FRIDAY MUSIC: Last-minute Christmas Chopin, by JD

A bit of calming music as a blessed relief from the madness of the world. The first video was attributed to Frédéric Chopin but was in fact composed by Paul de Senneville under the name "Mariage d'Amour".

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frederic-Chopin

US college math: If at first you don't succeed... by Paddington

There is current news on the intent of the state legislature to take over the State Board of Education, and the articles on the subject include a discussion of the 2021 Ohio Remediation Report. That report states that the percentage of students going to higher education and requiring remediation in Mathematics and/or English is declining.

Most of that gain appears to have been achieved by changing definitions.

When I started teaching Mathematics at the University of Akron in 1978, approximately 80% of the incoming students had not mastered Algebra I enough to pass a placement test into a college-level Mathematics course.

That 80% figure was national, often quoted as 'only 15% of 12th grade students were ready for a college-level Math course' (The difference in percentages was due to those students who didn't go to higher education).

When I retired in 2017, that 80% figure had not changed, despite the addition of lots of technology, and rounds of 'innovation' from Colleges of Education.

So, universities and colleges around the country were under pressure to 'fix the problem', and responded by generating courses which were not actually college-level, simply eliminating the requirement for a Math course, or re-defining what a Math course was. Others, such as the University of California system, have tried to hide the problem by 'just in time' remediation, which works about as well as one would expect.

After a half century of teaching and thinking about this problem, I wish I could have an answer, as a genuine solution would likely make me rich. I can, however, safely say that wishing it away doesn't help.

Palace in new bigotry storm

The nation was rocked today by fresh allegations of religious prejudice at the heart of the Monarchy. Speaking on BBC’s flagship morning programme Bleatfast, Sir Rious de Ralement (pictured above, right) sobbed as he related a bruising encounter with an elderly member of the Royal Household:

She asked me if I was a Christian. What on Earth could have given her that idea? I said no, I’m a pagan actually. But she wouldn’t let it lie. What were you before that? RC? CofE? I tell you, I felt violated.

Sir Rious felt under his tabard, moved the large wooden cross beneath it to one side and retrieved a sodden handkerchief. He blew his nose and muttered:

Lucky I had a tape recorder on me - here’s a copy of the transcript.

Sir Rious (formerly Brian Prendergast) spoke movingly of his childhood on the Bungalow Estate in Penge. His peers used to laugh at the monk’s alb he wore over his school uniform and his chemistry teacher scolded him for lighting a votive candle during lab experiments with hydrogen.

It was a lonely hell. My Jew and Muslim class mates never accepted my invitations to our Sunday family pork roast. But I won’t give up, I’m proud of my homicidal Crusader heritage, even if I’m not one myself.

The BBC was deluged with sympathetic tweets during and after the broadcast.

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised please etc etc.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ringo Starr, by JD

Sir Richard Starkey MBE known professionally as Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor who achieved international fame as the drummer for the Beatles. That was more than fifty years ago and in the years since then Ringo has continued his creative journey with eighteen solo albums, several film roles the most well known being in "The Magic Christian" alongside Peter Sellers. He has published three books including the children's book "Octopus's Garden" as well as many other projects including his 'All Starr' band.

For all his many creative successes, Ringo is and always will be first and foremost a musician, a drummer. Ringo’s candor, wit and soul are the lifeblood of his music. As he sang on the autobiographical Liverpool 8, “I always followed my heart and I never missed a beat.” Peace and love are his life’s rhythm and melody, and he propels this universal message in everything he does: his evocative artwork, his enthused live performances, his legendary songs, all imbued with the joy, reflection, and wisdom of the music icon the world knows and loves simply as ‘Ringo.’

He is now 82 years old but looks twenty years younger so music must be keeping him youthful and he is still making records with a few of his most recent included below.

https://www.ringostarr.com/#/

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

Reopen the talent mines! by Paddington

As Heinlein pointed out, the natural state of Man appears to be poverty.

Two hundred years ago, a person living on my property was 10 miles from the nearest small town. If he didn’t plan ahead, he would starve or freeze in the winter. Thanks to advances in technology, all but the very poorest of us now have access to clean water, cheap and safe food, and terabytes of bad information and pornography.

These advances were the result of government investment in basic science, including semiconductors, computers, nuclear energy and the internet itself. The researchers who did most of this were middle class through and through. Most engineers and scientists still are, and gain their training through the public education system. The well-educated children of the rich become lawyers, bankers, and sometimes doctors.

The contest between the creative geeks and the leaders of our societies go back over a millennium.

During the Middle Ages, many of the skilled workers were represented by the guilds, including the Freemasons. The Catholic Church kept their power in by controlling the spread of science and technology, while keeping the nobility largely illiterate. This balance of power shifted in the labour shortage that resulted from the Black Plague.

As the population increased, thanks to the dissemination of technology, the balance of power gradually shifted back, until the Scientific Revolution required skilled workers in large numbers. This led to the drive for public education.

In our lifetimes, we have moved to a Global economy, giving access to huge reservoirs of cheap labour. Our business and political leaders, most of whom do not know how to do anything practical, simply assume that the vast riches around them are the result of their own brilliance, and so are quite happy to move all of our jobs to other countries. They also work to dismantle the education system, and cut money for research, since this saves them taxes. The current economic crises give them the perfect excuse.

The problem is that simply preserving what we have as a society requires mining our meager talents every bit as aggressively as we drill for oil.

The vet will Zoom you now

Pet insurer Pets In A Pickle are now advertising ‘unlimited access to video consultations.’

The NHS is ahead of the curve; one GP told a widow to show her husband’s body on camera so he could certify the death without making a visit.

I can just see how it will work for our animal companions:

VET: Can you hold your dog up, please. Now then, what seems to be the trouble?

DOG: *Whimper, whimper.*

VET: And how long has this been troubling you?

DOG: WOOF! WOOF!

VET: Fine, I’ll send a prescription and bill via WhatsApp.

So much more efficient.

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This is from my Substack archive. Why not get 'em fresh, for FREE? See right...

What football says about the nation-state

More from my Substack archive. Why not get 'em fresh, for FREE? See right...

The ‘beautiful game’ teaches us the positive aspects of nationalism. To play it you have:

• A defined playing area.
• Qualifications as to players. Only these, plus the referee, are allowed on the pitch.
• A clearly expressed objective.
• Rules that set down how the game is played and influence its style.
• Impartial judges to enforce the rules.

Similarly, with a well-run country you have:

• Territory with clear, well-defended boundaries.

• Laws defining who is permitted to be there.

• An agreed understanding of what the country ‘is about’ and whom it serves.

• Legal and economic systems to achieve those goals.

• Impartial judges to enforce the rules.

The European Union does not work because it has:

• A vast domain with highly porous boundaries. Penetrate anywhere and you can go everywhere inside it.

• Rules for who should be allowed to reside, but which are overriden by international conventions on refugees that are easily abused by bogus claimants, at huge expense to the host country.

• A lack of mission. The EU had its origins in the desire to stop the awful military rivalry of Germany and France; then it became a useful protectionist cartel that maintained the prosperity of advanced European nations in the face of growing competition from much lower-paid foreign workforces; then an expansionist empire drunk with aggrandisement even if it meant acquiring countries that were at a different stage of development and so would cause economic strains; then a cat’s-paw for US/NATO aggression by creeping ever closer to the borders of Russia and ultimately destabilising Ukraine to provoke war and devastate Europe.

• A hobbling centralised bureaucracy unrestrained by democratic power.

• A legal system to enforce the arbitrary edicts of autocrats.

You would think that once free of all that we would be ‘full steam ahead.’ What do we have?

1. Clearly defined and potentially very defensible territory. We kept out the mighty German war machine in my father’s time.
2. Rules for who should be allowed to reside, but which are overriden by international conventions on refugees that are easily abused by bogus claimants, at huge expense to our country.

Foreign countries are happy to point them in our direction, in particular France (because it is closest) - remember the Sangatte camp, by the mouth of the Channel Tunnel? And now the rubber boats that French authorities seem unable to stop from launching into the Channel.

On top of that there are our Government’s policies on (much larger) legal immigration, partly to do with the right of families to be united, partly to fill gaps in the labour market that are allegedly unfillable otherwise.

Then there is the political Right that likes to import cheap labour (externalising the costs of unemployment, ill-health etc associated with the underclass it displaces, plus costs of the health, education, housing and welfare needs of the imported people.)

Meantime the Left has an insane abstract notion of the desirability of ‘diversity’ and how uncontrolled immigration will teach its nasty racist opponents a lesson - and somehow reconciles the idea of diversity with the fantasy that all people everywhere are basically the same underneath. The more this impacts on the working class, the more the latter grumble and protest and can then be dismissed as what Hillary Clinton called ‘a basket of deplorables.’

3. A lack of agreed mission.

It has taken centuries for Britain to restrain the arbitrary power of its monarchs. Our most precious possession is not the material comfort most of us now enjoy, but a Parliament that has the ability to call the Executive to account and so - we hope - limit the harm it can do.

But whom does the system serve?

Until relatively recently, the rich, profiting immensely from e.g. colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the murderous greed of the East India Company. The ordinary person had no representative in Parliament. At the height of the British Empire’s prosperity people in the East End of London were working all the hours possible for a pittance, eating rubbish off the roads and facing the workhouse when they weakened.

Those who decry socialism as if it were Stalin’s Red Menace should read Jack London’s 1903 book to see exactly why we need regulations for housing, pay and working conditions, education, healthcare and welfare. The historian Correlli Barnett has argued that the paternalistic wartime regime of 1940-45 and the peacetime Welfare State that followed were unaffordable, sentimental. Well, we didn’t have it when we could afford it - Lloyd George had to break the House of Lords’ veto with the 1911 Parliament Act, just to get a modest provision for the underprivileged, and by 1945 the people had endured thirty years of wars and economic depressions and were in no mood for ‘jam tomorrow.’

Yet since then the British Labour Party has lost its way.

To some extent it was always conflicted, unable to decide whether it existed to serve the poorer element of this country or to promote international socialism, even at the expense of the British worker. Sixty years ago Labour’s leader Hugh Gaitskell warned the Party’s conference against membership of the ‘Common Market’, laying his finger on the tension in the socialist movement between international brotherhood and promoting the interests of working people at home.

More recently Labour seems to have been caught up in abstract thinking. It wants to buy the world a Coke but doesn’t realise that the world may have little intention of buying us one in return. It was enthusiastic about EU membership, under some Johnny-Head-In-Air delusion that we would all be jolly pals together (an illusion shared by many idealistic foreign Euro-MPs.) The consequence of EU mini-globalism and GATT maxi-globalism, as the late Sir James Goldsmith warned back in 1994, was socio-economic strain on ordinary families as the balance between labour and capital tilted sharply in favour of the latter.

We have to decide whether this country is to serve its people - an implication of the extension of the vote to all adults in the twentieth century, but not yet an express national commitment. Absent that mission plus control of immigration and renegotiation of trade terms, the country’s books will never balance and eventually the Welfare State must shrink and collapse.

If we go on as we are, then as I have said before, only disaster will save us. The wokeist flimflam from the Right is a cover for their old globalist agenda; if it and the Left don’t wake up in the proper sense, both will need to be replaced, as Nigel Farage is already advocating for the Tories. They must become nationalist and pragmatic if the nation is to survive and prosper.

4 & 5. … If that last is to be the plan, we need to structure our law and economics accordingly. This means revising our relationship with international and supranational bodies and agreements. We are now in a multipolar world and our team has to play for its own side.

____

That doesn’t mean hostility to other countries - in fact, we might have been spared the prospect of nuclear war if we had withdrawn from NATO as well as from complete absorption into the Euro-monolith, as de Gaulle suggested to us in 1969:

General de Gaulle made clear to our Ambassador that he wanted to see a Europe completely independent of the United States, which would result in the disappearance of N.A.T.O. as we know it; and that he would like to see the European Communities changed into a looser form of free trade area with arrangements by each country to exchange agricultural produce, and a small inner council of a European political association consisting of France, Britain, Germany and Italy.

What a shame that the then Labour Government sniffily rejected both proposals, as that link goes on to show.

What a shame, too, that we have forgotten the wisdom of Lord Palmerston:

We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

We need to launder our kit, get onto the world’s field and play our hearts out.