  But now my problem remains - do I re-read Bloom or follow Allenby and Lawrence into the desert?

Prince Phil - a National Treasure:  In all the forthcoming celebrations of Her Maj's 60 years of duty I do hope Prince Philip is given a mention.  Courtsy of 'SoD' (Son of Duff), here are a just a few of his priceless utterences over the years as recorded by the Daily Mirror which have reproduced ninety of them to celebrate the Prince's 90th birthday:

5 To expats in Abu Dhabi last year: “Are you running away from something?”

7 At a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965, he said: “Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don’t you have a slogan: ‘Kill a cat and save a bird?’”

10 His description of Beijing, during a visit there in 1986: “Ghastly.”

14To a British trekker in Papua New Guinea, 1998: “You managed not to get eaten then?”

21On the Duke of York’s house, 1986: “It looks like a tart’s bedroom.” (Which, in a manner of speaking, it was, I suppose.  Ooops, there goes the Knighthood!)

28 On the new £18million British Embassy in Berlin in 2000: “It’s a vast waste of space.”

 

Should foreigners be allowed to sue HMG?

I ask the question in the light of today's controversy over the Libyan who was, apparently, handed over to the former Libyan government where he was maltreated.  He is now suing Jack Straw and planning to sue Tony Blair.  I, too, would dearly love to sue both of those 'gentlemen' not for the same reason as 'Ahab the Arab', or whatever he's called, but "I have a little list" ready and waiting if any of m'Learned Friends are interested on a 'no win no fee' basis!

But back to the main point, is it right that foreigners should be allowed to sue ministers or ex-ministers for actions taken when they were in government?  They say that diplomats are sent abroad to lie for their country and I think government ministers are appointed to be beastly to foreigners - as and when required by the interests of state.  To be honest, I am somewhat pressed for time this morning and I confess not to have thought this through in any detail but provided that no personal interest is involved and that a minister is acting solely for reasons of state then he or she should be immune from legal action in our courts.

Am I wrong?  Convince me!

(Sorry, still no sensible suggestions from TypePad so you will have to suffer with this miniscule font size for a little longer.)

(At last, it's fixed!)

 

Mad or bad?

The Breivik case in Norway resurrects some old questions like is he mad or is he bad?  I hesitate to enter the fray because it is a quagmire of language, meaning, pseudo-science, legalese and good, old-fashioned gut-feelings, still, let's give it a try.

I would start by accepting that insanity does exist.  If a man regularly dresses up as Napoleon and insists that everyone refer to him as 'Emperor' then he is insane, or demented, or irrational to the point where his actions are no longer his responsibility.  In other words, his conduct is not freely chosen from a list of alternatives, he is merely a puppet subject to the delusion with which he suffers.  Do you lock him up?  Well, I would suggest that it depends on whether his actions are likely to hurt him or others.

But if a man goes out and shoots dead 77 strangers, is he mad?  You might say that such behaviour is as demented and irrational as 'Napoleon', above.  But is it?  Lots of people for different reasons have gone out and killed strangers en masse.  We briefly considered Che Guevara yesterday and he was but a mere apprentice in the killing game.  The reason that lies behind their mass murdering activities is claimed to be politics, as though that made a difference!

Breivik uses politics as his excuse.  In doing so he exhibits rational, you might call it super-rational, thinking.  He views the world about him and comes to some conclusions which are not without foundation.  He thinks - and I stress the word deliberately - that his country in particular and Europe in general is under threat from an Islamist invasion.  You may disagree with him but it is not an irrational opinion because it can be backed up by facts and figures.  (That does not make it true, of course, because there will be contradictory facts and figures to take into account.  My point is that it indicates a thinking, rational man at work.)  He comes to the conclusion that an act of what I can only describe as "shock 'n' awe" is required in order to bring about a radical shift in political opinion and activity.  Again, in political circles that is hardly an original strategy!

One other thing must be borne in mind when pondering these difficulties.  I am happy to state with complete conviction that the vast majority of psychiatry is pseudo-science.  Psychology, as a description of general human behaviour has merit - but only applies in the general and hardly ever in the particular.  The fact that these useless disciplines have maintained an influential grip on judges and juries is one of the more malignant characteristics of our current legal system.

In my view, Breivik is bad not mad and should be 'hung by the neck until he be dead' to use an old phrase I would dearly love to see return.

 

'Dear Lord, don't make me good, make me lucky!'

My title seems to be the default prayer today for more and more people, men and women, in all stratas of our society.  You might care to add to my title, 'And, Lord, don't let me be found out!'  I do realise that old men are prone to wailing that things aren't like they used to be and so I should make clear that I don't believe there has been some sort of golden age in which honesty and probity and straight-dealing was the order of the day.  Even so, it seems to me that simple, old-fashioned notions of virtue seem to have almost disappeared.  Ethics, in so far as it exists anywhere, seems to be confined by large organisations to ensuring that no-one indulges in racism!

In the last few years I have spectated the goings-on in the dismal non-science of climatology in which politically (I use the word in its widest sense) committed 'scientists' have bent truth to suit their agenda.  When they were found out, various committees of 'the Great and the Good' were wheeled in to whitewash their behaviour.  Just yesterday, I pointed out the disgraceful fact that 47 out of 53 supposedly 'scientific' papers on possible cancer cures were found to be impossible to replicate.  In our civil service, our local authorities, our schools, our universities, our police, our media industry and, above all, our parliament and government, we find a constant practice, almost amounting to a deliberate policy, of lying and cheating.  I would remind you that, despite appearances, these dishonest activites are not conducted by 'organisations', they are executed by individuals, people - people like me and you!

Whilst I cannot claim with any certainty that such corrupting and corruptible behaviour never occurred in earlier generations, I think I can claim that at least there was a sense of shame involved.  The perpetrators knew they were doing wrong. Today, I rarely sense that in the behaviour of the lying liars who hold positions of influence in our society.  Whether it's a teacher giving her pupils hints on the exam questions to come, or a public employee 'throwing sickies' as often as he or she can get away with, or a managers of large corporations being 'economical with the actualité', or a 'scientist glossing his experimental results, everywhere and all the time people are lying through their teeth.

So why, I wonder, has the notion of ethical behaviour, of honesty, almost totally disappeared?  No doubt part of it is the loss of Christian teaching to the very young.  Whatever one might think of Christianity as a corporate body, so to speak, no-one can gainsay its fundamental teachings on personal virtue.  However, the loss of the ten commandments has been matched by the growth in political ideology in which ends justify means.  Examples of this are too numerous to list and they exist on both sides of the political divide.  Well, as individuals, of course, our power is limited but we do have dominion over ourselves.  So perhaps we should remind ourselves of Shakespeare's words:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves

Or, perhaps the words of many of my old school teachers, "Could do better!"

 

Is intelligence like pornography?

You remember the old adage that it is impossible to define pornography but you know it when you see it!  Well, I am wondering whether intelligence is the same.  This whole concept of 'intelligence', as in the IQ assessments I touched upon in the preceding post, has been going round and round in my brain.  What is it, exactly?  How do you define it?  How do you measure it?  Does it only exist in one part of your persona or does it permeate your whole being?  Needless to say, my own fairly moderate intelligence only took me so far in seeking answers!

Most people, if asked, would equate intelligence to 'book-learning' or success in academic fields.  Alas, it only requires a nano second of thought to start listing the really stupid 'stoopids' who are weighed down with 'book-learning'.  One instantly thinks of Gordon Brown, one of the few men in the country who actually understands "endogenous growth theory" but who demonstrated without doubt his total inability to run a whelk-stall!  Even so, as I understand it, he has now gone on, in a very 'intelligent' way, to build a new career in which he will earn considerable amounts of money and enjoy a very exciting, international life-style.  So not totally unintelligent then!

Perhaps we should infer that intelligence is partial, that it can appear in one part of your life and be missing in other areas.  Well, that's pretty obvious from everyday life where one observes otherwise educated and 'intelligent' friends with good careers who then enter into disasterous marriages which are blindingly obvious to all the witnesses but not to the participants.  So, if that is the case, what is the point of measuring 'intelligence' unless you can pinpoint where it is working inside a person?

And how do you meaure it?  I have never taken an 'intelligence' test so I am not qualified to judge their efficacy.  I assume they are a series of increasingly difficult 'problems' which people are asked to solve.  The problem here is contamination.  The tests are 'designed' by people who may or may not be very intelligent themselves, and they are marked by those very same people!  Whilst some of the tests might be of a mathematical nature with a right or wrong answer, I suspect many of them are really matters of judgment and, I would remind you, the judgment of the testers is on the line as much as that of the testee, so to speak.  Is my lifetime's refusal to take any sort of intelligence test a sign of my intelligence?  Or lack of it?

Perhaps - no, almost definitely - I have the wrong end of the stick.  Perhaps it is not the ability find a right answer which these IQ testers are after but the evidence that the 'testee' is actually attempting to think of a way through to a conclusion whether it is 'right' or 'wrong'.  I suppose there are many (most?) people in this world who fail to think on a medium or long term basis and merely act on short term considerations.  We saw a few thousand of them doing so during the recent riots.  Were they unintelligent?  Not necessarilly, I would suggest.  If you are greedy for fashionable electronic goods which you cannot afford and you see a shop being ransacked, it is not unintelligent to help yourself.  Fleetingly you might do the intelligent thing and think of the consequences but were you to do so you would assume that the powers of the authorities to find each and everyone of the perps is limited and even if caught you know from experience that it will be an easy doss in jail - and you will still have the goods you nicked stashed away for when you come out.  So quite bright, really!

Now let us examine the long-term thinkers.  Are they more intelligent?  Take a young man who has set his sights on a career as an officer in the Royal Navy.  He knows that certain exam results will be required and that he will have to dedicate his life to this chosen path which has little equivalence in 'civvy street'.  Part-way through his career the government cuts the Royal Navy to shreds and he is out on his ear, middle-aged and with none of the right qualifications to gain employment at the sort of remuneration level he has been used to.  How intelligent was that?  Perhaps that example teaches us (the obvious) that being intelligent does not guarantee success.  In which case, why set such store by it?

In considering this subject of intelligence I am reminded of Mr. Cruddas, the unfortunate 'Get Rich Quick Merchant' who was the subject of a Sunday Times investigation into Tory donors.  He is a man with absolutely nil academic qualifications who, by circumstance, found himself in the right place at the right time.  He quickly turned his ability to understand and use the latest communications wheeze - at the time it was teletype or some such - and had the imagination to realise its wider applications.  He set up what was, in effect, a 'bookie's shop' in which foreign currency dealers could quickly and easily bet on price fluctuations.  He made a million, or to be precise, several hundreds of millions!  Was he intelligent or was he - and I deliberately used the word earlier - simply imaginative?

At this point I turn without shame to my Thesaurus because, the English language being such a tremendous tool for the expression of thought that I wanted to lay before you some other words for 'intelligence': wisdom, thinking power, intellectualism, wit, common sense, understanding, cleverness, gumption, sagacity, discernment, acuteness, shrewdness, foresight, craftiness . . .  and so on and on.  Again I ask, in this ocean of words and subtle differences of meaning, where-in lies 'intelligence'?  What is it?  How do we test for it?

And that, of course, brings us full circle!

 

I wish I had been at that lunch!

Well, for a start, the guest was Charles Murray, he of The Bell Curve book fame, or perhaps that should be infamy!  The host was Edward Luce, the America correspondent of the FT who has written an article on it.  And a second reason for wishing to be there is that Charles Murray, already fairly high on my favourites list, began the lunch with a dry martini and thus moved himself several notches higher.  Lastly, they began with black truffle pasta at $90 for two portions, so, using my American lingo, 'what's not to like?' - apart from the price!  And, of course, the conversation was rather interesting, too.

I never read Murray's book which proposed, so I gather, that IQ, more of it or less of it, is the big divide in society and he (and his co-author) left open the strong possibility that race and genetic heritage was an important factor in how much IQ you were likely to have or have not!  This, of course, brought down the wrath of the liberal hordes upon his head.  Personally, I have doubts concerning the exact meaning of IQ.  Several questions nag at me;  what is it? how is it measured?  what is the difference if any between IQ and academic ability? or IQ and commonsense?

Now he has written another book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  In this, apparently, he points to the growing gap between the ruling class of white America and their working class counterparts.  Both are moving further away from each other:

In his most recent book, Coming Apart, which has sparked heated debate since its publication last month, Murray depicts the atrophying of America’s white working class over the past generation. It also charts the growing separation of a new lower class from a new upper class – the latter a “cognitive elite” that tends to do all the things its blue-collar counterparts have forgotten how to do, such as get (and stay) married, read to their children, quit smoking, eat salad and get educated.

He offers the following reasons:

To Murray the culprit is entirely cultural – the loss of the Tocquevillian virtues of industriousness, marriage, honesty and religiosity on which he says the republic was built.

At the same time, the elites in America have become so tolerant – afflicted with such “ecumenical niceness”, as Murray calls it – that they cannot bring themselves to “preach what they practise”. Partly because of their moral squeamishness, they tend to shield their children against even the tiniest risks in life, Murray says, including mixing with Americans from less fortunate backgrounds.

Hmmn!  A good lunch, by the sound of it, and a fascinating conversation.  Wish I'd been there!

You can read the whole article here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628d8524-690b-11e1-956a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1qOfj777D

 

When academics fall out - watch out!

Why is it, I wonder - and not for the first time - that when academics fall out it makes a WWF bout look like a tea party?

The two gentlemen above, Mr. Chris Jericho and Mr. Shawn Michaels, and I stress for reasons of self preservation as well as strict accuracy that they really are absolute gentlemen to their fingertips, could well be replaced by these two gentlemen below.  In the blue corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Prof. Daniel Everett, the new kid on the block threatening the crown of the world heavyweight champ of linguistics, Prof. Noam Chomsky, know to his friends and comrades as 'Lefty'!

Another question I frequently ask myself is why so many otherwise intelligent men of science having in their youth overthrown the orthodoxy then pass into intransigent middle or old age insisting that 'the science is now settled', thus ignoring the entire history of science which is a never-ending tale of orthodoxy after orthodoxy being severely unsettled!  Still, at least in this dispute over linguistics you will enjoy the self-hugging delight in the irony that the entire subject of linguistics is so abstruse as to be almost incomprehensible to anyone outside the discipline!

Personally, I blame the Pirahã!  Not their fault, of course, because they sound like a rather intelligent tribe of people living in the depths of the Brazilian forest.  Rather sensibly, they have no religion and no hierarchy, not least because they also lack any sense of history or the future.  In other words, they do what we, er, advanced peoples are constantly told not to do, that is, they don't even think of the past and don't plan for the future because there isn't any!  The other thing the Pirahã lack is a sophisticated, or even a mildly complicated, language - such bliss my friends would mutter, not to hear Duff droning on and on and on - and in certain situations like hunting they communicate by whistling.  Anyway, the poor old Pirahã were minding their own business when suddenly Prof. of Linguistics, Daniel Everett, enters their domain.  Even worse than being a professor of linguistics he is also a devout Christian and is intent on converting them all.  After a few years, rather sensibly, Everett gives up his Christianity and concentrates on learning their language which is, according to him, amongst the most basic and under-developed ever found before.  As he gets to grip with the Pirahã's alnguage he realises that it is, and excuse me if I become slightly technical here, non-recursive.  In other words, their sentences are so short and to the point that they lack the ability to insert sub-clauses into their sentences.

So far, so tedious and so what, you might ask?  Well, it was upon this discovery of a language which was non-recursive that the linguistic brown stuff hit the fan!  You see, 'Lefty' Chomsky who, as I told you, is the World Champ in this division, had laid it down from on high that all - repeat ALL - human language, being a product of the human brain, is recursive.  Oh dear, academic handbags at dawn then ensued and continues until this day.  You can read all about it, complete with very recursive sentences, at The Chronicle for Higher Education.  It's a long-ish piece but worth reading not least for the unintentional but delicious ironies on display.

 

This is why the Obama election is critical

I have said it before and I shall say it again - well, that's what boring old farts are supposed to do - the defeat of Obama in the next election is critical for the medium term future of the United States.  Not because of any of the hopeless, helpless and hapless policies he might try and shove through, but for one huge, over-riding consideration - if he wins he is likely to choose the next Justice of the Supreme Court.  At the moment, there are four Democrat nominated Justices.  It is generally reckoned that being ideologically driven they vote as a bloc and they vote in favour of anything that increases Federal government power.  The remaining five Justices are republican picks but, in the nature of conservatives, they can differ on matters of ideology and therefore, legal interpretations.

The Washington Times sums it up in a report on the case facing the Court today:

For the past 70 years, liberal-minded justices have taken more uniform views of how far federal power extends while the lines are much more jumbled when it comes to conservative jurisprudence, court watchers say.

Hmmmn!  Let me see, 70 years back, that would take us back to Roosevelt's time -need one say more?!

Virtually everyone agrees that the four Democrat-appointed justices will move to uphold the law. Few doubt that Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by Mr. Obama, will join Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, in upholding as constitutional the mandate that individuals obtain medical insurance and the massive Medicaid expansion.

But, in the nature of conservatives, the Republican pick are much less likely to be the slaves of ideology.  Some of them actually remember that they are supposed to use the Constitution as the basis for judging whether an act is legal or not:

But among the five other justices, conservative stalwart Clarence Thomas is the only one viewed as a sure vote against the mandate and possibly other parts of the law.

So court watchers are left scratching their heads over Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While these four are generally regarded as conservatives, conservative jurisprudence isn’t as ideologically predictable on the issues the case raises.

The matter they are considering is the legality of Obama's much vaunted Health Bill which requires, nay, it orders, American citizens to take out health insurance with private companies.  If the court takes the decision that such an apparent infringement of the rights of the individual is unconstitutional, then Obama's dream boat turns into a Titanic!  Nobody is certain but the odds are on Obama's law squeezing through.

However, that is not my main point.  There are two Justices on the court who have a history of ill health.  One is 'Democrat' and should she die and Obama picks her replacement nothing changes.  However, the other is the Chief Justice, a Republican pick, who has suffered with some sort of seizures from time to time.  Should he die or take early retirement then, assuming he wins the next election,  Obama picks his successor and the Court swings definitely to the Left.  An Obama win with a decidedly Left-wing Supreme Court will inflict lasting damage on the United States.

 

Nah, it's yer Jesus gene wot does it!

Some more 'idle thoughts of an idle fellow' on the subject of the previous post because it is one of those topics which is inherently fascinating, well, it is to me, at any rate.  First, I think poor Ms. Chiao deserves a slight apology because, of course, her hard work was being paraphrased for a national news-sheet and was then further paraphrased by an ignorant oik like me, so the chances of her being misreported are high, certainly higher than the notion that a particular gene makes one race act differently from another.  Should a learned geneticist stumble into these columns by mistake I'm sure he or she will correct me but as I understand it, no single gene causes something else.  It requires other elements (genetic or bi0-chemical) to act with it and that combination is not a 'given', it is only a possibility, maybe a probabality, or perhaps it is merely a tendency.  We need to keep reminding ourselves that actually God does appear to play with dice despite what 'our Albert' said!

Even so, given a range of possible behaviours from 'a' to 'z' there seems to be a tendency for one group, be it racial or national, to choose one set of possibilities rather than another.  I stress "there seems to be" because, as I indicated in my previous post, one must be constantly aware that some of this perception is in the eye of the beholder, or even worse, it is simply an oft-repeated piece of folk-law which does not bear scrutiny. 

Despite that I can give you one example to which I have alluded before on this blog because I do think it is very solidly founded in historical fact, and also because it is a subject which I have studied at some length.  I refer to the North German 'tendency' to aggression.  This goes way back to the primitive tribes whose ferocity was legend.  Even the mighty Roman Empire drew a line at the Rhine and the Danube and, by and large, refused to cross over into what they considered to be an ungovernable hell-hole - the Afghanistan of their day!  The best explanation for this trait lies in geo-politics rather than genetics.  The plains of North Germany are flat and possess very little in the way of natural defensive barriers.  Consequently, they early tribes learned the advantage of 'getting your retaliation in first'!  It would be simplistic (the sort of thing you expect here at D&N!) to suggest that this idea of attack being the best form of defence was always and forever an automatic response from the North Germans, however, there is a considerable historical record covering their development from tribes into a nation state (Prussia) to support the notion that they attacked aggressively more often than defended placidly.  Von Scharnhorst in the early 19th century expressed it exactly, “Prussia should never conduct a defensive war, her geographical position and her lack of natural and artificial means of defence do not allow that option.”  Of course, their behaviour might be induced by genetics but my bet is on geography!

However, even geography is not the final arbiter because over the lat 300 years our sense of geography has been altered radically and those changes in perception have speeded up dramatically in the past 50 years with satellite observation, intercontinental air services and all the paraphenalia of this modern age.  Today, we are all looking at ourselves in a totally different geographical context from that of our predecessors of even just 4 or 5 generations ago.  What happens in Iran really does matter to us here in Britain with an immediacy not felt before!  So as circumstances alter so too will behaviour, or at least, it ought to because failure to change usually results in destruction.

Returning (at long last) to the sorts of differences that obviously fascinated Ms.Chiao and her colleagues, I would offer up a different explanation.  I will call it, only slightly joking, the Jesus gene!  The pathetic little runts who constitute what they like to call 'the revolutionary class' of today and who defiled the grounds of St. Paul's cathedral in London recently, seem to have forgotten that Jesus Christ, whoever and whatever he might have been in the spiritual sense, was far and away the greatest revolutionary in history.  I am still amazed that in a mere 300 years his teachings had toppled the ancient religions from their primacy to the point where the Roman emperor himself converted.  I would suggest that not the least of his revolutionary teachings was that all men, from kings to commoners, were equal before the eyes of God.  Suddenly, kings were no longer to be worshiped, only God.  It was only necessary to 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's', the remainder is God's.  The knights and barons at Runnymede took the revolution a step further by ensuring that henceforth the laws of the land governed kings as well as subjects - and that reallywas revolutionary.

The Chinese (to use one example) did not have the benefit of Christianity until the late 19th century.  Until  then all power rested with whatever emperor or war-lord ruled.  There was no private space for Chinese individuals as there was for practicing Christians in Europe and without that there was no chance of change.  Today in China, I would suggest, there is a new factor which will definitely alter things forever and that is private wealth based on capitalism.  Today, the Chinese have their 'private place', it is their homes which they have bought and paid for.  There is nothing like private property as a baulk against over-mighty government.  Hence, changes will occur in Chinese behaviour and I don't suppose they will be that different from western Europe.

 

They seek 'em here, they seek 'em there . . .

. . . they seek those damn neutrinos everywhere! 

Do you remember those pesky little neutrinos who had the infernal cheek to, as it were, stick two fingers up to 'our Albert' and go ever so slightly faster than the speed of light?  Well, you can say what you like about the 'swots' but they do have an excellent sense of humour, even if it is somewhat unintentional.  The particular 'swots' concerned spend all their time buried under a Swiss mountain chasing neutrinos - I know, I know, what a way to spend a life! - and when the little critters went faster than light it caused an emotional breakdown amongst the team.  First, there was elation that they had, in the proper Popperian manner, falsified a theory; quickly followed by trembling anticipation of the bucket-loads of offal likely to be deposited on their heads when it was found that the Swiss cuckoo clock they used for timing was one 'koo slower than it should be and therefore gave a false reading!

Consequently, a suitably Swiss-like announcement of total neutrality was issued merely reporting 'the facts, Ma'am, nothing but the facts' and promising that rigorous checks would be made on the cuckoo clock and all the other equipment.  The result, announced a few days ago and reported by Reuters, was so deliciously quantum physics-like as to be hilarious and indeed some people swear they heard the ghostly laughter of that great prankster and humourist (as well as Nobel Prize winner) Richard Feynman.  You see:

The scientists at the Gran Sasso laboratory said tests on the equipment used in their experiment had led to two question marks over its sensational results, because of problems with possibly faulty cabling and separately with a timing mechanism.

The first "could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos" while the second could have resulted in "an overestimate," said the statement by the Italian laboratory's OPERA group of neutrino specialists, relayed by the CERN particle physics research centre in Geneva.

The latest turn in the story, which set the scientific world in uproar when it first broke last September, left the basic question - did they or didn't they? - unanswered, with more tests set for the coming weeks and months.

My apologies to Reuters but they are wrong.  The basic question has been answered, and indeed, it has been answered in perfect conformity with what I understand to be the very essense of quantum theory, that is, the naughty neutrinos went faster than light and slower than light - simultaneously!  See?  It's simple, really!

And if that convinces you that I'm as daft a brush let me quote Feynman:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

As for 'our Albert', in anticipation he recorded his response years ago:

 

I suggest that we abort Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva with immediate effect!

I am obliged to 'SoD' (Son of Duff) for sending me the link to this Telegraph story which reports that the two brain-damaged (that's my description not theirs) mouth-breathers in my title call themselves 'medical ethicists'.  Before I contemplate an action under the Trades Descriptions Act, I had better tell you what this pair of latter-day moralists have to say.  In essence, they ask, why should babies who have actually been born be disqualified from abortion?  Being a man of generous, not to say, kindly disposition my first thought was that they were using an argument which philosophers describe as reductio ad absurdum. 

In the never-ending dispute over abortion it is an extreme example of an argument I have used myself in the past which goes something like this: at what point, exactly and precisely, does a bundle of self-reproducing cells change from being inhuman to being human?  I ask because, of course, that would decide whether an action to kill the cells was a moral abortion or a murder.  I have yet to hear from anyone, expert or not, who can tell me the precise point at which the change occurs.  Given that uncertainty, I have always maintained that abortion (except in a very small number of specific situations) should not be permitted.

So, in my innocence, I assumed that these two 'medical ethicists' were making my point (in extreme form) that unless you can point to some measurable factor upon which we can all agree that it demonstrates humanity, then the mere fact that a foetus has been expelled from a womb does not necessarily make it human.  Silly naive chap that I am, of course, this pair meant nothing of the sort.  They were being absolutely serious and published their views in a comic calling itself The Journal of Medical Ethics:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

There you go, just drop it on its head, that should do it!

"Oh, brave, new world".  Someone pass me a sick-bag.

 

"Joy shall be in heaven . . .

. . . over one sinner that repenteth" and all that sort of thing.  Well, I know the quote is not a precise fit for the event but it was the one that leapt to mind when I heard the news.  According to The Telegraph a few days ago, 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins engaged in a long debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the course of which he admitted that he was not entirely, absolutely, completely, convinced that there was no God:

There was surprise when Prof Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator.

Prof Dawkins said that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of his beliefs, referencing the seven point scale of belief that he sets out in his book The God Delusion.

The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did.

It was not reported at the time but I have it on good authority that Canterbury's beard shot out horizontal to the floor, and that several members of the Humanist Society required first aid!  When challenged as to why, therefore, he did not call himself an agnostic, he replied that he did.  At this point, I am led to believe, the scene resembled a Bateman cartoon with devout atheists rocking back on their heels with eyeballs threatening to burst from their sockets!

You see, that's one the very few advantages of living long - you get to see sundry chumps change their minds.  Even if, in this case, it is only 0.1 of his mind!

 

A real heavy-weight match: Keynes vs. Hayek

 Sorry, sorry, but my e-pal Hank sent me this link in 'Comments' and because I thought it was very witty and appropriate, I applied my usual high-tech skills, that is, clicking on every single button until something happens (did I ever tell you I served as a weapons officer on a nuclear sub?) in order to add it on at the bottom of my original post.  Instead it has appeared at the top.  Never mind, it's great fun, in fact, much better than my waffle!  Thanks, Hank.

 

After the 'hand-bags-at-dawn' nonsense indulged in by two obviously brain-damaged boxers yesterday, I thought you might be interested in a real heavy-weight match.  I am grateful to Brian Doherty of Reason.com for his review of a book by British journalist, Nicholas Wapshott: Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.  In it, the author attempts to score the 'contest' that took place between them over several rounds during the middle of the last century.  Both were hugely influential but, from my less than expert eye, it seems obvious that Keynes was far and away the winner in terms of whose philosophy was applied the most by the most governments of the world.

I half-considered buying the book but Mr. Doherty is less than enthusiastic.  He had assumed that the author would have considered whose economic theories would work best in our current and parlous economic condition but apparently he does not. 

Wapshott does not ignore the present in favor of the distant past, although the bulk of the book’s narrative is set in the 1930s. But he seems to think his subjects’ contemporary relevance is best reduced to the big-picture conflict between government intervention (Keynes) and free markets (Hayek). Wapshott focuses on the disagreements the two had over political philosophy and practice rather than the technical specifics of their economics. Those political disagreements are important, but they arose from crucial differences in economic theory. 

For example, Keynes believed that intelligent, well-meaning planners manipulating economic aggregates such as demand and employment can bring about a happy end to business cycles. Hayek, by contrast, insisted that individual decisions and imbalances between specific prices and demand, or interest rates and specific plans for long-term productive projects, are where the economic action is. 

I cannot pretend to be an expert on either of the two distinguished subjects of this book although I am definitely more grounded in Hayek, judging by the number of his books on my shelves; but on the other hand, with the exception of a dozen or so years, I have lived most of my life under Keynesian regimes of one sort or another.

It strikes me that in any competition for the attention of government ministers, Keynes was bound to be a winner because his theories provided both employment and power to ministers!  Hayek's philosophy, on the other hand, was quite specific in wanting to reduce the power of politicians and hand it back to people - dread thought!  (Well, 'dread thought' if you are a politician!)

Were I to be banished to that mythical desert island with my eight records and just one book beyond the collected works of Shakespeare, I think Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty would be my choice.  It's ages since I read it but I have just taken it down from the bookcase and it fell open to a page with one paragraph that begins thus:

Much confusion of this issue is due to a tendency (particularly strong in the Continental tradition, but with the spreading of socialist ideas growing rapidly also in the Anglo-Saxon world) to identify 'state' and 'society'.  The state, the organization of the people under a single government, although an indispensible condition for the development of an advanced society, is yet very far from being identical with society, or rather with the multiplicity of grown and self-generating structures of men who have any freedom that alone deserves the name of society.  In a free society the state is one of many organisations - the one  which is required to provide  an effective external framework within which  self-generating orders  can form, but an organisation which is confined to the government  apparatus and which does not determine the activities of free individuals. 

Yeeeees, well, you can see why the politicians and their bureaucrats sniffed at Hayek's propositions!  Also, you can appreciate even more the intellectual courage of the one and only British prime minister who did her best to follow Hayek's philosophy.

 

So what would you - yes, YOU - do in the circumstances?

Damn!  That book (see previous post) is forcing me to think.  What would you do if your country was captured, so to speak, by a criminal magalomaniac who had wooed the majority of your fellow countrymen to his support and won a free and fair election?  Bear in mind that his true criminality did not begin to show itself until after he had won the election.  It is also important that you imagine such a thing happening now - today - and that therefore you have no idea what the future holds or where this man will lead you and your country? 

What would you do?

He might threaten all sorts of extreme actions but, hey, who believes anything a politician on the make says?  And anyway, your country is at this very moment a complete economic disaster brought about, you believe (not without reason), by the current crop of useless politicians who have allowed themselves to be bullied by foreign governments.

What would you do?

You have a good job in government and this allows you to see the damage your country and your countrymen are suffering.  You have a family including young children who are depending on you as you, in turn, depend on a steady job and income.  All your friends and aquaintances are extolling the breath of fresh political air your new leader, despite his somewhat florid style of speech, is promising to breath into your nation.

What would you do?

The future for your country looks bleak but as time goes on under the new man's leadership things definitely look better and prospects for the future are improving almost month by month.  True, his government has pulled one or two strokes which are not, strictly-speaking, absolutely proper in an old-fashioned sense but the indubitable fact is that the shambles of previous governments have been swept away and things are really beginning to work again.

What would you do?

A few years later the country has been transformed.  It is now a prosperous and efficient economy with the population hard at work and earning good money.  Your armed forces have been reconstructed and are now fit for purpose.  Your nation is once again a power in global politics whose views are eagerly sought by others on various international matters.  True, there have been some unfortunate internal policy mistakes made by the government which have gone against your sense of natural justice, but there is no doubt that the country has prospered, as indeed have you and your family.

What would you do?

Now your country is being threatened.  All the media are full of the dangers surrounding your nation.  Your leader, who has worked such enormous miracles, constantly warns you  that neighbouring powers are determined to set your beloved homeland back to where it was, a second-rate, economic basket-case.  All your new-found prosperity might be taken away.  From the record of his achievements, your leader is obviously a shrewd, if ruthless, operator who knows and understands the world.  Do you know any better?  Can you see into the future? Could you commit treason?

What would you do?

Well, in somewhat simplified terms I have made the point, I think.  That was very much the dilemma facing the likes of Gen. von Manstein and millions of other Germans during the 1930s.  Some, a very rare few, did see the reality and the likely outcome and took steps.  Alas, for some of them the steps were towards an even worse outcome, and here I refer to the very brave but foolish Germans who joined the 'Red Orchestra' spy network which fed tremendously useful intelligence to the Russians - and which Stalin ignored!

So, what would you do?

 

"Measure for Measure": random thoughts

Since my recall to the stage for just one last performance (do stop cheering!) I have been pondering on the mysteries of Measure for Meaasure.  It is known in 'the Shakespeare trade' as 'a problem play' and for several good reasons, not the least because there are not too many comedies which feature an attempted rape!  Rather than bore on at too much length in one post I will jot down my random thoughts as and when they occur.

One of the main problems is the central character, the Duke of Vienna.  In my talks on the subject I refer to him as someone who today we would call one of 'the Great and the Good', or 'a total plonker', depending on your viewpoint.  It is always immensely difficult to pin down the real William Shakespeare because part of his genius lies in his ability to speak to us through the mouths of his characters and they, of course, express their thoughts, not necessarily, his.  However, there is one theme that runs though all of of his p0litical plays and that is his utterly bourgois insistence that rulers should rule, that those set in power above the hoi polloi must take on their responsibilities, that above and beyond all else, the rule of law must be imposed and defended - or chaos will ensue.  Here, from Troilus and Cressida are some extracts from the famous speech by that arch-conservative, Ulysses, which begins with an implied criticism of the Greek king's limp rule which has allowed faction and dispute to erupt:

The specialty of rule hath been neglected:
And, look, how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.

Then, warming to his theme, he describes in vivid poetry what happens when dissension rules:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure!

The city state of Vienna under the lax rule of its royal duke has fallen into almost total chaos, liberty has turned to licence and the entire city is a stewpot of brothels, gambling dens and bars.  Drunkeness and licentiousness run rife.  (Remind you of anywhere, my Brit friends?)  However, the Duke, for reasons never convincinglyy explained, appoints a lawyer, Lord Angelo, to the role of governor with full powers whilst he, the Duke, goes abroad on some spurious diplomatic mission.  (In fact he stays, disguised as a friar, to watch what happens.)

Now the problem lies in the nature of the Duke.  Some directors play him as youthful and thus without experience, although that does not quite chime with the text.  He cannot be played as unschooled because, by his own admission, he has spent most of his life locked in his study with his nose in books which is part of the reason why his state, for which he is responsible, is such a quagmire of vice.  A more serious analysis, and in my opinion a very shrewd and subtle one, has it that Shakespeare, in his usual sly, subversive manner was suggesting that the Duke stands for God!  That this bumbling, well-meaning plonker is a symbol for the Creator of the universe who seems to have stepped back from His responsibilites and just left the people He created get on with it as best - or worst - as they can.  This, obviously, was a highly dangerous proposition in the religious age in which Shakespeare lived.  But there again, there is no doubt, as numerous other examples demonstrate, that Shakespeare was possessed of an exceedingly subtle, sophisticated mind that allowed him to tip-toe through such minefields unscathed - although Richard II, another highly political play on the subject of a weak king, nearly caught him out.

However, I forgive the silly old Duke everything because he delivers this little passage of true political wisdom as he ponders on how Lord Angelo will cope with his new duties:

                                                   hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be.

 Or, as I tusually put it, many a time and oft', you never really know about these damned politicians until they are in office! 

 

Norman Geras on the oddity, not the banality, of evil

I haven't mentioned Norman Geras for some time.  It's partly my fault and partly his!  Mine because I am idle and his because he does not allow comments, and one of the things I like most about blogs and blogging are the conversations that can ensue.  Anyway, I 'popped in' today and was immediately taken by one of his posts.  Incidentally, for those unaquainted with Norman Geras he is a man possessed of Marxist leanings but any self-respecting Marxist tyranny - and when are they anything but - would have him shot on the spot!  Apart from that he is also a cricket nut, too!

Anyway, yesterday he was quoting an article by Howard Jacobsen in The Indepedent which posed an intriguing question put to him by a survivor of Buchenwald:

"In the mornings," he said, "in Buchenwald, when the guards lined us up to count us, to see how many had survived the night, and we stood there in the cold in just our shirts and bare feet, an orchestra played, a Jewish orchestra playing classical music. It had no effect on me. I was too numb to feel anything. Now, before I am able to sleep, I have to listen to classical music. No, it doesn't bring back memories of the music the orchestra played then. I listen to classical music now because it helps me to forget. They are not connected. But this is my question – why did the Germans order that music to be played?" [My emphasis]

Why, indeed?!  Was it, perhaps, an example of what we Brits call 'a Yerman yoke' to match the one over the entrance saying "Arbeit Macht Frei"?  One should never underestimate the German capacity for absurdist humour!  It cannot have been for the enjoyment of the Germans, after all, most of the guards would have preferred some 'oom-pah-pah' Berliner songs rather than Beethoven.  Nor, as the survivor testifies above, could anyone have imagined that it would affect the prisoners since it was obvious that they spent every waking hour wondering if they would ever experience the next waking hour!

So perhaps it was just an exquisite but meaningless act of extra cruelty.  Norman suggests strongly that no reason is needed because it simply derives from the innate cruelty which lies in human nature:

There is no limit to the inventiveness of the human capacity for cruelty, and in that sense evil is bottomless. This doesn't mean either that everyone will do evil or that humans are more evil than good. It only means that people's creative talents are boundless and when they apply themselves to cruelty no moral or other barrier will restrict them from horrors or from ghastly ingenuities.

From that, certain other dangers arise which are always and forever with us:

It is also why so many well-meaning sociologies and psychologies of extreme human wrong-doing miss a certain mark. Endeavouring to find preceding causes influencing individuals to behave badly - something one can always do because no human action comes out of a causal vacuum - they have a tendency then to downplay the gravity of the evil committed, as if it proceeded by an unbroken chain from its putative causes. But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always 'exceed' their causes, real or supposed. As depressing as it is to have to acknowledge this, they reflect those human sources of all that is also admirable about our species - the freedom to choose and the fertility of the human imagination.

Spot on!  Good man that Norman Geras, all we have to do is knock that Marxism out of him - ve haf vays, you know!

 

All the news that's fit to print!

The principal object of [this blog] is to convey intelligence.  [Look, I do the jokes round here!]  It is proposed that in [Duff & Nonsense] to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week.  In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or a transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad, that has taken place within the seven days preceding the termination of our labours; which, we wish it to be remarked, close on Saturday on midnight.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The Russians are advancing slowly in their invasion of Bulgaria: the army has crossed the Danube at several points, and thrown a bridge over the river.  The fort of Isakza has yielded and the town is burnt; but the more important fortress of Brailow, or Ibrail still resists; at least, there is no certainty that it has fallen.  The Emperor Nicholas has pitched his camp at Babadagh, a town of Bulgaria, lying between twenty and thirty miles from the south bank of the Danube.  Count Wittgenstein has issued a proclamation to the Bulgarians . . . "I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves" . . .  hang on, hang on, that's not right - stop the presses - that's another Wittgenstein, for God's sake!

Oh dear, I knew this would end in disaster so I had better explain.  In the course of the afore-mentioned (see below) 'tidy-up-your-garret-or-else' exercise insisted upon by the 'Memsahib' in which I have been engaged for what seems like days already, I came across a facsimile of the very first edition of The Spectator dated Saturday July 5th 1828, and all the above, er, with a few slight alterations, was their opening column which I thought might add a touch of much-needed class to this blog.  But then Wittgenstein, or his great grandad, had to stick his nose in and confuse me.  Typical!  Bloody philosophers!

 

Ne dites pas, "Non, ce n'est jamais arrivé".

Not bad my French considering that I had to take two goes to pass my 'O'-level.  Oh, alright, yes, I did have just a little help from mon ami, 'M. Google Translate'.  Anyway, the point of this (fairly useless) post is to ponder on the decision by the French Senate to ban the denial of genocide in general, and in particular, the genocide allegedly inflicted on the Armenians by the Turks in 1915.  I use the word "allegedly" for the simple reason that I have no idea whether or not the Turks are (or were) guilty of what is a crime under international law.  Commonsense (never a totally reliable indicator, particularly mine) indicates that a great number of Armenians perished at the hands of the Turks but whether it amounts to 'genocide' is quite beyond my pay grade, and indeed, my knowledge, to decide.  It sounds to me like the sort of squabble likely to keep lawyers busy for years, and international lawyers for decades, if not lifetimes!

So, setting aside guilt or innocence (and thus risking a hefty fine and/or imprisonment were I to say this in France), I would like to dwell on the sort of people and their mind-set that allows them to insist that other people say or unsay things.  It is a peculiarity mostly confined to those of a political persuasion and not necessarily full-time politicans only, but also the myrid bottom-feeders who swim round the arsehole of parliamentarians and nibble away at them until they take on board the message of the day.  Nor, of course, is it confined to our French neighbours.  I am still waiting in trembling fear for a knock on my door at 3.00 am because I have twice referred to Ms. Diane Abbot MP as a "fat, black clown" - and when it comes, I don't think it will be at the behest of the United Union of Clowns who are so useless that they can never carry a pail of water ten feet!

What these 'denialist deniers' fail to understand is that simply banning people from saying what they think or believe does not somehow make the beliefs go away.  In fact, I suspect that it has just the opposite effect of making the gagged believe all the more strongly that they are onto 'The Truth'.  It must be true, they say to themselves, quietly, under their breath, because otherwise why would the authorities make such an effort to silence them?  And because they have been silenced there is now no opportunity to bring to their attention certain established facts which might change their minds.  I mean, personally, I am more than willing to listen to arguments attempting to convince me that Ms. Abbot is, in fact, not fat, not black and not a clown!

 

'KILL A KID - OR - 2 FOR THE PRICE OF 1!'

Not a very nice title, is it?  Not exactly tasteful or discreet.  Not something you would want to flash in front of your vicar or your grandmother.  But I'm just trying to get you all used to the idea now 'They' - yes, those mysterious 'They' who decide things without asking us - have allowed abortion factories to advertise their killing skills on our TVs.  So warn Granny, or your young teen-age daughter, as she watches her favourite chat show that when these ads come on, in between the double-glazing offers and the cut-price sofas, she will be able to compare and contrast the various offers, and decide on exactly how skilfull the 'providers' are at gripping, twisting, pulling and tugging the various bits of a baby out of a woman's womb.

Of course, they won't put it like that, oh dear me, no.  There will probably be some soft music, a long view over the English countryside and one of those actresses speaking very slowly with a truly rich, melodious voice assuring you of absolute privacy, comfort and tender loving care as 'you kill your baby adjust your life-style priorities', or something like that.

In fact, having thought about it, there is another reason not to let Granny see any of those ads because it might occur to her that now that killing babies is no longer frowned upon, it can only be a matter of time before there will be companies advertising their skills at 'offing the elderly'!

 

Because I'm feeling idle - right?!

Yes, it's one of those somnolent days where energy is waning fast and I feel the inexorable draw of my armchair acting like gravity but tinged with the anticipation, although not entirely unalloyed anticipation,  of reading further chapters in one of the most jaw-dropping history books I have ever read - more of which later!  In the meantime, and without even a blush of shame, I hereby present you with a stolen extract from Adam Smith's The Theory Of Moral Sentiments which Russ Roberts of the excellent Cafe Hayek re-published today.  I will even nick his title which, as you would expect from Cafe Hayek, is entirely appropriate:

Adam Smith on the the self-deception of politicians

Amidst the turbulence and disorder of faction, a certain spirit of system is apt to mix itself with that public spirit which is founded upon the love of humanity, upon a real fellow-feeling with the inconveniencies and distresses to which some of our fellow-citizens may be exposed. This spirit of system commonly takes the direction of that more gentle public spirit; always animates it, and often inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism. The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation which, they pretend, will not only remove the inconveniencies and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniencies and distresses. They often propose, upon this account, to new-model the constitution, and to alter, in some of its most essential parts, that system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have enjoyed, perhaps, peace, security, and even glory, during the course of several centuries together. The great body of the party are commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it. Those leaders themselves, though they originally may have meant nothing but their own aggrandisement, become many of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as eager for this great reformation as the weakest and foolishest of their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet they dare not always disappoint the expectation of their followers; but are often obliged, though contrary to their principle and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common delusion. The violence of the party, refusing all palliatives, all temperaments, all reasonable accommodations, by requiring too much frequently obtains nothing; and those inconveniencies and distresses which, with a little moderation, might in a great measure have been removed and relieved, are left altogether without the hope of a remedy.

Mr. Roberts wanted one passage emphasised which I have done and hope, thereby, to escape a charge of literary larceny.  It is an irony of considerable bitterness that Scotland could produce such a superb philosopher of economic theory and then, over the centuries, sink into such a socialist slough of despond as exists there today.

 

The 'Kraut' takes a sideways look at Ron Paul

I once went down with a bad dose of libertarianism but happily I recovered.  I put it down to my youth, I think I was in my 40s then!  It is an enticing philosophy, even more so when all around you are the results of meddling, muddling governments.  However, it is, I suggest, a bit like Christianity, the main tenets and thrust of the idea are good but one simply couldn't live with the devils in the detail.  But even so, virtually all governments everywhere are long overdue a hefty dose of libertarianism, not least in the USA where the Federal Government is growing like Topsy.

Hence, the 'Kraut', or Charles Krauthammer as he is known in The WaPo, casts a benign smile on Ron Paul's balding, 76-year-old pate and applauds him (one-handed, I sense) for gaining, via the current GOP nomination process, an ever-increasing audience of stunned Americans who had never heard anyone in their entire lives on prime-time TV:

calling for the abolition of the Fed, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and the CIA; American withdrawal from everywhere; acquiescence to the Iranian bomb — and perhaps even Paul’s opposition to a border fence lest it be used to keep Americans in.

Millions of Americans are hearing such subversive thoughts for the first time.  It will not do Ron Paul any good in his bid for the presidential nomination, let alone for the presidency, itself, but it may, according to the 'Kraut', achieve two things.  First, it may put Ron Paul in a key and influential position come the Republican convention:

Paul won’t quit before the Republican convention in Tampa. He probably will not do well in South Carolina or Florida, but with volunteers even in the more neglected caucus states, he will be relentlessly collecting delegates until Tampa. His goal is to have the second-most delegates, a position of leverage from which to influence the platform and demand a prime-time speaking slot — before deigning to support the nominee at the end. The early days of the convention, otherwise devoid of drama, could very well be all about Paul.

The second aim will be to blaze a trail for his son, Rand Paul, aged only 49 and already a Senator, who shares many of his father's ideals but (apparently) without following Pop to the outer fringes of loonyville!  The 'Kraut' summs it up, thus:

Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy [my emphasis]. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.

Paul is 76. He knows he’ll never enter the promised land. But he’s clearing the path for son Rand, his better placed (Senate vs. House), more moderate, more articulate successor.

And it matters not whether you find amusement in libertarians practicing dynastic succession. What Paul has already wrought is a signal achievement, the biggest story yet of this presidential campaign.

Hmmmn!  I wonder.  A wily, cunning political operator told us many years ago that 'a week is a long time in politics'.  Young Paul will have to wait at least five years, assuming Obama wins, before he can reap the harvest sown by his dad.

 

What a shame this man can't run for the Presidency

Right, here's a little test for you.  Who pointed out these, and other, truths which have been paraphrased thus:

Gun-control laws began to be passed during times when crime was declining, rather than climbing.

Crime began climbing after gun-control laws were passed.

Places with very strict gun-control laws typically have more crime than do places without them—a fact that holds true between countries and between regions of the United States.

There is little or no relationship between the rigorousness of gun-control laws and criminals’ access to guns.

Many countries have lots of guns but relatively few murders, while others have few guns but relatively many murders.

Swimming pools kill many more people in accidents than guns do.

Well, you can almost feel the liberal nannies wincing, but he went further and into much more dangerous territory when he asked, again paraphrased:

Why is it that these programs that we are told will help blacks in fact hurt them? And what should be done about that?

Even worse he pointed to actual examples:

He points to the case of Dr. Patrick Chavis, a celebrated case study of affirmative action, and notes: “[Chavis was] publicly praised by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights—just two weeks before his license was suspended, after his patients died under conditions that brought the matter to the attention of the Medical Board of California. An administrative law judge referred to Chavis’s ‘inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.’ A year later, after a fuller investigation, his license was revoked.”

Not that his enquiring mind is limited to investigating American domestic idiocies.  He has given considerable thought to the travails of Africa:

Consider his fascinating disquisition on the geography and natural environment of Africa, in which he argues that such factors as the lack of navigable interior waterways, the steepness of its rivers, the lack of pack animals due to insect-born disease, the lack of natural ports and harbors on the continent’s smooth coastline, other interior barriers to travel, the resulting isolation of group from group, and linguistic fragmentation (Africa, he points out, has 10 percent of the world’s people and a third of its languages) explain much of the continent’s socioeconomic backwardness. Such brilliant observational analysis does not fit neatly into orthodox conservative or orthodox liberal explanations of development. It is fact-intensive and based upon observable, empirical realities ...

Now, were any of the Republican hopefuls, currently bashing each other to pieces so that the survivor will be easy meat for the Dem-controlled media to finish off, to say these things we would hear the howls of outrage 'over here'.  But it is a little tricky for the massed regiments of the politically-correct brigades to attack this man.  For a start, he is black which helps but does not make you fireproof as Herbert Cain has recently discovered.  Also, he has just about the most 'authentic' black background a noodle-headed liberal would swoon over - he was born poor in the south and remained poor in Harlem where he was eventually raised.  He was forced to drop out of school at 17 and was quickly called up to the Marines during the Korean war.  During his twenties he was a Marxist until his inner compulsion to follow facts and reason where-ever they led turned him into a conservative, free-market libertarian.

This man is Thomas Sowell whom I first came across and admired back in the '80s when I used to subscribe to The American Spectator.  Intermittantly, I have followed his career as he has steadily decimated what he calls "the vision of the anointed", that is, all the pontifical streams of un-consciousness poured forth by the liberal 'Great and the Good'.  He would be the first to admit that he is not necessarily always one hundred percent right about everything, but you would need to get up very early in the morning to prove him wrong.  What a pity his talents are denied in the field of politics.

I am grateful to an article in Commentary by Kevin D. Williamson from which I have quoted above.

 

Is there anybody there? asks 'the Kraut'

But first, a terrific poem which came back to me through the ages from my long-lost school days provoked by the recent words of 'the Kraut':

'IS there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,	5
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill	10
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight	15
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.	20
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even	25
Louder, and lifted his head:—
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake	30
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,	35
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

I love that poem - how could I have forgotten it for so long? Anyway, on to 'the Kraut' who had some fascinating ruminations in The WaPo last week.  He asks one of those simple but deadly questions, "Are we alone in the universe?"  He was prompted to this by the, probably undue, excitement in cosmological circles (or should that be 'ellipses?) at the discovery of some planet-like objects circling suns in much the same way as our tired, battered, old planet does.  Instantly this raises the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.  "Is there anybody there?" we mutter, and answer comes there none!

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

The silence, as they say, is deafening!  And perplexing.

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

'The Kraut' quotes something called The Drake Equation (1961) which seeks to enumerate how many advanced civilisations there must be in just our galaxy alone.  Apparently if you add in the information gained from modern satellite sources the number should be very great indeed.  And yet ... and yet ... despite all our signals sent out at the speed of light and our monitoring devices which could pick up the sound of an alien's fart from a zillion miles away - there is nothing, just the vast, endless emptiness of nothing.

Personally, I am not too unhappy because I always reckon that people - or beings, if you like - are nearly always trouble in the end and are therefore best avoided!  But 'the Kraut', being 'the Kraut', has an even gloomier explanation:

Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

He lists the many man-made possibilities available to those madmen who, seeking a salvation in an after-world, would be happy to pull the trigger and bring about 'apocalypse now'.  But then, in a startling and original piece of thinking, he points to the only thing likely to save us - politics!

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Good man, 'the Kraut', he makes you think.

 

The swots begin to realise they are dumb and dumber!

Actually, my title is not only unkind but also a tad misleading if it leaves you with the impression that I am somehow anti-science and scientists.  I am frequently anti-technologists, particularly when they manifest themselves in quasi-scientific speculations like global climate and neo-Darwinism; but I have genuine, almost open-mouthed admiration for real scientists, particularly those grappling with the mysteries on the far horizons of our knowledge.  Some of them, like the late Richard Feynman, are almost heroes in my imagination. 

Even so, regular readers will already know of my firm belief in disbelief, otherwise known as agnosticism, and my shivering delight in rich examples of irony.  Reading a recent article in Harper's Magazine by Alan P. Lightman, I was able to hug myself with delight at receiving a double helping of both!  Lightman, a considerable polymath, himself, reminds us of the incredible achievements of physicists during the 20th century.  I suppose it began in 1900 with Max Planck and his almost accidental discovery of the peculiar behaviour of electrons.  From that moment on it was the scientific equivalent of Renaissance travellers discovering America - a huge undiscovered continent filled with delights, riches and dangers.  In they rushed, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman and many, many more.  At last, was the general feeling, we've almost cracked it, soon, very soon, there will be no more mysteries! 

“Back in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Alan Guth, “the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out.” What physicists had figured out were very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together, the weak force that is responsible for some forms of radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles. And there were prospects for merging the theory known as quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and thus pulling all of them into the fold of what physicists called the Theory of Everything, or the Final Theory.

It just needed one more shove, but unfortunately, it was like shoving on the end of a piece of string.  Indeed, in their efforts to reach this final Theory of Everything they had to use what they called 'string theory', the implications of which are mind-bending.

In essence (and you need to read Lightman's essay to double-check my errors of omission and/or commission), they discovered that for life to exist at all, as it manifestly does on this planet, several critical criteria at the moment of the 'Big Bang' had to be within very tight and specific limits.  Too much, or too little, of this, or of that, and life would not have been able to develop.  And yet it did!  Looking back at this peculiar, one almost might say, contrived, state of affairs at the very beginning of the universe, there is a severe temptation to suggest that God is a sort of master chef adding a pinch of this, or slightly less of that, in order to ensure the flavour of the stew is just right!  In other words, the sheer exactness of conditions at the very instant of the 'Big Bang' might lead a physicist to mutter, sotto voce, if he has his eye on a Nobel prize, the dread words - Intelligent Design!

Recoiling in horror, the swots have been forced into ever more complex hypotheses to explain away this awkward set of circumstances.  One theory currently in vogue in some quarters is the idea of  a 'multiverse', that is, the notion of an almost infinite number of universes all of which are different.  Thus, we can all relax and forget about the amazing set of circs which has allowed life to exist in this universe because given a 'multiverse' of almost infinite proportions it was bound to happen somewhere, sometime.  I have to say that smacks of desperation, to me.  H0wever, I leave it to you to read Mr. Lightman's fascinating article and make up your own minds.  In the meantime, I will, after shifting my buttocks to obtain what comfort I can, remain sitting firmly on this fence.

 

This blog is now on an austerity programme!

With stock markets falling, the euro tottering, the Americans spending faster than they can print, the Management Board of D&N has met and decided that strict austerity measures must be imposed on this blog.  As a first example, you will see in the post below that we have sacked our editor and are now publishing posts from anyone and their uncle, or, in that particular case, their 'aunt'!  As a second measure, I couldn't help noticing that yesterday a visitor to these distinguished columns had clicked on Old Duff's Almanack 2011 which I published last New Year's Eve, and re-reading my wise and omniscient words and bearing in mind the need for savings I have decided to republish it today:

Old Duff's Almanack 2011  2012

Trouble!

More trouble!

Even more trouble!

Double trouble!

Trouble in the rubble!

But in between, an occasional smile, perhaps a giggle or three and even one or two bellows of laughter.

In other words, same old same old.

Well, if it was good enough then - and it was pretty damned accurate, I reckon - then it will be good enough today!

However, if it strikes you as a tad depressing, allow me to repeat the words of that great 'philosopher', Barney Cashman, hero (if that's quite the word) of Neil Simon's Last of the Red Hot Lovers.  Asked by a manic depressive girl friend he is trying unsuccessfully to seduce if there are worse things than death, a frantic and frustrated Barney replies:

"Like suffering and pain?  They're bad, but they're second and third after death.  Death is first [. . .]  I love living.  I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far . . ." 

Yes, a great thinker that Barney Cashman!  Anyway, it's time for me to wish you, all my e-pals who visit me here so frequently, a peaceful and boring New Year.  Yes, boring!  At my age I like 'boring', 'boring' is good, and excitement I can do without, thanks all the same.

 

But will the 'nasties' shrivel under the gaze of the mutitude?

In my previous post I speculated on the rise, or not, of the 'nasties', that is, those glib demagogues capable of leading a mass movement into mischief - or murder - depending!  Of course, I look back and think immediately of Lenin and Hitler.  One interesting facet shared by both of them was that they never led a majority party until they had seized power.  It was only necessary for them to win over a sizeable minority, just big enough to lever open the doors to power.  However, to remind you that it was a very different world back then is to state the 'bleedin' obvious' in capital letters!  Today, there are forces at work which the demagogues of old never had to face.

I have been made all too aware of this by the current campaign for the Republican party presidential nomination.  It has been a classic example of an election campaign in this 21st century.  Under the unblinking eyes of the TV lenses the various candidates have endured a seemingly endless series of debates with each other until they must yearn for the good old days when all they had to do was kiss a few babies and make the same speech 100 times at differnt cities.  I have almost lost count of how many of the presidential hopefuls have led the race in the opinion polls only to falter under the combined attack of the MSM and the internet.  They wriggle like lab rats but there is no escape and bit by bit their flaws are exposed.  It's a rough and ready business but no-one can deny its efficacy.  In fact, post-Obama (especially post-Obama), perhaps it is dawning on more and more people that there are no perfect men - or women - and dreams of a great saviour, dare I say - The One - must be confined to Disney and/or The West Wing!  If indeed that is a lesson that has been learned it is one of great importance indicating, as it would do, that the public, or some of them, are beginning to understand politics.

 All this makes life exceedingly difficult for the evil demagogue who must share with the ordinary 'scurvy politicans' the unrelenting investigation and questioning of every part of their lives with any exposed faults sent round the globe at the speed of light.  However, even if I am right, that still leaves the ground, or at least, the undergrowth, free for the outright terrorist 'nasties' to chance their arm.  Oddly enough I do not fear them in general terms because the sophistication of modern security techniques gives the advantage to the authorities which is why no terrorist organisation has ever succeeded in over-throwing a western government.  There is a possible exception to this comfortable view and that is the possibility that one of these days some group will lay hands on chemical or biological weapons but even in that desperate case it is unlikely that a handfull of fanatics will overthrow a state.

So I leave you with a surprisingly comforting conclusion, albeit, a somewhat depressing one.  I don't think the 'nasties' will take over but that means we shall have to put up with the incompetent, lying liars we have at the moment.  Oh God  . . .

 

How I tried to be a rat but failed because of Conan Doyle!

I am provoked to this post by a hero-worshipping essay in The Paris Review by Michael Dirda on the subject of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).  I, too, loved the man but not for his famous Sherlock Holmes stories which I don't think I have ever read but for just one book, an early one by him, The White Company.

My mother was not a religious woman.  As an illegitimate (and subsequently the mother of yet another - me!) she no doubt felt the scorn and whips of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk and probably for that reason she made no effort to inculcate Christianity into me.  (Although oddly enough, she kicked up when told that I was to be married in a Roman Catholic Church - 'I'll nae set foot in a Papist kirk', she muttered darkly until I spelled out a few home truths!)

So my admittedly rather dodgy morals were self-taught, or to be precise, they arose from my constant reading of Wizard and Hotspur comics in which mostly public school types, with a profound sense of honour, did amazing feats of bravery whilst maintaining at all times a lip stiffer than a rod of iron and accompanied at all times by a strict modesty which would allow of absolutely no boasting!  Then, aged 11, I attended my first 'big school' and the first book given to us for study was Conan Doyle's The White Company.  God, how I loved that book!  I even stole it - see what I mean about my dodgy morals?

However, the adventures of young Alleyne Edricson and his 'boss' Sir Nigel Loring enthralled me.  These were men of action and men of honour.  They had to kill in the English cause, the book is set in the Hundred Years War, but they did so to a strict code.  All idealistic clap-trap, of course, but inserted into the mind of a young boy it introduced notions of right and wrong such that, whilst I have committed many a wrong, I am at least ashamed of it and recognise it for what it is.

If any of you have young children or grand-children you could do them a great service by buying them a copy of this book for Christmas.

 

I demand the right to be offended!

Some further ramblings on the subject of offensive language.  If I knew, personally, a radical Muslim who called me, for example, 'a piece of white filth' I might, momentarily, be somewhat irritated but on consideration I would be glad because at least I would know for sure where we both stand in relation to each other.  I would find that infinitely preferable compared to knowing such a person but never being absolutely sure what he thinks inwardly.  Outright, even brutal, honesty is preferable to a Claudius-like ability to "smile and smile and be a villain".  Also, I want the liberty to be offensive, too - what do you mean, you noticed?! 

Needless to say, like all aspects of human behaviour in a civic society, such liberty must be constrained somewhat but in this case only by the laws of slander and the injunction against not inciting violence on the part of your supporters.  I stress that last phrase because if what you say leads to you receiving a punch in the nose, or a general brawl, then so be it and all parties to the dispute can explain their conduct to the judge on the basis of common disturbance of the peace laws.  However, if you incite your supporters to do violence then that moves the whole thing up into a much more serious level of illegal activity.

Also, I would like to dwell for a moment on the problem of differentiating between general dislike and particular dislike.  To give an example that arises from my previous post, I don't know John Terry personally, only through the sometimes distorting lens of the MSM but what I do 'know' from that I do not like.  So if I was to paraphrase his now infamous remark to a coloured opponent by telling him that, in my opinion, he was 'a footballing cunt', could that be construed as an admission on my part that I believe all footballers were despicable and detestable?  Would it indicate that I was, so to speak, 'football-ist' (which some of my rugby loving friends are!)  Well of course it wouldn't because I 'know' David Beckham in much the same way that I know John Terry, via the MSM, and what I know, faults and all, I like and admire.

When it comes to nations or ethnicities the problem of 'general' versus 'particular' likes or dislikes becomes more sensitive because of the political and/or the social history involved.  For example, many people I know, and even more I don't know, detest America and often express it by saying that they hate Americans.  Of course, they don't really hate each and every American, they are simply expressing a dislike for the political/social entity that is America.  In reverse, I like America which is definitely not the same as saying that I like all Americans!  Even so, there are some people who hate America and Americans and would like to see it and them obliterated and their language, being specific and 'particular', shows the difference between them and those with just a 'generalised' dislike.  Again, it is better for all concerned for them to say what they think and allow us to draw the appropriate conclusions.  In all of the above, of course, you may replace the words 'America' and 'Americans' with 'Blacks', 'Muslims', 'Russians', 'Jews', 'Icelanders', 'Jocks' or 'Martians' or whoever.  The main point is that it is better to hear what people 'think' rather than use the laws of the land to bottle up their thoughts so that none of us are aware of the malignancy growing in secret.

 

'Krugmania': we all suffer with it to a greater or lesser extent

Two fascinating essays over at the Cafe Hayek by Russ Roberts, in order, here and here.  Economic buffs can skip the rest of this paragraph but for the benefit of those who happily avoid economics on the sensible basis that not only is it the "dismal science" but also the incomprehensible science, let me tell you that Paul Krugman is a distinguished economist and Nobel prize winner who writes for the NYT, and that Mr. Roberts is a terrific economics swot at various universities who also writes for the MSM.  I should also add the critical information that Mr. Krugman is a Keynesian who believes that governments hold the key to all macro-economic problems.  (Just to confuse matters, well this is economics, there are those who would maintain that Keynes's views were rather more nuanced than that.)  On the other hand, Mr. Roberts is an 'Austrian' - no, no, not by nationality, he is a follower of the 'Austrian school' of economic philosophy which is exemplified in the works of Friedrich Hayek and which can be (very) roughly summed up as 'almost everything a government does in the economic field is "A Bad Thing"', to use the old Sellars & Yeatman phrase. Thus, you can see that Messrs. Roberts and Krugman approach our current economic woes from directly opposite directions.  Well, it was ever thus in economics!

However, Mr. Roberts's two articles have a very much wider scope than just mere economics.  In them he suggests that the differences between himself and Mr. Krugman are ideological, that is, that they stem not so much from a strictly analytical and scientific basis but from their differing 'worldviews'.  He doesn't say this but I will, economics is like a number of other subjects which pretend to be scientific but are really only what I call 'semi-science'.  In other words, the conclusions you come to depend to a great extent on where you started from.  As Mr. Roberts puts it:

But the key point I was trying to make when invoking ideology, is that Krugman and I and most economists have a worldview. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not an indictment or a criticism. It’s simply true. That worldview may be based on casual observation, various principles that make sense to us about how the world works, facts of various kinds, and more statistically sophisticated forms of evidence.

That, I believe, is absolutely spot on and can be applied to any number of other 'semi-sciences' such as global warming, Darwinism and so forth.  Mr. Roberts goes on:

We come to these views in various ways. They are part of our experience, our upbringing, our education, our thinking, and our observations of the world around us. They are inevitably philosophical and ideological at least in part and often in whole. We use these worldviews to filter and understand new information and process that information accordingly. That is not the way most economists or social scientists or even plain scientists think of themselves. They think of themselves as truth-seekers. (Journalists, by the way, have a very similar disconnect between how they view themselves and how I suspect they actually behave.) Truth-seekers look at the facts, allegedly uninfluenced by prior biases, philosophies, theories, and ideologies.

My emphasis above, and examples of what Roberts says can be seen on any of the global warming sites.  He continues:

My claim is that this image of ourselves as pure truth-seekers is a fantasy. Facts don’t speak for themselves. We have to have some kind of worldview to interpret the facts, to filter them, to process them, to organize them. We all suffer from confirmation bias. Facts that challenge our worldview tend to be ignored, minimized, or dismissed as irrelevant.

Ouch!  That certainly applies to me.  It also, I think, applies outside of 'semi-science' even, or especially, into the world of politics.  I have remarked before, in considering the various candidates for the Republican nomination, that so-called intellectual knowledge, or experience in high government office, is not the criteria by which they should be judged.  It is their underlying 'worldview' which is critical, all else flows from that.  We have, according to the (dim) lights of MSM commentary a university-educated intellectual in the White House today and bar a small minority he is generally reckoned to be an outstanding failure as a president.  The reason, in my opinion, is obvious, his entire 'worldview' is skewed in the wrong direction, and therefore, as sure as night follows day, his actions will prove to be disasterous.  It is also why I instinctively draw towards the likes of Sarah Palin and Herman Cain, because their 'worldview' is, in my opinion, clear-eyed and, on the whole, accurate and on that fairly firm base of relative reality they can be trusted to operate and re-act to 'unknown unknowns' in a sensible manner.  Mitt Romney (and also I suspect Rick Perry), of course, has no 'worldview' beyond getting his arse into the Oval Office armchair.  That is not to disqualify him from the job but one cannot do other than harbour considerable doubts.

I urge you all to read Mr. Roberts's two articles and then apply them to a wider 'worldview'!

 

Contrarian or crank?

Looking at his photo you would find it hard to choose, he could be either.  However, given that he takes to wearing a red fedora you might think he was a comedian!

Raymond Tallis by Felix Clay, Eyevine

Actually, I think 'contrarian' is his best description given that he is a former clinical neuroscientist by the name of Raymond Tallis and that he spends most of his time at war with his fellow neuroscientists.  I am obliged to The Chronicle of Higher Education - and, no, don't ask what an ignoramus like me is doing in such high-falutin' company - for an interesting article on the man by Mr. Marc Parry in which he suggests that perhaps a better job description for Dr. Tallis is 'dustman' on the grounds that he describes most of the theories put forward by his fellow specialists as "neuro trash" which he is all too eager to deposit on the nearest dump!

Happily, on this occasion, given that I know nothing of the subject I do not have to offer an opinion (wadd'ya mean that never stopped me before?!) I can simply carry their coats whilst they set to.  On the one side we have, according to Mr. Parry, those who support:

[...] a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love.

In the other corner we have the redoubtable, and probably very irritating, Dr. Tallis, who:

In 2006, Tallis gave up hospital-ward rounds for a full-time writing life that unfolds in morning and afternoon rounds of two local pubs. In these "offices," the atheist-humanist nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals "acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces." He takes aim at their exaggerated claims in a new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (McGill-Queen's University Press).

I like his working routine, it reminds me of the old three-martini lunches so beloved and missed of yesteryear.  I think I would pay good money to attend one of his lectures:

In a cheerful voice, turned out in a magenta tie and a blue boating blazer with broad white stripes, Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.

As I confessed above, I have no knowledge of the arcane details of neuroscience but I instinctively side with Dr. Tallis, not, I hasten to add, for religious reasons but simply because I am by nature a 'Bolshie bugger' and I do not care for the notion that anyone tells me what to do - whether it's God or Darwin!

It's a good article well worth reading not least because it makes you wish you knew more.

 

OK, enough of the science, already, my head hurts!

Honestly, Doctor, everywhere I go these days I am pursued by science and it's not fair because I gave all that up when I was sixteen and failed my exams!  But it won't leave me alone; if it isn't neutrinos whizzing past me faster than the speed of light then its news that the universe is expanding at an even faster rate than first thought. It's giving me a headache and on top of that I'm back into all that wave/particle duality stuff, and really, Doctor, I don't care, I mean, I'm not prejudiced, if these, er, thingies want to swing both sides of the street, it's OK with me.  What goes on in the privacy of a scientific laboratory is their business not mine provided they don't frighten the horses!

Alright, I'll calm down and try and explain.  As I indicated a few posts back I have returned to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a superb primer for science dummies attempting (Health Warning: Do Not Try This Alone!) to grapple with the craziness of quantum mechanics.  I have reached the dreaded 'two slit experiment' which, I recall from 30 years ago, blew my mind then and has done so again today.  Being a lifetime party-pooper, I will attempt to summarise it for anyone who has enjoyed an untroubled life so far, after all,why should I suffer on my own?

Back in 1802, some science swat shone a lamp at a wall into which were cut two slits.  He measured the results that appeared on a back wall behind the slitted one.  He found that if he kept one slit shut the result, unsurprisingly, was a well-defined square of light on the 'receiving' wall.  If he opened both slits, the result was a pattern of bright, semi-bright and dark stripes because the waves of light having passed through two slits they then interfered with each other on the far side, either re-inforcing each other, or cancelling each other out, or half and half, depending on their state when they collided.  Again, that's perfectly normal, the swats call it refraction and you can see it operating if you throw two pebbles into a pond and watch the ripples when they meet.

So, that was that, it had been proved without any doubt that energy (light) went about its business in waves and God was in His heaven and all was well with the world - end of story.  But this is science and there is never any end to it!  Nearly a hundred years later, in marched Herr Prof. Planck who, instead of planning WWI, had been interfering with little particles called electrons which surround the central core of an atom.  He found that if you gave them a dose of energy (say, heat) they became very, er, energetic and would glow (with light, that is, not pleasure, do behave yourselves!) but as the heat was removed and they calmed down they would give back the energy they had received in the form of light.  Very decent of them, you might think, but Planck noticed, to his personal irritation, I gather, that when they gave back their light it came in the form of specifically-sized quantities, not in continuous waves!  I assume that Planck then suffered with a headache of his own because now it looked as though light was not a wave after all but a series of quanta, or particles, a bit like a stream of bullets.  They called these light particles - photons.

So the science swats then went back to the double slit experiment.  They checked that if you switched on a light source with first one slit open, then two slits open, the results of the old experiment repeated itself.  However, if you used the latest gadgetry which allowed you to fire photons one at a time something very strange happened.  If you kept one slit shut and fired a photon through the other slit, you could mark the exact place it hit on the photon-sensitive plate at the rear.  You could do this several times and each time the photon would hit exactly the same place.  But then, without altering anything else, if you opened the second slit and pulled the trigger you would know, by comparison with the plates used in the wave defraction experiment, that the photon would hit one of the dark (non-light) areas.  However, when the plate was checked it was found that the photon had, so to speak, altered course and hit somewhere else in a bright area where it was 'allowed' to hit!  The question then arose, and with it my headache, how did the bloody photon 'know' that the second slit was open so that it could alter its trajectory? 

Answers on a postcard, please, to the Royal Society, not me because I'm off to take a paracetamol and have a lie down!  However, I can give you a clue.  Apparently, and it's obvious really (he muttered, giggling, as he played with his yo-yo), light is both a wave and a particle, all at the same time, and which is which depends entirely on how you look at it!  In other words, there is no objective reality, we make 'reality' when and how we look at things.  (Sorry, how's your head  . . . ?)

Now for some good scientific news!  You will remember -  you better or else! - that a few posts back I drew attention to the rather obvious and mundane fact that Al Gore is a lying liar.  He recently took over a TV station for a long dissertation on his fanatical beliefs concerning CO2 and global warming.  In his film there was one particular experiment that was shown in which two jars, each containing thermometers, were heated.  One jar had normal air in it, the other was filled with CO2.  The film then 'showed' the CO2 thermometer racing up like a rocket in comparison to the other.  The incomparable Anthony Watts of Watt's Up With That? put that particular film sequence through a forensic grinder and showed without doubt that huge chunks of it were 'photoshopped', or, faked, as we might call it!  However, Watts has now gone even further and, in the very finest traditions of good science, has attempted to replicate Gore's experiment.  Without, of course, any help from the programme makers he has managed to buy exactly the same kit that was used and, following their assertion that:

You can replicate this effect yourself in a simple lab experiment

that is exactly what he tried to do because, as Al Gore himself said,

The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.

The dismal, from Gore's point of view, result is summed up by Watts: 

Thus, the experiment as designed by Mr. Gore does not show the greenhouse effect as we know it in our atmosphere, it does show how heat transfer works and differences in heat transfer rates with different substances, but nothing else.

Anthony Watts closes his deconstruction of Gore's non-science thus:

Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified [my emphasis] , and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.

The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

"Falsified"!  Key word, that!  Absolutely deadly when used in a scientific context.  As soon as I read it my eyes flickered towards the various volumes of Karl Popper's work on my bookshelf but I dare not re-open any of them lest my headache turns into a migraine!  Please read Watts's piece, and if you have children, let them read it, too, because it is a perfect example of the scientific method in action.

 

Oh death WHAT is your sting-a-ling-a-ling?

Sorry for going AWOL over the last two days.  There were practical reasons ("Events" etc, etc) but rather surprisingly for an Olympic-level bore like me, I actually didn't have much to say and so for once I said nothing!

However, one of the reasons for my absence was in order to attend the funeral of an elderly neighbour who died 'naturally' in her sleep.  Ever since I have been pondering exactly what they mean by dying 'naturally'?  Of course, I understand death caused by a No. 29 bus running over you, or, a throw of the microbiological dice which results first in one cell going malignant and then spreading the malignancy throughout your system until it gives up and you die.  But if you suffer no external or internal trauma, why and how do you die?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that 'natural' death was simply a demonstration of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - well, everything gets blamed on the poor old 2nd Law!  The idea was that the body is a perfect example of a closed system which the 2nd Law demands and that from day one we strive to inject energy into it by means of food and drink.  Unfortunately, however hard we work at that we cannot outpace entropy which gradually increases until  it reaches an equilibrium, at which point there is no more energy in the system and we die.  According to the physics swats, the universe will go the same way!

Mind you, I'm not quite sure how that ties in with the latest galactic observations, reported last week, which show the speed at which the universe is expanding is actually increasing!  Everything is hurtling away from everything else faster and faster.  Where is it getting the energy from, I ask?  Perhaps its on the same stuff as some of those so-called athletes waiting to perform at next year's Olympics.  Anyway, to drop into this post with a dull thud the tritest of trite opinions, the more we learn the more we learn how little we know.  And it's funny how that old American saying, 'what goes around comes around', frequently occurs in science.  Thus, I was struck by a description of electrons circling the central nucleus of an atom.  It is as though the nucleus was surrounded by a series of invisible shells, each one larger than the next the further out they went.  The electrons sit naturally on the inner-most ring but when energy (heat) is directed at them they jump further and further to the outer rings.  However the description of these invisible shells operating at the sub-atomic level instantly reminded me of the Ptolemaic system which once ruled the scientific circus for 1,500 years or so and was considered the last, indeed the only, word on how the universe worked - until Copernicus came along and turned it all inside out.  Typical Prussian troublemaker - heh!

ADDITIONAL:  Another of those odd coincidences.  Last night listening to my radio there was a report that a group of genetecists had been given permission to map the entire genetic code of a lady who recently died at the age of 115 years!  Apparently she had offered her body for scientific research long before her death.  The scientists are attempting to find out if genetics played any part in her immensely long life.

 

Right, children, time for your Bumper Book of Amazing Facts

I used to love those sorts of books when I was a child - about 5 years ago, according to the 'Memsahib'!  Anyway, provoked by my own post on the subject of quantum theory the other day I turned to one of my absolutely favourite books which I purchased about 30 years ago.  It has the unusual title, which I admit was part of the reason I bought it, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics written by Gary Zukav. It is, without a doubt, one of the very best guides for the scientific simpleton into the mysteries of this fascinating, exciting but complex subject.  Mr. Zukav, like the very best of teachers, takes you by the hand and leads you through a jungle of high science, low technology with a good dollop of philosophy added.  I love this book!  Anyway, yesterday I took it down from the shelf and started reading it again.  Instantly I was caught up in what Lear calls "the mystery of things".  Of course, within a very few pages I was reminded of things which I had long forgotten and this passage in particular left me, as it had done 30-odd years ago, with my 'flabber' well and truly 'gasted'!  In it, Zukav provides a sense of scale so that one can appreciate the differences between this world we live in, the atomic world which lies beneath the surface and the sub-atomic world which is situated even deeper - my emphases throughout:

"The smallest object we can see, even under a microscope, contains millions of atoms.  To see the atoms in a baseball, we would have to make the baseball the size of the earth.  If a baseball was the size of the earth, its atoms would be about the size of grapes.  [...]

The step downward from the atomic level takes us to the sub-atomic level.  Here we find the particles that make up the atoms.  The difference between the atomic level and the sub-atomic level is as great as the difference between the atomic level and the world of sticks and stones.  It would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of a grape.  In fact it would be impossible to see the nucleus of an atom the size of a room.  To see the nucleus of an atom, the atom would have to be as high as a fourteen storey building!  The nucleus of an atom as high as a fourteen storey building would be about the size of a grain of salt.   Since a nuclear particle has about 2,000 times more mass than an electron, the electrons revolving around this nucleus would be about the size of dust particles.

The Dome of Saint Peter's basilica in the Vatican has a diameter of about fourteen storeys.  Imagine a grain of salt in the middle of the dome of Saint Peter's with a few dust particles revolving around at the edge of the dome.  This gives us the scale of sub-atomic particles.  It is in this realm, the sub-atomic realm, that Newtonian physics has proven inadequate, and that quantum mechanics is required to explain particle behavior."

It's only page 57 but already my mind is boggling nicely, thank you for asking!  Even so, what Max Planck, and all the others who followed him, have revealed to us is - and here I use a word that has almost lost its original meaning since it was highjacked by 'youf' - awsome!  And the myriad mysteries which follow from it are even more thrilling.  Perhaps the most amazing fact of all, which Zukav does not refer to, is that Man, little puny Man, in existence for no more than a blink of an eye in celestial terms, has yet managed to delve into these deep-laid mysteries and expose them.  Perhaps that will be our final epitaph.

 

The biggest collection of brain-boggling brains ever assembled!

The 1927 Solvay conference on particle physics: back row, third from right, Werner Heisenberg, sixth from right, Erwin Schrödinger; middle row, from right, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Louis de Broglie and centre, Paul Dirac. Front row, second from left, Max Planck, next to him, Marie Curie, then Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein. Of the 29 pictured, 18 won Nobel prizes, Curie in both physics and chemistry

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This picture and much of the basis for my post is taken from an article by Philip Ball at the Prospect site and he is definitely not to blame for my misinterpretations!

Crikey!  Even looking at that collection of mammoth 'brain-boxes' gives me a headache!  Well, what else do you expect from a man who failed Maths, Physics & Chemistry at school?  Even so, with the courage of the truly stupid I will attempt to provide you with the essence of Mr. Ball's essay which is worth reading in full - in fact it might be essential to do so because it is quite likely that I shall get hold of the wrong end of Schrödinger's cat!

Mr. Ball is taking a long view of quantum theory to see where and what it has lead to in the past 100-odd years. It all began with Max Planck who theorised that light was actually made up of tiny discrete bits of energy which he called 'photons'.  Einstein seized upon this and showed how it was that these high speed particles, or 'quanta', which knocked the electrons out of bits of metal, the process we know as the photo-electric effect.  And, as Mr. Ball usefully reminds us, it was for this paper that Einstein won his Nobel prize - not relativity.  Even so, from that time on, it was all downhill for physics, or perhaps, all upside down and inside out might be a better description.  But despite its almost 'unreal' description of 'reality', within the last 100-odd years quantum physics has solved innumerable problems and been turned to immense practical use in a variety of fields:

Scientists routinely adopt the approach memorably described by Cornell physicist David Mermin, as “shut up and calculate.” They use quantum mechanics to calculate everything from the strength of metal alloys to the shapes of molecules. Routine application of the theory underpins the miniaturisation of electronics, medical MRI imaging and the development of solar cells, to name just a few burgeoning technologies.

It is very necessary for physicists to keep 'shtum' and just stick to the maths because the whole field of quantum physics is based on paradox after paradox.  'Things' are and are not at the same time!  'Reality' is that these tiny particles might be here doing this, or over there doing that and you will not know until you 'look' at them at which point 'reality' or part of it, collapses, so it wan't very 'real' after all because merely by 'looking' you alter 'reality'!  Hence, Schrödinger's famous cat really is both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box to check, at which point one set of possibilities collapses.  I could go on but the late, and very great, Richard Feynman put it better than anyone:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.(1)

And he won a Nobel prize on the subject!  Still, that is hardly surprising given the nature of that mysterious entity we call 'light'.  In the earliest science, light was considered to be made up of particles but then later investigation showed that it was probably more like a wave.  Then along came Planck and, hey-ho, we were back to particles again.  Once more, Feynman does his best to explain it:

This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 0r 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics.  Now we know how the electrons and light behave.  But what can I call it?  If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves.  They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way.  They behave in a way that is like nothing you have ever seen before. (1)

So, today they are both waves and particles at the same time!  However, even given this weird, paradoxical description of a totally different 'reality' below the level of the everyday 'reality' which we inhabit and experience, nevertheless, quantum physics is highly accurate as Mr. Ball reminds us:

Quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable theories in science: its prediction of how light interacts with matter is accurate to the eighth decimal place.

So that's alright, then!  Even so, the description of 'reality' offered by quantum physics, that nothing at the sub-atomic level is ever certain, only the odds on various outcomes are accurate, was hardly satisfactory:

But the question of how to interpret the theory—what it tells us about the physical universe—was never resolved by founders such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Famously, Einstein himself was unhappy about how quantum theory leaves so much to chance: it pronounces only on the relative probabilities of how the world is arranged, not on how things fundamentally are. (My emphasis)

Back in the '20s, Neils Bohr and his 'disciple', Werner Heisenberg, attempted to come to terms with the paradoxical nature of the science they were investigating and proclaimed the Copenhagen Interpretation.  As Mr. Ball explains:

Most physicists accept something like Bohr and Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation. This holds that there is no essential reality beyond the quantum description, nothing more fundamental and definite than probabilities. Bohr coined the notion of “complementarity” to express the need to relinquish the expectation of a deeper reality beneath the equations. If you measure a quantum object, you might find it in a particular state. But it makes no sense to ask if it was in that state before you looked. All that can be said is that it had a particular probability of being so. It’s not that you don’t “know,” but rather that the question has no physical meaning. Similarly, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is not a statement about the limits of what we can know about a quantum particle’s position, but places bounds on the whole concept of position.

In other words, they are saying that the quantum description of the world beneath the atomic level is it and all about it; nothing more to see, folks, just move along.  But there is one nagging doubt, one piece of the jigsaw which remains stubbornly innaccesible, and that is the proposed marriage between quantum mechanics and gravity.  So far,no one has succeeded in wedding these two aspects of 'reality' together and until they do, the description remains incomplete.

(1) Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, ch.6

 

The first example of free market globalisation, perhaps?

I am reading a book called The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World. It deals with the last Pagan emperor who ruled after the convert Constantine and his Christian successors had ruled.  It is a fascinating book in its own right but it raised a question in my mind that had never occurred to me before.  Of course, I'm only half way through and perhaps there will be an answer, or at least a suggestion, later on. 

But my question is this: how and why did Christianity spread so rapidly and so successfully?  It almost, dare I say, acted like one of 'Archbishop' Dawkins's 'memes'!  Emperor Julian, who was something of an intellectual, looked at both Christianity and Paganism and chose the latter.  Of course, I do realise that some of my readers are practicing Christians and may be tempted to explain the phenomenon as an example of God's work.  Alas, that argument will not work with me on account of my being a paid-up memeber of the fundamentalist sect of agnosticism - or, fence-sitters, as we are often called!  No, there must be a rational explanation for its amazing success because, from the little I know, many of the Pagan activities were rather jolly!

(I may be somewhat delayed in replying to any comments - visitors due!)

 

"Way Upstream" by Sir Alan Ayckbourn; dir. Lucy Pitman-Wallace

There can be no doubt by now that Sir Alan Ayckbourn is one of the premier playwrights of his era.  His satires on the aspiring middle-classes contain enormous amounts of good humour but, as in all the best comedies, they are laced through with bitter bile.  This may or may not be a product of his own upbringing which can only be described as a confusing series of disasters and mistakes conducted mainly by his mother.  However, whilst Ayckbourn sets his plays firmly in the particular social milieu he knows so well, what sets him apart is his determination to push the limits of theatre to the extreme edges of possibility.  In over 70 plays his inventiveness seems to know no bounds.  Way Upstream, written (my God!) 30 years ago is typical.

The play takes place either on the banks of a river or on board a small cabin cruiser floating on the river.  Just pause for a moment and imagine the faces of a theatrical management faced with that prospect - "You want to build a river?  A 'real' river?  In our theatre?"  Well, let's hear it for The Salisbury Playhouse management who, no doubt, gulped, crossed their fingers but agreed to try it.  They took out their front row stalls and placed them up on what would have been the normal stage.  Between the two they built the 'river', so the production was staged in traverse with audience both sides.  It was superbly executed and the performances by an acting company with no famous names were first rate.

But this play was not just a sort of modernised version of that great English comedy classic, Three Men in Boat.  It began somewhat in that fashion with two couples taking over the cabin cruiser prior to a 10 day holiday on the river.  The two men are partners in a business but it is soon evident that only one of them is the boss and the other a very mild-mannered second-in-command.  The usual gamut of comical boating cock-ups occur and we begin to think this is just more of Ayckbourn's typical social comedy but then Vince enters in time to help rescue them after they had run the boat aground.  He is what they call these days, an alpha male, muscular, virile and commanding.  After that it is downhill all the way for the not-so-happy holiday makers, because it soon becomes apparent that Vince is an evil piece of work determined to take over the boat and its occupants and run things his way.

At this point the play moves from social comedy into political allegory.  To be absolutely honest, I'm not sure Ayckbourn quite pulls it off, I kept thinking that Tom Stoppard might have managed the change in tone with slightly more elegance.  Even so, Ayckbourn's main point struck home to me, personally, with great force.  What he seems to be saying through this allegory is that it is the ordinary people who must use their brains and their courage and stand up to the bully boys who seize power over them.  I never stop boring you all with my repeated sermon to the efect that in a democracy you get the government you deserve.  This, more or less, is what Ayckourn tells us in his play but with considerable humour added.

 

"How long, oh Lord, how long?"

Without being too exact, or even slightly exact, it took about 60 years for communism in power to establish itself, to flourish (in the minds of ninnies, that is) and then to die.  Hower, socialism, particularly social democracy, being milder and thus more beguiling, has proved to be much hardier.  I wonder if recent events which have highlighted the folly, verging on criminality, of governments borrowing and spending on behalf of supposedly grateful electorates will shake enough people out of their ignorance and their torpor?  I noticed yesterdy that even 'Cain' Miliband, as he flourished his 'gesture' of cutting university fees, felt, unlike his big-spending predecessors, the necessity of explaining how he was going to pay for it.  It wasn't very convincing and consequently the idea, obviously dreamt up by his teenage SpAds, has already become as embarrassing as a fart at a Bishop's party.

I may be guilty of wishful thinking, and it is certainly true that you will never go broke under-estimating the intelligence of the Great British Public, but I do believe that evidence of monstrous progligacy by so many different governments, including our own, must have given even people with minimal knowledge of economics the idea that allowing governments to seize or to borrow or to print and spend too much money will end in tears before bedtime; and that blandishments from politicians that they will be "investing" (dread word!) the money for our benefit should be treated by howls of 'show us your willy'!  (Or in the case of Harriet Harperson, cover it up!)  I am encouraged in my slight optimism by that grand, old Leftie, Councillor Bob Piper, who in a post today sniffs into his hankie as with tear-filled eyes he confesses that "The early 80′s proved to be the turning point, and may well be shown to be the last throw of the dice for the Labour left".  One can but commisserate - and hope he's right!

The great battle will be won or lost 'over there' next autumn because there the two distinct philosophies are more clearly drawn.  From Wilson's great shift Leftwards the momentum has been virtually unstoppable until now when the brokers' men are banging on the door demanding their money back.  'Over here' the argument is less clear cut being bedevilled by the complexities of the European Union which 'the cousins', by contrast, were wise enough to sort out once and for all in the 19th century.  As in all things political, in a political democracy, the answer lies with us, 'The People'!  If, instead of cheering (and voting) for political poltroons who promise to 'invest' our money on our behalf, we begin to boo them knowing as we do now (or are about to find out) that it will eventually end in wrack and ruin, then a great lesson will have been learned and, at long last, wimpering and snivelling, the beast that is social democracy will have died the death.  And on its headstone we should engrave the solemn words "Governments can harm your health!"

Well, a man can dream, can't he?

 ADDITIONAL:  Leaked reports of 'Blinky' Balls's speech today indicate that he is going to admit that were Labour in government they would not reverse the coalition 'cuts'.  Apparently polls are telling them that pie in the sky promises to spend, spend, spend, are treated with deep scepticism by the public - especially coming from him.

 

Oh, no, not just when I was beginning to understand it!

Scientists - heh!  You can't rely on them for anything.  Here's me, with a book-shelf full of books purporting to explain Einstein's theories, none of which I ever finish because what skulks in my skull pretending to be my brain is actually coagulated dandruff gathered over the years, and the one single thing I do understand and therefore cling to is that the speed of light is inviolate.  You could put Lewis Hamilton on a sub-atomic particle but not even he could go faster than the photon of light running alongside.  Up until today that is!

The BBC reports that scientists at CERN have fired off some particles down their version of the Bakerloo line which runs under the Alps, and guess what, the little critters arrived early!  Which is more than London Transport ever manages.

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

Still, unlike all those climate (so-called) scientists, Antonio Ereditato, the lead author on the published paper knows how a proper scientist should behave:

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

Good man!  And I hope those little scamps did run faster than anyone thought they could because I have always had my doubts about Einstein and his mad theory - well, my dears, that hair! - and now maybe I won't have to waste even more time and money buying books which fail to explain what the daft old codger was on about.

 

One last chew and then you can spit it out!

(This follows the subject matter of the three previous posts.)

The last bit of trickiness arising from this sad tale of the unexpected earthquake which virtually destroyed L' Aquila in Italy which I would like to dwell upon concerns the all too common disputes between experts and non-experts in the fields of science and technology.  My own very slight personal experience of this sort of thing came years ago as a teenager reading Nevil Shute's No Highway and later seeing the film with the great James Stewart.  This story written in 1949 tells of a lonely scientist's efforts to convinve the authorities that the cause of an aircraft crash is metal fatigue which he worked out using a (fictional) version of quantum mechanics.  He is an awkward cuss with few social skills and his interest in the symbolic meanings of ancient Egyptian pyramids is used against him when he tries to get people to take his ideas seriously.  In the end, of course, he is proved to be correct and the consensus opinion of the scientific hierarchy wrong.

In L' Aquila, a local man with a scientific background but no high degrees or published works to back his opinions, undertook regular measurements of radon gas emissions, this gas being endemic in the area.  I am not quite sure exactly what he was doing but it was based, I think, on his theory that the nature of the gas changed when tremors were imminent.  Consequently he warned that the chances of a big tremor hitting were very much greater than the 'experts'.  He ran his own open blog on which he published his data and his theory and so many people were reading it and becoming panicked that the authorities decided to place him under investigation.  A big-ish shock occurred the same day, and the really big one hit about five days later.

Does that remind you of something?  AGW, for instance, although in that case the concensus science is the one predicting enormous catastrophes whilst the 'maverick' outsiders are denying it.  The 'Warmers'/'Changers' (at the moment they appear not to be certain which climate they are forecasting!) have retreated into their stockade defended by 'peer review' which in practice means reviews conducted by other scientists (and sometimes friends) who agree with them.  Happily, we now have 'internet review' in which everyone and his uncle can join in, although that mass rapidly filters down to a few very expert blogs whose owners are extremely knowledgeable.

So, yet another intractable problem to add to the others I have referred to.  I certainly do not pretend to have solutions.  I only ask for complete openness on all sides so that we, the public, can best decide for ourselves.  However, I would add that a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to 'experts' is often very good for your, er, health!  Unless, of course, it is your local cardiologist telling you that your indegestion is actually a sign of an impending stroke and the prat selling you homeopathic lichen is having you on!

'What's a body to do?' you may ask.  'Pay yer money and take yer chance', is my fairly useless reply.

 

So keep on chewin'!

(This post follows on from the two preceding posts.)

In the comment thread to my preceding post my commenters pointed up the fact that I had failed to make absolutely clear exactly what the unfortunate Mr. Fish, the weatherman, actually said on his famous night of the 'hurricane' that never was.  In doing that, of course, they illustrated exactly the next point I wished to raise, that is, the difficulties of using language correctly.  The word 'hurricane', for example, means one thing to a weatherman, that is, a wind of a particular measurable force which places it in one category, 'hurricane', rather than another, say, 'gale'.  But to the likes of me and you, those 'gales' which battered Britain in 1987 were indistinguishable from 'hurricanes', being winds of such force that none of us had ever experienced the like before.  And several people died as a result.

Returning to Italy, after the conference of seismologists which, due to the near panic developing  was moved from Rome to L' Aquila, two of the scientists and two 'civilians' (so to speak) came out to talk to the press.  It was at this point that the inherent problems of probability and possibility were doubled by the problems of language.  "Words, words, words", the gloomy Dane complained but in this context of approaching catastrophe words really did matter.  The mixture of scientists and 'civilians', each putting a greater or lesser emphas here or there merely added to the confusion.  But are there any 'correct' words in such circumstances?  I am reminded of the terrorist security gradings issued by HMG which are issued with colour grades to assist understanding.  One can imagine the man-hours invested by civil servants in parsing as exactly as they can the precise distinctions between each grade of risk.  But do they actually help?  At which point on the scale do you decide not to use the tube or an airport?  Probably the day after an atrocity which speaks volumes!

What was that?  Did someone ask what the solution was?  Haven't a clue, old boy, I always rely on gut instinct!

ADDITIONAL:  By coincidence, a good friend of mine, Mark Bannister, who combines computer 'geekery' of the highest order with a brilliantly creative musical talent - he composes music for all my theatre productions - has just written a post on the subject of the old NASA 'clunker' about to fall to earth in a shower of bits and pieces, and the liklehood, or not, of being hit.  An odd coincidence of minds pondering the same subject.  Worth a read.

 

So let's chew on it, then

(It is necessary to read my preceding post to understand this follow up.)

My title is derived from my previous post which raises an almost 'perfect' storm' of intractable problems.  First of all, should scientists be held legally responsible for forecasts they make in areas of science which are inherently 'chaotic', that is, areas in which exactitude is impossible and only probabilities can be offered?  A prime and infamous example was our very own Michael Fish from the Met Office who, back in the '80s, laughed off the silly notion of approaching storms and we all woke up the next morning with perhaps one the biggest weather disasters the country had ever experienced.  Mind you, Mr. Fish, rather foolishly, did not talk in terms of probabilities, he simply denied that it would happen. 

Returning to L' Aquila in Italy, the seismic scientists, who try to seek certainty in an equally 'chaotic' sytem, did not tell the people that there would be no earthquake, they limited their forecasts to the fact that there was a 2% chance of an earthquake.  At this point we move from science to language.  How many people truly understand the inherent meaning of 2%?  And how many can weigh that 2% against the catastrophic disaster if they 'bet' the wrong way?  I use the word 'bet' advisedly because there are far more punters than there are bookmakers and on the whole punters tend to end up poorer than bookmakers which indicates to me that very few people understand the mathematics of probability, or, 'odds', as the bookies call it.  Let me put it this way, if a seismologist tells you that the chances of an earthquake is only 2 in a hundred - but you will die if the 2% comes up, then that sets the problem in a new framework for a punter to decide.  But, I am tempted to ask, why 2%?  Why not 3%, or 1%, or even 5%?  Scientists like exactitude but is it responsible of them to provide an exact probability when in fact there can be no exactitude?

This is an important point because increasingly inexact science is being used to propel social-political aims.  I think back to the days when the anti-smoking lobby insisted that lung cancer was caused by smoking where-as even a quick glance at the charts indicated that age was obviously an important factor but somehow the slogan 'Die young and you won't get lung cancer' is hardly inspiring.   Also, sex rears its ugly head!  As you can see from this chart, smoking trends are down in men and so are the incidents of lung cancer.  But women, too, are smoking less but their cancer rates are increasing!

I have no wish to be drawn into that old debate, I use it merely as an illustration that scientific pronouncements of a statistical nature should come with a 'health warning', particularly if they are issued by scientists expert in one specialist subject but not necessarily equally expert in the arcane complexities of statistical mathematics.

But the overhanging question is, should scientists be held legally responsible for their pronouncements?  Should we, to put it crudely, have sued the arse of Michael Fish?  Here-in lies the dilemma facing the Italian judges asked to pronounce on the guilt or otherwise of the Italian seismologists whose pronouncements were wrong and 308 people died.

(Alas, I am off, reluctantly, to the dentist but I shall return - I hope! - because there are even juicier difficulties arising from this tragedy.)

Now here's a juicy wrangle to chew upon!

I do not wish to sound my usual flippant self on this topic because some 300 people have died and several men face criminal responsibility charges.  The topic has been reported elsewhere but, with other important matters playing out in the news, it has been pushed to the inside pages.  My remarks are based on the report at the Nature site.  Apart from the particular complexities of this case, there are very much wider implications for science in general and us in particular.

I will try to sum up the story briefly but read the full report for the details.  In 2009 an earthquake hit the medieval town of L'Aquila in Italy.  This town, situated in a traditional area of earthquakes, had been suffering low-level tremors for several months and the population was becoming increasingly worried.  The general tenor of the information put out by the Italian scientists specialising in earthquakes was that periods of frequent low-level shocks, known as 'seismic swarms', rarely precede major earthquakes.  Note the word 'rarely' which is not the same as 'never'!  (This is, perhaps, an example of 'consensus science', an expression all too familiar to those of us who follow the global warming (AGW) controversy.) 

However, in this case there was, as in AGW, a 'denier'.  A local man who, whilst having a scientific background, did not have any high-ranking degrees to his name and who had not published, with peer review, the results of his scientific enquiries.  Instead of analysing seismic patterns, he measured re-actions in the radon gas which is endemic in the area.  He published his results and predicted that a 'quake was highly probable.  The local authorities, irritated by the alarm his reports were causing in the local population, took legal action against him on the 30th March 2009 - and on that day a 4.1 magnitude tremor shook the town of L'Aquila.  By now the townspeople were really worried and in response the authorities called on the top seismic scientists to hold their scheduled meeting at which their latest findings were to be evaluated in L'Aquila rather than Rome, which they duly did. An announcement, of sorts, was made by two of the scientists, the mayor and a civil servant to the waiting reporters in which they attempted to translate scientific complexities into language suitable for non-scientists which would be further 'translated' by the popular press.

The result is best described as a shambles of misunderstandings, mis-statements and mistakes.  The local people were somewhat pacified but then, on the 6th April, the town was hit by a 5.1 'quake and the ancient buildings collapsed killing 308 people.  To add one further ingredient to this witch's brew, in 1985 a man in charge of civil protection in the earthquake zone was investigated after he ordered the evacuation of several villages because of the threat of a severe seismic shock - but nothing happened!

So here we have a nice mixture of professional science and 'amateur' science, language and liability, mathematics and understanding, probability and probity.  I would not wish to be a judge in this matter.  I hope to return to this fascinating and intricate tale tomorrow, provided I have recovered from having a tooth out in the morning!

 

Wrong number? Ring Malcolm Pollack!

Feeling philosophical, are you?  Looking for an excuse to get out of the Saturday shopping trip with the missus, or, to avoid starting on the Autumnal garden tidy-up?  Then, pop over to Malcolm's place and waste an entire weekend on the tricky subject of whether numbers exist without Man inventing them.  I had a brief paddle in the shallow end of this deep discussion until my brain started to hurt and I retired to bed last night.  I am happy to say that although they have been hard at it 'over there' during the night no conclusion has been reached and no-one's mind has been changed.  It was ever thus with philosophy!

Telling right from wrong

Sorry, but I'm in a philosophical mode at the moment.  I blame my e-pal Malcolm Pollack for starting me off this morning with an irritating conundrum concerning numbers - irritating because so many philosophical problems end up rather like driving round and round a roundabout ad infinitum!  However, it is moral philosophy I wish to ponder this morning.  It has been worrying away at the back of what passes for my mind for some time now and an article in Commentary by Peter Wehner, in which he draws from another article in the NYT by Peter Brooks, has brought it back again.  This particular conundrum is best summed up in my title to this post 'Telling right from wrong'.

According to Brooks:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

This study confirms with depressing accuracy that whilst notions of 'right' and 'wrong' still exist people, and especially young people, are hopelessly inadequate when it comes to thinking their way through to some conclusions.  Incoherent, when they are not actually silent, when faced with moral dilemmas, almost to a man and a woman they fall back on - feelings!  As Brooks explains:

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Well, the milk was well and truly spilled years ago and a whole new debate can be 'enjoyed' in deciding exactly who the villain was who began it all - Darwin, Nietsche, Ibsen, Marx . . .  you choose!  In the meantime, we must all come to terms with the fact that, like Monty Python's massed crowd, "We're all individuals" now.  And so the question, if I may indulge in some cod-Latin in order to add a spurious veneer of learning to this post, ' qui iudicet?' (who decides?) is now of some importance.  To give but one very recent example from these 'distinguished' columns, yesterday I told the story of a young woman who murdered her baby, lied to the police and then attempted to frame an inncocent man.  I wrote of her in disparaging terms and was instantly reprimanded by one of my e-pal commenters for lack of charity.  Or, if you prefer a more social example closer to home, there was the recent sight and sound of British youth indulging in pillage and murder on our streets followed by a chorus of relative 'moralists' insisting that they were simply misunderstood and lacked love!

So the question looms, like the famous elephant in the living-room, how and who decides what is moral and what is immoral?  The youngsters who were interviewed, being intellectually crippled by an utterly useless education, were unable to use any criteria to decide other than - feelings!

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

I will now indulge myself with a couple of trite clichés: 'nature abhors a vacuum' and 'the devil makes work for idle hands - and minds'!  By which I mean to indicate that a lack of moral rules will quickly be filled by evil under the guise of being the 'New Morals' under which babies will be murdered with impunity because it 'feels' right at the time.

So, what is to be done?  Ah, well, that's the problem, you see, and because it's a philosophical problem there probably isn't an answer!

 

How to curb the 'weasels' and the 'stoats'!

Having enjoyed my grumble in the preceding post I have tried to think of some solution which will, if not rid us of these scurvy politicians, at least control them somewhat.  Because, of course, it would be wrong to eliminate them entirely.  You need to be interested in politics in order to practice it, or to put it another way, you need some skill in the black arts to become a practitioner.  Most of us have a very limited interest in or knowledge of politics, usually confined to how much HMG is taking from our income every month. So, it's no good just picking 500 men and women off the street, so to speak, and plonking them in Westminster.  Quite apart from anything else, the civil servants would eat them for breakfast!  We must, alas, stick to those whose abiding interest is the pursuit of power and who possess, therefore, some expertise in the matter.

Given that, then the only answer is to devise means to control them.  It seems to me that the one thing that terrifies all of them is - an election!  Hence, I suggest that some financial limits should be passed which, if they are transgressed, would immediately trigger an election.  For example, inflation rates, governmental debt and budget deficit ratios should be established with the help of a committee of the relevant experts.  If any government goes beyond those limits then, hey-ho, immediately we and they are 'off to the races', so to speak.  Of course, there might be pressing reasons for going beyond, say, the borrowing limits, like a war, for instance, but a government party would have then to fight the argument on the doorstep.  Furthermore, the rule would be that the government would have to return to the status quo within five years, at which point there would be another election anyway.

Well, it's one idea, if you have any others, besides shooting one in three of the bastards to encourage the others, then please let me know.