Cragside

Sackerson says: An inaugural post by our new contributor, Cherry, about a part of England I've wanted to visit for some time.

Cragside House

Whenever I visit Northumberland I am always drawn to visit Cragside, the home of industrialist Lord William Armstrong.

He initially built the house as a weekend retreat, but in due course went to live there permanently. Over the years the house was added to giving it an unusual appearance and leading to the building having the look of a baronial castle and to it sometimes being referred to as the “palace of a modern magician”. The house which is perched on a craggy hillside overlooking Debdon Burn, contains many of Armstrong’s innovations and inventions. Surrounding the house on three sides is Europe’s largest rock garden. He and Lady Armstrong also turned the craggy hillside into a mass of greenery by planting thousands of trees and mosses.

Cragside has many constituent parts. I always visit the formal garden first ensuring peace and quiet before the garden gets busy. It is a perfect example of a Victorian formal garden. Within it is a restored orchard house believed to have been built circa 1870. The fine structure, with its timber base and cast-iron glazing bars in the roof, is a quite distinctive landmark in the surrounding district. The orchard house was built to grow hardy and tender fruits protecting them from the Northumbrian climate.

Carpet Bedding and Clock Tower

Carpet bedding can be found next to the orchard house and in summer months it has diminutive foliage planed in geometric patterns. The plants are clipped fortnightly using sheep shears to form a flat carpet-like surface. Each bed requires 10,000 plants which have been raised in the nursery at Cragside. My favourite time of year to visit the garden is September because the Dahlia walk is spectacular.

A clock tower is just outside the formal garden. It originates from the 1860s and was previously the estate’s timepiece (and pay office), chiming the start and finishing times for the estate’s workers.

View over holiday cottages towards Rothbury

The formal garden also provides an ideal viewing point over the market town of Rothbury. If you venture down into the town, you will see a pleasing mix of old stone and newer brick built properties either side of a wide main street. Rothbury has a number of small and interesting retail businesses including a very nice ladies clothes shop.

From the garden you can walk to the house by crossing the historic iron bridge which was designed especially to provide walking access between the house and the formal garden. In 2009 the bridge was restored and reopened for the first time in nearly 30 years. The 19th century grade II listed bridge spans the Debdon Burn providing magnificent views of the house and rock garden along with views of the Debdon valley with its waterfalls.

From the iron bridge the house is approached through the rock gardens, which extend all around the house covering 4.5 acres. Most of the rock has been man-laid, using sandstone from the local area. 

Within Cragside itself you can see several of Lord Armstrong’s engineering achievements including a hydraulic lift which lightened the load for the servants when carrying coal to the upstairs rooms.

Lord Armstrong was a collector of contemporary British art, furniture and natural history. Some of his collections are still displayed in the house, which was the first house in the world to be lit entirely by hydro-electricity. This was done by using water from Black Burn and Nelly’s Moss to provide a head of water to turn a turbine in the Power House. The National Trust has recently completed the installation of a new hydro-turbine, the Archimedes Screw, which will produce 12kw of electricity over the course of a year providing around 10% of electricity required to power Cragside. This will light the house for a year, continuing the aspiration of Lord Armstrong to illuminate his house by hydro-power.

Cragside has its own holiday cottages offering spectacular views of the garden and Rothbury. The cottage building was once known as the Cottage in the Park and was built around 1865 for the estate manager. The cottage has many features in common with the original part of Cragside and is thought to be designed by the same ‘unknown’ architect.

Nelly's Moss

There is a delightful leisure drive around the estate. The highlights for me are the Nelly’s Moss lakes which are beautiful. Behind the lower lake a labyrinth has been cut among the rhododendron trees to entice children of all ages. The drive is most spectacular when the rhododendrons are in full bloom.

If ever you pass in that direction I can thoroughly recommend a visit, there is something for everyone and something for all seasons.

More information can be found via the following links:

• National Trust – Cragside
• Cragside Facebook page

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Prime Ministers: the "tw*t" test

Why don't I like PM-to-be Boris Johnson? Because like most PMs I've observed, he thinks the electorate are fools or, to quote Brian Cox the Strumming Astrophysicist, "tw*ts". Ho ho, big, blond, bluff and bouncy, surely a man with his ebullient charm and wit is right for us? No, and pity the poor girls who've fallen for him. Many successful men have mistresses, but (allegedly) arranging the destruction of the innocent life they've created, that's another matter.

Look at Cameron - skirt-twitching about an EU referendum again, except this time he might - just might - even campaign for Brexit (if you run up the stairs three at a time you'll find you're not on a promise after all) , and forever having "feelings" about issues where we need "action" (his claiming to be "heartbroken" if Scotland became independent was the sort of oddly camp narcissism-on-wheels that his mentor Blair taught him). What happened to that Lisbon referendum, Cam? Frangible stuff, cast iron, apparently. But of course, you think we're goldfish.

Brown thought we were mathematically ignorant, so he habitually double-counted financial figures to impress us; the back-seat "bigot" comment might have helped the scales fall from many eyes.

Blair: at Oxford he promised a "Spacematic DISCO with LIGHTS!!" (do you know, it's getting hard to find links to that? I understand you can pay people to bury stuff low down on Google). Ever since, he's promised the obvious, the undoable or the forgettable - another goldfish-dazzler. Please God, Tom Bower stays well and completes his forthcoming biography of TB.

John Major, too, prided himself on knowing how to talk to the man in the "four-ale bar".

And so on and on, back and back. There are (a) few who - like them or loathe them - you could say were genuine and had our (quarrelsome) collective interests at heart.

• In an idle moment long ago, I riffled through the diary of Horace Walpole: his measure was whether someone had a "good heart" or a "bad heart".
• The criminal law is principally about intent.
• When I was in insurance, one pat slogan was that the clients don't care what you know, they want to know that you care.

Please, spare us another flashy man with contempt in his heart.


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Ur-language: "Tax"

A recent archaeological discovery in the Caucasus is being hailed as the most important find for over a century.

Deep in a cave complex whose location is still secret lies extensive evidence of life before the last Ice Age. Cave Six, dubbed "Rosetta Max" by the researchers based there, is festooned with images and writing spanning tens of millennia, yielding radical new insights almost weekly into human prehistory, social development and the evolution of language. Yet last week's revelation may be the most dramatic of all: Palaeolithic political graffiti.

Cave 11c - a tiny and obscure offshoot of one of the most remote spaces in the system - appears to have been visited only once before in all of history. Examination of the dust and debris has uncovered the ashes of a fire and a single human coprolite. The latter is provisionally dated to 25,000 BCE, but a more precise figure will be ascertained with the use of advanced scientific instruments. However, the season of the ancient visit (autumn) is already established, because of the type of pollen grains found in the stool. And although hunting was a key element in the society of that time, there is no trace of animal matter here.

Low down on the wall, just where the fire might have shed a fitful light, is a crudely-executed image scratched into the rock and enhanced with ashes. This shows a number of stick-figures accompanied by goats, proceeding between lines of other, larger figures armed with short clubs and spears, towards a seated group wearing some ceremonial head-dress. The artist has depicted the latter with large abdomens and above them is a bison, unmistakably defecating.

There are glyphs beneath the sketch, most of which are currently untranslatable as they are not found again elsewhere in the cave-chain; except for one, phonetically rendered as "taks." Wild, but very tempting speculation has it that there is a connexion between what appears to be the exaction of payment in the form of herd-animals, the artist's meatless coprolite, the word "taks", the apparently disrespectful drawing and the use of rare language.

The work continues.


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The best job in the world

No bad weather work, no dirt or bodily fluids, no heavy lifting.

If there are no results, the customer is at fault.

Repeat business for years, decades even.

Sigmund Freud: utter genius.


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The Freud Files

From Wikipedia

I’m tempted to buy a book called The Freud Files. It claims that Sigmund Freud promoted his own reputation, deliberately placing himself at the centre of a "lone genius" myth at the expense of others in his field. Furthermore, the book claims Freud’s acolytes have promoted and nurtured the myth for decades.

How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud 'triumph' to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history.

I suppose many of us have encountered significant cracks in Freud’s faded reputation during the course of our general reading. Doesn’t necessarily mean the issue is worth pursuing though. The field of Freudian scholarship is so vast that a dabbler is almost obliged to begin from a potentially biased starting position. Otherwise how does one select sources? Even neutrality doesn’t work if one side of this debate is substantially correct.

So as a taster I downloaded a free sample of The Freud Files onto my Kindle. You may or may not know, but this is a standard Kindle feature – browse before you buy. The book appears to be clear, concise, well-written and meticulously researched.

So if I buy it, this may be my biased starting point or it may not. Reviews suggest the book is certainly controversial and I am in no position to resolve the controversy.

However I already have a suspicion that Freud was dodgy. For example, some years ago I came across an essay in Speculum Spinozanum which claimed that he acknowledged an intellectual debt to Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth century philosopher but only in three private letters. He never acknowledged it publicly.

This is not necessarily a big deal because Freud could not have owed a huge debt to Spinoza in the first place. Why not acknowledge it more publicly though? It would have attached an interesting thread to Freud’s thinking, locating it in the wider sphere of human thought.

Inevitably his failure to acknowledge Spinoza, however trivial his debt might have been, raises a suspicion that Freud had no wish to extend the public perception of his ideas beyond his own person. Only a suspicion, but there have been others and they add up.

Freud's reputation probably isn't particularly important to the modern world, but I was brought up in a time where he was still a towering intellectual figure, at least in popular culture. A paradigm of the "lone genius" myth. So maybe I’ll buy the book and perhaps bury the myth.

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Smarter voting

A guy who happens to be a billionaire, or at least very rich by normal standards isn’t like the rest of us. For one thing it is easy for him to buy influence if he so wishes. There are over a hundred billionaires in the UK, but let us introduce a fictional one named Alexander Charles Prosser. Let us also infect him with an irresistible urge to spread his political wings.

To satisfy this urge, Prosser could easily afford to put aside say £500k per year and donate it to a political party. It’s only £5 million over ten years – chickenfeed for a fictional billionaire such as Prosser. So what does that £500k buy our man in terms of political influence?

Firstly it depends which party he chooses to support. Hand over the cash to a fringe party of loons and all he gets is to be is a big fish in a small pond. Which may be nice enough but Prosser also has to speak fluent Loon if he is to enter into the spirit of the thing. A tedious learning process may blunt his enthusiasm.

Apart from which, in terms of political bang for his buck, it is obviously better for Prosser to stick with big parties. In the UK that would be Conservative or Labour. With the Lib Dems there is still too much Loon to be learned. UKIP may be an option, but UKIP might not make it into the big time. Prosser should wait until the fog of political war clears – the moolah will still be welcome to the victor.

Unfortunately Prosser will still have to learn a certain amount of politically correct Loon if he chooses to stuff the Conservative or Labour party with his cash. The big plus here is significant political influence - the thing he really yearns for. He gets to rub shoulders with people who actually pass a few laws every now and then. It’s not quite the EU, but UK MPs are still allowed some residual functions.

So Prosser’s £500k per annum buys him a level of influence far beyond anything the ordinary voter could ever hope to wield. The only trouble is, there are other political heavies in there too, so his money might not go as far as he imagines. Even so, it beats being a voter with only a measly five-yearly cross on a piece of paper to look forward to. 

How do we ordinary voters compete against Prosser's £500k per year? It isn't easy, but we have the power of democracy on our side don't we? So one solution is much smarter voting...

Doh!

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Is our EU membership ultra vires?

Dr Richard AE North is a distinguished blogger and writer, but I do not entirely share his distaste for UKIP, of which he was once (like Professor Alan Sked) a key mover and shaker.

It seems that like many others, Dr North finds constitutional objections to EU membership as irritating as a gadfly. Here's a recent exchange:

[from the main body of his post] To this sad, dysfunctional crew, the EU treaties are "illegal" and those who signed it are "traitors". Any idea of negotiation or agreement is an anathema. They would sooner see the British economy crash and burn than accept a deal with Brussels.

[Me] Bit tendentious. I do indeed argue that UK entry into the EU in 1973 was ultra vires. Why that should make me sad and dysfunctional I'm not quite sure...

[Dr North] This is exactly what I mean .... apart from the fact that we didn't enter the EU in 1973 (or the EEC for that matter), the entry was in accord with our constitutional arrangements. Why does it matter so much that you need to assert that it is "ultra vires"? It isn't...

[Me] But we did enter the EU and didn't know it. We were told it was simply a trading arrangement and didn't know about the commitment to "ever-closer union". But Macmillan, Heath and others did know, because they got legal advice that told them of the constitutional implications. And we do have a constitution, one that very specifically forbids ceding any sovereign power to anyone outside the country. So yes, it was and is ultra vires. The referendum didn't validate the change because again the prospectus was false. If this seems like a boring legal point then let us have done with law - which is a trend I see here and elsewhere.

Constitutional argument is currently raging - among those who read, rather than play computer games - in the USA also ("Washington's Blog" is a good place to start). For example, under the US Constitution - at least as it used to be - Congress declares war, not the President.

It is a bit odd that a passionate democrat like Dr North, who espouses the direct-democracy "Harrogate Agenda", should dislike those who point out that here as in the US, constitutions - the foundations of legislation and power, the source of their legitimacy - have been snipped through like the string on a child's balloon.

For all its many faults - and no human institution is free of fault, as doubtless Dr North will discover if ever the Harrogate Agenda should come to be implemented - UKIP is gaining support because people are becoming aware how radically disenfranchised we have become, and how money and power are clearing away the last obstacles to their unrestricted global rule.


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Neoliberalism vs. freedom

Here is Mary Wakefield in this week's Spectator magazine, on the use of mainstream Hollywood entertainment to desensitise teenage war criminals:

"Joshua Milton Blahyi (General Butt-Naked to his foes) ... was once a warlord in the Liberian civil war. Back in the bad old days, Joshua specialised in turning boys into psychopaths...

"He began, he said, by promising boys status. ‘They followed me at first because I was powerful and strong, and they wanted to be important like me.’ It was crucial that this first step was freely taken; that it was their choice. After that, the monster-making began. They were shown violent movies. ‘So they can see,’ said Joshua, ‘that these people in the movies, they intentionally shoot people that die, that killing is just a Hollywood game.’ Hollywood movies, I asked, not African ones? ‘Yes, Hollywood films.’

"The next step was to let them play with guns, shooting blanks, showing off, pretending to kill, and then: ‘We give them a knife to stab dead bodies,’ said Joshua. ‘At first it is hard for them, they feel fear. Later they are stabbing the bodies on and on… On and on and on.’

"...You must escalate the violence all the time, he said, so as to keep the boys in line. Once they’re happy killing, you make them rape, torture, behead. There are things Joshua made his young recruits do that are too horrible and too sad to repeat..."
 
Overleaf in the print edition, we have James Delingpole's panegyric to violent computer gaming, headed:

"The greatest joy of playing Grand Theft Auto V? It lets you give the finger to the PC brigade. It’s condemned for its outrageous sexism, racism, misogyny and violence. But it’s damn good fun."

And one in the eye for his false opposite, "feminazis".

John Ward's piece last night also has a go at the brainless dichotomies offered by neoliberalism, starting with:

"Problem: On the whole, regulators of markets have no experience of commercial life….and thus they tend to both miss the villainy – and come up with daft regulations that just get in the way.

"Neoliberal solution: Deregulation. No more regulators at all."

We have seen what financial deregulation has done since the 1980s. And the latest twist is global regulation in favour of big money - TTIP and so on.

Neoliberalism - as far as the term has any sense to me - may be neo, but it is not what I understand by liberalism. It is not about promoting the freedom of individuals, but - as far as I can see - destroying their defences against oligarchic power and wealth. Now international law is co-opted, so for example if GATT stalls at Doha in 2008 because smaller countries worry about American export disruption to their domestic markets, the US crashes into the TPP to find another way round. The juggernaut rolls on.

From a review in the Sydney Morning Herald
of Ludwell Denny's book, "America Conquers Britain" (1930).

This week also, Charles Hugh Smith looked at the "clerisy", those who serve themselves by serving the world's would-be masters:

"The Status Quo around the world--from France to China to the U.S.--is optimized to protect its Elites and the sprawling Upper-Caste of academics, managers, think-tank toadies, technocrats, apparatchiks, functionaries, factotums, lackeys and apologists who serve the Elites, and are well-paid for enforcing the Status Quo on the disenfranchized castes below..."

What a shame it would be if, in his efforts to get noticed by Rupert Murdoch, Jame Delingpole should eventually find himself wearing the livery of the clerisy.

Can anything stop them? "What chance has the world?"


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After the conference?

This little figure of a clown was carved from linden wood by Pascal Bosshardt of Thannenkirch in Alsace. We were there last year and bought the figure after watching him at work. To take the photo I stood the clown by a pound coin to give an idea of scale. 

I'm fascinated by this kind of skill, probably because I'm so far from being able to emulate it. I just don't have the coordination between hand and eye, the sense of scale and proportion. This was one of his simplest pieces too. 

I don't know what inspired M Bosshardt to carve it, but to my eye the clown could be an ironic reference to politics. A clown blowing his own trumpet. Doesn't quite work because his expression has a touch of melancholy. 

After the conference?

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MAD

AK Haart raised the question of how over-entertainment and superinformation are changing us. I think it's at least as serious an issue as the phoney drugs war.

Mentally Addictive Devices (MAD) seem to me to be shortening attention span, overstimulating and exhausting the mind with trivial and repetitive tasks, and fostering a hazy expectation of instant gratification in other aspects of life.

They also divert attention from pursuing action that furthers one's real long-term interests - there are students flunking college because of their addiction to computerised role-playing games.

And they override alertness to real physical risk. Look at those who walk blindly across a road while on their cellphones; and the poor girl murdered on a Birmingham bus last year had previously noted the strange behaviour of what was to be her killer, but had merely commented on it on her phone - I think the phone gives the illusion of society and so misleads one into a false sense of security.

What if Orwell's eternally ruling Party had realised that you could subjugate the people with endless dreams?


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Ur-language: "Politics"

One of the striking aspects of archaeolingustics is how certain words have survived millennia almost unchanged - one thinks for example of "atman" (breath, to blow) in Cave Six, the ancestor of the German "atmen" (to breathe) and "atman" (vital breath, the soul) in Sanskrit. The glyph for "atman" is found close to the depiction of a hunter using a blowpipe to bring down some as yet unidentified arboreal creature; given the age of the painting, this has sparked a lively debate on the tools that early Man may have developed before the Rift Valley diaspora.

Similarly, there are several images of what appear to be mouflons in a non-hunting context, suggesting that they may have been domesticated much earlier than the c. 8,000 BCE date previously theorised, perhaps owing to the local geography and micro-climate at the time and the protection offered by the size and depth of the cave complex.

Long duration of settlement and relative prosperity and security may also have fostered more complex forms of social organization not re-created until after the last Ice Age; this may explain the apparently formally-arranged groups of humans in some of the images. One of these shows such a group gathered around a flock or herd, possibly for the purposes of division, which may have been unequal, seeing the crown or helmet on one of the figures. Alternatively, it may have been to do with some form of treatment, since the co-habitation of man and animal promotes diseases and pests.

It is possible, therefore, that one of the compound words found beside this image may either have a purely literal meaning or, as Professor Strumpfhosen has controversially suggested, be the world's first example of metaphor: "poli" (many) and "tics" (bloodsucking insects). As the Professor remarks, some things never change.


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I sit on a man's back

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.

Leo Tolstoy - What Is to be Done? (1886)

Yes I know it's only another quote, but it seems about right for the party conference season.

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Ur-language: "Managers"

Researchers at the E207 Caucasian cave complex, the world's oldest continuously-inhabited site, believe they have deciphered another part of the ancient wall-scratchings in Cave Six.

It has already been established that the Ur-word ancestor of the Chinese word "ma" (no) and Italian/French "ma/mais" (but) is "man", a generalised negative. More difficult, but extremely exciting, are the pictograms that appear to represent abstracts, including the one that is tentatively rendered as "thought" or "reflection".

It is now theorised that the Ur-etymology of "manager" is "man" (not) + "ager" (much idea).


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The Great Leap Backwards

Preparations for the Great Leap Backwards began in October 1927. According to Wikipedia that’s when the first feature film talkie was released - The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson.

From this small beginning the world changed forever as a number of social trends began to march in step.

Firstly the moving image became an important part of life all over the developed world. Not just for entertainment, but news, information and commentary. Although books had become much cheaper and lending libraries were popular, the moving image gripped its audience in a way books would never emulate.

Cinemas were built in every town, cities had lots of them. Only a few decades later the moving image entered our homes via television. The conquest was complete.

Secondly as the twentieth century progressed and in spite of wars and financial disasters, the developed world began learning how to feed and house even the poorest of its citizens.

These two factors brought out something fundamental about ourselves, an issue we must have missed while still hypnotised by the moving image. Something to do with how we deal with the real world – how those dealings can be subverted by security and physical comfort.

In a way this something is merely the circus of bread and circuses, but much more powerful, intrusive and sinister. As the moving image and comparative prosperity took hold of our lives, intellectual curiosity began to wane.

Today, nearly eighty years after that first talkie, we are losing the urge to know in favour of an urge to be entertained. With it comes a deep-seated love of show and display - a love of theatre. As if life’s edge has been dulled by comfort and prosperity, as if a less basic need slipped into the driving seat while we were queuing up to watch the latest blockbuster at the Odeon or switching on the box for an evening of family entertainment.

Display has always been important to us, as it is with other animals, but without the sharp edge of survival – well the arts of display seem to be all we have left to push us on into our brave new world.

Perhaps we thought intellectual curiosity was enough to spur us on in spite of our full bellies, but apparently not. Curiosity is intimately linked with survival and we’ve dealt with survival. For now. Folk memories of genuine poverty and real hardship are disappearing from the reach of living memory.

The recent Scottish Referendum was pure theatre, rational argument very much noticeable by its absence. Instead we had the unedifying sight of political theatre and its emotional power to get those metaphorical bums on seats. From economic summits to Prime Minister’s Questions, from elections to great debates, it’s all theatre.

Even the mad murderers of ISIL seem to be gripped by a grisly sense of theatre. Black uniforms, sinister headgear and black flags. All theatre. Grim, deadly, insane and even juvenile in some respects, but still theatre.

Science is certainly drifting towards theatre and away from a knowledge culture. Climate change is pure theatre, always was. Take leading actors on the climate stage. Al Gore, Vivienne Westwood, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting, Emma Thompson... 

Strewth! 

But it's just theatre – nothing else, nothing deeper, nothing demanding, nothing intellectual. Forget the science - the names topping the bill tell you all you need to know about the show. Apart from who dunnit.

Climate impresarios rope in celebrities, fashion designers, artists, pundits and assorted thespians with limited knowledge of the science because they don’t need it. They have their lines off pat. It’s what they do, why they are able strut their stuff on the climate stage without knowing anything worth passing on.

Staying with science - how about physics? Multiverse theories? They look like theatre to me. The vast drama of the cosmos, the thrilling strangeness of untrammelled scientific conjecture, the mysterious depths of untestable notions. Bums on seats matter, even in relatively small and publicly supported theatres such as this.

All the world’s a stage – literally. Yet if people are to be liberally rewarded for acting a part, for learning a narrative instead of the truth, then we cannot use the cold blue light of reason to show us the way to anywhere worth visiting. 

So lots of drama but no happy ending.

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The problem with democracy

Last week's Scottish referendum has lit a match to other firecrackers in this country and elsewhere - Belgium and Spain, for example. But how far (and in what way) should the collective will of the people be sovereign?

The sense of being effectively disenfranchised by a remote political elite leads to calls for localism and direct democracy, an example of which is the Harrogate Agenda:

The trouble is, any system can be gamed. The strategy and tools merely vary according to the way the game is set up.

The birthplace of democracy is said to be ancient Athens, and the classical scholar Peter Jones in The Oldie magazine runs a column in which he often compares current affairs with how matters were settled by the Athenians, who voted en masse on everything, in their weekly assemblies. Yet this democracy excluded women, and the slaves on which the city's economy largely depended. Not everyone's interests were represented.

And even for those who had a voice, there was the question of how their decisions were influenced. The way to game a system based on debate and voting is to refine the arts of persuasion, so that emotion can sometimes not assist but overcome reason. Set against Socrates, who asked questions to get at the truth, were the sophists such as Gorgias, who held that nothing really existed and who gave answers simply to sway opinion. Socrates was forced by his enemies - who persuaded the Athenian assembly - to drink poison at the age of 71, when he was still in good shape; Gorgias lived to 108.

As well as his opponents, the skill of the orator can ruin his supporters, and even himself. Demosthenes, reputedly the greatest speaker in history, caused Athens to resist the Macedonians, and it was only by the earnest pleading of Phocion with Alexander the Great that the city was spared the destruction visited on Thebes. Phocion also persuaded Alexander to give up his demand for Demosthenes and other crowd-rousers to be delivered up to him, which gave the orator a few more years of life (until he had another go at the Macedonians).

A modern example of the deadly persuader would be Adolf Hitler, whose speeches were electrifying even though he was eventually off his head with the cocktails of drugs he took daily. In the latter stages of World War Two the Allied decided to stop trying to assassinate him, because we were more likely to win with him still ruling his roost and terrifying his general staff.

Ultimately, democracy can be used to annul itself. The French Revolutionary Assembly quickly turned into a reign of terror that consumed its own leaders. Democracy turns to mobocracy and the rise of cliques and strongmen, as the Communists - heirs of Gorgias as far as respect for the truth is concerned - well know. Those who advocate local democracy can look across to the USA and see how wrong it can go in some communities - judges and police chiefs making decisions with an eye to re-election - just as democracy is failing in the nation as a whole, with a developing media-and-law-buying oligarchy that even the Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen can't quite deny.

And those who think referenda are the universal answer might like to watch Peter Cook's 1970 film, "The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer". What the Wikipedia synopsis doesn't make clear is how the antihero becomes a dictator: he offers the public the power to take part in all law-making via referenda , so that the ordinary man finds himself fretting at home over proposed legislation while his tea is getting cold, and eventually the people decide to leave it all in Rimmer's hands.

Nor do the people speak with one voice. I think it's an American spin doctor who describes the electorate as "a bag of magnets", that is, groups of people who feel strongly on both sides about issues and about other groups, so that the art is not to please all but to get a small majority polarised in the direction chosen by the manipulator.

Majority voting is not only decisive, but divisive, as we now see north of the border. Members of the minority have become sharply conscious of the numbers that share their view, and there will be work to do in reconciling the two sides. It is not enough that the greater number should have their will; their defeated opponents must agree to abide by the result.

Debate continues about voting systems and how fair they are, and we saw in 2011 how the Establishment united and fought hard against proportional representation. This misleads us into viewing the political crisis as psephological. It is not.

Far more important is what unites the community through its differences: a sense of common identity, equality for all under the law, the preservation of individual rights and liberties, and the justified expectation that by obeying the law and applying oneself it is possible to better one's economic condition. In these aspects there have been grave failures by the political elites and the magnates within and outside the country who have their ear.


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Man of Sorrows

According to the Loeb Classical Library translation, the root of the name "Odysseus" is "man of pain". Athene, remonstrating with the chief of the gods, uses a pun on the hero's name to ask why he has been imprisoned on Calypso's island so long:

 τί νύ οἱ τόσον ὠδύσαο, Ζεῦ
Why then did you will him such pain (ὠδύσαο - "odusao"), O Zeus?
(Odyssey, Book I, line 62)

Something I never knew before, and which changes how I see the story: a series not of adventures, but tribulations. So it is about endurance and fidelity - Penelope waiting ten years after the Trojan war has ended for a husband that most would by then have assumed was dead; Odysseus turning down Calypso's offer of immortality so that he may spend his remaining mortal years with Penelope.

The Greeks: grief, grit and pride.

And loyalty and pathos, exemplified by the moment his ancient dog Argos is the first to recognise the much-changed man on on his return to Ithaca.

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Could the law order a fresh Scottish referendum?

 

http://i4.dailyrecord.co.uk/incoming/article4265480.ece/alternates/s615b/1.jpg



On 15th September 2014, the leaders of the three largest political parties in Westminster made and published the above "vow".

I understand that when a contract is negotiated, any oral explanation, or additional undertaking given as a condition of agreement, forms part of the contract, even if it is not in the wording on the page.

So this "vow" must be considered as an integral part of the referendum held by the Scots. A vow is a binding commitment and for me the implication is that by making it the British Government has turned the No decision into a legal contract between itself and the Scottish people. If it fails to keep these promises in full, then the contract is invalidated and Scotland will be entitled to a fresh referendum.


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Like I said...

‘What price the union?’ said one senior Conservative MP angered by the last-ditch offers to the Scots. ‘And why is Gordon Brown the tail-wagging Westminster dog?

 

‘Nobody wants to cause trouble ahead of the referendum but these panicked offers mean Alex Salmond has won whatever the result.’

- Daily Mail, 16 September 2014

"I think it's coming anyway. The panic last-minute promises from HMG are a gift to the Yes camp, who can say, "Would they have offered these concessions if they didn't think we'd leave; will they keep their promises if we don't?"

"Then later, if the promises aren't kept, it'll be let's vote again, now we know; and if the promises are kept, then it'll be like one of those I-need-some-space "trial separations" that end in divorce proper.

"Salmond's done it, with the assistance of an incompetent and negligent Westminster."

- Broad Oak Magazine, 9 September 2014

Ye heerd it here fust.


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Manchester, 1965: aliennation

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China heading for a bust, the rich are running

"Over half the nation's monied Elites have either left the nation or plan to leave and transfer their financial wealth overseas."
Another fascinating post from Charles Hugh Smith.


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