A delectable sense of freedom

It is very agreeable to find yourself alone in a great city which is yet not quite strange to you and in a large empty hotel. It gives you a delectable sense of freedom.

W. Somerset Maugham – The Human Element (1931)

Some years ago Sackerson wrote a very interesting post on freedom - Three levels of freedom. The following post is intended to add another aspect to the debate. Not an alternative view of freedom but a possible way to frame questions of freedom - what it could be, why ideas differ so much and why freedom seems to fade away so easily.

In the above quote Somerset Maugham is clearly referring to freedom as a feeling - a delectable sense of freedom. Equally clearly people differ in how they react to restrictions placed on their freedom. Some appear not to notice many restrictions and may even welcome some of them. Others have a greater tendency to see restrictions as an oppressive burden, an imposition to be resented at every opportunity.

To take a familiar example, some motorists see our vast array of traffic laws as oppressive while others see them as necessary for road safety and not particularly oppressive. These are different reactions to the same situation and perhaps this is the important yet entirely familiar point - it is extremely common for people have different reactions to the same situation. Consequently they interpret the same situation differently – as we all know too well.

In which case neither freedom nor oppression are clearly identifiable situations in the outside world. There is an inescapable human element, an emotional component to do with feelings about oppressive situations and those feelings are far from universal. Maybe we should go further and suggest that freedom is not only a state of affairs in the outside world but also an emotion, a state of affairs in our brains. Hardly a surprising conclusion but worth exploring consequences.

How could freedom be an emotion? Not necessarily a strong emotion such as anger, but something more subtle such as unease, contempt, frustration or dissatisfaction. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Professor Lisa FeldmanBarrett says emotion is our brain’s way of interpreting an amalgam of bodily sensations linked to events in the outside world. An emotion is a concept, a way of making sense of things which affect us or seem to affect us.

This is not to suggest that ideas about freedom are caused by emotions. Ideas about freedom are themselves emotional concepts. They are rationales we use to explain and link our bodily sensations with events and situations in the outside world. Why am I fed up with all the traffic laws? Because sometimes they feel oppressive, life-sapping, frustrating. Not always though - and that is another clue.

Driving on modern roads can be mildly depressing and in some cases the feeling is explained quite well if linked to an objective reality of vastly complex traffic laws. Hence the label ‘oppressive’ applied to modern traffic laws. Yet without a feeling of oppression the laws are not oppressive. Oppression has to feel oppressive or we don’t notice because it isn’t there until we do notice it. We can’t work it out from the bare physical facts of the situation because it isn’t there - it is in our brains.

In other words, people who do not see traffic laws as oppressive are people who have little or no emotional need to interpret them as oppressive. There is no point arguing about it, no point saying that some people fail to see the oppressive nature of traffic laws. In themselves they are not oppressive. We make them so via our emotional concepts or we don’t. These emotional concepts are not our emotional reaction to the laws but our emotional concept of the laws – the laws plus our feelings about them.

To take a much more extreme example, most of us see North Korea as a grotesquely repressive regime, but from the outside this is an emotional concept of a situation we do not actually experience. Stories about North Korean oppression coupled with a sense of unease or outrage that these things can happen are probably conceived by most people in democratic countries as extreme violations of freedom.

However it is possible that many North Koreans have different emotional concepts of freedom and oppression. They may be familiar with heavily regimented lives and their sense of oppression may not be as generally acute as we suppose. In our terms they may not perceive the oppression as strongly as we think they should. Or they may perceive it more strongly than we imagine – it is not something we can simply work out from what little we know of North Korean realities.

The oppression does not cause the emotion because there is no oppression without the emotion. The oppression is an emotional concept we label as ‘oppression’ and we interpret the oppression as happening beyond our own minds, out there in the real world. Some of it is happening out there in the real world, but the concepts, the use of words such as ‘freedom’ or ‘oppression’, these lie within our own minds. Not in every mind though – that’s the point.

This is why familiarity may inhibit concepts of political freedom and oppression. It seems likely that many people do not see their heavily circumscribed modern lives as oppressive or as lacking certain important freedoms. Not because they are obtuse, but because they do not make the same use of emotional concepts others label as ‘freedom’ or ‘oppression’.

However -

In her book Professor Barrett makes a fascinating claim. She suggests that our emotional concepts are our own responsibility. We may choose to react differently to the same situation for a whole range of reasons. That’s something we see regularly too. We see it all the time in politically correct outrage – emotional concepts with a political purpose. The outrage feels artificial because it is – it has to be.

This may imply that people who do not interpret an oppressive government in terms of restricted freedoms are not well informed about what the government is actually doing or failing to do. Freedom may be an emotional concept encompassing the outside world, but people with a limited understanding of the outside world will have a limited ability to interpret their world as oppressive. Possibly no ability at all.

Perhaps a democratic government may become as oppressive as it wishes if it is also conspicuously benign – if it spins benign emotional concepts. If it also manages to avoid generating too many emotional concepts of oppression or lost freedom then there is no real barrier to totalitarian government within a democratic shell. Bare reality won’t expose it.

Freedom simply disappears.

And is finally –

forgotten.

FRIDAY MUSIC: St Patrick's Eve, by JD

It is St Patrick's Day tomorrow, Saturday, so instead of the usual 'to be sure, to be sure' and Leprechaun stereotype blather it is better to dig deeper into the roots of Erin's soul as expressed in Irish music; concentrating on two 'icons' namely Liam Clancy and Finbar Furey. Many years ago they toured together when the Clancy Brothers had the Fureys as their support act. What follows is a random selection of wonderful music:








"Oh all the money that e'er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e'er I've done
alas, it was to none but me
For all I've done for want of wit
to memory now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
good night and joy be with you all

"Oh all the comrades that e'er I've had
they are sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e'er I've had
they would wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
that I should rise and you should not
I'll gently rise and I'll softly call
good night and joy be with you all"


"No fear,
No envy,
No meanness"

Liam Clancy 1935 - 2009 Slán abhaile, mo chara

Hope For Humanity

FRIDAY MUSIC: Tango - too hot for TV, by JD

Back in the 'good old days' of black and white television the BBC had a show called Come Dancing. It was first broadcast in 1952 and featured, if my memory is not failing me, a sort of competition format with couples dancing things like waltz and foxtrot, an injection of 'glamour' into those grey post war years. The dancing was stiff and formal but stylish in a restrained way. They would also include a 'latin' section with samba and tango but again in a genteel and formal manner.

It was after I went to work in South America that I began to see those 'latin' dance styles in a new light. They were anything but formal and restrained, quite the opposite in fact!

There was a television channel called TangoTV and it was fascinating and informative but also insidious. Music from Carlos Gardel to Mercedes Sosa and old film of dancers in smoky bars revealed the soul of the music and I was drawn into understanding that soul.




A colleague at work filled me in with more information. It was, he said, their equivalent of the Blues in the USA. The music of those at the bottom of the heap, the rural poor and the slaves in the north and the porteños in Buenos Aires. They were down but they were most defiantly not out.

Most alluring of all was the dance form. As with the dancing to the music of the Blues, so with tango; it was the vertical expression of a horizontal desire and no attempt was made in either case to disguise the fact.

What you might have seen on your television screens, as the BBC showed it from the fifties and even now, is not the way tango should be danced. All stiff legged and stylised jerky movement, they resemble clockwork penguins. The real thing is probably too uncomfortably erotic for the BBC. There should be a smooth fluidity in the movements to give it the necessary sensuality.



As far as I know, TangoTV no longer exists but there is this http://www.tangocity.com/tangotube/ which could be a development of the idea.  And, as with all forms of music, it changes and evolves but the spirit remains. Most recently it has begun to embrace an electronic/techno style, the first of the following videos includes references to many well known melodies of the past and, being Argentina, there is a football reference also!





The Gotan Project began life in 1999 and they were probably the first to marry the tango to electronic/techno beats. Their most famous number is Santa Maria (del Buen Ayre) and has been featured many times in films and TV shows. There are many versions of it on YouTube but this one here is outstanding. It is a live performance, mixed with video clips, running almost nine minutes and features the finest modern jazz piano I have heard in a long time!

"Hay milonga de amor
hay temblor de gotán
este tango es para vos.
Argentina
Buenos Aires
El Puerto de Santa Maria del Buen Ayre"

Flight Entertainment, by JD

JD recalls fun aboard a Spanish jet...


Everybody who has travelled will have a tale or two about the weird and wonderful things that happen. Amusing tales, scary tales, strange tales…..

In over thirty years of travelling and probably 1000+ flights I should have kept a log of all the things that have helped make the journeys interesting and entertaining; missed connections, delays, ‘firm’ landings, turbulence, lightning strikes (three so far), scared passengers as well as mad cabin crew.

(If you are wondering how I could reach 1000 it’s because I live nowhere near London which means I have to take two planes to go anywhere and two more to return. And when I have needed to make a day trip to, for example, Zurich or Frankfurt it can mean four flights in one day, two there and two back, So they quickly mount up.)

Almost all of my travelling has been work related. A job in Madrid involved periodic short viits to Cairo. On one of these visits, after boarding and settling down, I then wandered along the cabin to ask the stewardess (am I still allowed to say stewardess?) for an aspirin or something for my hangover and we had a chit chat about nothing in particular, as you do.

Back to my seat and it was seat belt, safety routine and away we go. Then it was drinks, duty free trolley, meal, wine, more wine, coffee, brandy and later it was blinds down, dim the lights and time for the in-flight movie. I am not much of a movie fan so I relax into my usual semi-comatose tranquility with only half an eye on the screen.

And then – Ding!

“Cabin crew; twenty minutes to landing.”

Oh. Shurely shome mishtake. I wasn’t really paying attention but it seemed to me that there was about half an hour left before the end of the film. I must have misheard but then the bustle began. Cabin lights on again, clearing away empty glasses, checking overhead lockers, seat belts fastened etc, the usual. The film was switched off and then we landed.

Well, that was a new one. Iberia always keep you on your toes, you never know what to expect.

Three or four days later, having done whatever it was I was in Cairo for, it was time to return to Madrid. Lo and behold it was the same crew and the stewardess recognised me. “Hola de nuevo, JD, como estas?” and we had a chat and I asked her, “Will we see the end of the in-flight movie this time?” She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, no problem. Now we are better organised.”

So I settled down and as above; take off, drinks, duty free trolley, meal. wine, more wine, coffee, brandy. In flight movie time once more and again I lapse into dozy contentment, half an eye on the screen and mind in neutral.

And then………

The film snapped or the projector broke down or something and we ended up with a blank screen (this was in the olden days before digital video etc). The crew and the other passengers must have been dozing too because I don’t think anybody noticed. And we carried on cruising home, ‘entertainment’ free in blissful quietude, until we landed in Madrid and returned to the hurry-up of normal life.

The in-flight wines were better and more reliable than the in-flight movies. Iberia have got their priorities right, they know what is important to their passengers.

In case you think I am being unfair and critical of Iberia, I am not. They are one of my favourite airlines. Unlike the Barely Average competition, they employ real humans and their First Class really is first class.

Wherever and whenever you are travelling can I wish you all ‘buen viaje’.
___________________________________________________________

The above piece first appeared -with visual supplements - on Nourishing Obscurity here.

Can you have ethics without some form of religion?

I think not. 

Ethics have to have a basis. You can't derive an "ought" from an "is" - unless you have a philosophy that combines both - e.g. God the Creator who is also the Lawgiver. 

Without that, ethics is merely a study of moral attitudes without any hortative or normative force. Or a matter of logical consequences - "if you believe x and wish to be consistent, then you should do y". For example I asked a class whether eating animals was cruel and they all said yes, but balked at the idea of not eating meat at lunch. 

One answer would be simply to change one's principles to make them consistent with one's desires. Although possibly, being consistent could also be seen as an optional principle.

A moral code may be desirable, but that is not enough for it to be independent of human wishes or inclinations. Codes may differ sharply, with no way to determine which is correct or superior: for example, how does one adjudicate between cannibals and vegans?

The Beast From The East, by Wiggia

I had to take the wife shopping yesterday, I have to take the wife shopping anyway as she no longer can drive, and we went to the local Sainsbury's.

All went well until I was requested to fetch a loaf: what I saw as I turned into the bread sales area was a scene from East Germany, when all the shelves were permanently empty in the food stores. Amazingly with only a couple of days left of the effects of the “beast from the east”, shoppers were still plundering the bread and milk sections.

I had taken No1 shopping on Monday morning as usual and it was fairly quiet but by the time we left the car park was full as the public piled in to purchase anything that would stave off death by starvation. The till operator said the weekend had been unbelievable with the public buying multiples of everything from bottled water to fruit and veg and they had run out of most staples.

I have no idea how the public react to a weather warning on the rest of the continent but we have made an art form of the whole thing, from the weather reports in the MSM threatening Armageddon with threats of ten foot snow drifts, ice flooding and gales everywhere, trains stopped running before any snow had fallen in the south, schools shut everywhere on the principal that NO one would be able to get in and health and safety prevailed - prevailed to such an extent that the same schoolkids told to stay at home for safety reasons were then seen on national news jumping off steep hills on unlikely homemade sledges.

The road outside my house had the good fortune to have a snow clearer come through in the night, but I discovered in the morning that the snow clearer in ridding the road of snow had thrown it all on the pavement, meaning pedestrians had to walk in the road !

I can remember a similar cold spell - it was worse - back in the early eighties, when a local firm in Essex cornered the market in moon boots, bringing in on a barge up the river Blackwater in Essex thousands of these boots from Holland; I thought afterwards there must be cupboards everywhere stuffed with these boots that will never see the light of day again. There is no doubt that an impending weather “event” can be a great sales promotion.

A similar thing happened in the Great Storm when trees were down all over the place: my supplier told me he had been inundated with people wanting to buy chainsaws as tree surgeons could not cope with the work offered, and he had sold out twice and Stihl were trying to get extra supplies in from Germany.

Again I thought that there would be thousands of redundant chainsaws on eBay soon after, as those that had purchased them would have no further use, but no it never happened and again there must be thousands of hardly used chainsaws rusting in sheds all over the country. So no doubt now moldy bread and rancid milk is already being dumped along with limp lettuce and off veg, all will be forgotten until the next beast from the east or wherever it may come from.

Is Our Political Class Incompetent?

I watched the first half of BBC's Question Time on catch-up, and there was the old, dangerously avuncular Ken Clarke explaining how those who voted Leave hadn't considered all the - oh, so complicated - implications.

Sadly, no-one there thought to take him up on the question of contractual due diligence. For after Parliament voted to end the UK as a free country - as Tony Benn pointed out - in 1993, Ken Clarke, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, boasted that he hadn't read the Maastricht Treaty.

He was not alone: Douglas Hurd, then Foreign Secretary, said (Maastricht signing, 7 February 1992) "'Now we've signed it – we had better read it!'"

What would any commercial business do with a contracts manager who waved through agreements without even looking at them?

So I'm not inclined to take seriously any waffle from the old Bilderbergian about knowing exactly how everything will pan out before making a decision.

And no - not incompetent, or at least. not merely incompetent: arrogant, antidemocratic and treacherous.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Arvo Pärt, by JD

This evening (Friday) on BBC4 is a programme called "The Magic of Minimalism" about the American composers Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and La Monte Young.
https://digiguide.tv/programme/Documentary/Tones-Drones-and-Arpeggios-The-Magic-of-Minimalism/1237248/

I shall probably watch it, of course, but Charles Hazlewood's description of them as 'great composers' is stretching it a bit. Their music is interesting but eventually becomes monotonous.

It would be a more interesting programme if he were to include the genuinely great 'minimalist' composers of the 20th century, the late Sir John Tavener and especially the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt

“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation”- Arvo Pärt
http://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/071_arvo_part.htm

Herewith a selection of Tintinnabulation plus a rather quirky interview of Arvo Pärt by Björk.

The US gun debate - some additional facts

The recent mass shooting in a Florida school has seized the imagination, since it combines elements of fear, unpredictability and helplessness.  But emotional reactions have a way of skewing perceptions of overall reality. For example, the thought of an airplane crash has a similar terrifying effect, even though commercial passenger flight is, statistically, the safest mode of travel.

Without at all wishing to discount the horror of those killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I offer a few facts that might make us consider related issues more deeply:

In most countries, suicide is a bigger threat than homicide

"In 2013, 33,636 persons died from firearm injuries in the United States [...] The two major component causes of firearm injury deaths in 2013 were suicide (63.0%) and homicide (33.3%)." (1)

In most large and advanced countries, suicide is significantly more likely than murder or manslaughter - 2 1/2 times more in the US, 12 times more in Germany. (2)

Some other advanced and developing countries have a worse intentional death rate than the USA

Taking the overall rate of intentional death (i.e. homicides and suicides together), the US is less plagued than Finland, Japan and China, to name but a few. (2)

In the USA, black people are, proportionately to their numbers, far more likely than whites to be victims of homicide

Despite representing only 12.6% of the US population (3) ... "Of the 13,455 cases from last year [i.e. 2015] in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims – or 52.3 percent – were black." (4)

A number of other large countries have a worse murder rate than the US

The intentional homicide rate is some 5 times higher in the USA than in the UK (5), but the rate in the US [4.88 per 100,000 inhabitants] - terrible though it is - puts it 94th in the list by country. Large countries [see (6) for population figures] that have a higher homicide rate include (e.g.) Brazil (pop: 209m), Mexico (129m), Russia (144m) and the Philippines (105m).

Mass gun slayings in the US are a small percentage of overall firearm homicides

In 2015, mass shootings accounted for less than 4% of total US homicides by firearm. (7)

Things used to be far worse, in the Middle Ages

The murder rate in the university town of Oxford, England, in the 1340s is estimated to have been 110 per 100,000 inhabitants (8) - slightly worse than the most violent country today (said to be El Salvador - see (5), again)
_________________________________________________________________________________

(1) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_death_rate
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
(4) https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations)
(7) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604
(8) http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html

FRIDAY MUSIC: Breton Lays, by JD

Staying with the French theme of recent weeks, here is some very different and distinctive music and dance this week from the region of Bretagne, Brittany. This is the Celtic fringe of France and the final video here is Himne de la Bretagne "Bro gozh ma zadoù " which you will recognise as exactly the same as the Welsh equivalent, Land of my Fathers.

http://visite.bretagne.free.fr/index.php/en/culture.html

Africa: Still A Basket Case, by Wiggia

Wiggia is pessimistic about the outlook for South Africa:
______________________________________________



This is a short summary of my feelings after seeing the "address the nation" speech and the other speeches in the South African Parliament; absolutely nothing ever changes there in Africa.

Anyone who has been to Africa will have seen those countries that have “shrugged of the yoke of colonialism” as they like to call it, fail miserably to take advantage of the legacies left by the European settlers.

The scramble for Africa had many faults, the carving up of territories with disregard for tribes was probably the worst mistake, but with exceptions a land sparsely populated then was given a blueprint for a way forward that would enhance their future in a way they could never have dreamed of.

The cry we hear for reparations from African states is nothing more than a hand being held out for endless funds to bolster their total failure to take advantage of that legacy. Certainly Europeans took or made available valuable resources in these countries, resources the inhabitants had no knowledge of or any means to extract or use those resources; it was Europeans that made that possible.

So what happened? For many reasons - greed, personal ambition, the quest for power is all pervading in those countries - graft is on a scale outside the imagination of European politicians. Even relatively minor government officials find ways to squirrel away millions in Swiss bank accounts; and even those who (rarely) are brought to account and jailed or dismissed are immediately replaced by more of the same.

We see Prime Ministers and Presidents from these countries feted on official visits here, politicians who could never legally gain the wealth that they flaunt to the public; yet still they reign, using the power of their parties and corrupt legal processes to build impregnable walls round themselves and their cohorts.

Coincidentally I met one one of these officials when I was working for a client in Bayswater, London. One morning I was outside and the door of the house next door opened and several people came out; all, I discovered, were Nigerian. A smiling man called out good morning and we had a quick chat about the work I was doing next door.

It was only later when talking to my client who owned several properties in the area that he told me who he was and that the Nigerian also owned the property the other side of his: this one always had the curtains closed day and night and is where his “other” wives lived. This was all after this episode that you may remember:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20211380

This of course is just another story in a long list of corruption scandals out of Africa. But it is not just corruption that holds the continent back: power is the real driving force to the universal malaise there. Power and the acquisition of it is the bedrock of all political parties everywhere and here as there how that is gained becomes more questionable and democratic with time.

Yet Africa somehow manages to do all this with acquiescence of its people who blindly believe that any change will deliver them from poverty and that whatever happens whitey is to blame. One can’t blame them, for that it is what their leaders have been telling them for years, because they have no other excuse.

Nothing could be a better example of the above than the maiden speech of Cyril Ramaphosa the new president of SA, finally having ousted the corrupt Jacob ‘I showered so I can’t get AIDS’ Zuma. He starts off his tenure with the popular commitment "land will be appropriated from white farmers without compensation"* giving all the murdering thugs who support the EFF and its leader Julius Malema in the belief he will be the nation's saviour the right to kill and injure white farmers even more than is happening at this time; their choice, of course.

But that route will lead South Africa to the condition of Zimbabwe, and international investment withers on the vine. It does not seem credible that a nation with the resources of SA can disappear down the plughole of incompetence, but sadly once again we are talking about Africa, a continent about to suffer the biggest demographic explosion the world has seen - and they make getting rid of white farmers who feed and export for the nation a priority!

Africa will not change in any meaningful way. It has proved time and again since they got their independence from the European colonialists that the only thing they are good at is wrecking the legacy left and opening Swiss bank accounts on the money the West still gives them, and that includes the charities. It is a basket case.
_________________________________________________________________________________

*"We will accelerate our land redistribution programme not only to redress a grave historical injustice, but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation... this approach will include the expropriation of land without compensation.

"We are determined that expropriation without compensation should be implemented in a way that increases agricultural production, improves food security and ensure that the land is returned to those from whom it was taken under colonialism and apartheid."

https://www.biznews.com/sa-investing/2018/02/16/cyril-ramaphosa-debut-state-nation/

Labour's conundrum

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/17/labour-dreaming-uk-wants-socialism-privatisation

I suspect the Guardian hates Corbyn and wants Guardian-type socialism instead - the kind where you do well out of doing good, and get to condescend to the lower orders.

The trouble with being the friend of the poor is that you need them to be poor always so you can be their well-paid friend forever.

This is why the way out for the poorly paid and unemployed could come from the sort-of Right rather than the Left. A real Labour Party would seek so to improve the lot of the workers that in time, they wouldn't need the Party. What are the chances of that happening?

In the USA a maverick like Trump is hated not only by the Left (Michael Moore seems to be another one doing well for himself by noisily championing the poor without actually giving them jobs) but by the Right because he is interfering with the extractive setup that has seen a small minority hoovering up the wealth gains of the last 40 years. If he succeeds then we should all forgive his crassness and history of buccaneering business deals.

Is there a British Trump among us?

Cheap cameras, great results, by JD

A reposting from 2010, originally published on Nourishing Obscurity -
http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2010/09/cheap-cameras/

http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2010/10/cheap-cameras-2/

JD is big-leggy…………

…and is also a happy shopper….

…and is bemused by silly road signs….

and is also lost…

These pictures were all taken with a digital camera which I bought for £35 at a time when the cheapest Canon or Pentax etc were around £200. It is basically a webcam to sit above the computer screen but can be used out and about as you can see.

Cheap doesn’t always mean bad and expensive isn’t always good.  The camera shown here is an updated version of the one I have.

The picture to the right is of my key ring camera.

The key ring itself is more robust than the flimsy plastic box on the other end of the chain. When I saw it in the shop I thought it was just a novelty but I was assured that it was a real digital camera and it worked.

So for £12 I had myself yet another camera (current count is eight I think) and I set about seeing what it would do.

Because it was so cheap I didn’t mind when this very friendly horse, curious to know what I was up to, stuck its nose over the wall and snorted into the lens. As you can see this toy of a camera produces good pictures.

Two other photographs show that it is good for bold colours and strong shapes and patterns.

Pillar box

Skylight

Pinhole Camera

It’s back to basics with the pinhole camera shown on the left. Can’t remember where I bought it but they are available in the USA from here

Just fold the cardboard, assemble all the other bits and pieces, glue it together and you are ready to go. It takes 120 roll film and gives eight pictures per roll.

With digital photography having almost completely taken over it is difficult to find anywhere that does 120 film processing now. So that and a lack of time means I haven’t fully explored its potential.

But this self portrait sitting outside my little hovel shows what can be achieved:

Those two cameras could be described as Toy Cameras and if you search the internet for Toy Cameras you will discover a whole sub-culture of reactionary enthusiasts dedicated to their Lomo, Holga, Diana or Seagull cameras. (Unfortunately Lomo and Seagull have exploited this enthusiasm and their products are not as cheap as they ought to be.)

And if anybody knows of anywhere that still processes films for my Nimslo 3D camera then I might be able to use it again.

JD adds (18.02.2018):

A necessary postscript is that the two cheap digital cameras no longer function; not because there is anything wrong with them but because the likes of Microsoft have 'improved' their product with Win10 which does not accept old gadgets (my scanner no longer works either).

There was nothing wrong with XP but the technology companies want us to keep on spending money we do not have on their new stuff which is all created in the spirit of Hutber's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutber%27s_law 

You can insert swear word of your choice at this point!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Yann Tiersen, by JD

Once more some musique française pour apaiser vos soucis......

This is from Yann Tiersen who is a Breton of Belgian/Norwegian descent. Finistère was not far enough to the west so he currently lives on the island of Ushant, off the coast of Brittany. His new recording studio there will have uninterrupted views of what he calls the Celtic sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_Tiersen
http://yanntiersen.com

On some of the videos below Tierson plays a 5 string violin. Here is a guide to the history and the reason for the additional string-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_string_violin

In the final video here the music is played on a toy piano which I think sounds better than the original grand piano.

The Dream Of Reason (Revisited), by JD

Nearly seven years on, and after an unexpected result in the 2016 EU Referendum, JD offers this reposting, which first appeared on Nourishing Obscurity here:

http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2011/06/the-dream-of-reason/

JD says:  "It remains appropriate because the EU is still wedded to that dream of reason, that all problems can be resolved by 'wise' political 'elder statesmen'. Bah humbug!"
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El sueño de la razon produce monstruos 
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the title of this etching mistranslated as “The sleep of reason…”

Sueño can mean either sleep or dream depending on the context.

“The dream of reason calls forth monsters” is the correct interpretation.

When you are asleep you are unconscious and brain activity is flat. When you are dreaming, the subconscious is actively creating pleasantries or nightmares according to your inner true nature, as in the scene above.

Goya lived through a turbulent period in European history and, even though he was a proponent of the political enlightenment and freedoms promised by the French Revolution of 1789, he became aware of the Terror that followed, where Reason prevailed and the old ways were swept away.

No one is innocent once he has seen what I have seen. I witnessed how the noblest ideals of freedom and progress were transformed into lances, sabres, and bayonets. Arson, looting and rape, all supposed to bring a New Order, in reality only exchanged the garrotte for the gallows.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s armies during the occupation of 1808 with this painting. Along with its companion piece of the same size, El dos de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (La carga de los mamelucos en la Puerta del Sol) it was commissioned by the provisional government of Spain at Goya’s suggestion.

El 3 de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid. (Los fusilamientos en la montaña del Príncipe Pío)

As Goya noted, the ideal of reason does not produce reasonable behaviour.

Germany and the Russian Revolution; George Soros and... ?

Gosh, will I ever cease to be so ignorant. Douglas Adams' hapless hero Arthur Dent  "no more knows his own destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company," and until Peter Hitchens' column today (second section, here) I didn't know Germany started the Russian Revolution to free up 50 divisions from the Eastern Front and (so nearly) win the Great War in the West.

I'd always fuzzily assumed that Lenin had been deported from Germany (in a sealed train) as an undesirable; I hadn't known that the plan was not to deport, but to export him - to send a spark into the Russian gunpowder room.

An explosive situation prepared, it seems, with some 50 million gold marks funding high-print-run, quality-paper subversive newspapers among the Russian armed forces and factory workers:

http://www.thehistoryforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30125

In the same edition of the Mail On Sunday - a paper edited by a Scot who, confusingly, wants independence for Scotland but for the UK to remain in Europe - George Soros is allowed to tell his version of the story in the controversy over his funding the pro-Remain "Best For Britain."

I don't know what Soros' game is, but if he wants more amicable relations between the increasingly hysterical and demanding EU negotiators and the limp-as-old-lettuce UK leadership, wouldn't he do better to grease the wheels on the European side?

What does he imagine to be the eventual result of unrestricted movement of people into a country like ours with high (albeit disguised) unemployment - not to mention skewed employment, away from wealth production and into various forms of bandaging for a wounded society - and a generous but ever more unaffordable Welfare state? Is it - revolution?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Moriarty, by JD

The 'three French hens' a couple of weeks ago seems to have been very popular. The final video in that set was labelled "Jimmy (Moriarty cover)" so, naturally, I looked for the original and what I found was another group of French musicians who turn out to be rather good also. You can read about them here- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriarty_(band)

The sound quality/balance is less than good on one or two of these videos; apologies for that, hope it doesn't spoil your enjoyment.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Edgar Meyer and friends, by JD

This music post came about after listening to the violinist Joshua Bell on Radio 3 last week. Among the tracks played during the interview was one from an album called Short Trip Home which Bell had recorded with the virtuoso double bass player Edgar Meyer and others, a strange mix of bluegrass and classical. My curiosity aroused, I looked for more of the same on YouTube and found a whole new world of wonderful music and what follows is a selection from Edgar Meyer and friends.

Meyer himself began playing bass at the age of five! The mind boggles at the image of a small child grappling with a musical instrument almost twice his size but, no doubt, there are ways around such minor problems. You can read a short bio of him here in which The New Yorker calls him “…the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively un-chronicled history of his instrument.”
http://edgarmeyer.com/about/

JAZZ: Seated One day At The Organ, by Wiggia

Not an obvious choice for the playing of jazz, but these examples show it can be done with some aplomb.








Very brave lady, Sandra Kaye, taking on the mighty Wurlitzer with such bad acoustics.............

and to finish on the pipe organ at the Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago, Barbara Dennerlein.



Bonus footage: the largest working organ in the world (28,500 pipes):

The Contradictions of US Education, by Paddington

What are we doing wrong in the US education system?

The short answer is: nothing.

The appropriate way to evaluate a system is based on what it is designed to do, and the education system is not designed to do anything. Rather, throughout 200 years of public education, it has been given a sequence of demands, and has responded by adapting organically.

Among other things, the system has been required to:

• prepare young men for factories and the military, and young women for marriage and domestic service;
• serve as a mechanism for upward social mobility (Dewey);
• produce an educated electorate (Jefferson);
• generate 'well-rounded' individuals;
• serve as a minor league for professional sports;
• fix major social problems (Head Start);
• provide enough science and engineering majors to keep the economy working;
• graduate most students, each immediately ready to be successful in higher education, or prepared for a job;

with no recognition that some of these goals are in direct conflict.

For example, demanding increased performance necessarily means that more students will fail to clear the bar. Alternatively, demanding increased graduation rates necessarily leads to grade inflation and lowering the bar. There is no way around this, as it is precisely the problem of Type I and Type II errors in statistical testing.

The over-emphasis on sports in some districts, and the effect on grade inflation, has been well-recorded. What is rarely noted is the effect on the other students. If unprepared student athletes, or others who seem to put no effort into their studies, still progress to the higher grades, what is the immediate incentive to work hard?

If teachers are trying to fix every social problem in their classrooms, where is the time for learning? In my experience, the more talented students tend to get less attention, because 'they will learn anyway'. This is a recipe for mediocrity.

In short, before we try yet another major overhaul of the system, we should perhaps first decide the goals to be met, and also check that those goals are actually achievable.

Music for Burns Night, by JD

The songs of Robert Burns:

FRIDAY MUSIC: More French Hens, by JD

On the third day of Christmas Mr S posted a video by 'three French hens' and I thought the three young ladies, known collectively as LEJ, were rather good (that video was, as it turns out, played at the wrong speed and the image was reversed but no matter, they deserved further investigation!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.E.J

We deserve an encore (but not in France, when they wish for an 'encore' they will shout bis! as they do also in Belgium. On the other hand I might have been misinformed! However the OED confirms it.)

Zero hours

"Two hours at normal power, or six to eight hours at economical cruising speed." I'll settle for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ray Thomas 1941 - 2018, by JD

"He is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life --"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Thomas

"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form" -

(Plato). (Wordsworth Dictionary of Musical Quotations, 1991, p. 45).
https://voices.no/community/?q=colgrocke061106

The death culture advances another step

It was inevitable. Once you concede the right to kill unborn children, with time limits shifting back and forth in no-man's-land, someone would eventually suggest that infanticide could also become legally permissible, perhaps even a moral duty. That someone - and he started in on this 40 years ago - is Peter "animal rights" Singer who

"began to argue that it is ethical to give parents the option (in consultation with doctors) to euthanise infants with disabilities."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-about-disability-and-infanticide-from-peter-singer

In consultation with doctors, of course. The white coat makes all the difference - remember the Milgram experiment?

At the other end of life, we have "mercy killings" - again, something to be legalised and left to doctors.

I suppose that at some point these tendencies will meet in the middle. For if allowing the deformed or crippled to live is cruelty, why should there be any upper age limit to "termination" or whatever mealy-mouthed term is in fashion at the time?

Once we accept that human life is not sacred and that it can be assessed in terms of money and convenience, we're off down the slippery slope.

Already, the British Government is encroaching on our (or our family's) right to our own bodies, proposing a presumed right to "harvest" (another sweetened obscenity) organs in the absence of an "opt-out"; the Chinese are a little further ahead at the moment, killing political prisoners on demand for their spare bodily parts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China

There certainly are issues to be discussed, but one thing I won't have is an assumption that ethical matters are to be delegated to (or grabbed by) paid philosophers, politicians and doctors - authority, in short. The way things are going, maybe one day we could see posthumous pardons for a Continental government that did all the above in the 1930s and 1940s.

We Want Plates! - by Wiggia

This was prompted by a piece on the David Thompson blog and my personal antipathy to much that calls itself trendy in the strange world of modern celebrity chef led restaurants.

I wrote some while back about the modern practice of decorating plates rather than putting food on them, but that has been pushed aside as the current trend for serving on anything but plates gathers momentum. So much so that a website and Twitter account seeks out the ridiculous levels this diversion from food itself has reached; it has been spoken of as "performance art" by those up-their-own-backsides "hipster" chefs  !

The desire to get bums on seats runs perilously close to insanity in some cases but the modern world takes it all in its stride as little seems to shock or surprise any more: restaurants with toilets for seats, another with urinal pots holding flowers on the table seemingly gather a clientele that thinks these gimmicks are worth paying for; so be it, it's their money.

But the replacement of eminently proved and practical ceramic plates is a step too far. It could be said that this trend is nothing new - chicken in a basket was around long before the advent of the plate substitutes, as was the Chianti bottle wrapped in raffia and adorning Italian restaurant tables as a lamp throughout the land even in the fifties (this latter, believe it or not, is making a comeback.)

The wood, the slate, the half brick, the paper towel all run parallel with strange new ceramics that are designed to frustrate the diner. A nine-inch surround to a plate leaves a deliberately small area for food and nowhere to put your cutlery unless you want it to slide into whatever is in the middle; the bowl with a top rim at different levels is very near to the aforementioned urinal in shape, so could they be trying to tell us something about the food therein? Or the extreme oblong plates that make eating akin to playing the piano.

The platters, as they are known, have recently come in for a food standards agency fine in one Birmingham restaurant, having not been cleaned properly and looking repulsive - this after a previous warning. This event has kick-started the fight back against the "anything but plates" outfits (and there are many of them.)

I first encountered the slate plate some years back in a Michelin starred restaurant that served a fish dish on the slate. The peas were served in a small bowl that sat on the edge as for obvious reasons they could not be served on the slate - what was the bloody point? I laughed when it was served and the chef/proprietor was not amused when I asked for a plate: he explained it was part of the presentation - back to performance art !

Anyway here is a selection of the extremes that today's restaurants go to to divert your eyes  and thoughts away from the actual food, starting with the wonderful example of a full English on a grease-proof paper mat on a board with the beans in a coffee cup and the coffee in a jar ?

Democracy is neither Right nor Left

The above video is of a Newsnight opinion piece by David Aaronovitch. He appears to relish sharing with us some morbid calculations by Peter Kellner to suggest that we need only wait for the older generation to die in order to subvert Britain's withdrawal from the EU.

Underneath this, I think, is the illusion that support for democracy is somehow exclusively a feature of the Right - an illusion that many half-wittedly debating these things on social media seem to share.

They may not understand that opposition to membership of the EU was and should still be heartily supported by those on the Left, as well as by Conservative voters, who share a love of their country. It was Macmillan and Heath that got us in; Peter Shore....



... Michael Foot, George Galloway, Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner etc who did and do oppose - on democratic grounds. UKIP itself was founded by Professor Alan Sked (still living and fighting) as a Left opposition to the EU.

I suspect that getting us into the EU (as it now is) was not only a project sponsored by the USA but was seen by certain elements in the British Conservative Party as a lasting solution to suppress British socialism and those pesky unions.* Just look at Heath's simmering rage in confronting a socialist, not so say arrogance and rudeness (not once politely calling Foot "Mister" as the latter scrupulously called him back) in this 1975 TV interview/debate:



We democrats may have our political differences but we are united on the principle that it is the people who should be informed and who should decide. It's not a left-right thing, except insofar that there is a group on the right that thinks (as the Communists do, and New Labour seemed to) the common man should accept being treated like a family pet and shouldn't complain as long as his master throws him some food.

"Pet-ernalism", perhaps.

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*And the popular perception of trade unions as simply greedy troublemakers - though some there were - fails to take into account decades of major economic and monetary mismanagement -  by parties of both colours - that helped lead to the high, wealth-destroying inflation of the 1970s.