DUFF & NONSENSE!

Thinking or grunting, which came first?

It's another of those coincidence things again.  They keep happening to me.  It must be a coincidence!  Anyway, this one is the infinitely tricky subject of language, an attribute we take for granted because it appears to have been granted to us as of right, which has cropped up in two very different books I have just aquired.  The first book, The Information by James Gleick, proposes that everything in the universe is 'information' in various discrete forms and Gleick investigates the various means by which 'information' is passed between humans.  He begins with primitive language including perhaps the most primitive of them all - African drums!  In so far as I have ever thought about it I always assumed they were generalised signals of feast-making or war-making or some such.  But Gleick tells us that they were language, a highly stylised one but capable of transmitting simple but fairly detailed information.  It was not until the mid-19th century that white men gradually realised that the drums were 'talking' - possibly about them!

Daniel C. Dennett in his book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking, approaches language from a slightly different angle.  As a philosopher he deplores (whilst recognising its utility) the way in which mathematics has impinged on philosophy.  He prefers a return to plain, straighforward language - well, as straightforward as language can ever be!  His opening reflections made me ponder, not so much on contemporary philosophical language but how and why the ability to speak and then to write evolved.  I think we need to beware because so many of the things that evolution has wrought seem obvious, almost pre-destined - now - but it should never be taken for granted, as the last survivors of the zillion species which tried existence but failed would tell you if they were still around!

Most higher level creatures (and, no, I'm not going to define that because I'm not a philosopher!) have the means to communicate with each other, mostly through 'body language' or through whatever 'sound system' they have developed.  They can indicate, for example, flight or fight or another word beginning with 'f' but it is signalling rather than language.  For language it is, or was, necessary to take a truly giant leap.  The signalling I referred to above merely indicates what I might call 'a mood' but to use language requires a being to think, and to think requires (I think) self-consciousness.  It is necessary to recognise yourself as an entity and that will cause you to recognise other things about you as entities.  Well, we're all aware of the difficulties and complexities that still surround the notion of self-consciousness, and once I have finished Gleick's book I look forward to reading what Dennett has to say on the subject.

However, I would add that whilst self-consciousness is one thing, having the physical ability to emit a variety of sounds is equally important.  What a bummer to be a creature that has become self-aware but who lacks the vocal ability to form a variety of sounds that could be joined together to form something coherent and meaningful!  (Perhaps that was Cro-Magnon man's problem but at least he didn't have to put up with his nagging wife as he waited for his species to die off!)  So which came first, the vocal chords or the self-awareness and the desire to speak?

Anyway, gradually a cacophony of clicks, grunts, snuffles and squeaks gradually evolved into a language more or less as we understand it today.  Truly miraculous!  There then ensued thousands of years of human life in which communication was only ever verbal.  As Gleick reminds us, it is almost impossible to imagine a world, one which existed for thousands of years, in which there was no writing.  And lack of literacy, of course, entails lack of definition because, as we all know, 'word of mouth' is not to be relied on!  In a non-literate world, Humpty-Dumpty rules because words 'mean' whatever the speaker chooses for them to mean.  Well, the non-literate world was never going to last forever and eventually some 'trouble-maker' picked up a bit of soft clay and started making marks on it with a bit of sharpened reed and, hey-ho, writing was invented.  Of course, many (most?) written words are not fixed forever in their exact meaning even when they're chiselled on stone but they are certainly more definitive that verbal communication.  Once literacy arrived memory suffered and again Gleick reminds us, Plato bemoaned this fact in Phaedrus:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.  You have invented an elixer not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

Much of the uncertainty in written language stemmed from the fact that no-one laid down 'rules and regulations' to cover meaning, spelling, syntax and so forth.  In English, Gleick tells us, it was not until 1604 that a village school-master and priest produced a book with the less than punchy title of: A Table Alphabeticall, conveying and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes.  His name was Robert Cawdrey and, alas and alack, both he and his truly monumental work faded into obscurity and today only one example remains.  In compiling his Table Alphabetical, Cawdrey discovered, the hard way, that in his age the act of defining words means choosing, first the spelling and then the meaning.  The difficulties involved are demonstrated in Cawdrey's own title page in which he first writes wordes and then in a later sentence words!

At this point I feel the approach of a Shakesperean quote which constant repetition on this blog has rendered hackneyed so I will avoid temptation and bring this meandering post to an end.  Needless to say, like most of the posts on this blog, it ends with absolutely no conclusion except, that is, to say that the history of language is a fascinating topic well worth investigating.

 

The Sunday Rumble: 19.5.13

In which, during the course of the day, I will emit sundry burps and belches on anything that catches my beady eyes.

'Swivel-eyed plebs':  By their unguarded, flabby-mouthed remarks shall you know them!  And actually, I am rather pleased when it happens because suddenly in the fog and mists of PC-speak you catch a rare glimpse of the truth, or at least, the truth as perceived by the "swivel-eyed loons" who run this country of ours.  In this latest case it was some Tory toff referring to the grass-roots suckers workers who volunteer their time and efforts to get these oily rascals up the greasy pole, however, it is an attitude of mind that stretches effortlessly to encompass all of us "plebs" who actually vote.  Even as they grovel, they despise us.  But you should not think that this attitude is confined to Tory toffs; the grandees of, say, the Trade Unions who swill their champagne in the best hotels and restaurants in the land think the same way about the real-life "plebs" who are daft enough to volunteer their union dues every week in order to keep the champagne flowing.

  

 A poem:  An old and dear friend gave me a rather beautiful book of war poems for my birthday last week.  Very nicely produced in folio size, it contains war poems from all ages not just the usual and well-rehearsed WWI poems.  Here is one that struck me as I was flicking through the book.  It is reminiscent of Rupert Brooke's famous "That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England" but this was written by Thomas Hardy who lived and wrote in Dorset just a few miles south of here and the particular "corner of a foreign field" to which he refers is somewhere on the veldt in South Africa.

Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined – just as found:

His landmark is a kopje-crest

That breaks the veldt around;

And foreign constellations west

Each night above his mound.

 

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –

Fresh from his Wessex home –

The meaning of the broad Karoo,

The Bush, the dusty loam,

And why uprose to nightly view

Strange stars amid the gloam.

 

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge forever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellation reign

His stars eternally.

 

Oliver Kamm misses the point:  A week ago on his Times blog Oliver Kamm (you can read it via my link or something called 'Tumblr', whatever that is!) took issue with Nigel Lawson over Lawson's urging that we leave the EU.  In his usual concise and logical manner he laid out the economic advantages of us remaining in, although he admitted that we would instantly be £8bn a year better off for no longer having to pay into the EU budget.  As an economist/banker by trade (before he fell into Grub Street) it is not too surprising that he sticks to economic arguments but 'the dismal science' is not the primary one in this particular and fractious matter.  It's politics, innit?  We, that is the royal 'we', in case you're wondering, simply do not wish to be ruled by European politicans and bureaucrats - it's as simple as that!  I don't care if our standard of living drops 0.75% or whatever, or even if it goes up by the same amount, I just want the United Kingdom to run itself, make its own laws, make its own mistakes, make its own way - c' est tout!  (See, bloody French get everywhere!)

 

 Albert Finney's Big Fail:  I have just had lunch in my kitchen and the 'Memsahib' was watching Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney playing Hercule Poirot.  I nearly murdered Albert Finney!  That has to have been his worst performance - ever.  He shouted his lines from somewhere at the back of his throat because in his effort to look plump, which he was not at the time, he kept his chin buried in his neck in an effort to show a double chin.  I have admired Finney for years, for just one example, his performance as Sir Donald Wolfit in The Dresser was superb.  I suppose from time to time even the best get it wrong - the worst do so constantly as my past performances bear witness!  Anyway, no-one does Poirot better than David Suchet.

 

The Bookaholic's Tale:  I got lucky last week.  I wrestled with my conscience, with which I had sworn never, not ever, to buy another book until I had reduced the pile of 'waiting-to-be-read' books - and lost!  So in I went to Waterstones without even a pang of regret and ended up in front of the American History section which was surprisingly small.  I am still waiting to come across a book on Lincoln which is biography and not hagiography.  There was one on the shelves but reading the reviews my suspicions were aroused.  However, when I replaced it I noticed The American Civil War written, I was re-assured to notice, by a Brit and a damned good historian at that - the late Sir John Keegan.  It was half the size of Lincoln's biography so that helped, too!  Anyway, a warning to my American e-pals, sometime in the next 10 years I will be an expert on your civil war about which, at the moment, I know next to nothing.

But my good fortune did not end there.  Going to the Pay Desk I noticed a bookcase of books at knock-down sale prices.  Amongst them was The Information by James Gleik.  I have two of his books on my shelf, one on Richard Feynman and the other on chaos theory.  Gleik is excellent at writing science for dummies without actually insulting our intelligence.  The book had a tear in the cover and slight damage to the spine but was only reduced by £2.  My second-hand car dealer persona took over and I asked the man at the desk if that was the best he could do given the damage.  Not only did he sell it to me for a fiver, he noticed a very slight tear in the cover of the American Civil War book and knocked two quid off that, too!  Well done, Waterstones!

That's my lot for today.

 

Related articles

Words in the News: Loon

Happy Birthday to Albert Finney

Sorry, this post is chaotic!

Oh, alright then, more chaotic than normal - OK?  And what else do you expect as I, a man who failed maths, physics and chemistry exams not just by a smidgen but by a mile, attempt to write a post on the late, great Benoit B. Mandelbrot.  On my wall, just above my computer screen is a framed picture of the Mandelbrot set which, apart from their scientific interest, are a beautiful set of images in their own right.  It was given to me by the cast of my production of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, in my opinion one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, and I treasure it not just for the beauty of the images and the pleasant memories of a production I was proud to be associated with, but also for constant reminder of what a brilliant observer and thinker Mandelbrot was.

Take a look at a cauliflower - go on, try it! - and you will see that it has a rough floral form.

 Additional:  Courtesy of 'SoD', see Comment below, here is a Roumanian cauliflower which is obviously off its head on fractals!

 

 

When you look closer you will see that the 'head' of the cauliflower is made up of lots of smaller 'cauliflowers', or florets as they are called.  Each of these florets looks almost exactly like the cauliflower itself.  If you seperate one floret from the main flower and carefully pull out one of its mini-florets that, too, would look like a tiny version of the big cauliflower.  If you then placed the mini-floret under a microscope and pulled out  . . . and so on and on.  In other words, Mandelbrot spotted that there is an underlying similarity in nature and believing that at the heart of everything in the universe lies mathematics he  set about working out the mathematics of irregular but similar natural forms.  This, of course, set him at odds with the High Priests of classical mathematics who were only concerned with the mathematics of regular forms.  Here is a passage of dialogue from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia spoken by Thomasina, a child genius living in the early 19th century and Septimus, her intelligent and thoughtful tutor:

Thomasina: [...] Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of of algebraic relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles.  God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a blubell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?  Do we believe nature is written in numbers?

Septimus: We do.

Thomasina: Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture?

Septimus: I do not know.

Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.

Septimus: He has a mastery of equations which leads into infinities where we cannot follow.

Thomasina: What a faint-heart!  We must work outward from the middle of the maze. (She picks up the apple leaf) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation.  You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten.

And Stoppard is a genius, too, for encapsulating a hellishly complex scientific concept in such charming and pellucid dialogue. 

Mandelbrot's observation of self-similarity at different levels was not confined to cauliflowers or even just to flora, as Jim Holt reminds us in the New York Review of Books:

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds,
coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them.

Mr. Holt was reviewing a memoir written by Mandelbrot shortly before his death in 2010 entitled The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick which has just been published.  I suppose, when you think about it, it's obvious that naturally occurring things will look similar at different levels of magnification.  The trouble is that we plodders never do think about it, we needs must wait for the Mandelbrots of this world to tell us 'the bleedin' obvious'!  Here is a simple example of the Mandelbrot Set in which each picture is the blown up picture of the tiny square in the preceding picture:

 

 

Quasi-self-similarity in the Mandelbrot
set

 

Here is a more extended sequence and if you look closely at each preceding picture you will be able to see the tiny detail which has been magnified:

Start	Step 1	Step 2	Step 3	Step 4
Step 5	Step 6	Step 7	Step 8	Step 9
Step 10	Step 11	Step 12	Step 13	Step 14

 

  Yes, indeed, now cauliflowers will never seem quite the same, will they?!

   (I think even Stoppard would enjoy that little witticism!)

 

 

Related articles

The Mathematics of Roughness

14 amazing fractals found in nature

Readings: Chaos theory and fractal geometry

WARNING: Do not read this on a full stomach!

Whilst wearing surgical mask and gloves I did touch upon this subject a few weeks back and it is only with extreme reluctance that I return to it.  I do so because my e-pal, Dom, sent me link which both turned my stomach and sent me into apoplectic rage.  If you do not wish to suffer similar symptoms, read no more!

It concerns Dr.(?) Kermit Gosnell, a man who has run abortion 'factories' for decades and who has now been found guilty on three murder charges relating to the deliberate killing of babies minutes after they were born.  In my earlier piece I remarked on the fact that none of the American MSM had bothered to use the court seats which had been reserved for them with the result that great swathes of the American public know nothing of this case - although now, thanks to the efforts of a minority of media outlets, the story is spreading.  I also described the technique employed by Gosnell and his assistant butchers to despatch these babies after they had been born as they lay there on the table moving, crying and fighting for life.  Gosnell or his assistants used scissors or a scalpel to snip the spinal cord at the back of the neck, in fact, they called it "snipping"!

Today, Dom sent me a link to a Catholic blog which in turn drew heavily on an article by James Taranto in the WSJ written last month.  Taranto's article is quite long but is a meticulous summary of the current situation and the past history of abortion in the USA and I urge you all to read it.  He ends with this example, rich in irony, of history coming back to bite you in the arse:

One of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful example from their own city’s history.

It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor “offered
to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy.” The women didn’t know that the doctor “planned to use an experimental device called a ‘super coil’ developed by a California man named Harvey Karman.”

A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption
as “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were
coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted
into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the
gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up
the fetus.”

Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them
needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v.
Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried
out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit
Gosnell.

Back-alley abortions were indisputably a problem before 1973. That’s no
defense of the Roe regime, which failed to solve it.

How are you feeling?  Yeeeees, quite!  And before you are tempted to shrug and say, "Only in America", ask yourself how our baby killing factories are doing?!

 

No Monday Funny, instead, a Monday Mumble

Well, I only produce my Monday Funnies to cheer up all you wage-slaves as you start the week but today being a Bank Holiday, and a sunny one as well, you are all, no doubt, lazing about in your gardens watching the weeds grow!  Anyway, I will leave you a Tuesday Funny later tonight because I have an early start for 'Londinium' again tomorrow, so no posts on Tuesday.  Anyway, today, as I keep taking shelter indoors from this unbelievably fierce sun, I will leave you the occasional mumble.

 

Euro founder calls for break-up:  Not so much a case of chickens coming home to roost as 14-year old dead turkeys hitting the floor to rot!  Courtesy of Ambrose E-P in The Telegraph, allow me to remind you of a long-lost name - Oscar Lafontaine - remember him?  He was yet another in a long line of swivel-eyed Germans with a fanatical idea - a common currency for a United States of Europe:

Mr Lafontaine was labelled "Europe's Most Dangerous Man" by The Sun after he called for a "united Europe" and the "end of the nation state" in 1998. The euro was launched on January 1 1999, with bank notes following three years later. He later left the Social Democrats to found the Left Party.

Ah, but that was yesterday, or to be precise, back in 1999.  Today, that nasty old real-politik has stuck its oar in and poor old Oscar has had to face reality:

Mr Lafontaine said he backed EMU but no longer believes it is sustainable.  "Hopes that the creation of the euro would force rational economic behaviour on all sides were in vain," he said, adding that the policy of forcing Spain, Portugal, and Greece to carry out internal devaluations was a "catastrophe".

He foresees a resurgence of extreme anti-German sentiment across southern Europe including France.  Whodathunkit?  Well, lots of people, actually, but no-one listened.

 

Mary Bousted, edukatanist, earns an 'F' for Fail:  According to this particularly dim light in the 'edukatanist' firmament, pupils should be allowed to skip the "slow", "boring" openings to the plays because they leave them "gritting their teeth" with boredom.  I can only assume that Ms. Boustead teaches 'Media Studies' or 'Japanese Paper Folding' or some such vital subject because it is obvious that she hasn't a clue concerning Shakespeare and his plays.  Happily, Ms. Bousted's terminal stupidity has permitted her to, er, rise well above mere class-rooms and reach the exalted heights of being general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.  Yeeeees, quite!

 

Could Adam Smith be proven wrong?   A truly fascinating article in Der Spiegel sent to me by the ever alert, 'SoD' - well done, my boy!  In it, two economists and directors at the MIT Center for Digital Business dare to forecast the complete overturning of one of the central beliefs of free market capitalism, that is, that no matter if new technology (trains, for example) puts workers in outdated industries (farriers, stablemen, coachmen, etc) out of work, the increase in productivity will provide alternative jobs.  According to these two swots this may no longer be the case because the rate of increase in computer controlled automata is such that human work is decreasing.  For example, pause and consider for a moment the possible impact of driverless autos which have just been given licences to be tested.  The implications, if true, are awesome!  A fascinating article, worth reading.

 

Maybe, just maybe, Obama is nearing a 'Gotcha' moment:  I must admit that one of the crucial events which convinced me that Obama would lose the election was the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi followed by the most obvious and disgusting programme of lies and obfuscation put out by his regime.  He made Nixon look like a vicar!  I thought at the time that American patriotism would be so enraged that they would slaughter Obama at the polls in much the way the American victims were slaughtered in Benghazi.  But it didn't happen.  Just like the outrage of 'Operation Fast & Furious' in which a Federal government sting took place and went hopelessly wrong leading to the death of an American border guard, a systematic barrage of foot-dragging and out-and-out lying went on and no-one, least of all the Attorney-General, paid a price for it.  The deliberate docility of the Obama-lovin' lickspittles in the media was an enormous help, of course.  But, as Michael Walsh points out at PJMedia, this time the people feeling betrayed by Obama's inaction at the time and his lying ever since are hard-bitten intelligence and Special Ops types who are thirsty for revenge on behalf of their friends.  New Congressional hearings are due and the brown stuff is likely to hit the fan.  Obama will be well and truly splattered but so also will 'Hillbilly'.  Allow me to mention one word, perhaps more in hope than expectation, but even so - impeachment!

 

Critics - don'cha lurve 'em?  Well, actually I do, at least, some of them.  Take for example, Lloyd Evans in The Spectator, I love him because he has just saved me 'loadsa' money!  I was trying to work out an underhand way of getting past that implacable backstop, normally referred to here as 'The Memsahib', in order for me to pay over the odds to get a ticket for the ROYAL National Theatre (I like to rub their proper title under their rotten republican noses) production of Othello.  I don't have Evans' erudition but I just know that I would share a great many of his views - and his view of this production was exceedingly dim.  So, money saved, time better spent and terminal grumpiness avoided - thanks Mr. Evans.  And that's the end of this Monday Rumble.

Related articles

German euro founder now calling for its break up

German Finance Minister Who Launched Euro, Calls For Euro's Breakup

The Sunday Rumble: 28.4.13

Grovelling apologies:

Sorry - sorry - SORRY!  OK?  I'm really sorry!  On Thursday, with all the computer expertise for which I am famed the length and breadth of, er, this room, I carefully composed a brief but elegantly worded post informing you of my absence.  Just to prove it, here it is:

London calling!

Well, it's calling me, at any rate, on personal business and theatre business on Friday and Saturday.  I will get home in the wee small hours of Sunday morning so you can expect a Sunday Rumble - but not too early!

Having written it I then saved it as a 'draft' ready to publish on Thursday night before my departure early Friday morning.  And yes, you are quite right, there it stayed in my 'Draft' box unpublished until now, and whilst I think 200x lines is a bit on the steep side of course they will be completed and handed in on Monday morning!  There is nothing more irritating than regularly visiting a gossipy blog which suddenly stops dead without warning and you are forced to keep clicking back on it to see if it has started up again.  Those of you hoping that this one was indeed dead and buried must delay your celebrations - I have returned!  My usual Sunday rumbles will commence a little later.

Sam Walters, The Orange Tree Theatre:  Part of the theatre business that occupied me yesterday was a visit to The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond to listen to a talk by Sam Walters, its founder and manager.  At one stage he described himself as 'a jobbing director' which was absolutely accurate but under-stated the breadth and width and depth of his theatrical experience, and his total and absorbing love for it all.  He was entertaining, shrewd, enthusiastic, slightly disorganised but through it all you could positively feel the drive behind the man which led him to start with a theatre in a room above a pub and which has now moved to a room next to a pub and which provides a small theatre in the round.  Being so close to the metropolis, and given his lifetime of friendships in theatre, he frequently attracts top class actors to his tiny performing space.  Plus, I suspect, his obviously tremendous charm plays its part in getting the 'luvvies' to work there.  Well worth a visit for any of you metro theatre lovers. 

'Enemies of the Earth':  Regular readers will know that under my strict accuracy policy that has long been my re-arrangement of the name 'Friends of the Earth'.  It appears I am not alone.  'Bishop Hill' attended a seminar given by some cove called Pascal Bruckner - yeeees, quite! - and he jotted down the main points that came across:

• The idea of catastrophe has replaced the idea of progress
• Racial minorities, women and slaves have been replaced as principal victims
  by Mother Earth
• Fear has become something to be desired.
• We are being transformed into children, ready to obey the orders of an
  enlightened elite.
• Friends of the earth have become the enemies of mankind
• Environmentalism is universal but "end of the worldism" is purely western.
• Environmentalism is about keeping the world for the bobos (bohemian
  bourgeois)

Sound fella, that Bruckner despite, or perhaps because of, his formidable name!

"Bye Bye Miss American Empire":  Continuing my secessionist agitprop, there is a review in The American Spectator of an interesting book which looks in detail at the myriad groups of what they call 'seceshers'.

Some seceshers, like those in West Kansas and New York City seek to form their
own states. Others, (Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, Vermont and the old confederacy)
long for complete independence.

Apparently their chances are minimal to zero!

It’s a cliché to say that lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for,
but that doesn’t make it any less true. And, as Kauffman reminds us, “I know:
Breaking away is impossible. Quixotic. Hopeless. So was dancing on the Berlin
Wall.”

These are Kauffman’s kind of people, the kind who hesitate to say the Pledge
of Allegiance, not because of the phrase “Under God,” but because of the word
“indivisible,” which clangs on the ear like a cell door. Self-government
dreamers, small-is-better believers, localist underdogs and home grown patriots.
How can you not love them?

Someone is to blame!  But I don't expect they ever will be, except, perhaps, by the historians eventually.  I refer to the somewhat dismal record of the British army in recent times.  There is a truly dispiriting article in Commentary Magazine remarking on what looks like a total cock-up in Camp Bastion, the British base in Afghanistan, in which an unguarded perimeter was attacked and two US marines killed and six Harrier jump-jets destroyed.  The writer, Max Boot, reminds his readers of the shambles in Basra after Iraq II when the Brits, full of supposed expertise in urban counter-insurgency gained from the Malaya campaign onwards, more or less handed the entire city over to the gunmen and eventually the American s had to go in and clear up after us!  Too, too, embarrassing - but no-one in command has been blamed!

 

 

Related articles

The Breadwinner, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, review

The Man Who Pays the Piper, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, review

Pascal Bruckner's opus: 'The idea of catastrophe has replaced the idea of progress' - 'Racial minorities, women and slaves have been replaced as principal victims by Mother Earth'

The Sunday Rumble: 21.4.13

"Oh, what a beautiful mornin'"!  And, as it happens, it is indeed a beautiful morning here, all the more so given what seems like in retrospect six months of cloud, rain, snow and a non-stop freezing wind from even further 'ooop north' than the usual 'ooop north'.  Even so, I am provoked to the opening quote not by the sunshine but by a filmed version of Oklahoma produced by the Royal National Theatre back in 1999 and which was shown on Sky Arts last night.  I was curious to see it because it starred (a much younger) Hugh Jackman who later played Jean Valjean in the film of Les Misérables.  I remarked at the time that whilst I had heard of him I had never seen him before.  Well now I have seen him twice with a fourteen year gap in his career and I now realise what the rest of the world already knew, that he is tremendously talented.  Unfortunately, Oklahoma suffers a little, as so many of those earlier musicals do, from thudding dialogue whose only advantage is that it gives one time to get up and make a cup of tea before the next brilliant, moving and/or witty song begins.  In retrospect, what an act of genius it was when the producers of Les Mis decided to forego spoken dialogue and just let the songs tell the story.  Even so, Oklahoma from the RNT was a superb piece of theatre and the director, Trever Nunn, is quite simply the very best.

 Sometimes it gets personal:  This morning, quite properly, the news bulletins are full of details concerning the Chinese earthquake with 200+/- killed and God knows how many injured and thousands bereaved and mourning.  And yes, for a moment one is moved to pity and sympathy before moving on to the next story of the day.  To be thus is to be human.  But sometimes, somehow, a tragedy sticks beneath the skin and it will not be moved.  For me, it is the tragedy of the man and his family - wife, two sons and a daughter - who went to the Boston marathon.  The father was taking part in the run and his family were close to the finishing line to cheer him in.  And then - personal apocalypse!  The bomb went off, one son killed outright, a daughter maimed by the loss of a leg and a wife in hospital with brain damage.  It beggars understanding.  At one moment you are this, a happy family tied together with mutual love and affection; and the next moment you are that, a wreckage of hopes and expectations blown apart.  "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport."

Sow and ye shall reap:  Or something like that; but it was Heffer, I think, in The Daily Mail yesterday who reminded us  with sardonic brutality that Boston was the main centre of financial and 'moral' support for the IRA whose atrocities 'over here' far, far exceeded the marathon bomb.  Folly, to which we are all prone, does not deserve the non-linear retribution exacted lat Sunday but it is a salutary lesson all the same.  Think before you drop a dollar in the collecting tin!

 

And talking of terrorist bombers there's always the president's old friends:

 

 

Whilst supping with the Devil (and his wife) it is usually good practice, or so I am told, to use a very long spoon.  The President seems unaware of this as he enjoys a dinner with the convicted terrorist, Bill Ayers, and his equally despicable wife, Bernadine Dorhn.  Both, of course, now major players in the Chicago mafia Democrat party which, as Emmett Tyrell of The American Spectator reminds us, is never totally averse to bombing atrocities.  According to Obama they are "just good friends"!  Yeees, quite!

 

Fitch the Fab!  At last, and long overdue, the credit rating agencies are turning the screw.  On Friday Fitch downgraded the UK to AA+ which is not much in itself but anyone with half a brain would take it as a serious warning of more, much more, to come unless Osborne stops borrowing m0ney!  He can only do that by cutting government spending, not little bits here and there but wholesale slashing and burning whilst at the same time cutting taxation to those likely to produce wealth in the future.  And, no, I'm not holding my breath! 

 

Another great oxymoron - 'settled science':  Well, they told us that global warming was 'settled science' and temperatures have barely budged for 15 years.  Then again, we have been told that the origin of life took place down in the depths of the ocean where heated air from the earth's core erupted through fissures and set off a chemical re-action and, hey presto, suddenly what was inanimate was animate.  So, the swots told us, 'settled science', move along, nothing to see here.  But, you just gotta love those swots because no sooner is science settled when some rascal comes along and unsettles it.  According to The Mail, a couple of computer nerds have used something called Moore's Law which explains the rate at which computers have increased their complexity and efficiency since they were invented.  Using the same equations on life forms but working backwards they estimate that life actually began about 10 billion years ago and as the earth is a mere stripling of 4.5 billion years then it is obvious, innit?, that life began somewhere else in the universe and caught the equivalent of a No.29 bus to this old globe of ours. 'Settled science' - heh!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 14.4.13

Measles and MMR:  Peter Hitchens in The Mail repeated a few days ago what I thought back when the controversy over the MMR versus single, separate immunisation jabs was raging in the headlines and, no doubt, in the hearts and minds of parents.  Given the colossal waste of money going on in our not-so-beloved Nationalised Health Service, surely the government of the day could have allowed people a choice between the two proposals whilst the scientific validity of the doubters was tested.  Today, of course, there is a massive panic on as regional health authorities use emergency procedures to vaccinate thousands of youngsters whose parents opted out all those years ago.  Massive panic, of course, means massive expense, so they didn't save any money.

Beyond irony:  According to The Mail, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, the fragrant, dainty, saint-like Sally Bercow who took part in a Celebrity Big Brother Show but was, in a surprisingly tasteful decision by the mostly moronic viewers booted off at the first opportunity, has let it be known that she will not be attending Lady Thatcher's funeral.  Her reason is that Lady Thatcher "was very divisive… She also ushered in a very greedy and selfish society".  In the meantime, this delightful specimen of all that is best about English 'gels' is busy looking for some Labour party suckers supporters to provide her with a Parliamentary seat to fight at the next election.  Can anyone doubt that she will make an excellent parliamentarian and prime minister, certainly capable of out-classing "that woman" . . . sorry . . . didn't quite catch that  . . .

Taking UKIP seriously:  Well, that's what young Master Fraser Nelson is doing over at The Coffee House.  Last week he dropped in to a UKIP rally meeting in Worcester expecting to find three men and a dog and maybe an elderly lady looking for the Women's Institute.  Instead, he found the main meeting room packed and when a second room with a broadcast loudspeaker was arranged that too quickly filled to over-flowing.  Of course, Nigel Farrage was speaking and there is no doubt that he is one of the most gifted political speakers of this age and a lot of people would be happy just to hear him reading his laundry list.  Still, Nelson was more than somewhat surprised at the turnout and in his interesting article he analyses the popularity of the UKIP and the effect it is likely to have.  The forthcoming local elections should give a clue.

Alinskyed, by Jove!   An interesting article at The American Thinker by Thomas Lifson which follows on from my post yesterday concerning the corrupt behaviour of the Left-wing American media in refusing to report on the mass baby murders executed by an abortionist in Pennsylvania.  Apparently some Right-wing journos have studied in detail the writings of Saul Alinsky, Obama's political Godfather, and have applied his methods back onto his advocates.  Thus, dictum #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules" and dictum #13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it" is being used against individual journalists and their organisations who have resolutely ignored this case.  Such fun!

 

More music - sorry!  I risk becoming a bit of a bore on the subject of music - sorry!  But, even so, how  in hell's name can I have missed Tchaikovsky's symphonies?  Obviously, like most kids I loved Tchaiko's 1812 Overture decades ago when I first heard it, and I have liked and admired it since despite the pitying smiles from friends with, er, more sophisticated tastes - or so they would have me believe.  And everyone knows and loves the gorgeous ballet music he composed and which reduce us all to romantic goo after a few bars.  But, dammit, I have been demanding to know in the last few weeks why did no-one tell me about the symphonies, especially the 5th and 6th?  They are just superb beyond description and, I am ashamed to confess, I have had all six of 'em on my shelf for years - unplayed!  Now, I ask you, am I a totally daft, mad, old coot or what ? - don't answer that question!

 

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In which this blog ventures below the waistline!

I'm thinking of starting a series of posts on utterly useless research projects undertaken by universities but I fear it could take over this entire blog.  It never ceases to amaze me the way university departments come up with truly arcane subjects to investigate, nor the skill they must possess to relieve budgeting agencies of their, or usually my, dosh!

Yesterday, I read somewhere about a team of researchers who had established that back in the days before one had a tailor, in other words before clothes were invented (dread thought!), women used to judge men as potential mates by the size of their willies.  This, according to the 'brain-boxes' concerned, led to Darwinian selection pressure for men to, er, hang lower, if you catch my meaning.  Apparently, these under-employed  busy 'brain-boxes' came up with a mathematical equation to do with the ratio between length and diameter which measured how attrected the ladies would be - and, no, I don't know if they conducted any practical experiments!

Happily these days one may rely on one's tailor to hide the truth and as I assured the 'Memsahib' one night back in the mists of time, "He might not be very big but he's a very good little worker!"  Also, a great friend of mine who is still today a master 'swordsman' of enormous reputation and, er, proportion whilst sympathising with my, er, modest appendage, told me, "Don't worry, Duffy, it isn't the size that matters, it's the knowledgeable arse behind it!"  Later in life I realised that since humans have discovered clothes and all is hidden, the ladies are not attracted by the size of your todger but the size of your Porsche!  See, that's Darwinian selection theory at work, innit?!

 

ADDITIONAL:  As this blog has now left all semblance of taste and polite discourse behind it, allow me to give you, via the good offices of Drudge, the headline of the year:

Witnesses: Man drove 90 mph with genitals hanging out the window

And, according to the report from News Channel 11, I think this incident could be described as the perfect example of someone risking getting their own back:
 

"At over 90 miles per hour, he had his penis out [the window]... he was
masturbating... and that's when it got really, really bad.

He was probably reduced to this technique because his car was not a Porsche!

 

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Nagel or Nagle, who cares, they both sound interesting

I wrote about naughty Thomas Nagel back in January.  He has had the temerity to write a book pointing out 'the bleedin' obvious' that Darwinism cannot explain consciousness.  Now he has popped up again in Arts & Letters Daily which pointed me to an essay in The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier.  He describes the 'shock 'n' awe outrage' in Darwinian circles at Mr. Nagel's slim little book Mind and Cosmos:

[I]n which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions [...]

The one almost certain reaction from 'Darwinistas' (just like the 'Warmers') facing a critique of their beliefs is a screech of rage:

Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained.

Thus, in my eyes, Mr. Pinker sinks to the level of 'Bishop' Dawkins!  Nagel had warned earlier that any criticism of the 'Church of Darwinism' was likely to cause the formation of a mob and indeed that is what has occurred on publication of his recent book - if, that is, you can call a bunch of 'tweeters' a mob:

A mob is indeed forming, a mob of materialists, of free-thinking inquisitors. “In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against religion,” Nagel calmly writes, “... I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” This cannot be allowed! And so the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Secular Faith sprang into action. “If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.” I hope that one day he regrets that sentence. It is not what Bruno, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Kant, and the other victims of the anti-philosophical Vatican had in mind.

No doubt Mr. Simon Blackburn would call himself a 'liberal' - yeeeees, quite!  But let us turn from one load of old rubbish, the 'Darwinistas', to another, and here I mean real rubbish as studied for some ten years by my other 'Nagel/Nagle', Prof. Robin Nagle.  She is a professor at New York University and has spent her time studying the 'Noo Yawk' garbage industry.  I don't wish to be ungallant but whilst she might be the clinical associate professor of anthropology and urban studies, and from her photo looks to be a very attractive and elegant lady, my advice would be remain up wind of her as far as you can!  Lawrence Biemiller at 'The Chron of High Ed' refers to her as 'Dr. Garbage':

So several dozen sanitation workers waiting for roll call take notice when, a
little before 6 a.m., she strides cheerfully into the sodium-­vapor glare of the
Manhattan 2 garage, a hulking yellow-brick relic of mid-20th-century New York
that juts into the Hudson from the West Village. A sidelined collection
truck—what most people would just call a garbage truck—sits outside the door,
while salt spreaders are parked cheek by jowl inside (sanitation workers are
responsible for clearing snow as well as collecting trash). Over by the office,
guys are standing around in boisterous groups, sipping coffee, telling stories,
ribbing one another, and waiting to get their assignments for the day.

Several recognize Ms. Nagle. In some cases, that's because she has worked
alongside them—about 10 years ago, she decided that the best way to do field
research on the department was to get hired as an ordinary sanitation worker and
see DSNY from inside its lunchrooms and transfer facilities, to say nothing of
seeing it from behind the gaping maws of its trucks. Other guys know her because
she rode with them while collecting information for Picking Up, her new
book about the department and its people, or for one of her related projects,
like a series of oral histories she assigned as a class project at NYU two years
ago.

Admittedly, garbage collection and disposal is a somewhat esoteric subject but on the other hand, were I paying taxes in 'Noo Yawk' I would be very interested to learn that their dustmen (as we call them 'over here') can retire on half pay and full benefits after a mere 22 years service!  I am sure there were all sorts of other highly interesting facts in Mr. Bielmiller's essay but that one stuck in my mind, rather as it will, I suspect, stick in the craws of many 'Noo Yawkers'!

  

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Walk tall!

Via the always excellent Arts & Letters Daily I was taken with an article in The Smart Set by Wayne Curtis on the fascinating subject of, well, er, walking, actually!  The act of walking has played a large part in my somewhat boring life.  In the infantry I did a lot of it and thereby grew to loathe it.  In my lot it was called 'tab-ing', that is, 'Tactical Advance to Battle', or, 'put that enormous load of kit on your back, you 'orrible little man, and carry it several miles over those hills and you'll be on jankers for the rest of your misbegotten life if you drop out!'

Then, of course, there was the endless repetition of that other form of military walking - marching!  How many hours of my precious life did I waste marching up, down, to and fro, backwards and forwards across those Aldershot parade grounds?  To be fair, unlike the 'wooden tops' (Her Maj's Brigade of Guards) we did not go in for a lot of marching and drill on the very sensible grounds that we were crap - think 'Dad's Army' with attitude!  Any and every attempt to "Fix bayonets!" invariably ended up with a clatter as a third of them landed on the ground.  Practicing for our very rare attempt to troop our colour, a thing the 'wooden tops' do annually, regularly produced the equivalent of a six-lane pile-up on 'spaghetti junction' sending our (ex-Guards!) Regimental Sergeant-Major into paroxysms of fury - and us into helpless giggles!

In his article, Mr. Curtis directs our attention to the several different ways of military marching other nations have developed.  The obvious beginner is the hideously ugly and utterly ludicrous goose-step:

For the past century or so, the goose step has been used chiefly in totalitarian regimes — that is, states where it’s exceedingly inadvisable to laugh at the military. (George Orwell wrote in 1940, “Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me.’”) Today, the goose step is about as commonly seen as the Hitler’s toothbrush mustache, although it does live on vestigially among some ceremonial guards (Greece’s parliament, Moscow’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) and in a faraway, possibly mythical, land called North Korea. 

It certainly does live on and takes some unusual forms:

Whether this picture was taken in China, North K0rea or at the Folies Bergère , I am not sure.  However, Mr. Curtis informs us that the French army developed its own method of marching:

Meanwhile, across the border in France, the French military has also long been interested in teaching its infantry how to march, although with an eye less to the ceremonial and more to the practical. At the end of the 19th century, the French Army emerged as the leading proponent of the slouchy, somewhat slovenly “bent-knee” method of long-marching. The gait was modeled after infants learning to walk, with knees angled and the body pitching slightly forward. The idea was that, by leaning in the direction of travel, gravity would pull you along and make it easier to cover vast distances with less energy.

This method of marching is known as 'the French scuttle', er, for obvious reasons!

Later, in my more, um, aesthetic days as, admittedly, a less than distinguished actor I gradually learned that good actors try and work out if the role they are playing can be partly expressed through the supposed gait of the character concerned.  Even a moment's thought would warn any semi-intelligent actor to treat this very, very carefully because the difference between, say, Anthony Sher's brilliant, crutch-hopping Richard III and The Art of Coarse Acting is miniscule.  One of my earlier efforts to walk 'in character' drew a remark from the director that it was not a panto and that I was not playing Long John Silver - bitch!

Yes, yes, there is a point to all this, just be patient! Mr. Curtis points to the future (it's a habit with young men, I find) and tells us that some university swots are working on a method of digitally filming individuals walking in order to identify them by their gait.  Everyone, as - ahem! - any decent actor will tell you, has an entirely individual way of walking.  Thus, like fingerprints and retina scans, the technique has possibilities in the world of security.  "Not a lotta people know that" and now, I suppose, you wish you didn't either!

 

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In which I forecast, with my usual accuracy, the future of the universe

Now, we've been over all this before, yes, I did make a couple of boo-boos in predicting the results of some totally unimportant American elections but that was only because I was concentrating on higher things, such as the future of the universe.  Happily, I can now inform you of the results of my sustained and concentrated cogitations - this is what the universe will look like in x-zillion years:

 

Oooops, sorry, wrong picture, that, of course, is actually a picture of an electronvolt doing, er, whatever electronvolts do - and you already know all that so there is no need for me to explain (thank God!)  Right, back to the future of the universe.

On second thoughts, perhaps I had better own up and admit that it isn't actually my forecast.  I mean, I was nearly there with my theory but this terrific swot called Dr Joseph Lykken just beat me to it.  According to him:

A concept known as vacuum instability could result, billions of years from now, in a new universe opening up in the present one and replacing it. [My emphasis]

To be honest, I thought "vacuum instability" was a description of my efforts at hoovering the house under the influence of a couple of dry martinis! Anyway, the new theory all depends on this Higgs-thingie they tripped over in the corridor at CERN the other day.  The swots had been looking for it for ages and there it was rolling around on the floor just outside the gent's loo.  Dr. Lykken seized upon it and has been looking at it this way and that and finally come up with this theory that because of the Higgs particle the old universe will turn into a brand new universe, a bit like the old bits of 'shrapnel' I used to flog to the unwary would inevitably end up as 'Iggs particles themselves, via the good office of 'Arry 'Iggs: Scrap Metal Dealership, and then, following some recycling, they no doubt rolled off the production line at Dagenham once again.

To be honest (and when a second-hand car dealer, even a retired one, says that - check your wallet!) I was prepared to add my not undistinguished name in support of Dr. Lykken's theory - until I read some Dread Words in the BBC report:

"It turns out there's a calculation you can do in our Standard Model [my emphasis] of particle physics, once you know the mass of the Higgs boson," explained Dr Joseph Lykken.

Oh no, I thought, not those standard bloody models again!  Don't the swots at CERN know that the climate scientologists have utterly destroyed the whole concept of 'standard models'?  They built their entire farrago of global warming nonsense on the basis of 'standard models' and nobody with more than two brain cells - so that excuses the present government - believes anything they forecast.

Sorry, Dr. Lykken, only 'E' for Effort this time, must try harder - back to the lab, I fear!

 

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If you seek a true seer then, er, look no further!

Yes, indeed, my predictions for the future are beyond compare.  Alright, so I mis-called a couple of presidential elections but, hey, what does it matter, once they're in office they mostly all turn out to be chumps so who cares who wins!  But when it comes to the really important things, like the future of our planet, then I'm the man who calls it the way it will be.

For example, I have been issuing warnings for absolute ages about those noisy, inconsiderate neighbours across the other side of the Milky Way who keep getting drunk and throwing bits of builder's rubble across at us.  I even, out of the kindness of my heart, offered this new alarmist cause to that sad bunch of derelicts squatting over at Deltoid who continue to cling, like shipwrecked mariners, to the flotsam of their global warming cause.  I do realise, you see, that those sorts of people do have a psychological need for a really alarming end-of-the world scenario to make their otherwise dreary lives exciting - and it's the only way they can pull a bird at a party! 

Anyway, they ignored my kind offer, in fact they sneered at it.  But now, you see what I foresaw!  This week an enormous lump of rock just missed us by a few thousand miles.  In cosmic terms that's closer than a gnat's whisker but the neighbours, irritated by the miss, then sent over a shower of smaller rubble.  Happily, they all landed in Russia - so not all bad, then! - in fact given that Russia is already mostly rubble I'm surprised they noticed.  But never say I didn't warn you!

I have suggested to the sad little Climate Scientologists over at Deltoid that they take up this new alarmist cause in order to save themselves from further embarrasment given that their climate forecasts have proved to be rubbish.  I have even given this new cause a name - Cosmic Rubble Against People, or, CRAP, as it will be known.  Sorry, I didn't quite catch that  . . .

 

 

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Back to the beginning

I still remain fixated, well, fixated for five minutes at a time after which my head aches, with this problem of the very first incident of inanimate matter becoming suffused with life.  What's the problem you ask?  Well, after the 'Big Bang' it is surely the Singularity of Singularities.  Absolutely everything that has ever lived, that lives now and that will live in the future depended utterly on that single little chemical burp which resulted in biology.  As Matt Ridley puts it:

The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature.  GCA means an arginine and GCG means an alanine - in bats, in beetles, in bacteria.  They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures insulphorous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses.  Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code.  All life is one.  The generic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature.  We all use exactly the same language.  This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born.

Matt Ridley: Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 1999, p21.

"One single event"!  Can that be right? It seems like it because we all, from people to plants, bacteria to baboons, share the same genetic 'language' and presumably if some other bits of matter had been kick-started in the same environment at that time then there would have been a plethora of different languages - and one shudders to imagine the chaos that would have been created! As it is, the human genome which was thought likely to contain at least 100,000 genes turned out to consist of only 26,000, and that is a mere 5,000 more than - a blind, millimetre-long roundworm!  So, one single event, in one single place in certain very specific conditions.  What are the chances of that?  Of course, the 'Dawkinistas' will propose, on nil evidence so far, that life probably exists on other planets in the cosmos, hence their desperate hopes that signs of life will be found on Mars.  There may well be signs there but if and when they are found they need to be treated with great caution and scepticism because, like global warming, inference will become fact overnight!

Anyway, we are left ruminating on the great, nay, humungous, singularity of the start of life on our planet and then we have to consider those absolutely critical, six physical constants which, had any of them varied by a hair's width (or the physics equivalent thereof) then the whole bloody universe would not have been possible.  Makes you think, doesn't it?  Well, it might make you think - it gives me a headache!

Incidentally, I'm on an away-day tomorrow, back on Wednesday. 

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The gallant charge of the Nagel Brigade

No, not another military anecdote, although it is concerned with the 'war' between philosophers and scientists.  Not, I hasten to add, that I qualify under either title, my part, as always, is to act as an unreliable cheerleader who supports one side and then the other!

But let me begin with young Brian Cox, 151/2, a super-science swot from the Upper Fifth who somehow has managed to get himself an entire programme on BBC2 teaching us all how life began and why.  Except, of course, that he didn't quite explain how life began and nor did he convince me of his reason why.  Partly, this was due to the retards in the BBC production team who seem to think that we, the plebs, will never understand science unless there are never-ending and totally incomprehensible computer graphics showing abstract shapes expanding and surging to the sort of ghastly 'musak' you hear inside hotel lifts.  Of course, Prof. Cox is not really a schoolboy, he just looks like one, as this photos shows:

 

Now, I was one of his earliest fans because he and a colleague wrote a book promising the irreducibly stupid, er, that's me, in case you're wondering, to explain Einstein's theories of relativity.  Big Fail!  But as I wrote at the time, 'the fault, dear, dim Duff, lies with you, not in your stars'!  Even so, I remain a big fan of Prof. Cox and, as regular readers will know to the cost of their diminishing patience, I remain captivated by some of the many mysteries of existence. Like, how did it all begin?

As far as the beginning of biological life is concerned, I'm afraid to say that young Cox was no more illuminating than his peers.  I concentrated as hard as I could, despite all the BBC visual effects crapulata and the vomit-inducing 'musak', but all he offered was what I more or less knew from others.  That is definitely not a criticism of Prof. Cox who was not on my 'telly' to offer a new theory, he was just there to explain the old one, because the fact is that none of these science swots actually know quite what the spark was that turned inanimate material into living, reproducing organisms.  They seem to have a fair idea on the ingredients and the conditions required, and the likely place in which it probably occurred - way down deep in the ocean amongst the nooks and crannies on the seabed - so it's farewell to the old 'primordial mud' which used to be the favourite as the start point of life years ago - pity, really, I quite like the idea of us all crawling out of mud!  Anyway, that missing 'x' factor continues to plague science and it is interesting that every effort to reproduce the conditions inside a lab have all failed.

So, needless to say, I tottered off to bed with a headache and awoke this morning pondering on the problem as I drove to the swimming pool - have I told you before about . . . right, moving on - and it was still festering in what passes for my brain when I sat down at the computer and virtually one of the first items I came across, courtesy of Arts & Letters, was a review in the New York Review of Books by Prof. H. Allen Orr, a biologist, of a book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.  The title of his book appears to sum up the content:  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  'Luvin' it already,' I thought because I will always offer to hold the coat of anyone taking a swing at 'Archbishop' Dawkins!

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.

I could feel my headache returning!  However, it soon became obvious that Prof. Orr's mum and dad had brought him up properly because, unlike the insufferable Dawkins, he admitted some of the doubtful areas in modern biological explanations whilst applying a cool but critical attutude to some of Mr. Nagel's other theories, especially his main one which was to propose a teleological imperative behind the universe whilst simultaneously excluding any sort of God.  And, no, I'm not sure how Nagel pulled that one off but with great courtesy Prof Orr expressed his doubts.

Anyway, it's five to eleven and time for my life-saving caffein injection which I hope will cure my headache.  I recommend Prof. Orr's review, an example of the very best sort of scientific writing for the non-scientist and if it gives you a headache too, well, I like to share my troubles, I'm generous like that!

 

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Churnalism: noun: the act of recycling crap

I am obliged to my regular commenter and fellow blogger, A. K. Haart, for nudging me into this contemporary tale of journalistic incompetence.  Incidentally, I recommend AK's blog.  He manages to say in a brief but elegant paragraph what would take me several pages to express.  This is because he thinks before he writes, unlike, er, well, moving on . . .

I expect, like me, you picked up from the MSM out of the corner of your eyes or ears the 'news' that incidents of asthma in 'likkle-kiddie-winkies' had dropped in the UK since the imposition of the smoking ban.  Since, by definition, all my readers are wise I expect that like me you muttered the word 'crap' under your breath and forgot about it.  Well, if you stopped and actually thought, let alone investigated all the crap stories in the MSM you wouldn't have time to read my, and 'AK's, excellent blogs, would you?!  And again, you know that you can rely on us - er, well, him, actually - to seek out one of those many and tremendous brain-boxes who inhabit Blogdom and who seem to have the necessary qualifications to investigate all the crap in the MSM; that is, they possess brains, time and diligence.  Thus it was for this story and 'AK', in just one sentence (unlike the two paragraphs it's taking me!), pointed me towards Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, whose owner, Mr. Christopher Snowdon, has pure, unadulterated scepticism flowing through his veins.

I will not attempt to summarise his analysis because I want you all to take the time - oh, go on! - to read it for yourself.  However, I will add, in view of my recent post concerning the less than imperial standard science emanating from Prof. Joanna Haigh of Imperial College, that as this insitution has associated itself with the unscrupulous agit-prop activists who wrote this garbage, I fear for their reputation.  Perhaps my other regular reader and commenter, 'DM', a university science swot, himself, might have something to add to that particular aspect.  Well, there's nothing like an academic punch-up, beats a WWE bout any day of the week!  Where was I  . . .?

Oh yes, the main point of this particular post - which has now only taken three paragraphs to reach! - is the perennial problem that is the MSM.  Actually, the problem may be diminished somewhat because the printed version of it, as opposed to the broadcasters, is dying on its feet and deservedly so.  The myth, perpetrated by Hollywood and bolstered by sundry 'novels', of the truth-seeking journalist battling against the odds to 'tell it the way it is' simply reduces one to giggles these days.  The fact is that most journalists, most of the time, simply suck off the teat of ersatz crap like this non-story concerning asthma cases in children.  They swallow it whole and then regurgitate it onto us and, as I indicated above, we mutter 'crap' under our breath and move on - so is it any wonder that the prints are dying?

I realise that time is money and that the newspapers blame the denizens of Blogdom for their falling circulation but why have none of them spotted the bleedin' obvious?  If, in fact, it is the likes of Mr. Snowdon who have the time and brains to produce the facts about a story then why not pay them for their trouble - or better still, just steal it, like I do from time to time (although I do always try to give acknowledgments)!  If, perhaps for near tragic reasons, you are interested in the subject of asthma in children then you would find Mr. Snowdon's report much more interesting than the obvious bilge provided by those anti-smoking fanatics which the prints repeated without comment.  Perhaps it is that "old common arbitrator, Time" which is the problem and perhaps that is an explanation of why the weekly Spectator actually flourishes and makes a profit for its owners.  'The Speccie' has the time over seven days to consider its articles and, whilst it leans towards the libertarian Right, it is prepared to publish articles from Right, Left and Centre provided they are thoughtful.  If I were an editor of a daily newspaper I would have at least one  page reserved for follow-up stories taken from the internet to correct or expand on original reports.  This might actually make them worth reading again.

In the meantime, get over to Mr. Snowdon, via 'AK', of course, and thereby edge a little closer to that damnedly tricky essence - The Truth!

 

 

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Oooops! Apparantly CO2 causes global cooling not warming!

As you lie awake at night wondering how to find the money to pay your heating bill which is that much bigger because you're paying subsidies to the likes of Tim Yeo MP and his company to produce hideously expensive non-carbon energy, I thought you would like to know that all that screeching from the HAFs that carbon emissions were going to boil the globe were, well, hot air, actually!

Here, courtesy of WUWT and one of their regular readers, Mr. Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer, is a diagram comparing the emissions of 1983 to 1997 against those of 1998 to 2012.  As any 'fule do know', courtesy of China, India and most of south east Asia, the amount of CO2 pumped out has hugely increased, by about a third, actually.  And guess what, the earth has cooled not heated!  

HEALTH WARNING: The essence of this diagram appears to be accurate but the design exaggerates the visual effect!  Read the 'comments' thread at WUWT.

Stand by for the screech of brakes and the sight and sound of the HAFs doing 'a hand-brake U-iee' as the campaign against carbon emissions continues but this time because it is absolutely, and definitely, 'on me muvver's eyes', going to cause global freezing!

In the meantime, sensible people will watch and measure carefully the effects of CO2 emissions but not leap to conclusions about its effects without hard evidence.

ADDITIONAL:  Here's another chart showing the same data:

 

 

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Would you buy a used-car from Prof.Joanna Haigh of Imperial College?

I ask because 'The Tall Bloke' reckons she's a bit dodgy, know wot I mean, John?  Like, you'd need ter check the mileage twice over, see!  Just kidding, I'm sure Prof. Haigh is impeccably honest in her personal dealings but when it comes to a scientific dispute she does need to be watched most carefully.

The other day you may have noticed dear old Boris going off on one of his inconsequential rambles this time on the subject of so-called global warming of which, he intimated, he had some severe doubts.  This provoked Prof. Haigh into dashing off a letter to The Telegraph:

SIR – As a professor of atmospheric physics, at Imperial College London, I’m delighted that Boris Johnson maintains his interest in weather and climate (“It’s snowing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age”, Comment, January 21), but he should be wary of drawing generalised conclusions from his observations. He suggests that the cold weather is due to declining solar activity – but the sun is more active now than it has been since 2009, and about the same as it was in 2004 and 1998. What we have is the lovely variability of British weather sitting on top of a long-term global average warming due to greenhouse gas increases. This is not an issue of opinion, but one of basic physics.

We don’t need to invoke mysterious solar particles to understand long-term trends.

Professor Joanna Haigh
London SW7

 

Naughty, Professor Haigh, I can only give you an 'E' for Effort for that one! 

You see, what she has done is to take the top of the very weak and feeble peak of the current sunspot cycle #24 and compared it to a couple of points only halfway up and halfway down on the preceeding cycle #23!  The proper comparison would have been between the peaks of both which would have shown a remarkable drop in activity - which may, or may not, be a factor in global climate.

To paraphrase the learn-ed Professor rather naughtily: 'What we have is the lovely variability of British HAFs sitting on top of a mirage of non-existent long-term global average warming not due very much to greenhouse gas increases'.  Yes, that's more like it!

These 'cli-scies', honestly, it's the way they tell 'em!

 

H/T to Paul Matthews, a commenter on the Telegraph blogs who kept his eye on the pea!

 

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The HAFs are even worse than me at forecasting

This blog stands proudly on the rubble of its forecasting reputation, it being the product of the daft old coot somewhat myopic old gentleman who runs this place!  However, when it comes to getting things hopelessly wrong on a regular basis we have nothing on the peer-reviewed (as they constantly remind us!) prats who constitute what I call the HAFs - the Hot Air Fanatics.  Nobody, surely, needs to be reminded of Paul Ehrlich's daft bet (with Julian Simon) that his even dafter forecast of huge rises in the cost of raw materials would come true over ten years - it didn't but to his credit he paid up.

Then there were the sundry sillies who forecast the end of those nice 'cuddly-wuddly' polar bears.  Back in 2008, Prof. Armstrong of Pennsylvania University, wrote to Sen. Boxer, one of the dippiest Democrat politicians to rise to emminence in la-la-land California:

We found the forecasts of declining polar bear numbers contained in the government’s administrative reports were not the product of scientific forecasting methods. Given the large current population of bears and the upward trend in the population, our findings lead to the conclusion that there is no scientific basis for listing polar bears. Indeed, a reliance on evidence-based forecasting suggests that it is more likely that the polar bear population will increase rather than decrease.

In 2012, as reported by the Global Bet site, Paul Waldie in The Globe and Mail wrote:

“The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.”

Well, as the late Mr. Freddy Mercury put it, "Boom-boom, boom-boom, and another one bites the dust - heh-heh!"  But there are more, as the indefatigable Anthony Watts reports:

“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.

And what, according to yet more experts, is the major problem facing this country today - mass starvation?  Er, no, obesity, actually!

The Limits to Growth (1972) – projected the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993. It also stated that the world had only 33-49 years of aluminum resources left, which means we should run out sometime between 2005-2021. (See Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

Pity, Ms. Meadows, that you didn't live long enough to see just how daft you were, but then again, you were so daft you could have lived to be a hundred and still failed to notice the elephant in your living room!

Claim: In 1974, the US Geological Survey announced “at 1974 technology and 1974 price” the US had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.

Data: The American Gas Association said that gas supplies were sufficient for the next 1,000-2,500 years. (Julian Simon, Population Matters. New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1990): p. 90.

Heh, that trouble-maker Julian Simon again!  And today, thanks to fracking, the USA is on the way to being self-sufficient in energy.

Claim 1970: “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Paul Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970.

Has anyone been more wrong, more often and with greater consistency than Paul Ehrlich?  Anyway, moving closer to home on this snowy, freezing day, here is a report in “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The Independent. March 20, 2000:

“Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.”
“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and … are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters–which scientists are attributing to global climate change–produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.”
“London’s last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.” “Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community.”
According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” and winter snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.
“David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow.”

What can one say?  Except possibly to ask if Messrs. Viner and Parker have been fired and are today employed on road-gritting duties on our snow-covered highways?  Take that as a 'no', shall I?  Anyway, always positive, let me make a useful suggestion.  Burning Guy Fawkes's effigy every 5th of November is becoming rather pointless because our 'Skool Sistum' no longer teaches any history prior to the 1960s when sex was invented so it means nothing to our kiddie-winkies.  So instead, let's have an 'Ehrlich Day'.  We don't have to burn effigies of him, just have enormous blow-up balloons of him which, as the fireworks go off, we can release into the air and watch him whizz around in circles and deflate as all the hot air rushes out.  Can't wait!

Thanks to WUWT  and the original source David B. Mustard

 

It's no longer 'Warmers' vs. 'Deniers', it's 'Deniers' vs. 'Deniers'!

First the 'Good News'.  That bastion of politically (in)correct thinking, aka, NASA, has taken a gigantic step shuffled forward a tad!  Hitherto it has represented the High Church of the Anthropogenic Global Warming cult with its insistence that global warming was entirely due to man-made production of CO2.  For years they have resolutely turned their backs on that enormous ball of burning plasma in the sky and insisted that it was 'CO2 wot dunnit'.  Needless to say, they now find their backs scorched and blistered and have been forced to turn over.

Sorry, too much sarcasm and too many metaphoricals, so let me get to the point.  The ever-excellent WUWT reports that NASA has concluded a grand meeting of experts in just about every field concerned with the viciously complicated causes and effects of our global climate and finally they have admitted, cautiously and hedged around with various 'ifs', 'buts' and 'maybes', that there may be something in the theory that solar energy, in all its various forms, may have something to do with the earth's climate.

As a result we now have a fascinating and new debate on the pages of WUWT in which the 'usual suspects' in the AGW camp have been totally ignored because they are now irrelevant and instead a ferocious argument has broken out between what I am tempted (and I never resist temptation!) to call the 'Sun Worshippers' and the 'Sun Infidels'.  The latter are led by the stiff and unyielding, Dr. Lief Svelsgaard (a major sun-swot), who refuses absolutely to take any step in any direction without solid scientific proof.  Then there are his opponents who, so they maintain stoutly, keep offering him proofs which, they say, he keeps ignoring.

It's always a shame when friends fall out but at least those scattered remnants of the AGW cult have been put back where they belong - on the outer fringes.  That they have been shoved there by NASA, the spritual home of the likes of James Hansen and Michael Mann, spells doom for them and their potty ideas - at last.  I urge you to read the article and the comments thread, as good an example of controversial science at work as you will see anywhere.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/09/nasa-on-the-sun-tiny-variations-can-have-a-significant-effect-on-terrestrial-climate/#more-77253

'If irony be the food of humour, give me excess of it'!

Yes, yes, I know, cod Shakespeare (sorry Will!) but today I have a huge, 'gi-normous' dollop of irony, enough for me to surfeit on for weeks!  You see, that 'solitary, nasty, (Leftish), brutish and short' little thug who runs Venezuela (sorry, Hobbes, old chap!) is dying of cancer in a Cuban hospital.  Truly now it may be said that 'El Presidente-Comisario' Chavez is dying for his beliefs.  Being (allegedly) a true red Marxist he has swallowed whole the lying lie, which was helped on its way round the world by the lying liars' lying liar of choice, Michael Moore, that Cuba's socialist health service is terrific, one might almost suggest that it has taken over from our very own, dearly beloved Nationalised Health Service as being "the envy of the world".  The fact, of course, is that the Cuban health service is total crap, as reported by Investors.com:

Cuba by contrast, remains substandard, with average Cubans forced to bring  their own bandages, water and sheets to hospitals that haven't seen repairs in  years.

Recent reports say Cuba cut medical spending from $209 million in 2009 to  $190 million last year — "bending the cost curve" by giving less care. Sound  familiar?

When Chavez was first diagnosed with cancer he was offered the services of the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil which is considered to be a world leader in cancer treatments.

His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist  propaganda and bad choices that came of it.

"In July 2011, during (a)... summit in Caracas, Brazil's President, Dilma  Rousseff, told a few of her colleagues — in private — that Chavez was likely to  die as a result of 'his excessive paranoia rather than as a consequence of his  serious — yet treatable — cancer,'" wrote Venezuelan consultant Pedro Burelli in  a newsletter.

"What she meant to say," Burelli added, "was that by choosing secrecy in Cuba  over medical competence at the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo (where she  had been treated successfully for lymphatic cancer) Chavez had condemned himself  to a shorter life."

Perhaps he was conned by Michael Moore's 1998 propaganda film, Sicko, which praised 'Castro-Care' to the heavens.  If so, it is obvious that one lying liar couldn't spot another even if they were both together on a desert island!

As Chavez suffers through four surgeries in Cuba, it's instructive to note it  was the Brazilian hospital — a teaching institution with top-of-the-line  tomotherapy equipment, 2,000 doctors, and a record of success for beating cancer  — that cured Rousseff as well as then-President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay. But  it gets no recognition from the likes of Moore, who still promotes CastroCare on  his Web site, while ignoring the private U.S. hospitals the Brazilians model  themselves after.

To be fair, Chavez is far from being the worst of South American gangsters masquerading as national saviours but even so, he had choices and he took one - and you know what those beastly American gringos say about giving a sucker an even break - "Never"!

 

Commonsense from the Commons - SHLOCK-HORROR!

Intelligent thinking  - well, any sort of thinking, really - is fairly rare in Westminster but we have an excellent example of it today in the form of a report from the Defence Committee as reported in The Telegraph:

James Arbuthnot, committee chairman, said: “"It is our view that cyber
security is a sufficiently urgent, significant and complex activity to warrant
increased ministerial attention.

"The Government needs to put in place – as it has not yet done – mechanisms,
people, education, skills, thinking and policies which take into account both
the opportunities and the vulnerabilities which cyberspace presents."

The catastrophic shambles that would ensue across the country if a cyber attack was only partially successful hardly bears thinking about.  I don't believe many of us are even aware of the huge complexity of the networks which support almost all aspects of our lives and daily business.  It is only when one breaks down, usually due to human error, that we are momentarily shocked, like that recent bank 'snafu' when suddenly cheques and money transfers failed.  Imagine if, say, 50% of our networks across a whole range of activities were damaged or destroyed - what then?  Even more to the point would be the effect on our armed forces:

The defence committee report concluded: “The armed forces now so dependent on
information and communications technology, should such systems suffer a
sustained cyber attack, their ability to operate could be fatally compromised,"
the committee said.

It said there was an “inevitable inadequacy of the measures available to
protect against a constantly changing and evolving threat” and that it was not
enough for armed forces just to “do their best” to prevent an effective attack.

The extent of information and communication technology in weapons, satellite
and intelligence systems means “many more points of vulnerability”.

Currently, there are some major cuts slashing away at our armed services, and quite right, too, in my opinion, but some serious money should be spent on the creation of a joint military and civil agency to combat cyber warfare.  This will not be cheap - the top people in 'computeronics' (there, a little neologism just for you!) demand and receive top money but it has to be done and done quickly.  It's no good depending on the generals and admirals, they don't understand it any more than you or I, and frankly, if it doesn't go bang they are not very interested!  What we need is a leader from the computer/software industry, provided with a massive budget to set up an entirely new agency.  It needs the Prime Minister to get behind the project and push it through as a matter of urgency - oh dear, why do I suddenly feel depressed?

 

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"Watch the pea, very, very carefully."

That's the order from the 'Tallbloke' and as I am not particularly tall, I'll just do as I'm told!  And it's worth it because he neatly eviscerates a paper produced by some of the cult leaders of the 'AGW scientology' movement, the likes of Ben Santer, Susan Solomon, Tom Wigley, Julie Arblaster and Peter Stott.  These worthies have produced a paper entitled: ‘Identifying human influences on atmospheric temperature’.  In it, they attempt, quite rightly and admirably, to differentiate between solar influence, man-made influence and "the noise [my emphasis] of internally generated variability" influence as causes of the rise in global temperatures in the latter part of the 20th century.  But now it becomes necessary to watch the pea!

What they have actually done is to conflate outside influences, the sun, etc, with man-made influences so that now the 'anthropological' element of so-called 'Anthropological Global Warming' (AGW) is quietly lost in the 'noise':

The main bone of contention in the climate debate is the question of whether the late 20th century warming was predominantly caused by the more active than average Sun, some longer term modes of internal variability, or by increasing human emission of carbon dioxide. Now the ‘Team’ is trying to conflate the solar influence with human influence and contrast these two entirely different factors with internal natural variability, which they call ‘noise’.

This panicking effort to hide the effect(?) of CO2 is essential because, of course, it is man-made CO2 which the hystericals have pointed at and blamed for causing global warming.  However, in the past 15 to 20 years there has been hardly any warming at all and yet China, India and most of South East Asia has been pumping out CO2 in, literally, eye-watering amounts. If in fact, global variations in climate are simply the result of natural cycles, or, the sun having a bout of acne and throwing out a gale-force of cosmic rays, or whatever, then the political red meat in the AGW movement simply disappears - along with all of their wretched agitators.

The fact that it is their so-called experts who have been forced to own up even as they try to obfuscate the truth is utterly damning.

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The Sunday Rumble 7/01/13

It's the solar rays wot dunnit!  Once again this blog was wrong - so no surprise there, then!  In fact, this blog is pissed off with having to keep owning up to errors but then again, no-one in their right mind pays any attention to what is written here, so what's the problem?!  Anyway, my frequent dire warnings and my shaking, accusatory finger-pointing at those nasty little sun spots as being the cause of all our good/bad weather was wrong.  At least, that is according to Dr. Leif Svalgaard, the well-known Scandinavian spelling mistake and the expert of all experts when it comes to solar matters.  He has written an article over at WUWT which I urge you all to read, not least because I don't see why I should be the only one with a headache this Sunday.  It is also worth reading the entire comments thread - just take a handful of paracetamol first - because sundry swots add in their expertise and slowly - very slowly as far as I am concerned - you begin to grasp, not the absolute truth of the matter, but the complexity of it all and the way in which first-class scientists, like Svalgaard, inch their way slowly and carefully towards some tentative conclusions.  One of which appears to be some sort of correlation between cosmic rays emitted from the sun and the formation, or not, of cloud cover on earth which, of course, even a scientific twit like me can see would alter our climate to some extent. 

The '50s: Heaven or Hell?  I grew up during the 1950s in the pleasant county of Surrey.  As a 'family' unit my Mum and I were exceedingly hard-up although I never sensed it at the time because whilst there were never any luxuries equally there were never any shortage of absolute essentials.  So for me, the '50s were heaven, or as near to it as you can get on earth.  Of course, it was a time when public propriety went hand-in-hand with private promiscuity as, according to the  reviews of An English Affair by Richard Davenport-Hines, was the case with the Profumo affair. So no change there, then!  From the reviews I gather that Davenport-Hines was shocked - shocked, I tell you - by the rank hypocrisy of the ruling class to which I can only respond with a yawn.  One only requires a slight knowledge of 'dear Bertie's' efforts to shag for Empire, or, going further back, to the dear old 'Duke of Boot' and his 'heroic' efforts to defeat 'feelthy' French hints that we Brits were not really up to the job whilst on the job!  Anyway, one result of the scandal was that henceforth hypocrisy, that is, the wilful practice of hiding one's sins because of shame, has disappeared and today anyone and everyone is advised to 'let it all hang out' so shame has been banished.  Well, bring back the era of hypocrisy, I say.  (By the way, Profumo once shook my hand and if I had known then where it had been I would never have washed it again!)

Chicago should follow LA:  Let not Mayor Rahm Emanuel put it about that this blog has it in for his 'Windy City'.  Absolutely not, even if the body count last year was at record heights and that in the first three days of this year, five more people were murdered.  Despite all that, this blog is eager to assist the mayor in his valiant efforts to cut the killing - er, he is making efforts, isn't he?  Anyway, eager to be of assistance might I suggest that he begins by introducing strict hammer and club control laws because according to the FBI, no less, more people are killed with those implements than with rifles!  Next, he should begin a vigorous campaign to attract Latinos to his city because according to a city cop with the Los Angeles Police Department commenting on the drop in crime stats in his city, a goodly part of it is due to the influx of Latinos pushing out Blacks.  Ooops, perhaps that was a tad blunt, so allow me to re-phrase it in 'PC-lingo for the cringo', let's just call it a "demographic shift", there, that's much nicer, isn't it?

The Plods get it right and wrong:  I noticed somewhere, I forget exactly where, someone moaning that Scotland Yard were wasting public time and money in putting 30+ officers onto the task of investigating the so-called 'Plodgate case' involving the ex-Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell.  I care nothing either way for Mr. Mitchell whose efforts at the Ministry of Overseas Aid should have led to him being put naked in the stocks in Parliament Square so that we could all pelt him with rotten veg.  However, if - and it still remains an 'if' - there was a concerted effort by a gang (I use the word deliberately) of police officers to 'fit up' a government minister then absolutely every effort should be made to uncover it.  It strikes with deadly accuracy at the very heart of our democracy.  What they should do, is cut down on the ridiculous investigation, now verging on a witch hunt, into various elderly gentlemen (er, well, men, anyway) accused by sundry old biddies of having touched them up as young girls but none of whom, as far as I know, were exactly kidnapped and raped!  I am also slightly miffed that I have not been questioned as yet!  I consider it a slur on my manhood because I certainly spent a considerable amount of time and energy attempting to touch up inappropriately as many young girls as I could get to stand or lie still long enough for me to do it.  Alas, truth will out, and the fact is that the number was distressingly tiny.  'E' for Effort - again!

 

 

Related articles

IoS book review: An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, By Richard Davenport-Hines

Why is a historian blackening the name of this Mail reporter who went to jail rather than betray a source?

Politicians Sleeping With Spooks; Vassall; Profumo

Christine Keeler 'was not mistress of KGB spy'

The un-true face of an eco-totalitarian

Looks harmless enough, doesn't he?  Nice smile, properly dressed, respectable-looking chap, could be your local choir-master, perhaps.  However, if like me you are an enthusiastic and determined opponent of HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) then - be afraid, be very afraid - because this man, Prof. Pratcunt Parncutt, wants you executed - and I kid you not!  He rates you as being worse, far worse, than that Norwegian mass killer who shot and blew up 77 people:

Even mass murderers should not be executed, in my opinion. Consider the politically motivated murder of 77 people in Norway in 2011. Of course the murderer does not deserve to live, and there is not the slightest doubt that he is guilty. But if the Norwegian government killed him, that would just increase the number of dead to 78. It would not bring the dead back to life. In fact, it would not achieve anything positive at all. I respect the families and friends of the victims if they feel differently about that. I am simply presenting what seems to me to be a logical argument.

But if you are against the theory of Global Warming that makes you guilty of the murder of, er, well, people who are not yet dead, and also those who have yet to be born, you see, you are a 'future killer'!  This is a novel extension of legal theory and it will be interesting, albeit, painfully interesting, to see if it catches on:

GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.

I must confess that as I began to read Prof. Pratcunt's Parncutt's essay I fell about laughing on the assumption that it was a giant, satirical hoax but then, gradually, I began to realise that he meant it:

If my argument is correct, it has clear political consequences. Here is a scenario for what might happen if my argument is broadly accepted, both democratically and politically.

•  
  • The universal declaration of human rights and every national constitution would be amended to include the rights of future generations. Incidentally, that would also make national debts illegal, because they oblige future generations to pay them. Getting rid of national debts would in turn solve an important aspect of the “global financial crisis” (more), which currently belongs to the list of common excuses for not investing money in the prevention of GW.

The proposed legal change would be announced and widely publicized for an extended period before it came into force. During that time, GW deniers would have a chance to change their ways and escape punishment.

The police would start to identify the most influential GW deniers who had not responded to the changed legal situation. These individuals would then be charged and brought to justice.

If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.

 

Apparently, he is "Professor of Systematic Musicology" at the University of Graz.  The coincidence that Austria is the birthplace of psycho-babble and that poor old Pratcunt Parncutt is obviously several sandwiches short of a picnic makes me wonder whether he's actually there to, er, 'take the cure', as it were!  Anyway, his ravings have gone viral on the internet and apparently he has now withdrawn the whole piece and replaced it with something more anodyne.  ("You zee, vee haf vays of making you zane again!")

In the interests of science I have conducted my own little experiment with the mouth-breathers over at Deltoid (pages 2&3).  I pointed out to them that I would not hold them liable for the fact that some loony had attached himself to their cause but it was incumbent upon them to repudiate what the man had suggested.  The silence has been deafening.  Oh, plenty of abuse aimed at me - but no repudiation of 'Pratcunt', not one.  By their inactions shall you know them!

 

Never mind the fracking, what about the fractals?

Up here in my garret the walls are covered in a variety of pictures.  Nothing of much merit.  Quite a lot of them are just old photos of drunken orgies from my past - well, to be truthful there was never much in the way of 'orgy' but there was plenty of drunkeness!  However, amongst them is a much treasured series of pictures, nicely framed, illustrating the Mandelbrot set - and, no, me neither until 1999, that is, when I directed Tom Stoppard's classic play Arcadia and I had to delve into the subject.

In writing this play Stoppard's endless curiosity takes him into the intricacies of chaos theory and the peculiarities of iterated algorithms - yeah, yeah, I know, but give me a chance and I'll try to explain it but don't expect to much in the way of accuracy!  If you have a mathematical equation which you work out to a result and you then feed the result back into the equation and re-work it out, and then do it again with the new result, and then again, and again, and so onfor  several zillion times that's called an iterated algorithm.  So far, so eye-stabbingly tedious . . . but!  Suddenly, as you plot the results on your graph with the line showing a steady, boring, predictable increase with each result, the line shoots off the graph for no apparent reason!  You check your equation, check your sums, but there it is, an inexplicable change.

I will pause for a second because even from here I can sense the sound of crashing bodies as sundry swots reading this faint away at my crass explanation - sorry, chaps, but 'sums' was never my strong point - oh, you guessed!

Anyway, this mathematical discovery has profound implications.  For example, the constant reproduction of biological cells in which sets of chemical equations are iterated normally with standard results, can sometimes, out of the blue, produce entirely unexpected results - either for good or ill! Even human reproduction can be looked at as another example of an iterated algorithm Here-in, perhaps, lies a very much better explanation for evolution than 'Archbishop' Dawkins' theory of tiny little incremental changes being forged, or destroyed, in the white heat of survival of the fittest.  Big changes wrought every so often by the mathematics of iterated algorithms would provide a more believable explanation for complex and infinitely variable living beings, as Richard Bird suggests in his book Chaos and Life.  In fact, human reproduction can be looked upon as an iterated equation as genetic codes are constantly melded together producing, so to speak, fairly standard people but occasionally throwing up quite exceptional human beings such as, for example . . . er, but modesty forbids!

Another area of iteration occurs in the natural world about us.  Look close up at a broccoli flower and you will see the same shape 'iterated' in the tiny flowers that make it up.  Put it under a microscope and you will see yet more repetitions. 

This characteristic in nature of endless repetitions at different scales is what attracted the attention of the late Benoit Mandelbrot, a Polish Jew who spent the war in hiding from the Nazis in occupied France, according to an article in The WSJ by Stephan Wolfram:

Mandelbrot ended up doing a great piece of science and identifying a much
stronger and more fundamental idea—put simply, that there are some geometric
shapes, which he called "fractals," that are equally "rough" at all scales. No
matter how close you look, they never get simpler, much as the section of a
rocky coastline you can see at your feet looks just as jagged as the stretch you
can see from space. This insight formed the core of his breakout 1975 book,
"Fractals."

[...]

There was no book like it. It was a new paradigm, both in presentation and in
the informal style of explanation it employed. Papers slowly started appearing
(quite often with Mandelbrot as co-author) that connected it to different
fields, such as biology and social science. Results were mixed and often
controversial. Did the paths traced by animals or graphs of stock prices really
have nested structures or follow exact power laws?

Below, courtesy of Wiki is an illustration of a Mandelbrot set in action and you can see how a simple pattern repeated can produce extraordinary complexity:

 

Anyway, that's enough bad science for today - my brain hurts and I suspect that my swot readers have suffered enough.

 

Ladies, buy your man a fur-lined jock strap!

And in return, chaps, treat your 'gal' to a fur-lined bra!  I kid you not because the evidence is mounting that the sun is, like me, going for nap.  You may, if you are up to it, read the whole of Anthony Watts's post entitled Our current solar cycle 24 – still in a slump – solar max reached? including the long and, in places, fearfully learn-ed (and often incomprehensible - to me, at any rate) commentary but I can save you the trouble and merely re-iterate my previous warnings to expect a deep chill over the next few years.  Mind you, let me add a quick caveat in the sensible words of the exceedingly intelligent, Willis Eschenbach, a distinguished writer on climate affairs:

No, please, no, no, no. I don’t want anyone sounding the dang alarm regarding ice any more than I want them sounding the heat alarm. I don’t appreciate people SHOUTING ABOUT THE COMING LITTLE ICE AGE any more than I care for people SHOUTING ABOUT THE COMING THERMAGEDDON. Future climates are unknown, get used to it. It might cool down … but then it might not. It might heat up … but then it might not.

Take a deep breath, things are not happening fast. Let’s learn some more about the climate and give up on predictions. If the Little Ice Age cometh, we’ll deal with it. If you want to be forewarned and prepared and corner the market on fur-lined jockstraps in anticipation of future earnings, that’s up to you. Me, I take another tack. Just like with the never-ending threats of global warning, I don’t pay the threat of global cooling any mind until I see actual evidence of a shift, either up or down.

Still waiting …

Climate, as opposed to weather, tends to change (relatively) slowly and steadily, it's never an exact line but gradually a trend appears.  When it does, that is the time to adapt.  In other words we must behave in exactly the opposite way to that indulged in by the 'Warmers' when they mistook a (very) slight rise in temperatures over the second half of the 20th century and rushed around in circles like Cpl. Jones shouting, "Don't panic, don't panic" whilst doing exactly that!

I confess to a complete ignorance on the intricacies of solar science.  My shame is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the actual scientists involved - just like scientists in every field of research - are themselves struggling to come to terms with their discoveries, not least because no sooner do they suggest a theory than someone else discovers something new and, hey-ho, it's back to the drawing-board.  However, I am able to offer you the findings of two truly rigorous, scientific experiments which defy falsification no matter what that old clever-clogs Karl Popper might say!

The first experiment is what I call the LJF measurement.  This is taken at the beginning of November and is a strict measurement of the actual day in which I feel the necessity of wearing my Long Johns!  (Look, stop that sniggering, if you're not going to take this seriously you will all get extra homework!)  In the last two years my LJ Factor began in December, the first time in years that I was forced into them before Christmas - and remember, I am always faced with a barrage of jokes, smirks and general rudery from the 'Memsahib, so I'm not that keen to wear them!  This year, the LJF began - in November!

My second strictly scientific test of changing climate comes from whittling, or non-whittling, to be precise, this being a scientific post and all that.  (Look, I won't warn you again ...!)  Approximately four years ago a friend indulged my idle remark to the effect that I have often wished to take up whittling but lacked suitable knives and wood.  Lo and behold, that Christmas he gave me several pieces of wood, all named, a superb and proper whittling knife, and a billy-basic book explaining the technique to the ignorant and the inept in which I qualified for both with distinction!  Of course, whittling being a messy business the 'Memsahib' insisted that it could only be done outside on the patio and I was to sweep up regularly.  Anyway, that summer I began and you would be amazed at what I produced, I mean, wonderful wasn't the word, darling!  But since then - nothing!  I even mislaid the whittling kit for a time because the last three summers have been so cold, wet and miserable that the last thing I wanted to do was sit outside.

So that's it - quod erat demonstrandum - as the swots always say.  We are definitely into a cool spell.  In the unlikely event of any 'Warmers' wandering in here to tell me that what I have experienced was just confined to the south west of England and has no connection ot the rest of the world, my reply is simple.  Who gives a flying fig for 'the rest of the world'?  All I'm interested in are two critical factors - here and me, that's 'me', as in 'ME, ME, ME'! and the rest of the world can look after itself!

In the meantime, take my advice and buy a scarf if you can't 'man up' enough to wear Long Johns!

 

An official 'go slow' here at D&N!

Yes, I'm afraid 'the trains will not be running on time' here at D&N due to a coincidence of events.  First of all, on Wednesday this blog is not so much taking a great leap forward as rather stumbling through the swing-door into the 21st century by up-dating to Microsoft 8.  In addition, as part of my effort to rejuvenate and once again lead a healthy, vigorous sex blog life I am having a new 'drive' fitted - and, no, I have no idea what a 'drive' is in 'computerese' but I am assured it will do me a power of good.  Needless to say, with all the cynicism aquired after 25 years in the second-hand car trade, I am prepared for the whole thing to splutter to a halt the first time I press a button!

However, despite that particular event there is something else causing a slow down at D&N and I blame Waka Waka Waka!  No, no, that is not some new Max Mosley-style party game for Christmas, Waka Waka Waka is the blog of my e-pal Malcolm Pollack who makes occasional appearances here in the 'Comments'.  He has written a post drawing attention to some other contemporary thinkers and writers who share my increasing misgivings concerning the direction and the ends pursued by so-called 'democracy'.  In particular, Malcolm points to a four-part series of essays written by Nick Land (no, me neither) who explores the historical and philosophical routes that have led, inexorably it seems, to where we are today, and the likely (in his view) outcome in a dim but not so distant future.

Nick Land, and the other writers he links to, raise huge questions which I, and I think several other readers of this blog, have sensed without perhaps, in my case, the intellectual or just plain, old-fashioned, educational ability to formulate them.  His essay runs to four fairly long parts and then, of course, there are the other writers he refers to who must also be read.  In the meantime, I am slowly and carefully working my way through Jonathan Sacks's book whilst simultaneously trying to snatch bits and pieces from Hans Zinserr's eccentric master-piece Rats, Lice and History.  I am uneasily aware that some of my recent posts have been, shall we say, cursory and whilst I know that you do not expect polished gems of wit and wisdom I really don't like scribbling too many 'space fillers'.  So, there will be a bit of a 'go slow' for a few days as I try to catch up with my reading and, even more tricky, attempt to assimilate its contents.  Except when I go 'off air' on Wednesday there will be the odd post but nothing too 'heavy'!

Anyway, in the meantime, get over to Malcolm's place and pick up his links to Nick Land and start reading!

 

Give me a kiss, sweetie, and I'll tell you!

That is my non-serious answer to a serious question raised by Prof. David P. Barash in The Chronicle of Higher Education, to wit, "The Evolutionary Mystery of Homosexuality".  Regular readers will know that whilst I accept (for the moment) evolutionary theory, that is, the concept that all living things evolved from preceding living things (except the first living thing which evolved from  . . . ?) I have and still have doubts concerning the notion of zillions of tiny incremental changes leading to the huge range of living forms we see about us today.  Nor do I totally subscribe to the idea that all changes to a life form which aid it in its efforts to reproduce is the sine qua non of biological success.  You can reproduce all you like but if our poor old globe suffers a solar minimum leading to an extended freeze, as it has done in the past, then you and yours die - end of!  In addition to several other objections to Darwin's theory that all living things win or lose (so to speak) depending on their success in 'the mating game' there is the hardy perennial of how it is that stern 'Mother Nature' continues to allow homosexuality to exist.  According to strict Darwinian and even stricter 'Dawkinsian' theory it should have died out eons ago.  But no, it flourishes still in every human society adding, dare I say, to the gaiety of nations!

In my numerous internet dog-fights with 'Darwinistas' and their first cousins, the 'Dawkinistas', I have never received a convincing response when I raise this awkward question.  Happily, Prof. Barash, whilst offering a wide survey of all the latest theories to explain this devilish tricky problem, comes up with - zilch! - nada! - bugger all!  Oddly enough, I was slightly disappointed because it is an irritant in what is otherwise a very smooth (too smooth?) theory but at least it demonstrates his scientific honesty.  He remains confident that sooner or later his fellow biological swots will come up with an answer.  My advice?  Don't hold your breath!

 

Jonathan Sacks reminds me of my ignorance!

The last time I mentioned a book by Jonathan Sacks called “The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning” I had just finished chapter  #1 and already I was jumping up and down with excitement.  Now I have finished chapter  #3, and yes, it is slow going but I am both savouring the words whilst simultaneously trying to ensure that I understand them correctly.  The result of all that effort is that I am even more enthusiastic for both the book and the author - and my brain hurts!

Sacks, who is, as it happens, the Chief Rabbi, puts forward in quiet, elegant and civilized English the notion that: “Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”  He then sets out to support this proposition.  He begins by returning to that esoteric specialty, the study of ancient texts.  He reminds the swots amongst you, but actually teaches me because I never knew it, that whilst the Old Testament was written in Hebrew the New Testament was almost certainly written in Greek.  In other words, the teachings of Christ were eventually written and saved for us in a language which Christ himself probably did not speak.  It was at that point that two very different influences were brought to bear on the whole fractured and fractious business of God and His nature and purpose.

Sacks suggests that these two differing ways of thinking about our existence is mirrored in the natural make up of our brains in which the left hemisphere tends to be the basis of rational, analytical thinking whilst the right is more concerned with empathy and relationships and emotion.  Thus, he concludes, the left side of the brain will concern itself with seeing how things work whilst the right will search for meaning.  In early times when written language was just evolving most languages, certainly Hebrew and Aramaic, had no symbols to denote the vowel sounds and the written language went from right to left.  Later, beginning with the Greeks, a written language evolved which included vowel symbols and the writing switched to left to right.  The coincidence, Sacks points out, that this revolutionary change occurred during the period in which Greek philosophy and science also began is more than just a coincidence.

To begin with, Sacks tells us, the two very different approaches to the mystery of existence – the Greek scientific approach and the Jewish/Christian mystical approach – went along hand in hand and with mutual respect.  The Rabbis of the time never questioned Greek analytics, in fact they frequently agreed with them, but they remained steadfastly to the view that whilst it explained the ‘hows’ it failed to explain the ‘whys’.  For ‘meaning’ to become clear it was necessary to look into men’s hearts.  This happy synthesis continued until the 16^th century when the truly amazing explosion of scientific knowledge began which drove a wedge between the two that remains more or less unbridged right up to this day.  In fact many of the scientists in their arrogance are now positively hostile to any idea of a remaining mystery.

But not all of them!  If you need your sense of wonder to be re-ignited turn to the book written by Lord Rees called “Just Six Numbers”.  These are the six ‘prime’ numbers, if you like, that simply had to be met – exactly and independently of each other – before our universe could exist in the form we know it and they are, therefore, the absolute bedrock for our existence.  Rees puts it thus:

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitiveto their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I take the view that it is neither. An infinity of other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile. We could only have emerged (and therefore we naturally now find ourselves) in a universe with the ‘right’ combination. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, on our place in it, and on the nature of physical laws.

It is astonishing that an expanding universe, whose starting point is so ‘simple’ that it can be specified by just a few numbers, can evolve (if these numbers are suitable ‘tuned’) into our intricately structured cosmos.

“Astonishing” is an astonishing understatement, in my view.  More later as I read further but why wait – get out there and beg, borrow or steal a copy – er, but not mine!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Partnership-Jonathan-Sacks/dp/0340995246

 

Oh God, not God again!

It is with some trepidation that I touch upon this God business again.  The last time, as you will recall, ‘Deogolwulf’ marched in, gave me a sound thrashing and then stalked off haughtily – and no-one does ‘haughty’ better than him, except, perhaps, his hero, Edward Feser!  Anyway, this is not primarily concerned with God – much to His relief, no doubt – but to a book about Him.  The sick friend I visited yesterday loaned me a book and I was about to place it on the wobbling pile of ‘waiting-to-be-read’ when I thought that perhaps I would just read the Introduction. Oh dear, within a few paragraphs I was well and truly hooked!  So, yes, this is another ‘rave review’ for a book of which I have only read the Intro and Chapter #1 but you are used to my extravagant enthusiasms by now.

It is written by a man whose name, Jonathan Sacks, is familiar but about whom I know nothing else except that he is the Chief Rabbi.  The book is entitled The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning.  It is simply superb!  Based on considerable erudition it is written with enormous enthusiasm in clear but eloquent English; I put it up there with Ferdinand Mount’s book Full Circle about which I raved a few weeks ago.  What I would not give for a chance to share a dinner with those two men!  To give you a taste, here are two extracts.  The first, quoted in the book, was written by Bertrand Russell:

That man is the product of the causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast depths of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s salvation henceforth be safely built.

Then Sacks neatly inverts the argument to illustrate his way of thinking and belief:

That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life his is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity, too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten – all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history.  We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding ghope, can the soul’s salvation be safely built.

Sacks sums up his philosophy thus:

Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

I am intrigued, I shall follow where he leads and when I have finished it I shall return to the subject but in the meantime, do yourselves a favour and go buy a copy!

 

Eat, drink and die - everybody else does!

Here, for your amusement in these grim times, are some quotations from a book I have only just begun to read, so they all come from Chapter #1.  I am so impressed and amused that I cannot help but believe that the whole book is going to be both fascinating and – a giggle!  Here’s the first extract:

Biography has become neurosis-conscious.  Freud is a great man.  But it is dangerous when a great is too easily half-understood.  The Freudian high explosives have been worked into firecrackers for the simple to burn their fingers.  It has become too easy to make a noise and a bad smell with materials compounded by the great discoverer for the blasting of tunnels.  Biography is obviously the best playground for the dilettante of psychoanalysis.  The older biographers lacked this knot-hole into the subconscious.  They judged their heroes only by the conscious.  The subconscious dethrones the conscious.  Great men are being reappraised by their endocrine balances rather than by their performances.  Poor Shelly!  Poor Byron!  Poor Wagner!  Poor Chopin!  Poor Heine!  Poor Mark Twain!  Poor Henry James!  Poor Melville!  Poor Dostoevsky!  Poor Tolstoy!  And even poor Jesus!  There are still  a lot left – the surface is hardly scratched.  But even before the great ones give out, the “damaged” ones make good reading:  P. T. Barnum, Brigham Young – even Al Capone and Pancho Villa.

I started reading this last night in the pub as I supped my pint (Butcombe bitter, naturally) before picking up my fish and chip supper.  My chuckles began to cause consternation amongst the regulars in the Saloon Bar where I am not known for a sense of humour – particularly if they make a noise when I’m reading!  Here’s another bit, soaked in sardonic irony:

Nature seems to have intended that her creatures feed upon one another.  At any rate, she has so designed her cycles that the only forms of life that are parasitic directly upon Mother Earth herself are a proportion of the vegetable kingdom that dig their roots into the sod for its nitrogenous juices and spread their broad chlorophyllic leaves to the sun and air.  But these – unless too unpalatable or poisonous – are devoured by the beasts and by man; and the latter, in their turn, by other beasts and by bacteria.  In the Garden of Eden perhaps things may have been so ordered that the mutual devouring was postponed until death, by the natural course of old age, had returned each creature’s store of nutriment to the general stock.  Chemically this might have been possible, and life maintained.  But on a crowded planet, the habit of eating one another – dead or alive – has become a general custom, instinctively and dispassionately indulged in.  There is probably as little conscious cruelty  in the lion that devours a missionary as there is in the kind-hearted old gentleman who dines upon a chicken pie, or in the staphylococcus that is raising a boil on the old gentleman’s neck.  Broadly speaking, the lion is parasitic on the missionary, as the old gentleman is on the chicken pie, and the staphylococcus on the old gentleman.

And finally, there is this:

A friend of ours is a professional writer.  By this, we mean a person who makes his living by writing in the same way that a bricklayer makes his living by laying bricks, or a plumber supports himself by sweating joints.  Writing, of course, like speech, is a method of expressing ideas or telling tales.  It is also a means of conveying to others emotions, conceptions, or original comprehensions which might instruct, amuse, delight or elevate.  This kind of writing used to be called art.  And once – when only the intelligent could read –writing also needed to be intelligent and artistic.  In our day, however, all kinds of people can read: college professors and charwomen, doctors and lawyers, bartenders, ministers of the gospel and trained nurses.

OK, OK, I here you, enough of the quotes and tell us who wrote it! Well, a rather witty fellow called Hans Zinsser who, with a name like that should have been working in Vienna perhaps but instead was a ‘Noo Yawker’ born and bred and died from 1878 to 1940.  I have owned a copy of his book, from which the quotes are taken, for just over 10 years but somehow, for some reason, I have never quite got around to reading the damn thing.  I only bought it for the reason I buy a lot of my books – the oddness of its title which is: Rats, Lice and History.  If it goes on the way it starts I think I’m going to enjoy it!

 

Meet Micky Mann, the Knobel Peace Prize laureate!

I told you before of my claim for a fair share of the dosh going to those Euro-crooks because the EU has won this year's Peace Prize award.  My claim rests on the fact that I am, albeit somewhat reluctantly, a member of the EU and, dammit, I help pay for the whole rotten edifice.  In addition, I relied on the example set by Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State U. who claimed that he, personally was a Nobel Laureate on the grounds that he, along with several hundred others, did some work for the IPCC which itself did win the prize.  Now, those rascals at National Review, who are being sued by Prof. Mann for defamation of character, have placed the following ad in the Penn State U. student newspaper:

 

Something tells me that this fight is going to get down and dirty before it's finished.  'Peace 'n' Hope' are not helped by Mark Steyn, another defendant in the legal action, who is also a very, very, naughty boy and who wrote this on his blog:

While I wait for Hurricane Sandy to shatter my woodlot into delicatessen-sliced tree-rings, some readers have asked for a progress report on Nobel laureate Michael Mann's* suit against NR. So here's a couple of outside takes: This gentleman compares it to Oscar Wilde's suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, while this analyst compares it to Napoleon invading Russia.

Personally, I think it's more like Oscar Wilde invading Russia, but each to his own. (My emphasis)

Ooooh, goody-goody, this could be even better than the Lesbian-straightener's day in court!

My thanks, again, to Watts.

 

It's the geeks, nerds and swots wot wunnit!

That is what we will all be crying as we surge down the Mall towards 'Buck House' to cheer Her Maj on the balcony as we celebrate victory in WWIII.  Yes, yes, no doubt our brave soldiers, sailors and airmen will have played their part even if it was reduced to looking like a bunch of spotty teenagers playing ‘shoot ‘em up’ games on X-boxes but that, I suspect, will be the nature of 21^st century warfare.  Instead of “Right, chaps, fix bayonets and prepare to charge” it will be “Right, chaps, download your apps”!

I am provoked to this semi-nonsense by a couple of links supplied, I suspect, by ‘our man in Arkansas’ - taps side of nose and winks!   Take a look at this photo and tell me what you see:

A particularly nasty little bug, you might suppose, and you would be more right than you know because this ‘little bug’ is actually an electronic device which:

"Such a device could be controlled from a great distance and is equipped with a camera, microphone. It could land on you and then use its needle to take a DNA sample with the pain of a mosquito bite. Or it could inject a micro RFID tracking device under your skin.”

Well, alright, that might be a bit of a stretch today but I bet some boffin somewhere is working on it even as I write.  Some progress has already been made:

In 2008, the U.S. Air Force showed off bug-sized spies as "tiny as bumblebees" that would not be detected when flying into buildings to "photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists."

So remember the next time you swat a fly you might be destroying government property!

Meanwhile, if we follow the US Navy’s lead we will soon have a surfeit of sailors to match the hordes of useless admirals we already possess.  Apparently, ‘over there’ they have already experimented with remotely-controlled, robot ships packed with guided missiles.  You may see the results on this video - if the link works:

http://bcove.me/pdpyqtfl

The firing came as part of a test off the Maryland coast on Wednesday. Six of Rafael’s anti-armor Spike missiles got fired off a moving inflatable hulled watercraft, aiming for a floating target about two miles away. The missile firings and the boat’s controls were all handled remotely by Navy personnel on shore at the Navy’s Patuxent River base.

It’s the “first significant step forward in weaponizing surface unmanned combat capability,” Mark Moses, the Navy’s program manager for the armed drone boat project, tells Danger Room. Sure, the U.S. military has no shortage of armed robotic planes and — soon — helicopters. But it doesn’t have weaponized drones that patrol the seas, either above it or below it. The Navy’s early experiments with robotic submarines are for spying and mine clearance, not for attack. Until this week’s tests at Pax River, the Navy didn’t have a robotic surface vessel capable of firing a weapon — the fulfillment of a goal the Navy set for itself in 2007.

Oh dear, so sorry, Your Maj, I'm afraid the Spithead Review will never be the same again!

 

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/future-drone-surveillance-swarms-cyborg-insect-drones

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/navy-drone-boat/#more-95307

 

How I won the Nobel Peace Prize

Aha, you didn't know that, did you?  Of course, my innate British modesty forbids me from boasting of it but "truth will out" and the fact is that I'm down up there with the likes of Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, John Hume and David Trimble - I know, I know, but you can't pick and choose your company, it's those soppy Norskis who decide the matter.  Anyway, this year they seem to have got their act together and in their infinite wisdom have chosen me as this year's recipient.  I trust they will not think me ungrateful but despite my frequent 'phone calls since the announcement the cheque has still not arrived.  All I get by way of reply is something that sounds like "Yerdy-burdle-durdle-murdle" which I assume is Norwegian for "The cheque's in the post" which simply will not do!  Of course, the actual name on the prize is the European Union - look, stop that laughing now, this is serious! - but as a prisoner member of this tremendous force for peace - ask any Libyan - I feel I am fully entitled to claim my fair share of it and henceforth I will describe myself as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate - and if there are anymore sniggers from you lot, you will stay in after school!

I do not make this claim frivolously, there is precedent for it from a man - or do I mean Mann? - who stands at the very pinnacle of scientific rubbish learning, I mean, Prof. Michael Mann, he of 'Hockey Shtick' fame.  This poor man has been sorely tried - or is about to be! - by the likes of Mark Steyn, The National Review and The Competitive Enterprise Institute because he has taken out a legal suit against them for denigrating his reputation.  As part of his outrage against this example of  lèse-majesté, Prof. Mann insists that he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner because the IPCC ('International Pirates, Crooks & Con-men) was awarded the prize and he had contributed to their work.  This fatuous claim which has about as much reliability as the 'Hockey Shtick' itself has been absolutely and definitely rejected by the Nobel authorities themselves.

I understand that Mark Steyn has been rushed to hospital with STLS - Severe Traumatic Laughing Syndrome!  I may follow him because, of course, by filing suit Mann has opened himself up to defence claims for full disclosure and all those naughty documents and papers which have so far been kept secret will now have to be publicised.  Read about it all at Watts - such fun!

 

Your Sunday snigger

Well, like watching a man slip up on a banana skin, you simply can't help an involuntary snigger but we all know, deep down, that in the best of comedy there lies tragedy, either real or potential, which is why clowns are funniest when disaster strikes and we watch laughing as the bucket of cold water cascades down their pants.  Bernard Buffet captured this paradox in his famous clown painting, a copy of which hangs in my living-room.  I never tire of looking at that melancholy face beneath the cheerful make-up.  For me, it sums up much of life.

All of which brings me, courtesy of CBS New York (via Drudge), the 'sweet 'n' sour' tale of Mr. David Jiminez who prayed daily to a crucific affixed to the outside wall of a Catholic church.  The heartfelt plea he offered up to this representation of Christ on the cross was that his wife should make a full recovery from ovarian cancer.  The 'Good News' is that the lady did exactly that.  The 'Bad News' is that Mr. Jiminez , in his gratitude, offered to clean the statue which had not been tended in years.  In doing so, the crucifix fell off the wall and crushed one of his legs which subsequently had to be amputated.

Sorry, sorry, you are probably appalled but, I confess (mea culpa), that I sniggered - and, yes, I know it says so much about me.  Even so, after picking myself up off the carpet and wiping my eyes, I did attempt some more serious thinking on the incident.  At this point I must tread carefully because I am uneasily aware of the lurking presence of Deogolwulf who is more than capable of hurling down a logical thunderbolt upon my head if I draw a wrong conclusion.  (You may see the the sort of wreckage that ensues in the comments, here, here and here.)

The question that arises in my mind is whether this incident, encapsulating as it does so much of life's trials and tribulations, tells us anything about the nature of the 'Thing' that originally hurled all those hydrogen and helium particles into a void?  Some might venture that the 'Thing' at least has a sense of humour, others might complain that if so his humour does not seem to rise above the cruelty of 'The Joker':

 

Yet others, like me, might simply suggest that given the billions of years since those naughty particles first disturbed the peace of the void, the zillions upon zillions of objects that have been formed across the universe and the fact that we, the entire  human race, past, present and future, represent only the equivalent of, say, one grain of sand in the entire Sahara desert, then frankly, my dear, the 'Thing', doesn't give a damn!  I might go further and suggest that, apart from some dilettante dreamers with nothing else to think about and whose tortuous contemplations takes us not an iota further forward in our understanding of the 'Thing', we should just ignore it all and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and getting through this 'vale of tears' - and laughter - in the best way we can.  And, because I always like to finish my parables with a moral injunction, I would strongly urge you all not to stand under statues of Jesus on the cross! 

 

I'd bang up this programme-maker inside a cell!

There was programme on over the weekend which I wanted to see very much .  It was called, I think, Inside the Cell, or some such, and a terrific bio-chemistry swot had been wheeled in to provide the spiel.  Now, as you all know, I am a semi-educated man, in fact, worse than that, I am a semi-self-educated man which, of course, provides me  with little inthe way of hard facts but a great deal of self-inflated opinions!  Where was I?  Oh, yes,  Inside the Cell, well, I didn't stay for long, but before I blow the BBC to hell and back let me explain why I was looking forward to this programme with such eagerness.

I can still remember my exact location the day I first found out about the intricacies of the human cell - a remote farm cottage in Wales, since you ask, and yes, it was raining!  The book was Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe which itself caused a minor sensation in the world of biology and nearly caused 'Archbishop' Dawkins's mitre to achieve lift off.  This was because of its advocacy of the Intelligent Designer notion which is about as convincing as the idea that something like a human eye could have evolved as a result of zillions of tiny incremental improvements.  However, in the course of supporting his argument Behe, a micro-bio-chemical swot, himself, went into some detail describing the actual 'mechanics of what goes on inside a living cell. 

It was a very quiet weekend that weekend in Wales because I was so utterly gob-smacked as to be incapable of anything in the way of conversation with my wife and friends - probably to their relief.  Until that moment I had simply no idea of the complexity - well, 'complexity' is hardly the word, think of 'complexity' multiplied a hundred-fold - and then multiplied again - of the processes which go on inside every cell in our bodies every minute of the day.  I cannot describe the excitement I felt on learning all this, but also I felt a sort of rage because I realised that had I known of this as a boy I would have concentrated on chemistry and made it my life's work.  In a recent exchange of comments down below somewhere, the subject of blood-clotting arose, and again, that is one of the 'miracles' (I use the word loosely because I cannot find another to express my reverence for the process) that Behe describes and which left me - well - silenced!

So, you can imagine my eagerness to watch this programme Inside the Cell.  Of course, being a weekend there was Strictly Come Prancing on and the 'Memsahib' has prior rights to the schedules so I turned in gratitude - yet again - to dear, old Rupe's 'do-flicker-recording-thingie' (which is the cleverest clever thing since, well, blood-clotting, really) and duly recorded it.  Yesterday I watched it.  I switched off after 10 minutes.  Rage ensued!  I do realise that making scientific programmes is not easy.  Not everyone wants some dusty, old university prof (sorry DM!) standing there talking directly to camera, although I seem to recall it worked quite well in years past, but neither do we - or I - want ludicrous, special effects cartoons all over-laid with portentious and ghastly non-music.  That's what we were provided with on this programme.  It was science for seven year-olds! 

The boss of the BBC is up in front of a committee of MPs this morning to answer questions about this hsyterical Jimmy Savile nonsense.  I wish someone would ask him about his totally crap science programmes!

 

Well, at least we'll be looking at the real culprit as we shiver!

Even the Met Office has agreed, muttering through clenched teeth, that there has been no significant global warming for the last 16 years.  Needless to say, carbon dioxide has been pumping out at increasing levels throughout, so sooner or later the Grand Panjandrums of the IPCC and all the other crooks and/or clowns will be forced to own up.  In the meantime, a truly disturbing picture is beginning to emerge from a direction we should never have ignored in the first place - the sun:

Something strange, very strange, is happening on the sun. On October 8th, NOAA’s Solar Cycle Progression monthly update report came out.  Sunspot activity has dropped off to its lowest point in over 100 years, perhaps to its lowest since the Dalton Minimum of the early 1800s.

The sun is headed into a quiet phase. The evidence is mounting. Sunspot activity is down. Solar flux is down. The sun’s magnetic field is decreasing linearly toward zero by 2026. The long term trend points towards a less active sun.  Solar physicists believe a prolonged period of low solar activity lasting more than one cycle is coming.

This change in the sun’s behavior could have profound long-term implications for climate change over the next several decades.

This quote is from a writer calling himself 'azleader' at a site called Inform the Pundits.  Alas, I don't know any pundits but I do know you, so here goes.  This diagram shows sun spot activity since 1700.  Obviously you will need to treat the earlier measurements with care because they had less sophisticated equipment with which to observe.  However, as you can see from the chart, their observations followed closely the recorded drops - and leaps - in earthly temperarature and climate, as reported at the time.

In a previous post I quoted from The History of British Winters which describes the dreadful winters of the early 19th century which played havoc with harvests and led to great hardship.  Now take a look at the sun spot chart for that period.

'Azleader' continues:

The Maunder and Dalton minimums share something in common. Both are associated with cold periods in Earth’s climate history. The time of the Maunder Minimum is often referred to as the “Little Ice Age“.  It is probably not entirely by chance that the Modern Maximum and another earlier period of high solar activity, the Medieval Warm Period, both correspond to warmer temperatures in Earth’s recent climate history.

In the satellite era it has been found the sun varies in radiant energy from 0.1% to 0.2% over a solar cycle. It is hottest during maximum solar activity. That could be a forcing mechanism driving historical climate change, just like the IPCC says CO2 is today.  It is unknown what the cooling effect of a prolonged period of inactivity might be. Physics cannot yet answer that question, but a long history of anecdotal empirical evidence suggests it does.

So, we must not leap to conclusions but wait patiently for the physics to catch up.  Solar science is in its relative infancy but it is already making great efforts to peer as closely as it can into the sun and its workings.  The general consensus is that the sun is heading for a sustained period of inactivity and will produce a 'cold' period.  Our globe is but a speck in the eye of the mighty sun and if it sneezes we need to watch out and be prepared.

I have said it before but I don't mind repeating myself - oh, you noticed! - cold kills a lot faster than heat!

 

The Sunday Rumble: 21.10.12

Will Dave make it to the end?  It's not "the vision thang" with Dave, he doesn't have any, but the judgment thing.  I suppose, in retrospect, the first doubts arose before he even entered No. 10 when he hired the ex-editor of The News of the World to be his main spokesman.  I remember thinking at the time, The News of the World - uuurgh - The Times, possibly; The Independent, maybe; The Telegraph, perhaps; but the good, old 'Screws' - never!  Anyway, that was but the first of a series of misjudgments which have culminated in the long-overdue despatch of Andrew Mitchell whose only claim to fame appears to be his ability to drag down even further the contempt in which most of us hold politicians.  He should have been marched into No. 10 the next morning and in brusque, Clem Attlee-style told to get on his bike - and use the proper exit!  Dave funked it and now he's paying for it and, even worse, his own party, already aware of his general uselessness, are beginning to realise that he is an electoral disaster.  It can only be a matter of time - watch this space . . .

If Romney loses:  'MDA2' which stands for 'My Darling Andra' and has the numerical suffix to differentiate her from 'MDA1' (My Darling Ann [Coulter]) poses a question in a thread below: when Romney doesn't win ... what then?  Well then, MDA2, America will go to hell in a handcart and you, as an Australian living in the southern Pacific will either have to seek about for new powerful friends - and don't ask me where - or learn to speak Chinese!  At home, Obama, with nothing now to lose, will let loose the Democrat dogs of big spending and constitutional tampering with catastrophic results.  And to put the final seal on it, Obama will choose the next one or two Supreme Court Justices who will set his Marxist ideas in stone for a generation.  The good news' is that he will not win.  As I have said since the last Congressional elections two years ago, he's dead man walking!

Crime stats down - you're 'avin' a laugh!  At sometime during this week I heard an item on the news that crimes stats in the UK were down across the board.  What I would really like to do is meet the solitary man, woman or, more likely, child, who actually believes any stats issued by this government but in particular the crime stats.  They, in particular, are the most ragged, bagged and shagged set of numbers in the entire government machine.  It starts at the very bottom of the imput process in which the various police forces throughout the land duck and dive with the full connivance of their Chief Constables, a bunch of self-interested, self-promoting chancers I wouldn't trust with a two times table.  The results then go to the "not fit for purpose" Home Office and after that they don't stand a chance.

My bottom:  Yes, I know, not the most prepossessing subject to contemplate over your Sunday breakfast (or is it lunch, you lazy sods?) but it gets even worse because it is actually what emanates from my bottom that is the real subject.  I know, I know, it might not be something you wish to know about but Her Majesty's National Health Service are tremendously interested and have kindly sent me a special pack with instructions and little cardboard sticks with which to lovingly take samples to send back to them for inspection.  I hasten to add that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my bottom, or its contents, but apparently my age has triggered this enquiry.  As a less than sympathetic friend remarked, "Well, if it's your shit they're interested in, tell 'em to read your blog!"

The Head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is a pillock!  To be honest, I'm not absolutely sure what a 'pillock' is so I looked it up.  According to the OED it is "a stupid person" which is what I meant but its archaic origin comes from "pillicock, a penis"!  Anyway, it's nice and rude and above all - insulting!  At this point my innate sense of fairness intercedes which it tends to do from time to time thus ruining many a good rant.  The fact is that I have no idea who the head of the CPS is and anyway, he or she is not to blame, it's those 'pillicocks' (and their female equivalents) in Parliament who deserve the insults for it was they, in their infinite dimwittedness, who made a crime out the very fine, old, British tradition of insulting.  I have become dimly aware (look, I've told you lot before, I do the  jokes!) that various mouth-breathers using a public communications system called 'Twitter' which confines your comments to a tiny number of words - to the relief of the afore-said mouth-breathers - have been arrested and charged in the courts, so the Head of the CPS does share some of the blame.  These alleged miscreants have not been urging violence or racist attacks against anyone, all they have done is publish moronic grunts - to call them 'thoughts' is to stretch meaning too far - usually in extremely bad taste.  For this the 'Old Bill' are suddenly galvanised and whilst incapable of catching or stopping your average burglar they are right on the case of some dimwit who helps them by providing an identity - and it improves their stats no end!  Brenden O'Neill, editor of Spiked has an excellent article on this over at Reason.

At last, some words of wisdom here at D&N:  No, no, not from me, come on, you should know better than that!  No, these, courtesy of Cafe Hayek are from a very wise old bird, indeed, a man who had an enormous influence on my hesitant tiptoes into philosophy and science - Karl Popper:

There is, first, the classical myth, vox populi vox dei, which attributes to the voice of the people a kind of authority and unlimited wisdom.  Its modern equivalent is faith in the ultimate common-sense rightness of that mythical figure, ‘the man in the street’, his vote, and his voice.  The avoidance of the plural in both cases is characteristic.  Yet people are, thank God, seldom univocal; and the various men in the various streets are as different as any collection of V.I.P.s in a conference-room.  And if, on occasion, they do speak more or less in unison, what they say is not necessarily wise.  They might be right, or they might be wrong.

On this Sunday morning, here endeth the first lesson - and what a corker!

ADDITIONAL - A 'MUST READ':  Do not, under any circs, miss Chapter One of Anna Raccoon's life story.

 

Met Office in a 'multi-decadal oscillation', or a flat spin, as I call it!

Perhaps the only positive advantage to be enjoyed as global warming dies the death in the cold mists, rains and fogs of a new (and totally expected) cooling period is that I no longer bore on about the subject - or at least, not quite so much.  To paraphrase the mighty Python, this global warming is ex-global warming; this global warming is DEAD!

And to prove it, we have no less an authority than the Met Office (and it is difficult to be a lesser authority than that unforecast shower!) who quietly slipped out a press release a couple of weeks ago telling us that global temperatures have remained static for the last 16 years. 

Some eagle-eyed hack at The Mail, no doubt snuffling through their waste-bins late at night, found the so-called press release and published it.  Smelling salts all round at the Met Office and poor old Prof. Jones at East Anglia 'Polytechnic-Night-School' came over all faint.  Since the publicity there has been a sustained soft-shoe shuffle from all concerned as they spun in 180 degrees un-saying their previous declarations that 15 years was long enough to establish a trend, the previous warmer period having lasted 15 years, natch!, and now they are trying to stretch the term required to establish a trend to 17 or even 20 years whilst they all practice sun-dancing in the hope that it gets a bit warmer.

Frankly, I wish them well because I would much rather have a warm globe than a cold one but given their abilities in things like, well, climate science, I don't rate their chances very highly.  Even a piss up in a brewery is quite beyond their abilities.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/15/noaas-15-year-statement-from-2008-puts-a-kibosh-on-the-current-met-office-insignificance-claims-that-global-warming-flatlined-for-16-years/

 

Me, me, me and you and you and you!

These random ruminations follow on from my earlier post on Thomas Szasz.  In the very finest traditions of D&N, of course, they are based on virtually nil professional expertise!  The mind/body problem is as old as Man and I don't suppose that I will contribute anything to a solution.  This is, really, an effort on my part to clear my own confusions.

There are, it seems to me, as many human personalities as there are humans and each and everyone is unique whilst at the same time each shares an enormous number of characteristics with most of the others.  The steady, merciless pressure of evolution has ground down most extreme characteristics.  Personality, it seems to me, can only be judged by actions.  You might sit and brood on murder but unless you actually do it, or attempt it, no-one will ever know.  Thus, I, the real, secret 'I', sitting inside this shell of skin, peer out through my eye sockets at you, the shell of skin opposite where-in the real 'you' hides, and I try as best I can to evaluate your personality.  The only clues I have reside in your behaviour - and that means very much more what you do rather than what you say!

By and large, the number of behavious is limited by the design of our bodies and the laws of physics.  That still leaves an enormous number of possibilities and humans being human there is a tendency to aggregate them so that such-and-such behaviours, being common, are considered 'normal', whilst others, being more or less uncommon, are not.  (It is around this point that semantics begins to interfere with the free-flow of ideas but I hope we can keep it to a minimum.)  For different societal and historical reasons some forms of uncommon behaviour might be labelled as eccentric but harmless whilst others as mad, bad and dangereous to be around!  For example, generally, killing people, especially strangers, for no apparent reason is frowned upon - but not all the time!  Some societies perceive all strangers to be a threat and killing them is sensible; equally, in some societies killing an unknown member of a family or clan or tribe with which you are in a state of vendetta will be encouraged!  So we need to be very careful before we classify certain behaviours as 'abnormal' or 'psychopathic' or - whatever.  A constantly evolving legal system offers only a very rough guide as to how to classify different types of behaviour.  The history, just in my lifetime, of the legal attitude to homosexuality is but one very obvious example.

As we struggle with these problems which seem to grow in complexity the harder we look at them, an even more important question arises, and to provide this miserable blog with a veneer of learning I will, courtesy of Google Translate, break into Latin - qui judicat?  Who judges?  In simpler times, anyone who exhibited strange or eccentric behaviours (as judged by those with 'normal' behaviours!) was either locked up or possibly burned at the stake.  Today, it seems to me, we lack the iron will to burn them, and also the nerve to lock them up.  Instead, so it appears, we let them roam freely but drug them up to the eyeballs to sap their wills.  Obviously, or at least, it is obvious to me if not to the medical profession, this procedure is not safe and with all the regularity of rain at a Test Match, some 'nutter' stabs someone to death.

So, on what basis do we decide how to deal with people who exhibit 'strange' behaviour, that is, behaviour which does not fit what we think, and decide, is 'normal'?  It seems to me that we must start with a basic premise - everyone deserves to live their life free from physical attack.  However, in deciding whether or not someone is likely to carry out such an attack it is necessary to judge by their behaviour, not by some judgment arrived at by a psychiatrist attempting the impossible, that is, to try and look inside someone else's secret self.  Of course, this leaves open the possibility of someone going off on a rampage without warning, but that is the very stuff of life - and death.  It is only after an event that we should make judgment.  Sometimes, of course, there will be behavioural warning signs, like the constant wife-beater, and action can be taken then to restrain the person including imprisonment.

But there are a variety of behaviours, judged to be 'abnormal', which fall short of violence against a third party.  For example, one of my commenters in the previous post mentioned a lady who, in every other respect, appeared to be 'normal' but who nevertheless talked to an imaginary third party.  Well, lock me up because I frequently 'talk' to third parties.  In fact, just this afternoon I was talking to you!  Yes, you, and you, and you, and all the others who read this blog.  To be fair, I wasn't talking out loud and my lips weren't moving (well, not much) but even so the 'Memsahib' asked me what I was thinking about and I told her that I was trying to compose a blog post.  But on other occasions, just like you, I do talk in my head to other people some of whom are dead!  Does that make me a nutter?  I think not.  It makes me human.

Until the malign influence of Freud it was violent behaviour or superstition or political/religious bigotry that decided whether you were insane or not.  Today it is pseudo medical 'science' that decides.  There are cranks, who call themselves psychiatrists' who truly believe that they can 'see' inside your 'secret self'.  They cannot.  One commenter pointed to x-ray scans of brain behaviour  which, according to him, offer absolute proof of this or that or the other.  I have no doubt that certain impulses applied to a person will result in certain sorts of increased brain activity but actually deciphering accurately what that activity amongst the zillions of synapses inside a brain means as an expression of the secret self is pure unadulterated rubbish.  You should read my brain scan after a speech by David Cameron!  Murderous isn't the word!  It is, in my view, barely one step up from reading tea leaves!

I remember my days as an army interrogator in which we were trained to try and grade 'prisoners' as either introvert or extrovert, and then, in both cases, to divide them even further into either extreme or mild versions.  It acted as very rough guide as to how to conduct the forthcoming interrogations and sometimes it worked but more often it didn't.  The secret self nearly always remains secret.  Here is a witty summary by Tom Stoppard from his play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour set inside a Soviet prison for the allegedly insane:

Alexander:    I have a complaint.

Doctor:         (Opening file)  Yes I know - pathological development of the personality with paranoid delusions.

Alexander:    No, there's nothing the matter with me.

Doctor:          (Closing file)  There you are, you see.

Alexander:    My complaint is about the man in my cell.

Doctor:            Ward.

Alexander:    He thinks he has an orchestra.

Doctor:           Yes, he has an identity problem. I forget his name.

Alexander:    His behaviour is aggresive.

Doctor:            He complains about you, too.  Apparently you cough during the diminuendos.

Alexander:    Is there anything you can do?

Doctor:            Certainly.  (Producing a red pill box from the drawer.)   Suck one of these every four hours.

Alexander:     But he's a raving lunatic.

Doctor: `        Of course.  The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while the people walking about outside are all mad is merely a literary conceit, put about by people who should be locked up.  I assure you there's not much in it.  Taken as a whole the sane are out there and the sick are in here.  For example you are in here because you have delusions, that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

Alexander:    But I am in a mental hospital.

Doctor:            That's what I said.  If you're not prepared to discuss your case rationally, we're going round in circles.

And so on into an infinity of mirrors . . .

 

Thomas - who? Thomas SZASZ!

But first of all let me pause and, metaphorically speaking, cover my e-pal, Louise, with kisses - poor girl!  Until yesterday I had never heard of Thomas Szasz who, incidentally, died on September 8th at the ripe old age of 92.  I cannot find the words to express my gratitude to Louise for bringing this man to my attention, er, hence the metaphorical kisses.

So, who was this Thomas Szasz?  Well, with the usual caveat, you can get a very good idea of his life and achievements from his Wiki entry which I urge you all to read.  He, during the course of his lifetime, has put into words all the nagging doubts and the confused fumbling thoughts I have had for years concerning the nature of psychiatry and psychiatric practice.  Let me just quote a few lines from his Wiki entry which will provide you with the flavour of the man:

His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1970) set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated. [...]

As Szasz said, having become convinced of the fictitious character of mental disorders, the frequent injuriousness of psychiatric treatments, the immorality of psychiatric coercions and excuses, he set himself a task to delegitimize the legitimating agencies and authorities and their vast powers, enforced by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, mental health laws, mental health courts, and mental health sentences. [...]

"Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors." [...]

Oh boy, is that ever righter than right!  And this sums it up exactly:

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."

I know it is quite ridiculous but I am so excited by discovering this man.  My lonely grumblings about the iniquity amounting to an inquisition on the part of the medical hierarchy, in general, and the psychiatric branch of it, in particular, has brought down on my head the ill-tempered abuse of most of my friends at one time or another - usually towards the end of well-oiled dinner parties when they all start swapping their medical histories and going all gooey-eyed over their wonderful, wonderful doctors!

Also, at the risk of being even more boring than usual, I must repeat again my excited and passionate belief that this internet-thingie is the greatest invention in the history of Man.  I have mentioned before the appalling state of my ignorance (and I keep 'Deogolwulf' around like Lear's fool to remind me should I ever forget!) and the fact is that via the internet I have learned more about more things in the last ten years than I have learned in the rest of my life. Anyway, I can see yet another book approaching at speed. 

In the meantime, out of respect, I shall sit quietly for a moment and contemplate the life of a great and original thinker - Thomas Szasz. 

 

Are philosophers more like lawyers or car salesmen?

In the commentary to my post on "This God Business" I was admonished - and how! - by my e-pal, Deogolwulf, and instructed sternly to read the words of wisdom that flow from Mr. Edward Feser, a philosopher much admired by him.  Always an obedient pupil, if not a very bright one, I did as I was told.  How was it for me?  Well, in my heading I ask whether philosophers are more like lawyers or car salesmen but I think I should have added footie fans to the list of possibles!  The first few paragraphs consist mainly of Mr. Feser booting and nutting his philosophical opponents.  Now I know that so-called high-minded swots just love going in with boots and bottles (it must be the unrequited yob in them) and vicious university common-room rows are the stuff of legend, but it is more than somewhat tedious for a reader seeking knowledge.  To give you the flavour these are some of the words that occur in Mr. Feser's first few paragraphs: hacks, mediocrities, intellectual rubbish, this stupid argument, silly argument, utterly contemptible and sleazy, the feeble argument, intellectually dishonest and sleazy, stupid, a slimy debating trick - and needless to say they are aimed at those who disagree with his particular 'opinion'.  (I slightly stress the word 'opinion' because that, at the end of the day (or the last two and half thousand years), is what it amounts to because, as far as I can tell, almost every philosophical thesis put forward suffers with an antithesis that simply will not go away!

Of course, Deogolwulf abjures emotion and warns us all against indulging in it but, alas, we're all human and the fact is that Mr. Feser's tone pisses me off!  Rather like watching a pub fight on Saturday night, one is tempted to put the boot in against this hectoring bully boy.  Mind you, I have a suspicion that his opponents are equally bitchy and it is that sort of constant handbags-at-dawn slapfest that was part of the reason I gave up on philosophy years ago.

I have yet to finish Mr. Feser's blogpost and reached only his first point of contention - after wading through all the nonsense in the first few paragraphs.  His complaint against those who attack him, and his ilk, is for suggesting that what he, Mr. Feser, is proposing is that everything has a cause.  Mr. Feser is outraged, I tell you, outraged!  That is absolutely and definitely not what he is proposing, far from it.  What he is actually putting forward is - now pay attention - what comes into existence has a cause.  Yeeeees, quite!  Well, I have read it, first with one eye and then the other, I have stood on my head and looked at it, I even gave the computer-thingie a slap and took another look, and still I can detect no difference in the essential meaning between the two phrases.  If Mr. Feser is only concerned with things that do not come into existence, well, good luck to him, I say, but it is of no concern to me, I want to know about things that do exist.  But you see what I mean about lawyers and car salesmen.  I do think that all philosophical writings should henceforth come with a government health warning and a reference to the Sale of Goods Act!

I am short of time this morning - it's my 46th wedding anniversary and a posh lunch is called for - but if any of you swots out there can explain the difference I would be most grateful.  However, I should warn you that I may be even less sensible this afternoon than I am this morning.

ADDITIONAL:  For God's sake don't tell  'er indoors' that I said it was my 46th wedding anniversary because, of course, it is actually my 48th but then, time goes so quickly when you are enjoying yourself!

 

Now, about this God business . . .

I have been sorely provoked, but glad to have been so, by my old e-pal, Deogolwulf, to discuss this' God business' which I do so, of course, with all the authority of your average fifth former!  You can follow the opening shots of this campaign here and in the comments section.  Necessarily, given the nature of that particular post we started our conversation somewhere in the middle of the controversy that I call 'the God business'.  Here I want - dread words! - to go back to basics.

To begin with I intend to avoid the use of the word 'God' which has religious overtones that tend to obscure rather than enlighten any discussion.  Instead I prefer to use the term 'Prime Mover'(PM) which is more neutral.  As I understand it, one of the very first reasons for posturing the existence of a PM is the idea that before there was nothing and afterward there was something and a PM is the only answer because something cannot be produced from nothing and so a PM is required.  That is entirely logical but only if you accept the premise for which there is no proof.  For example, it fails to explain who or what created the PM in the first place . . . and then who created the creator of the PM and then, hey-ho, we are off into an infinite regression. 

As I understand it, speaking as man who failed 'O'-level maths, physics and chemistry, it all began with a bang in which two entities, twins really, were 'created', or appeared, matter and energy.  The matter, atoms of hydrogen and helium with virtually no mass, were hurled outwards, but, and this I always think is significant, they did not explode with perfect synchronisation, there were very slight but significant variations which were critical because that helped to bring about collisions and fusions between the particles at which point their increased mass resulted in increased gravitational forces which helped meld more and more of them together.  The question which arises in my mind is, assuming the PM exists, did it intend to have those slight imperfections or was it an accident?  I have a vision of a PM muttering, "Oh, fuck it!  That wasn't perfection, let's sod off to another plane of potential existence and try again" and meanwhile our sad, imperfect, old universe was left to get on with it.  This leads, naturally, to the question of intentionality on the part of the PM.  Did it build-in imperfections and did it know where those imperfections would lead, or was it all one big roll of the dice?

All of that, or even some variations on that, I am prepared to accept as a hypothesis to explain the notion of a PM, but is it exclusive to other hypotheses?  For example, returning to infinity, a notion treated with great caution and some distrust by ancient Christian thinkers, it is a possibility that nothing was created because everything exists, always has existed and will continue to exist - even though the form changes constantly and forever.  Thus, as one scientific theory postulated (although I seem to remember that it has gone slightly out of favour recently) our universe will one day fall back on itself and everything will be collapsed into a black hole before it explodes yet again, and thus does "the wheel of fire" keep turning forever and ever, amen!

Now, I find the idea of an infinity of existence, or perhaps, existences, as cautiously acceptable as the notion of a PM.  As theories they both share some strengths and some weaknesses but neither of them is entirely satisfactory.  In other words, I am not prepared to accept that a PM is necessary to explain existence.   However, as my conversation with Deogolwulf is concerned with religious explanations of existence I will set aside infinity for now and concentrate on the nature of the Prime Mover.  However, the sun is shining and I must take advantage of it to do some gardening so I will continue this dreary monologue this afternoon.

 

I have just been re-educated and I didn't feel a thing!

Actually, that is not quite true because what I did feel was intense pleasure, delight and wonderment mixed with shame at the lazy idleness I have nurtured through the years which has left me as a man filled with opinions but not much in the way of true learning.  So, thank the Gods, for (Sir William Robert, 3rd Baronet) Ferdinand Mount and his jewel of a book, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back To Us.  It is typical of this man that he rarely if ever uses his title, and he carries his staggeringly huge learning with the lightest of ease.  And I do mean 'learning' in the very highest and best sense of the word.  He doesn't just read books on the innumerable, mind-boggling subjects on which he writes with such elegant ease, he goes out and inspects them, digs into their history, compares them with similar artifacts, takes account of the mores of their day, links them to events and artifacts of today, and then with the sort of wit that leaves you smiling and nodding in appreciation he offers some startling conclusions.

Perhaps the most startling is the main thrust of his book which is the proposition that, far from the progressive's dream of Mankind climbing ever higher and higher to new levels of civilisation, in fact we have just spent the last two thousand years going in Full Circle back to the Greeks and the Romans.  He points the finger, not of hostility but more of intellectual wonderment, at the last 2,000 years of Christianity which, whilst it, too, had its virtues, also acted as a big wet blanket on the behaviour of Man.  Now the blanket has dried out and is beginning to disintegrate under the unrelenting forces of "that old common arbitrator, Time" and, lo, we find ourselves returning in a mixture of surprise and delight to the truly ancien regime of the classical world.

Please, please, buy this delightful, witty and immensely learn-ed book.

 

The sun still refuses to put his hat on and come out to play!

Regular readers will know of my long-held scepticism concerning AGW (Anthropological Global Warming).  Partly this arises from the nature of the people propagating it as a theory, and also, my instinct that our, meaning humanity's, effect on global temperatures is the equivalent of me pissing in my local reservoir and worrying about it overflowing!  There is a constantly repeated cliche these days to the effect that some people 'ignore the elephant in the living-room'.  In trying to guess (yes, I call it a 'guess' although the swots prefer to call it a 'theory' because it sounds better) as to what is likely to have the greatest influence on the world's temperature, I would point unhesitatingly at that great, big, bright thing in the sky that we call the sun.  That monstrous creator and discharger of energy in all its forms is the equivalent of not just one elephant, but every elephant and every elephant's near relations, that has ever existed in the history of the world all crammed into your living-room!  The difficulty is trying to decipher the information we have on the sun and its variable states and trying to guess/theorise as to their effects on earth.

One feature has been spotted (pun intended!) and regularly measured for some years and that is the frequency and strength of sunspots which follow a roughly 11-year cycle.  There seems to be a correlation between their behaviour, in the sense of appearance or non-appearance, and subsequent effects on earth.  This whole subject is densely  'swottish' and consequently I can only pick up the very vague gist of it all.  However, in a comments thread to a recent post at the ever-excellent Watts Up With That site, an equally bemused reader begged for someone to provide a synopsis in language that a layman could understand.  Shortly there-after, Mr. Rhys Jagger stepped forward and wrote this superb summary and I for one am deeply grateful to him.  I have only cut his opening, introductory paragraph:

1. The sun has things called sunspots on its surface some of the time and the numbers of them have been shown to oscillate from a minimum through a maximum and back down to a minimum in a cycle whose length varies from cycle to cycle but is usually around 11 years.

2. Due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycles are usually grouped in pairs of ‘odd cycles’ and ‘even cycles’. One pair is called a Hale Cycle which is usually around 22 years.

3. It has been shown that certain features in the global weather patterns show cyclical patterns, some of which are linked to one solar cycle, others to the Hale cycle. There are other ‘footprints’ of shorter or longer duration which are also linked to interactions between solar and lunar variables; solar and big planet variables etc etc.

4. The effect of sunspots is to change the intensity of certain radiation emitted from the sun which reaches the earth. Occasionally, these can be major pertubations when features called ‘Coronal Mass Ejections’ or ‘Flares’ occur. These have effects on radio signals, satellites and other things orbiting our earth, so folks like NASA, the Hubble Telescope guys etc etc monitor these things carefully.

5. People have noticed that every few hundred years the sun ‘goes quieter’ or ‘very quiet’ for a few decades to several decades. These periods are called minima and are usually named after someone. The Maunder Minimum in the Middle Ages was particularly quiet, whereas a smaller minimum occurred in the early part of the 19th century and was called the Dalton Minimum.

6. Although understanding is still far from complete, researchers are now trying to link solar activity, specific solar output to weather patterns, either short-term or long-term. Piers Corbyn of Weather Action Ltd is someone who makes a living out of this, being particularly adept at predicting extreme weather events associated with solar/lunar pertubations several months ahead of time. His method continues to evolve, as he would freely admit both to his subscribers and those who read his website (www.weatheraction.com).

7. In general, also, the fewer the sunspots you get in an 11 year cycle, the greater the likelihood there is of cooling of the earth. Conversely a series of high sunspot cycles, as occurred in the 20th century, is postulated/believed to be associated with a warming climate. The Little Ice Age was associated with the Maunder Minimum, which was the quietest period of sunspot activity in the past 500 years.

8. Researchers are also wondering whether frequencies of volcanoes/earthquakes/tsunamis etc can be linked to the sunspot cycles. There is certainly no official scientific proof of this, but people are looking at it and having attempts at predicting such events. Time will tell whether they are accurate or not.

9. Of course, if scientists could predict how sunspot cycles would pan out a few decades in advance, this would be extremely valuable for mankind if our politicians, financial communities and farmers made good use of such information for the benefit of societies. In particular, if we were able to predict a marginalisation of yield in major growing areas like Canada, the Northern Mid West of the USA, Russia/Ukraine etc due to the onset of a mini ice age, then efforts would surely be made to evolve agricultural production through lower latitudes. It’s by no means clear that we are able to do this yet and it may take 100 years more of detailed research before it does become possible.

10. Really detailed monitoring of the Sun has only become possible in the era of satellites and telescopes and therefore data prior to about 1950 isn’t really as accurate as the measurements since 1979, when the first satellite data started coming through. As a result, true understanding of what sunspots looked like back in the 1700s, 1800s etc etc is never going to be as accurate as scientists would like. Nonetheless, data from 24 cycles of sunspot cycles since the end of the Maunder Minimum is what scientists use for their predictions for the future.

11. Currently, many scientists believe that the current cycle (24) and the next one (25) will be much weaker than those which have preceded them. There is a body of opinion which believes this points to cooling tendencies from the sun, although how any warming of oceans may compensate for that in terms of air temperatures and subsequent land temperatures is less clear. Scientists who believe that solar output is a major contributor to temperature fluctuations on earth are therefore somewhat skeptical about the ‘global warming’ scaremongering going on particular those who postulate increasing carbon dioxide as the major forcing mechanism.

12. It would not be considered ludicrous therefore for politicians to plan for little rise in temperatures for the next 30 years and they should certainly scenario plan for a possibility of significant cooling. Given, however, that the Dalton minimum in the early 19th century only lasted for 2 cycles before solar output increased again, until proven otherwise, it should be assumed that a return to potentially warmer fare may occur thereafter. Politicians will ask scientists, however, to be constantly looking out for signals that the sun may be going into a deeper sleep and they should be planning how to manage a Northern Hemisphere which might become dangerously short of food in the absence of the Sahara not becoming more fertile in response, should a Maunder-style minimum come to pass.

I wouldn’t expect anyone to take this as gospel truth, nonetheless, I reckon it’s probably a fair summary for non-experts and certainly doesn’t say anything which is clearly false.

The care with which Mr. Jagger avoids claiming certitude for what is, after all, still a theory, is excellent.  I, for one, am deeply grateful to him for his superb explanation.

 

The fight of the century - and I don't care if there are 88 years to go!

Coming soon, Mann v. Steyn, in a US court near you - well, they're bound to televise it.  But first, take a brief pause and read Steyn's short article in The National Review which is the red meat likely to be fought over by these two big cats in this latest and bestest 'rumble in the jungle'.  For those, mostly Brit, readers unsure as to exactly what the Sandusky scandal was, it involved the coach of Penn State University's American football team who was, over a period of years, regularly sexually molesting young boys.  The Penn State authorities were informed but refused to act partly, one supposes, because 'over there' college football teams attract big sponsorship deals.

As Steyn reminded us, Penn State still faces yet another potential scandal if, but only if, allegations concerning the work of their very own Prof. Michael Mann, the inventor of the fabulous 'hockey stick' graph, are proven.  There is, perhaps, no more famous icon that Mann's 'hockey stick' which has been seized upon world-wide by the HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) as a proof of their theory that we are all about to 'fry 'n' die' because of global warming - heh, chance would be a fine thing!  These allegations arose because the 'hockey stick' has so far proven to be wildly out in its predictions but also because of the hacked e-mails from that other nest of HAFs at East Anglia University in which sundry 'scientists', including Michael Mann, were writing of "Mike's nature trick", "hide the decline" and so forth.  Penn State conducted their own investigation and found Prof. Mann had acted absolutely properly but, alas, their so-called investigation into Sandusky's activities means that anything they pronounce upon is treated with derision.

It was Steyn's particular derision which has provoked Michael Mann into either a very brave act or a monumental folly - he has decided to sue Steyn and The National Revue.  The critical point is that hitherto, Michael Mann has refused to release certain research papers for scrutiny by the scientific community.  But now, Steyn's lawyers will have the legal right to scrutinise every single document ever produced by Mann including those he has so far wished to keep private.

This could make 'Climate-gate' look like a mere squabble.  Can't wait!

 

In which I share a bath with Ferdinand Mount

Well, I have known him, off and on, for about 30-years.  Perhaps 'known' is too strong a word but back in the day he used to write for 'The Speccie' and, like all my favourite columnists, I feel I really do 'know' him even if I have never met him.  Anyway, my somewhat laboured joke in the title to this post refers to the opening chapter of his latest book - Full Circle: How the Classical  World Came Back to Haunt Us.  In this chapter, entitled The Bath, he provides us with a history of baths and bathing as a means of proving his central point in the book that far from following progressive notions in which Humankind has steadily advanced to ever greener pastures in an upland of civilisation (always led by Progressives, of course), in fact we have merely executed a complete circle and are now back where we started in Greco-Roman times.

Now, it really doesn't matter whether or not you agree with Mr. Mount who is, after all, a typical 'Speccie' writer in that he is highly intelligent, perceptive and able to cast a cool but good-humoured  eye over all sort of ideas and then distill his conclusions into shrewd but witty words.  However, having only read his opening chapter on the history of bathing I am convinced!  And, what is more important, in the process of being convinced I have also been effortlessly educated and delighted with a seemingly unending wealth of details and personalities ranging from Sir Daniel Gooch who was Isambard Kingdom Brunel's chief engineer and the patron behind the building in Swindon of the huge bath-house provided for the benefit of his workers on the Great Western Railway, to the eras of Diocletian, Caracalla and Hadrian and their baths each covering some 25 acres which puts them amongst the biggest buildings we know of in the ancient world.  I am tempted to quote that old catchphrase of an equally old Brit comedian whose name eludes me - "notta lotta people know that!"

I know I am always banging on about this book or that but really, truly and honestly and cross my heart and wish to die - this is a copper-bottomed, gen-u-ine, absolute CORKER!  I know that one or two of my regular readers are tremendous brain-boxes (which makes me wonder why they slum it over here) but I bet even they will find things in this book which they never knew and which might, just, alter their perception of our world.

 

A case of severe PBS, doctor

What is PBS, you ask?  For goodness sake, you really must keep up to date with the latest medical jargon.  It means Psycho-Babble Syndrome, about which I wrote recently.  If you haven't got it then you need to aquire it - quick!  And before you click away from this muttering to yourselves that 'Mr. Grumpy' from South Somerset is off another one today let me make clear that I have been provoked into this post by a book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books - and when it comes to psycho-babble, Los Angeles is the world's leader!  I wrote about this just a few weeks ago and pointed to the malevolent synthesis between the psycho-babblers, themselves, and Big Pharma.  What I had not realised, but Mr. Andrew Scull, the book reviewer, makes clear is that there is a third party to this unholy alliance - you!  By which I mean, you, the general public.  But first, let me reproduce the illustration I used in my previous post on this subject:

These increasingly large volumes are the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of the American Psychiatric Association, or, DSMs, for short.  They contain all the boxes which require to be ticked in order for you to be 'diagnosed' with this, that or the other syndrome.  The production, or perhaps 'construction', of DSM-V is on its way but has been much deleayed not least by honourable and brave intercessions by the main author of DSM-III, Robert Spitzer, and a leading contributor to DSM-IV, Allen Frances.  These two men have gradually come to the conclusion that there is something rotten in the state of modern psychiatry and have become increasingly vocal about their doubts.  Needless to say, the scientific world being bitchier than the Women's Institute, this has brought down buckets of brown stuff upon their heads.  The book being reviewed, All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders is written by Alan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield.    

The first, and perhaps the main, problem is diagnosis of mental illness and when, some time ago, certain psychiatrists investigated the process in a careful manner:

Their findings dramatically reinforced the growing suspicion that their profession’s claims to expertise were spurious. Prominent figures like Aaron Beck, Robert Spitzer, MG. Sandifer and Benjamin Pasamanick published systematic data that dramatized just how tenuous agreement was among psychiatrists, even the most prominent ones, regarding the nature of psychiatric pathology; consensus barely exceeded 50 percent whether the subjects were patients in state hospitals or out-patient settings. And in 1972, a systematic study of diagnostic practices in Britain and the United States found massive differences: New York psychiatrists diagnosed nearly 62 percent of their patients as schizophrenic, while in London only 34 percent received this diagnosis. And, while less than five percent of the New York patients were diagnosed with depressive psychoses, the comparable figure in London was 24 percent. Further examination of the patients suggested that these differences were byproducts of the preferences and prejudices of each group of psychiatrists, and yet they resulted in consequential differences in treatment. [My emphases throughout this post] 

It was these sorts of criticisms which led to the decision of the American Psychiatric Association to try and pin down exactly which symptoms relate to which illnesses and publish them in a manual form.  Thus was born the DSM volumes which, like Topsy, 'have growed and growed'.  Needless to say, Big Pharma watching anxiously from the sidelines and rubbing its hands with glee at future profits to come from 'cures' for these spurious ailments encouraged the psychiatrists to greater efforts.  Put simply , the more 'syndromes' there are, the more 'cures' can be offered - at a price, natch!   But now the public has joined in.  Get yourself a nice, handy 'syndrome' and it's, hey-ho, and off to your local DHSS for the requisite handout!

Consequently, the number and variety of 'syndromes' has multiplied:

Of more contemporary relevance, a range of commentators have noticed the explosive growth of depression as a diagnosis, to the point where it is now frequently termed ‘the common cold’ of psychiatry; the equally dramatic expansion in the number of children being diagnosed with ADHD; the appearance out of nowhere of juvenile bipolar disorder, which apparently became forty times as common between 1994 and 2004; the epidemic of autism, a formerly rare condition afflicting less than one in five hundred children in 1990, which has now mushroomed into a disease found in one in every ninety children. More than a few scholars have been tempted to attribute these seismic shifts not to any real alteration in the numbers of sufferers from these disorders, but to disease-mongering by the psychiatric profession and by Big Pharma, the multi-national pharmaceutical industry that obtains a huge fraction of its profits from the sale of drugs aimed at mental disorders of all sorts.

The construction of the DSM volumes provided cover for the psycho-babblers to hide behind.  In effect, if enough of their more distinguished members agreed that, say, living and breathing were likely causes of high anxiety, which indeed they are for most of us at some time in our lives, then we can all be diagnosed as suffering with Living Breathing Anxiety Syndrome (LBAS)!

Oddly enough, just writing this has increased my heart rate, my eyes are bulging and I'm breathing heavily - sorry, must finish now - I'm off to my local psycho-babbler and then straight down to Social Services.  Yippeee!

 

You don't need an aircraft carrier, General, you need a worm!

Apologies for the slight slowdown around here but I am under a certain amount of domestic pressure at the moment, which roughly translates as 'the Memsahib is a bit crock and I'm having to do things I normally take for granted.  I have warned her that much more of this and I'm going to trade her in for new model!

Anyway, I have been amused (slightly) by China's efforts to build and operate an aircraft carrier.  This has caused the Indians to redouble their efforts to bring their aircraft carrier capacity up to the maximum.  It reminds me of all those admirals between the wars who followed Adm. Fisher's pre-WWI policy of building bigger and bigger battleships with bigger and bigger guns.  After the First War it was the cheeky young officers who saw that the battleship era was over and that aircraft carriers were the new queen on the naval chessboard.  Today, of course, it is missiles, both attack and defence missiles, which are critical and, I guess, a titchy little destroyer now carries ten times more destructive power than Adm. Yamamoto's favourite 18" gun battleship, the Yamato.

But tomorrow, I suspect, it is going to be 'electronics' that will be key to success on the battlefield.  Of course, I use the word 'electronics' in the widest sense, not least because I am a man who gives himself a silent cheer everytime I manage to switch my computer on and off!  As the bankers have learned - the hard and expensive way - just recently, we are all utterly reliant on 'electronics'.  When they go wrong, or just go off, we are well and truly stuffed.  It is essential, I believe, that armies and navies need to practice operations without 'electronics' and see how far they get and how well they do.  Being essential, my guess is that that they don't bother!

I am provoked to these musings on modern warfare by a small story on the BBC News site introducing us to 'The Worm'!  It's a pity this is written and not spoken because it really needs that American guy who does the voice-overs for thrillers to use his deep-pitched, gravelly voice to say omminously, "The Worm is coming!"  Here it is:

Doesn't look much, I admit, but the possibilities are manifold.  It's the latest robot made for the Pentagon and it imitates not so much "the action of the tiger" but more that of the worm! Made of a flexible mesh 'skin' with wires around it, the operator can send pulses down which makes the 'body' contract and expand and slowly, 0.2" per second, cross ground.  So be careful if you are walking along scanning the skies for a drone so small it looks like a bird (that too exists!) because you might tread on a 'worm'.

Right, that's enough meandering for this morning, I will return later.