Pic of the day: V&A

The spiral staircase in the Jewellery Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 04 July 2013. (Photo: author.)

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Human history vs Earth's history

 

If we wrote the entire history of Earth on A4 paper at 1,000 years per page, the stack would reach up a bit over 1,533 feet - higher than the top of the antenna on the Empire State Building.

 

Of the 9,200 reams of paper, only the top 5 would have anything about humanoid creatures; the last ream (thinner than the top line of the column in this diagram) would contain the entire history of homo sapiens, and the uppermost 0.8 inches would record modern man (homo sapiens sapiens).

 

The final 10 leaves tell of what happened since the end of the last Ice Age, and the first writing by Man himself (in Sumerian) appears on the fifth-to-last page.

 

As you float in the air above, you reach out and pick up the top sheet, which is written in the language of the time. In the British edition, the first half of the page is unintelligible to the ordinary reader, as it's a mixture of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Norse, Norman French and Middle English. Even the early part of the second half, in Modern English, can be confusing, as it may contain words no longer used, and others whose meaning has since changed.

 

A standard A4 sheet contains 46 lines at 8 - 9 words per line, so the history of the globe since 1900 is covered in the last 5 lines - about 40 words. There are only 8 people in the world still alive who were born before then; all of them are female.

 

The last dinosaurs - wiped out by the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, 66 million years ago - are to be found 22 feet further down the stack - still nearly 40 feet above the top of the antenna on the Empire State.

 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. 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.

Peasants

I recently ploughed through a collection of Chekhov’s short stories – 209 of them on my Kindle, although a few were duplicated – possibly alternative translations. Did he write more than 209 minus the duplicates? I don’t know, but by gum they’re good. 

I hadn’t read much Chekhov up until then, but what a writer! He found time to be a doctor too. Here he is writing a fictional, but one suspects all too real account of peasant life in late nineteenth century Russia :-

Only the well-to-do peasants were afraid of death; the richer they were the less they believed in God, and in the salvation of souls, and only through fear of the end of the world put up candles and had services said for them, to be on the safe side.

The peasants who were rather poorer were not afraid of death. The old father and Granny were told to their faces that they had lived too long, that it was time they were dead, and they did not mind.

They did not hinder Fyokla from saying in Nikolay's presence that when Nikolay died her husband Denis would get exemption--to return home from the army. And Marya, far from fearing death, regretted that it was so slow in coming, and was glad when her children died.

Above all, they were afraid of catching cold, and so put on thick clothes even in the summer and warmed themselves at the stove. Granny was fond of being doctored, and often went to the hospital, where she used to say she was not seventy, but fifty-eight; she supposed that if the doctor knew her real age he would not treat her, but would say it was time she died instead of taking medicine.

Anton Chekhov – Peasants (1897)

Russia has produced so much talent and to this outsider at least, seemingly wasted under the thumbs of mass murderers and autocratic wastrels. Why I don’t know, but we still need talent like Chekhov's.

There is one problem with him though. When I finally put aside my Kindle and looked around at modern entertainers and celebrities...

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. 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.

Energy Policy: Reductio Ad Absurdum

It is hard to know where begin a post on UK energy policy just now, though I feel vaguely obliged to try. Last week there were flurries of straws in the wind, adding up to what ought to be unavoidable recognition of the failure of the programme initiated by Ed Miliband when in power as Energy Secretary. His predecessor, John Hutton, was considerably more realistic but Miliband adopted a fantasy green agenda - arguably, part of Gordon Brown's overall scorched-earth strategy which I wrote about at the time - and with very few modifications the coalition swallowed it whole.

Now we have an updated forecast of reserve capacity which shows we can easily be up the proverbial creek by 2015 - no news to anyone reading C@W, I realise - and Ofgem scurrying for short-term fixes. Cue hysteria in the mainstream media (save for a curious silence in the Guardian).

The government and regulators will, of course, succeed in preventing large-scale black-outs, and probably even rolling brown-outs, although there could well be the odd isolated incident. How will they do this ? By throwing money at the problem, of course, because no politician will ever allow the lights to go out. Switching off large industrial customers, revving up diesel generators, paying the owners of mothballed gas-fired power plants to re-commission them, prolonging the lives of old nukes a bit - it isn't even very difficult. But it is far more expensive than it should be, and we shall all pay for it.

Perhaps - just perhaps - someone will also quietly finish off DECC's mad green + nuke agenda: because that is what all this ad-hoccery amounts to. The real problems are going to happen 2015-2020, when both Cameron and Miliband both hope to be holding the reins.

So we might hope for a bit of belated realistic policy-making from now on. They seem to have got the bit between their teeth on shale gas - (which, by the way, will bring forth the most astonishing amount of green fury). Some reckon that Ed Davey has lost faith in EDF's ability to come up with the nuclear goods, and not before time: EDF have given enough compelling evidence of their uselessness. Michael Fallon, the new safe-pair-of-hands energy minister (actually, minister for just about everything, it seems) seems pretty robust and clear-sighted. But he bullshits like the worst of them, and it's worth a few minutes to watch him in action against Andrew Neil (second item in this programme) - who asked a bunch of the right questions but allowed himself too easily to be fobbed off with Fallon's confident sophistry and bluster

It would be fun to fisk the whole interview but, sorry, I just don't have the time. Or energy. Sorry.


This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog


All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. 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.

In one picture: what the banks have done to us since the 1980s

Source: Charles Hugh Smith

 

Another corker from independent thinker Charles Hugh Smith today. The graph above shows how the "boom" of the Eighties was a phoney, as were the "recoveries" from the lows of 2003 and 2009. (The latter Nineties I see as partly "real" because of efficiencies and consumer demand created by dramatically increasing computer power and the international and cross-class spread of electronic communication systems.)

 

To me, this demonstrates that it's not a Left versus Right thing; it's about the unholy alliance of bankers and politicians who trade wealth and political power among themselves. In the UK, the British Conservative Party is just as much to blame as the supposed socialists (who oversaw a further deterioration in manufacturing and working-class employment).

 

The question is, can we have preventive reform soon or must we wait for full-scale disaster to force it?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. 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.

London in 1927 - in colour

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

Alastair Campbell: still fighting the last war

 http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx4n4rZI851qkev7vo1_400.gif

The Mail on Sunday's Simon Walters has a go at Alastair Campbell, for comparing Blair's misinformation about WMD to Churchill's "bodyguard of lies"wartime deceptions.

This came from a speech Campbell gave on Thursday in Australia, and the full text is on his blog here, which doubtless is where Walters got it from. We are in an era where the commentariat do all their sleuthing via armchair data mining (as I do, but I don't have their salary or expense account).

In a fight between two unsavouries, I find myself rooting for neither. Campbell's speech was about presentation in an age of easy fisking, and accordingly it's easy to reverse engineer Walters' attack and show what really happened and how angled the MoS piece was.

On the other hand, Campbell's fearsome rep as Number 10 spinmaster was founded on his knowledge of journalists' own personal vulnerable areas. In 2009, he put a shot across the bows of Andrew Marr, who had asked awkward questions about the then PM Gordon Brown's medication. Campbell wrote on his blog:

"It was sad to see Marr, perhaps with an eye to a few Monday morning cuttings, feel that he had to raise blogosphere rumours about Gordon going blind, or being on heavy medication of some sort. I know it will give him the passing satisfaction of pats on the back from journos … But it was low stuff. I'm sure Andrew would agree that everyone has certain areas of their life that they'd prefer not to be asked about live on TV."

It was a clear threat to disclose what Marr was at that time trying desperately to conceal, namely the story about his alleged love-child. Interestingly, this is no longer on Campbell's blog. Down the memory hole goes that piece of yesterday's news. Will we have to copy and paste everything in future, just to be sure it doesn't get "lost"?

Campbell seems still to be working to rehabilitate the reputation of his former boss Tony Blair (described by Clarissa Dickson-Wright in her first autobiography as "a mimsy psychopath"), and as the IRA told Margaret Thatcher, "We only have to be lucky once." I wish he would give it up: it's not just the Coalition lives lost, it's the Iraqi deaths too, running into six figures. But of course he won't stop, because his own reputation has to recover too. The Dodgy Dossier clanks behind him like Jacob Marley's account books.

In fairness, here's the bit from Cambo's blog that Walters semi-misused:

There has always been comms. There has always been public affairs. There has always been PR. There has always been spin. Read the bible for heaven’s sake. What is new is not spin but the reality of a globalized media age, an information economy, a world where technology is accelerating the pace of change on an exponential basis. Nor have there been political and media systems which for most democracies mean that even if people wished not to tell the truth, the pressures are all to do so, and woe betide those who don’t.

That’s not always been the case.

I read a book recently on the relationship between (SLIDE 8) Churchill and de Gaulle, who could regale each other with stories of their public deceptions, and perhaps in doing so deceived each other too. Another recent book, Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross, showed how Churchill got actively involved in the preparation of what he called the ‘bodyguard of lies’ to accompany the truth that an invasion across the English Channel was being planned. Macintyre states as a fact that after the invasion, Churchill lied to Parliament to keep various deceptions going.

Yet if the pollsters were to do a survey, who had a greater commitment to wartime truth, (SLIDE 9) Churchill in World War 2 or Tony Blair in Iraq? I think we know what the answer would be … it just wouldn’t be true. Interesting paradox in a world full of them.

Mr Campbell, too, has his interesting paradoxes.