What to do about the poor?

John Ward has an appalled look at the underclass and, though naturally a humane man, is leaning in the direction of abortion and sterilisation. I say:

I teach their children. Your observations - and I share your worries - raise philosophical and econo-political questions.

1. Before advocating abortion and sterilisation, consider whether we are nothing more than temporary forms of matter with the capacity for pleasure and pain. If a grain of sand is a nothing then there are no Arabian sands, since a zillion times nothing is nothing. This kind of thinking allowed Stalin to murder millions of people for the good of... er...

2. Peter Hitchens (who makes a living by stating what fifty years ago would have been unpublishable because it would have been thought too bleedin' obvious) is quite right that the middle class, by giving themselves ever-greater license in terms of substance abuse and sexual mores, have ruined the working class who do not have the same resources to recover from the concomitant pitfalls.

3. Much of the moral decay is also owing to a deteriorating economy and the shockingly cynical callousness shown towards the working class even by the Labour Party. What happened to the Rover works at Longbridge, Birmingham in the runup to the 2000 General Election is a damning reason why I can never see the modern LP as the friend of the workers.

4. As John Mortimer has Rumpole observe, the woes of the underclass provide much lucrative employment for their superiors, so the rot has spread much further than is immediately visible.The political class has signally failed the country as a whole.

5. The temporary beneficiaries of this state of affairs are the upper strata, who have created (as in e.g. the EU) a transnational governing class that is suborning the news media and any other form of supervision and governance that might restrict their endless self-enrichment. Their intermarriage (or interfornication) is, I suggest, leading to the surreptitious re-creation of a full-blown aristocracy - Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”). The TV commentators dine with the ministers and money-men, but neglected to bring a long spoon. Soon they will wear the livery of their true masters, and the more attractive or better-connected among their children shall refresh the bloodline of the new global ruling class. "Notting Hill and Islington, you have stolen my land away."

6. Part of the process is economic globalisation. Sir James Goldsmith warned us all in 1983 at the time of GATT, and now that the talks have stalled, see (those who matter in) the US pushing on via the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

7. And to distract (one of the central themes of your blog) from this dreadful scheme we are encouraged to click our tongues at what is now the benefit class, people who once were the hewers of wood and drawers of water and have been abandoned and exploited at every turn, latterly to scare the lower middle class into submission (in the vain hope that they will not be next). We are enjoined to moralise at the unfortunate victims of our own actions:

“If it were indeed the case that bad nourishment, little education, lack of air and sunshine, unhealthy housing conditions, and overwork produce better people than are produced by good nourishment, open air, adequate education and housing, and a reasonable amount of leisure, the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse, and we could rejoice that such a large percentage of the population enjoys the conditions that make for virtue.” - Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"

8. A heavy reckoning is coming, and not just for the current poor.

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Central England Temperatures

As we all know, the Central England Temperature (CET) record is the world's oldest continuous surface temperature record, going back to 1659, although to put it mildly the early data has a number of defects. It can be downloaded from the Met Office here.

In an idle moment and as I live in central England, I downloaded the data  aiming to play around with various ways of presenting it. For example, the Met Office shows each monthly mean temperature as a difference from the 1961-1990 mean (fig 1) which brings out the recent warm spell very well.

fig 1

Only data from 1772 is used by the Met Office, as in Parker et al. (1992). By the way, the Parker paper highlights rather well the complexities and the adjustments made in compiling a long historical temperature record. It certainly isn't a list of thermometer readings.

However, if you simply plot the temperatures rather than the 1961-1990 differences (fig 2), the graph is rather more innocuous. After all, it's worth remembering that we experience daily and seasonal temperature changes far larger than those we are supposed to be alarmed about. 

fig 2

I see nothing wrong with either format. I'd use the Met Office approach if I had a reason to emphasise the recent warming spell. However, if I was wondering whether to move north to escape catastrophic warming, then I might use the simple temperature graph in fig 2.

fig 3

The graph above (fig 3) is the CET data from 1979 - the satellite era. Just for fun I've fitted a second order polynomial which appears to show that the CET temperature has peaked, albeit a very shallow peak. I don't yet see it as a trend though, but it is worth noting how easy it is to present the data in many different ways depending at least in part on your agenda. 

fig 4

For example,  the temperature record from 2006 plotted the Met Office way (fig 4) seems to show a rapid cooling trend. Maybe so, but as nobody knows where it will go in 2014, let alone the longer term, what conclusion do we draw from that? Don't try to build an agenda on temporary trends in cyclic phenomena is my conclusion - at the moment.

Finally, the month of June from 1659 to 2013 (fig 5) shows a flat linear trend over the entire three and a half centuries - h/t to sunshinehours for that oddity.

fig 5

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Rubbish! Incompetent UK Government blames EU

Pics: Guardian, Telegraph

"When rubbish piled up for weeks in 1979, it was a crisis; now it's an EU policy." That was my starting thought, after all the MSM (and Conservative Home) complaints about fortnightly municipal waste collections.

Not so. EU regulation in this area is about reducing landfill and packaging waste, especially rotting organic waste. To incentivise change, a landfill tax was introduced by the Conservatives in 1996, at two different rates. Currently the standard rate is £2.50 per tonne, but "active" (organic) waste is charged at £72 per tonne, rising this April to at least £80.

Local authorities' failure to meet recycling targets results in heavy expenditure on landfill tax, so to save money they have threatened to cut down on household collection frequency, and the Government compensated them to maintain the weekly service.

Germany and Austria manage recycling rates of over 60%, compared with the UK's 39% so it can be done; our national government is paying councils not to pull their finger out. Unless we want to disappear under a swelling mountain of garbage, we need to do something, whether or not we're told to do so by some supranational body.

Pic: European Environment Agency

I'm agin our membership of the EU because, among other reasons, I believe in democracy - and on constitutional grounds, I say we're not in the EU anyway, since we never gave our informed consent. But in the case under discussion, it suits Parliament to blame the EU for its own weakness in dealing with recalcitrant councils, whereas in other cases our Government pretends to make decisions that have already been handed down to them by Europe.

Getting out of - or as I'd prefer to say, confirming that we're not in - the EU is only the first step. The next is to clear out the Augean stables in Westminster and institute more open, responsive, responsible and competent government.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Freedom and survival

This week saw the death of Hiroo Onada, a WWII Japanese soldier who continued his guerilla war in the Philippines until 1974. Although he killed 30 indigenous people over these years, most of us must have respect for a man fighting on alone for so long.

Except he wasn't on his own for most of that time, as the Daily Mail reveals: "Three other soldiers were with him at the end of the war. One emerged from the jungle in 1950 and the other two died, one in a 1972 clash with local troops."

Lone survival is a familiar motif in films, not so much in real life. In some tribal cultures, the punishment for major crimes such as murder was not execution, but simply shunning. Without the material and psychological support of their community, most individuals would die. Even Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, nearly broke his back hunting game.

The multiple challenges facing us - economic, environmental etc - feed the fantasies of doomsters and individualists. But if and when a whole society collapses, the disaster crushes all, not just the weak and ill-prepared - where were the rich Mayans to be found after their civilisation fell? Not drinking chocolate in some comfortable enclave among the ruins.

However, apocalypse is another hackneyed cinematic motif. As energy resources dwindle and become more expensive, it's more likely, argues John Michael Greer, that we shall see a series of economic resets, rather in the way that the coals burning in a hearth fire suddenly shuffle a bit closer together from time to time. That's something for which we can prepare, he says, and lists a number of technologies that would go towards making a sustainable local economy.

So far, so good. Yet even a cooperating community has to consider external threats. Aldous Huxley's 1962 novel "Island" depicts a society that is orderly and designed for the happiness of all, using a combination of accommodative social mores, neo-Buddhist wisdom and side-effect-free psychotropic drugs. It is overthrown when foreign oil companies move in...

"Island" is an imagined resolution of the potential disharmonies at two of what I have called the "Three Levels Of Freedom" - the conflicting or self-destructive drives within the individual, and the relationship of the individual with the group. The tragic ending is caused by a conflict at the third level, one group (the islanders) versus another (the greedy and powerful outsiders).

Worries about various potential dislocations in the global trading system are leading commentators such as Charles Hugh Smith to consider how to increase local resilience, as for example in Thursday's post, "A Thought Experiment In American Autarky". Here he is thinking on a national level, but the deeper the crisis, the greater the possibility that even countrywide arrangements could break down. Empires and nations have fractured before, as Germany did in the Middle Ages.

Most likely to survive, perhaps, are communities large enough to provide themselves with all the necessities of life (and sufficient diversity to stave off the problems of inbreeding), but protected from outside disruption by remoteness or difficult terrain. That reduces the threat of Level Three conflict, especially as technological deterioration in the long term makes it harder to wage war over long distances and great obstacles.

But material goods are not enough. There is also what one might term social wealth - shared ethical and cultural values that promote harmony and mutual support. Otherwise there will be unnecessary suffering and tensions that could tear the community apart - as Norman Cohn demonstrates with multiple horrific examples in his famous work about medieval uprisings, "The Pursuit Of The Millennium". Cohn's thesis is that the ground for revolution was prepared by want and insecurity, especially among the growing proletariat in urban areas.

Ironically, the trigger for insurrection was often an individual who had overcome his internal conflicts - achieving Level One freedom - and so could act without moral inhibitions. If one accepts the Freudian tripartite division of the psyche, such people had extinguished their superego and as full-blown psychopaths could lead their fellows in a merry, lethal dance toward ultimate calamity. (A major modern example would be Chairman Mao who, we see in a chilling 2005 biography, defeated his father's authority when a boy by threatening suicide, and one of whose early poems looked within himself and saw a mighty rushing power like a great storm, unstoppable.) So society has a stake in the mental and spiritual health of all its members, as well as their material well-being.

The long-term survival of humanity, and its prospects for reasonable contentment, requires vigilant and equitable balancing at all levels, from the mental stability of individuals, to whatever is the accepted "social contract" in society, to careful international diplomacy and robust economic arrangements. The struggle for freedom and happiness is not a solitary quest but a multi-player, multi-dimensional one; none of the Three Levels can be ignored.

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Disconnect

(Click to achieve enlightenment)

The image of Tianmen Square's giant TVs broadcasting the sunrise to relieve the smoggy gloom struck me as a metaphor for much more than China's industry and environment.

If we tore our eyes and ears away from the agenda-infested media, what conclusions would we draw from our own experience? What plans of action would we form?

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Curry on climate

Worth reading  is Judith Curry's statement to the Committee on Environment and Public Works of the United States Senate - Hearing on “Review of the President’s Climate Action Plan” 16 January 2014.

For example :-

The premise of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan is that there is an overwhelming judgment of science that anthropogenic global warming is already producing devastating impacts, which is summarized by this statement from the President’s Second Inaugural Address:

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.

This premise is not strongly supported by the scientific evidence:

• the science of climate change is not settled, and evidence reported by the IPCC AR5 weakens the case for human factors dominating climate change in the 20th and early 21st centuries 

• with the 15+ year hiatus in global warming, there is growing appreciation for the importance of natural climate variability 

• the IPCC AR5 and SREX find little evidence that supports an increase in most extreme weather events that can be attributed to humans, and weather extremes in the U.S. were generally worse in the 1930’s and 1950’s than in recent decades.

Not only is more research needed to clarify the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide and understand the limitations of climate models, but more research is needed on solar variability, sun-climate connections, natural internal climate variability and the climate dynamics of extreme weather events.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Alice puts her foot down

From Wikipedia

Alice is driving along the main road through the Derbyshire village of Wessington. It is a quiet time of day and she notices that she is well above the speed limit. Alice slows down and luckily there are no unwelcome consequences such as a speeding ticket.

Fragmented reality is the reality we live in, a world where most common events are left unexplained because life moves on and we have no time to work out the explanation. Even so, is it possible for Alice to explain why she broke the speed limit in a pleasant little place like Wessington?

Where should she begin? Should she begin with a sociological, psychological, political, legal, modern or old-fashioned view about motorists who break speed limits?

Presumably she will not favour all these points of view – but is there a leading candidate? To make Alice’s problem a little more difficult, let us concoct a list of ideas she might consider if she decides to look at this question from every possible point of view she can think of.

• Alice may get an emotional buzz from driving fast.
• Her psychological state – she may be anxious to get home.
• Her knowledge of Wessington – it may be a place she doesn’t know.
• Road layout and road sign visibility. Alice may not see the speed limit signs.
• Body maps and memories located in specific areas of her brain and specific neurological events may explain her behaviour in broad neurological terms.
• Complex biochemical processes in Alice’s brain may explain her speeding in terms of the molecular structure of her central nervous system.
• Alice's actions may involve trillions of electrons in the relevant areas of her brain.

Obviously as we go down this list, we soon leave behind the real world of Wessington, motorists and common sense.

There are some broadly usable ideas at the top of the list and scientific theory lurks at the bottom, but we do not have a way to knit them together and it seems unlikely that we ever could. Real life is left behind well before we reach ludicrous notions of electrons in Alice’s brain.

So which is best – top down or bottom up? Rigid determinism seems to suggest that everything from electrons in Alice's brain to her foot on the accelerator are all part of a coherent whole.

Rigid determinism is impossible to prove in real life situations though. So does anyone actually believe it?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Sherlock

Sherlock and Watson - from the BBC

Last night we watched an episode of Sherlock. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s a BBC version of Sherlock Holmes set in the bonkers world of TV drama and a magically deluded version of the present. Not a hansom cab to be seen.

Sherlock is played by Benedict Cumberbatch who makes a good Holmes at times, but is wasted here. Dr Watson is played a rather wooden chap I’ve seen somewhere before and Moriarty by a guy who comes across as a little boy pretending to be insane.

Last night’s plot was something to do with an all-powerful blackmailer who supposedly has the dirt on every important person in the country. Which rather confirms something we all know anyway, but that's by the by. The blackmailer was played by a neatly bearded chap with rimless spectacles and the subtle, spine-tingling menace of a meringue.

At one point, Dr Watson’s wife Mary is dressed in paramilitary black and about to shoot the blackmailing villain with her silenced pistol, but Sherlock intervenes so she shoots him instead. As you do. In a lucid moment she appears to know Holmes is the good guy but shoots him anyway.

The reason why Mary might make this superficially lamentable error was too boring and improbable to follow. She turns out to be some kind of ex-CIA assassin so my theory is this: Mary is very short-sighted and forgetful, so at the critical moment she simply loses her bearings and shoots the wrong fellow. Happens all the time.

At least it explains why the CIA might have wished to get rid of her. Judging by her performance last night, even St Obama would be in considerable danger with her around.

How Mary gains entrance to the blackmailer's almost impregnable hi-tech lair is a minor mystery too. Sherlock goes to all the trouble and incongruity of seducing the blackmailer's assistant, while Mary apparently uses the tradesman’s entrance which Sherlock overlooks in the sheer complexity of his thinking.

Sherlock’s delightfully aloof brother Mycroft appears, sneers and disappears throughout. He's rather good at sneering too – it's almost worth watching for that alone.

Mycroft Holmes - from the BBC

In my view, the BBC should go the whole hog and give Sherlock the ability to fly like Superman. Maybe a bionic eye and a bionic ear would add to the drama. The eye and ear could be designed and fitted by Dr Watson and Mary at a top secret MI5 research lab in Hinckley.

Mary would need a quick visit to Specsavers first though. Maybe the gun could be put in a safe place too.

This would bring Sherlock closer to his real mentors such as Batman and Superman. After all, right at the end we are told that boy wonder Moriarty has taken control of all electronic displays in order to broadcast his evil leer to the whole country. Petrifying stuff, but didn’t Lex Luthor try that?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Sunday Papers

Click to call for help...

Your car is spying on you!

"... the black box in your car is indeed recording everything and because of the GPS installed in your car, the manufacturer knows when a driver has ever been speeding and where. Car manufacturers can tell if you were speeding in a brand new car when you are supposed to not exceed certain limits for warranty purposes. All of this info is recorded. Police want access claiming they need this info to determine what happened in an accident. There is nothing that is ever private at anytime."

- Martin Armstrong

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Split Endz' counterblast to bankers!

(click to read the girls' rebuttal)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2536509/Revealed-How-33-000-families-claiming-26-000-year-benefits-cap-imposed.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-426074/The-REAL-cost-unemployment-61-billion-year.html

www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn06204.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/apr/11/mps-inquiry-hbos-directors-bonuses

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/12/17/carney-lays-out-bank-of-england-exit-strategy/

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Climate blogs

What's the collective noun for climate blogs?

Whatever it is and in case you haven't come across it, ScottishSceptic has created uClimate.com, a site listing about 100 - although I haven't counted them - sceptic and non-sceptic climate blogs with the first few lines of their latest posts. As a preliminary to this work he posted a ranking list of blogs here.

He also has an interesting post which tries to assess the motivations and outlook of the two sides. It doesn't fit me too well, although I agree with those who see a significant political influence in the climate debate.

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Stonerz

(Click to expand your consciousness)

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Introducing "Split Endz", the cartoon with broader appeal!

(Click to enlarge)

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Factoid: Brits need more governing than Americans

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/congressional-gridlock-expected-worsen-article-1.1566718
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/primary/2013
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

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Food poverty and the need for consumer education

The poorest 10% in the UK have significantly less money than they used to, but could still eat healthily. That's one message in DEFRA's 2012 Food Statistics Pocketbook:

As their income dropped, people in this group spent 26% less than before on carcase (fresh) meat, 25% less on fruit and 15% less on vegetables (p.28).

The Eatwell plate may not be right - some claim dietary starch is a factor leading to obesity and diabetes - and libertarians may object to what they see as nannying by the State. Those objections aside, surely there is room for more public education on how to use limited financial resources to best effect?

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Vote for John Ward!

At last, a party political manifesto I could get behind:

• Mutualise the NHS and all social weal services
• Replace Whitehall with mutualised administration
• Disallow all additional Sir Humphrey pension emoluments after 2006
• Stop immigration dead now
• Start retraining our over-educated, under-equipped workforce
• Stop building boxes and start growing food
• Leave the EU, let Scotland bugger off if it wants to
• Stop all rises and bonuses at taxpayer-owned banks
• Make any form of bank bailin illegal
• Purge the police force of crooks
• Stop non-taxpayers from owning media titles
• Sanitise Westminster’s money-lobbying forever
• Come down hard on multinational tax avoidance
• Introduce compulsory uniformed Social Service for every child without exception from age 12-14
• Put respect for others at the centre of education.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

From sad to glad

(Pic source)

Coming to the South Hams last week, we passed Dartington Primary School again. This time it had some marquees up and I wondered what the event was; it turns out that owing to alleged design faults, the cutting-edge eco-architecture is leaking rainwater into the school buildings, so that they have had to be supplemented with temporary structures.

Rather than laugh at the Greens, let's just see this as merely a teething problem. I thought back in 2009 that the school was forward-looking and I could imagine the children enjoying the light-welcoming environment. The Mail article linked above says they're enjoying the enforced change in routine, too.

Natural light is not only helping the school run on a "carbon-neutral" basis, it's good for preventing seasonal depression (SAD), an issue raised in the Mail yesterday ("Workers who see no natural light all winter").

Energy is getting expensive already, and eventually fossil fuels will become scarce (will the next generation see the end of gas?). Other resources may last hundreds of years yet, but unless you're hoping the human race will die out soon, it makes sense to prepare for the long term.

And there are further reasons to consider localism and resilience: the world may not always be so interconnected and relatively peaceful and co-operative. Totnes ( only two miles away) bought into the "transition town" movement early.

There's been some attempt to do the same for Birmingham, but it seems largely to have fizzled out.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Awakening

MotionElements Stock Footage

In a recent post, the billionaire Hugo Salinas Price considers how much time we spend in a world of illusions. What happens when the communal fictions break down?

When the money supply has broken free from limitation (such as precious metals - he advocates a return to silver-based currency), it will multiply until the dream breaks - and with it will go many of the other social constructs that keep us relatively safe and well-fed.

"... the National Debt of the US is entirely imaginary. It cannot and will not ever be repaid, and will grow numerically up to the point at which reality finally dissolves the bewitched imagination which holds the population in thrall...

"The storm will force the men and women of the world, who have lived so unquestioningly in their highly imaginary world, to wake up and find, to their astonishment dismay and anger, that they have lost their jobs, that they have no savings and that their pension funds are gone or have been confiscated. Their indignation will be forgotten as sheer terror sets in. The Department of Homeland Security has been given a supply of more than one billion hollow-point bullets for good reason."

We are connected to each other across the world and in abstract and technology-dependent ways that make the whole system increasingly liable to disruption. We have become detached from the resources and skills that would help us survive in our immediate environment.

This is why one of Charles Hugh Smith's major themes is the need to avoid debt and conventional forms of investment in the future (such as a college degree), and instead build up local connections and a wide stock of useful social and practical skills.

Sadly, I'm not sure how easily this (undoubtedly wise) scheme can be adopted by the urban masses, especially in overcrowded countries like the United Kingdom, whose ratio of arable land to population is one-fifth that of the USA's.

CHS is based in Hawaii, a fertile Pacific archipelago 2,500 miles west of mainland USA and almost 4,000 miles east of Japan. The majority of its food is imported, but official attention has now turned to the need for greater food security - see this 2012 Hawaii State planning document (pdf). Good luck, CHS - though you'll need it a bit less than we do.

 All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Know your place

For whatever a man imagines that he cannot do, he imagines it necessarily, and by that very imagination he is so disposed that in truth he cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.

For so long as he imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it: and consequently, so long it is impossible to him that he should do it.

However, if we pay attention to these things, which depend solely on opinion, we shall be able to conceive that a man should under-estimate himself.

Benedict Spinoza – Ethics

I’ve played around with this quote for years because it gets right to the heart of a key aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy.

By imagination, he means dubious notions and images we absorb from the outside world without having examined them effectively – or even without having examined them at all.

He wrote long before modern ideas of psychological conditioning, but here he is effectively saying that our abilities as well as our thinking can be conditioned by the outside world.

If we absorb the notion that we can’t do something without taking the trouble to analyse why not, then we simply can’t do it and that’s that. Not a particularly remarkable conclusion for our times, but remarkable enough for his I suspect.

Many of us do underestimate ourselves and I suspect we should always try to notice the fact and analyse why it may be so. Was the underestimate fed to us by external circumstances?

Do you know your place?

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Happy New Year!

We were in Army married quarters in a North German village, when this was first screened in June 1963. Since then, it's become a German New Year's Eve ritual. Drink, absent friends, defiant celebration.

Pic: Wikipedia

Although penned in the 1920s by a British author, Lauri Wylie, the skit is said to have been inspired by Prince Albert's step-grandmother, Duchess Sophie Caroline Amalie of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. From 1841 onward, the widowed Duchess celebrated her birthday in the Gotha Winter Palace, surrounded by her four long-dead friends – a publisher, an entrepreneur, a professor - and a colonel, whose part was played by her servant.

Because of post-WWI anti-German sentiment, the scene was transposed to an English country house, but in Wylie’s original script, the names of the protagonists and the food and drinks on the menu remained Germanic.

Thanks to Prince Albert, we now celebrate Christmas German-style, so why not New Year's as well? Prosit Neujahr!

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Society is like the air

This is an interesting quote expressed with Santayana’s inimitable lucidity. He says there is more to social life than gregarious socialising which he sees as an essentially passive activity akin to breathing.

Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It renders solitude terrible without making society particularly delightful.

A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable.

A creature separated from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with all its supports.

He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.

Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason

I’m sure we’ve all come across highly gregarious people who only appear to want superficial social contact. They may be good company in the right surroundings, but somehow don’t relish anything deeper than good humoured chit-chat.

Perhaps this is where the emptiness of modern politics comes from. The ghastly charade of social empathy which seems so shallow. If Santayana is right, the shallowness may result from a doomed attempt to substitute the forms of gregarious behaviour for the warmth of genuine engagement.

After all, striding to the political lectern in shirt sleeves doesn’t convince anyone. Simply telling it as it is would probably work better. Not only because the shirt sleeves are unconvincing, but as Santayana says - in itself gregarious behaviour is insufficient to live on.

A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable.

Sounds like a political party conference to me. It isn’t surprising that the vast majority of us seek more genuine social engagement while party membership inevitably declines to a squabbling, anti-social core.

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Oxford: the first coffee house

When you're in Oxford, walking down the High towards Magdalen Bridge, you'll pass Queen's College on your left, then the Queen's Lane Coffee House. Stop, and glance to your right at a four-storey building next to the Examination Schools. There's a blue plaque on it, to mark the place where Frank Cooper first sold the famous Oxford Marmalade made by his wife Susan.

But it may have a greater claim to fame, because here, or near here, was England's first recorded coffee house. In his 1691 book about Oxford-educated writers and bishops, Anthony à Wood noted*:

(1650 – p. xix) This yeare Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S. Peter in the East, Oxon. and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank. When he left Oxon. he sold it in Old Southampton buildings in Holborne neare London, and was living there 1671.

(1654 – p. xxiii) Cirques Jobson, a Jew and Jacobite, borne neare Mount-Libanus, sold coffey in Oxon. in an house between Edmund hall and Queen coll. corner.

St Peter's was later deconsecrated and turned into the library of St Edmund Hall (aka "Teddy Hall") Facing it on the south side of the High was a fourteenth-century inn, originally called the Tabard but renamed the Angel when Magdalen College developed it in 1510, and again in the 1660s.The larger left-hand-side part was eventually demolished to build the Examination Schools. The engraving below is from the early nineteenth century, when the licensee was Thomas Gellett.

(Pic source)

One wonders whether the two coffee purveyors were the same person, and whether the enterprise started in a side room of the tavern (which may have been glad of extra revenue during the Puritan Interregnum) and shifted over the road when business took off. If so, then maybe, as the Oxford History site also suggests, the modern Queen's Lane Coffee House is the site of the first dedicated cafe premises in the country.

(Pic source)

____________________________________

* “ATHENAE OXONIENSES. AN EXACT HISTORY OF ALL THE WRITERS AND BISHOPS WHO HAVE HAD THEIR EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD” (1813 edition, Vol. I – with additions by Philip Bliss). Accessed from https://archive.org/details/athenaeoxoniense01wooduoft on 26.12.2013

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Referism: gives you the hit without the tar

Pic source

By Sackerson

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Abandon success!

Successful people can't be successfully imitated, and successful fund managers are merely a statistical blip. That's Charles Hugh Smith's latest message, and though he is prolific and always thought-provoking, I think this is possibly his most important, because it bears on the happiness of the largest number of people.

CHS quotes Aaron Krowne:

The average man cannot ever hope to win with "investments"(or the world of finance in general), but must be content with savings. Unfortunately, in the absence of sound money, we don't really have "savings" anymore, which is why the whole world has effectively been converted to economic sheep for the slaughter, a kind of "superadvantage" of those who run our economic system.

Speaking as someone who was an IFA for 20 years, I completely agree that the majority of people should and would be satisfied with sound money, expecting no more than what they are willing to save, and no less than that it should preserve its purchasing power. It is one of the outstanding failures (or crimes, even) of the current British Government that one of its first acts was to shut up shop on NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates.

But turning to the wider implications of CSH's post, how many people's lives are wasted chasing what DH Lawrence called "the bitch-goddess Success"? Or, not even chasing Her, but being forced to put their immediate happiness and their personal and familial relationships to one side because of the demands of "the job". All those dreams of ultimate glory and happy retirement ruptured by divorce, ill-health etc. We get guff about "work-life balance", but who is allowed to achieve it in any significant sense? What happened to working the 9 to 5, hanging up your hat when you get home and being contented?

I think we should rebel in two ways: personally, by not falling for the con and as my dearest friend used to say, "Always have as much fun as you possibly can"; and collectively, by pressing for economic arrangements that are geared to making it worthwhile to save money, and possible to have time and energy to enjoy our daily lives, now.

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Noam Chomsky on the increase in US political instability

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Going viral

This post is merely a tot of pre-Christmas speculation.

Suppose a virus such as the common cold virus were to  mutate such that the symptoms it causes become generally less pronounced and less problematic for daily life.

The obvious advantage for the virus is that we are more likely to carry on mixing with other humans and so spread the virus more widely. Staying at home for a few days does not favour virus propagation so the new strain is preferentially selected by our behaviour.

Maybe this would lead to a more widespread general and persistent level of minor debilitation. Not enough to be noticed because symptoms are generally too minor to be presented to a doctor, but enough to cause general wellbeing to sag a little.

There is already a large amount of information on subclinical infections, but how would we deal with them if they became more prevalent and more subtle in their effects? An endless series of mass vaccinations? Probably not, because how would we know they were needed?

I’ve no idea if this is a significant issue or not, but suppose it is. What if it were to occur for a number of common viral and bacterial infections such that minor debilitation becomes endemic? What kind of symptoms might become more common?

Maybe we’d just sit in front of the TV and get fat.

Perhaps we’d think less clearly even though we are still able to get on with the daily routine well enough.

Perhaps we wouldn’t be as dynamic and decisive as we were a few decades ago, but the difference isn’t noticed because everyone else is subject to the same low-level infections.

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A reading from the Book of Santa, Ch. III, vv. 15 - 18

¹⁵When the king thus showed favour to their brother, the reindeer spake privily one to another, saying, surely we shall suffer wrath if we do as we have done heretofore.

¹⁶Let us honour Rudolph in the sight of our master, that his countenance shall smile upon us also.

¹⁷Then came they to Rudolph and praised him with loud voices, crying, thy name shall be remembered among us, yea, even to the seventh generation.

¹⁸Yet in their hearts was much bitterness, seeing that he had been set up over them.

Progress

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Badgers, Israel and Scientology

Richard Ingrams, in The Oldie (January 2014 issue): "Any commentator hoping for a quiet life should avoid writing about Israel, Scientologists and badgers."

I had originally planned to write a spoof combining all three, but in fact there is a connection to be made between the first and last: according to a recent report, bovine tuberculosis has begun to spread into the West Bank.

Until recently, Israel has been clear of the disease. But it's certainly not clear of badgers. According to the IUCN, the Eurasian badger, meles meles, our beloved British Brock, is found in northern Israel down to Haifa, and the honey badger, mellivora capensis, is all over the State, so their geographical distributions overlap to a degree. It's not inconceivable that if the brocks of the eastern Med have TB, they may indirectly have transmitted it to honey badgers, and so on to cattle.

 

We can just about drag the Scientologists into this if we agree with them that "all illness in greater or lesser degree and all foul-ups stem directly and only from a PTS condition", i.e. mixing with "Suppressive Persons" who try to oppose the Scientologist's quest for self-betterment. This psychological/spiritual explanation of disease is shared by Christian Scientists, among others, and I'm pretty sure a positive frame of mind and supportive social relations do help the immune system. In that case, a fig for disease.

But why does bovine TB matter? It can spread to humans, but aside from breathing in the exhalations of infected animals, or negligent hygiene when handling them or processing their meat, or drinking their untreated milk, the risks are low. If present in meat, the bacterium is killed by cooking.

The Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU) cites none of these in its explanation of why bTB is a concern, saying instead:

Why does bovine tuberculosis matter?
The increase in the number of herds affected and the spread of infection across the UK has impacts upon:

— Farm productivity.
— Mental health and wellbeing of farmers, frustrated by control programme culling of apparently healthy cattle.
— Health and welfare of animals, because effort is focused on the control programme, rather than on the development of good herd health strategies.
— International trade agreements, if herds testing positive reach a critical level.
— Public expenditure, at a time when budgets are under extreme pressure.

Seems like all except the first are to do with drawbacks of the control programme, rather than the disease. Not enough to justify the mass slaughter of meles meles, perhaps.

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Mass death at Station M

(Picture source)

Is Fukushima killing the Pacific Ocean all the way to America's West Coast?

Michael Snyder's latest post joins the dots to create a sketch of rolling mass extinctions related to nuclear seawater contamination off eastern Japan. He leads with news of a fresh carpet of dead organisms beneath Station M in Monterey Bay, as reported by National Geographic magazine.

In turn, NG's article bases itself on a press release from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), which shows that algal blooms in 2011 and 2012 created a temporary superabundance of food for other creatures, who multiplied and then died off as the supply ran out.

MBARI says this happens periodically, and the "pulses" explain why there are more ocean floor scavengers than could be sustained by the normal amount of  nutrient "snow" drifting down from above. When explosions of "sea snot" occur, material not consumed immediately mixes into the mud and creates a reserve that is mined over succeeding years.

So, not caused by TEPCO, then.

In a way, that's a shame. For as with global warming, overenthusastic nuke-scare-mongering like Snyder's could backfire and cause the public to ignore issues that may indeed be worth worrying about.

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Snow in Cairo

A few days ago, we had quite a few reports of snow in Cairo, an event apparently rare enough to make the news. The above headline from the Mirror is fairly typical. Other examples are :-

Playing in Cairo snow a first in 112 years
Snow Falls In Cairo For The First Time In More Than 100 Years

Egypt Sees First Snow Storm In Years

As I'm mildly interested in snowfall I decided to check it out. I soon came across the more nuanced view below, although you wouldn't guess from the headline. 

From all accounts, snow in Cairo is exceptionally rare – although historical records are difficult to attain. Some reports suggest it’s the first snow in Cairo in over 100 years – although they are not substantiated.

New York Magazine offers this intelligence:

Claims that this is Cairo’s first snowfall in exactly 112 years seem to be sourced from a tweet by one local man who later admitted he was just guesstimating. Whatever the exact number is, though, the point is that it basically never snows in Cairo.

Yet this weather site has snowfall records from Cairo airport going back to 1943. It shows snowfall on at least one day in 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1994, 1995, 2002, 2003 and 2004. 

Maybe the recent Cairo snowfall was uncommonly heavy or widespread, but if those figures are correct it was a long way from being the first in 112 years. Unless in the past it only ever snowed at the airport. Somehow I doubt that.

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