Intellectuals

I am still reading Tuvia Tenenbom, who describes himself as a 'recovering intellectual,' and would like to share this with you. The clever people here in Tel Aviv seem to be a universal type: one who cannot see past the end of his nose but confidently looks down it at you.

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I sit down with a number of leftist intellectuals, university professors and such, for dinner in quite an exensive restaurant, and talk with the nicest-looking of the bunch who holds the title of 'political psychologist.' The first thing she says to me is this: 'I am a liberal, super liberal, and I'm an atheist.' When the waiter comes she orders café latte, but being an intellectual that she is, she can't just order latte without making it tasteless. Her latte, she tells the waiter, should contain coffee without caffeine and milk without fat, and be served in a clear glass.

Her speciality, she informs me, is religious extremists, mainly settlers. The settlers, she declares with authority and certainty, are idiots. And when I ask her if she read any of their literature, just to make sure that they are 'certified nuts,' she tells me that she doesn't have to do so since she has read many of their detractors who quote them, and this is more than enough.

In addition to her settler expertise, she tells me that she's also an expert on Judaism, which she classifies as a 'pagan religion.' I ask her if she has ever studied Judaism, a question that makes her raise her voice in anger. For years and years and years, she yells at this offender of her high stature, she has been studying Judaism over and over and over. I light up a cigarette, inhale and exhale, look at her and ask her: Could you tell me, please, what the 'Vision of Isaiah' is? That's the most basic question one could ask and any student of Bible 101 could have answered this question in his sleep, but this learned lady has no clue. What vision? What Isaiah?

I am befuddled by her lack of knowledge but everybody at this table asserts beyond doubt that I lack the mental capacity to understand higher concepts. They pound me with super brainy words of no meaning, and I sip my Chivas Regal I reminisce about one of my favorite rabbis from the day of old, a genius by any standards: 'He who cannot explain his thesis in simple words is he who has no thesis.'

(GOOD) FRIDAY MUSIC: Easter medley, by JD

The existentialist, Albert Camus, argues that if there is no faith, there can be no hope for us, and if there is no hope for us, then we are all doomed to despair: 

"Up till now everyone derived their coherence from their Creator. But from the moment that (we) consecrate (our) rapture with God, (we) find (our)selves delivered over to the fleeting moment, to the passing day, and the wasted sensibility."

Fritz Schumacher summed up our contemporary sense of “wasted sensibility” by saying, simply, that it showed that “the modern experiment to live without religion has failed”. Schumacher believes that our only chance of any success in developing the communities we need for survival, is by getting back into religion, and reconnecting with others, through the Other, once again.

http://wecan.be/bereflective/860/

Doublethink

 Social media teach us that facts and logic make very little difference in argument.

The Israeli-born (now US-based) writer Tuvia Tenenbom has written a series of books recounting his experiences in the assumed guise of a non-Jew (he is blond and Western-looking), to get people to divulge their real feelings.

Arriving in Jerusalem, he encounters a Palestinian professor who is looking forward to an interview with a German journalist, so he can tell him the truth of issues in Israel:

'What is the truth? He shares it with me: the Israelis make sure that he, being a Palestinian, can't own a house [...] he proudly shares with me, he is not a man only of the mind but also a man of means: he owns a house in east Jerusalem, and he also owns another one in a place called Shuaffat.

'There are people who are alcoholics and there are people who are recovering alcoholics, meaning they've stopped drinking. I happen to be a recovering intellectual [Tenenbom was raised in an ultra-Orthodox family] and I draw from my former self to understand this intellectual. Logically it's impossible for a man who owns nothing also to own two houses. But "intellectually," you can explain away everything.'

Shortly after, the writer meets a couple of German girls who have volunteered to work with the Palestinians. He asks one, why:

"Three years ago I volunteered for Israel and I fell in love wth the Jewish people."

"And that's why you decided to come again?"

"Yes."

Three years ago you fell in love with the Jews and that's why you are now helping the Palestinians?

She looks at me in disbelief, very upset: "What are you trying to say?"

In the late 1970s, one of my Birmingham housemates was a young Yemeni who had escaped north through Saudi to Europe. He invited some Libyan students over one evening, and we got talking. They were full of praise for what Gaddafi was doing for the people.

They were also convinced of the Irish Republican cause. They thought they knew all about it, though they had never been there, seemed unaware that the IRA was a decided minority within the Catholic minority, and so on and on. I thought it best not to tell them of my father's several tours of military duty in Northern Ireland. But they were like so many people: on subjects that mattered to them, they 'just knew.'

Cartoonist and writer Scott Adams said recently on his podcast that you should abandon facts and logic and use psychological trickery instead. For example, with someone stolidly repeating the untruth that Trump advocated drinking bleach to kill Covid-19, you could ask their position on the Loch Ness Monster etc, saying that you were testing just how gullible they were.

Bad news, if Adams is right and most debates are bullsh*t contests.

Still, I recall overhearing two Asian lads talking in a secondary school, and one quoted what was obviously an old saying: 'When two people speak, one of them is lying.'

Where childcare and education can make a difference

Yesterday we looked at university-'educated' nitwits - should the collective noun be 'u-nits'? 

Now, here's how, further down the ladder, daycare and schooling can make a huge difference:

Millionaire uses fortune to help kids in struggling town

By Scott Stump (April 17, 2013)

Harris Rosen went from a childhood in a rough New York City neighborhood to becoming a millionaire whose company owns seven hotels in Orlando, but his self-made success is not his proudest achievement. Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent.

Harris Rosen went from a childhood in a rough New York City neighborhood to becoming a millionaire whose company owns seven hotels in Orlando, but his self-made success is not his proudest achievement.

Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent. Having amassed a fortune from his success in the hotel business, Rosen decided Tangelo Park needed some hospitality of its own.

“Hospitality really is appreciating a fellow human being,” Rosen told Gabe Gutierrez in a segment that aired on TODAY Wednesday. “I came to the realization that I really had to now say, ‘Thank you.’’’

Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood.

In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.

"We've given them hope,’’ Rosen said. “We've given these kids hope, and given the families hope. And hope is an amazing thing."

Tangelo Park resident Georgia Gordan admitted that she was ready to move away 20 years ago, saying the neighborhood was “drug-infested” and remembering when people were afraid to walk outside. Gordan decided to stay when Rosen offered free day care, and her daughter eventually became a college scholarship recipient from Rosen’s program.

“It's one thing to offer a scholarship to one person one time,’’ Gordan’s daughter, Rachel Jones-Manuel, told TODAY. “But to continuously, for over 20 years, to continue to provide this type of incentive for people to go to school, I think is absolutely wonderful."

Rosen is hoping other private donors see the positive effects of his scholarship programs and start their own versions in hard-hit communities across the country. His generosity continues to benefit students like scholarship recipient Kamillia Crawford, who is a freshman at Central Florida studying to become a lawyer.

“(I want to) make sure that I show the world that with his gift, I was able to reach my max potential,’’ Crawford told TODAY.

https://www.today.com/news/millionaire-uses-fortune-help-kids-struggling-town-1C9373666

Educated idiots

'JD' contacted me today to say (order slightly altered):

Post in The Conservative Woman today about Gates and his plan to 'seed' the atmosphere with calcium carbonate to 'protect' the earth from the sun. I had read about this last year but it is planned for June this year in northern Sweden. Recently Elon Musk called Gates a knucklehead; an optimistic assessment of his intelligence.

But it comes back to what I wrote in one of my posts: the ignorance of politicians, civil servants, academics, 'experts' and the over-educated. Here is a perfect example which I recently sent to Wiggia. His one word response was - blimey!

The man in the video, Tomasz Schafernaker, is a meteorologist who worked at the Met Office. This appearance on Would I Lie To You is not only unbelievable but is unforgiveable. Even David Mitchell was lost for words.

We are back to one of my hobby horses; those in the green corner are usually highly educated and ignorant. You will know by looking at their weather page that they are fully on board with all this climate change nonsense and green issues. 

School is where you go to learn how to be stupid and university is the finishing school where you go to have the remains of your brain given a quick rinse in the latest woke fads.

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I have often noted how 'celebs' on quiz shows seem more ignorant than contestants drawn from the general public. 

How to account for their success? I assume that it's down to focusing narrowly on what gets them where they want to be. I think that is a winning strategy in a situation where generally we are safe and secure and the social/work/political hierarchy has been settled. All you need to know is your performing role, and who to suck up to and amuse.

We inhabit a complex social and linguistic structure, mistaking human words and power relations for reality. Only when disaster strikes are we made to wake up truly - think of how the butler become the boss in The Admirable Crichton, when his practical and organisational skills become essential to the survival of an upper-class party shipwrecked on a desert island.

Ironically, the term 'woke' as used today really means 'in a fantasy' - riding political hobby-horses while remaining astonishingly ignorant. The first time I heard the modern usage was when watching 'Breaking Bad', when the chemistry teacher Walter White is finally provoked by poor pay and conditions and the scorn of his students into breaking his civilised conditioning and turning wholeheartedly to crime: 'I am awake,' he says ominously, meaning the exact opposite of the baby-idealism of cocksure, semi-educated 'woke' youngsters.

Our world is complex but artificial, like the Mayan building complexes left to rot in the encroaching jungle when calamity overtook that society. In my days as an English teacher, I used to attend meetings of the National Association for the Teaching of English; it was all politics, progressivism and 'skills' - leading to today's schooling that concentrates on teachable-and-testable duckspeaking about 'fronted adverbials' while airbrushing out much of our literary heritage, with its embarrassing links to religion, history and classical learning. I said we have become experts in abstractions, but cannot name the plants we see when we go outside; they looked at me as though I were mad.

Ah, learning. My friend's three children spent never a day in school; two each went on to do two degree courses in Europe (one is dyslexic and only decided to learn to read at age ten), while the third has travelled widely and walked into jobs lacking a fistful of exam certificates but having a powerful and engaging personality. 

At one stage, the young lady felt she might need formal academic guidance on one course, and went to a sixth form college in the Midlands. She soon gave up, saying that her fellow students didn't really want to learn and (possibly as a result) the teacher didn't really want to teach. She went on to get first-class honours in mathematics.

Modern society and its unbelievable wealth depend on STEM subjects - even just to maintain the systems we have, let alone develop further; and to provide for the 7.7-billion-plus humans on the planet, most of whom are trying to attain the Western standard of living. Meanwhile, as my American brother tells me, university managements cut away at the budgets of 'hard' academic disciplines while boosting business management courses (you can never have enough Pointy-Haired Bosses) and pouring millions into college sport.

You never know what knowledge will turn out to be useful. I recall seeing a TV programme that mentioned an episode in the North Africa campaigns in the Second World War, in which an American general (Patton?) remembered a detail in the Old Testament (Joshua, Chapter 8?) about how the ancient war-leader used a valley to hide a force to ambush the foe; the modern officer looked for and found the dip (not observable from a distance) and so managed to smuggle a column past the enemy's position.

Again, there is an anecdote told by David Niven of a discussion with Winston Churchill in 1941:

’Do you think, sir,’ I asked, ‘that the Americans will ever come into the war?’ He fixed me with that rather intimidating gaze and unloosed the famous jaw-jutting bulldog growl. ‘Mark my words—something cataclysmic will occur!’ Four weeks later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

“Months later, when we were once more at Ditchley, I asked if the Prime Minister remembered what he had said so long ago. His reply gave me goose pimples.

“‘Certainly I remember.’

“‘What made you say it, sir?’

“‘Because, young man, I study history.'”

- https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-144/around-and-about-9/

That sort of learning informed the great man's gambles - not all paid off, but enough did.

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Do our leaders today have that breadth and depth of learning that will save us in time of peril? Or do they, like Crichton's social superiors, have a 'little man' who sorts everything for them? Is it the right 'little man'? How would they know?

Quiz Night, by Sackerson

We can start to book holiday breaks from 12 April, allegedly. So here's a memory from 2013 of a stay in Totnes, Devon:

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We strolled a few yards up the damp road and into the pub. The board outside was there, advertising the competition for 8.30, but there was hardly anybody in. The gambling machine's display seemed to be keeping time with the piped music, until a man returned to it and fed in a tenner, which took several goes.

"It's full."

"I know, I'm trying to get some of it back out."

Gradually the entrants gathered: three chefs on our left, a couple of solitaries at this end of the bar, and a trio of regulars at the other end, hidden behind the pillar.

"We'll start at nine."

A man and his girlfriend dropped in to tell the owner about the funeral arrangements for a local who'd be known to others here, though he'd kept himself to himself.

Then we began. Welcome to the fourth pub quiz at the Castle. Googlers would be instantly disqualified. Prize a ten pound bar tab for the winner, and a packet of crisps for the best team name.  As Brummies, my wife said we should be the Peaky Blinders.

"Is there a picture round?"

We said it would be whoever could draw the best picture, but the barman handed us all a streakily-copied sheet of logos to identify.

A couple of years ago at the Waterman's, a big bloke had come in dressed as a Roman soldier and been thrown out for farting. The question-setter that time had been Lily, who'd escaped the dullness of Plymouth, but she's moved on again with baby and partner. Her sheets were full-colour and artistically illustrated.

Our host began squinting at his iphone and reading out questions.

"What type of monkey lives on the Rock of Gibraltar?"

"Orang-utans," said one of the chefs to his mates.

"Spaniards."

The lone wolves were comparing notes on the picture round.

"What element is needed for all forms of combustion?"

CO2 wasn't right when we came to mark a loner's sheet, but he can't have heard the barman remark "Another oxygen-related question" to the regulars round the corner.

Between rounds, the majority decamped to the pavement outside for a smoke, including Mine Host, leaving his taps vulnerable in the near-deserted bar. Stupid law.

A chef showed us a party picture on his phone, with two ghosts' heads in the group. Later, one of his mates suggested it could be done by someone changing position while the phone panned round. Post-quiz, a couple of girls turned up, one of whom had taken the pic, and she said they hadn't done that.

Next round. One of the loners left abruptly. He'd scored 5 out of 20, most questions not answered and the rest semi-legible. His response to "What do the letters RAM stand for in computing?" had been "ramofocation". (What do the letters THC stand for?)

Another chef came in and was updated on the ghosts.

"What are there twenty-six pairs of in the human body?"

We got an extra point for spelling chromosomes right. We had briefly considered "bollocks."

There was much anguish over what the C stood for in YMCA. And when asked what nuts were used in making pesto, the chefs agreed on cashews. Apparently the answer to "the butcher, the baker and the..." was not Old Mother Hubbard. The cry in fencing was what we'd put, "Touché!", not "Dun ya!" as they'd said - and there was no consolation point for correct punctuation.

Then there was the dispute with the quizmaster.

"What is the coloured part of the eve called?"

"Don't you mean eye?"

"No, there's no i in it."

"No, a y instead of a v."

"It definitely says eve," said the barman, screwing up his eyes and peering closer.

"If it's eye it's iris," said the remaining loner.

We settled for eye.

The Peaky Blinders struggled with the logos. Mercedes and Camel cigarettes were a cinch, but the double W defeated us (Wonder Woman) and the stylised R (Robin, Batman's partner). The head surrounded by a Greek wave motif turned out to be Versace.

The last question was impromptu, because of IT malfunction. "It's covered by the Google bar." "Move your thumb up." "I've done that."

So he thought and gave us, "What Spanish island did I spend a few months on when I was 21?"

"Alcatraz," said the loner.

"Majorca."

"No, it wasn't Majorca," said the barman.

We did our best.

The regulars beat us by two points, one of which I'd lost when I made my wife put yellow instead of white for the colour Wimbledon tennis balls used to be before they turned green. And we'd forgotten the candlestick in the six murder weapons in Cluedo; and it was a revolver, not a pistol (Mine Host had been very firm on that). The winners promptly left.

Best team name was between the chefs, who'd concocted something ending with a c followed by hunt, and the loner's Alone In The Dark. I gave my casting vote for the latter and the chefs accepted the justice of losing out for obscenity.

I stayed on for a half pint of lager while my wife went back to make a cheese and onion sandwich for me, but without onion as we'd used it up. The loner was a graphic designer who told me all sorts of interesting things about design, photography, maintaining copyright on the internet and making websites. He reckoned his 8-year-old child was ahead of him and you didn't need to be in London to go global any more.

A Hendrix documentary was on the screen behind us. I recalled seeing the news of his death as I walked into Newport bus station; AITD told me he'd covered it at college. Memory versus history. I told him what I'd only recently learned about how Bruce Lee had died (aspirin, the studio had spun -rubbish, it was Nepalese hash, especially dangerous if you had no body fat to absorb the toxins); he told me about his own martial arts expertise.

Home for a cheese sandwich, a shot of Chivas and the rest of Hendrix.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Whitewash, by Wiggia

Medical practitioner and multiple murderer Harold Shipman;
initially the inquiry was to have been held in secret

The call for an inquiry into the government's handling of Covid follows an inevitable pattern in these matters, various organisations are getting their ducks in a row to make political capital out of government mistakes during the last twelve months of lock down and confusion.

There is certainly a case to get to the bottom of why we along with other nations followed the path we did and are doing; never before has a pandemic been handled in this way, and in the scheme of things a minor pandemic at that.

The cris of ‘one life’ and 'saving the NHS' seem to have been enough to chuck certain sections of society on to the scrap heap and close down sections like hospitality and live entertainment to such an extent that  much will not recover in years, bankruptcy and unemployment beckon in those sectors like never before.

Naturally the call for further measures - rightly or wrongly, we have currently no way of telling - have come from the public sector safe in their jobs and protected pensions, the NHS has (apart from those on the front line, and we have no means of finding out how many that encompassed) been at home or working very short weeks, such as GPs yet still all get their full salaries. Where I live we have many doctors, surgeons and nurses as our neighbours as we are near the city hospital; along with teachers, many have been home for long periods of time, and the ‘we have been working from home’ mantra doesn’t wash when you see DIY and home improvements being carried out everywhere on a grand scale.

The decision to shut down the NHS to save itself was one that has grave consequences for those suffering from anything but the virus. The acronym the Covid Health Service is certainly justified, but with reports beginning to leak out about how many people went into hospital Covid-free only to catch the virus while there, perhaps there is a good case for being a Covid-only service; who in their right mind would want to go into hospital when the chances of contracting the virus have been as high as 40% - see this from the Daily Telegraph:

“More than 11,000 people who went into England's hospitals with unrelated issues contracted virus in December and early January”

The death toll from failure to treat other conditions will probably never be released and more likely hidden and a lot of can-kicking will ensue.

Care homes are the biggest disgrace in health this country has seen. The decisions on decanting elderly patients from hospitals into care homes, the lack of provision for care home workers re PPE and the failure to even monitor what was going on hovers like a stench over those responsible whether NHS or civil servants.

So an inquiry is inevitable. We are good at inquiries; as has been said before they are one of the few growth areas in the country these days. We or those who are involved do like  a good and long inquiry, the longer the better, longer because all those on the inquiry gravy train carry on earning at the expense of the taxpayer and longer because it suits those in the headlights because people simply get bored with the whole and forget why the inquiry was held in the first place; a win-win, but not for the general public, the people affected by the decisions and by the same token the ones paying for it all.

In the last 30 years there have been 68 public inquiries. Only 5 have had their recommendations acted upon in any way. £635 million has been spent on them up till 2017. Even the Bloody Sunday one has done nothing during the years it has gone on to change anything, a total waste of everyone's time.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/news/latest/government-must-act-public-inquiry-recommendations

There are currently two in progress, if you can call it progress: the Grenfell Tower inquiry and the contaminated blood inquiry. The Grenfell inquiry was sabotaged by vested interests from the start, - wrong sort of inquiry board, wrong sort of ‘experts,’ local council absolving itself - and then it became a platform as so many of this type do today, a platform to display angst for those involved and also to milk the system for money which makes all angst go away if there is enough of it. I suspect everyone will be blamed in one form or another and rightly so but little other than 'lessons have been learned' will come of it; the man who left his fridge on fire and actually caused it all is nowhere to be seen.

We are now going to have a new inquiry into the new coal mine in Cumbria. This has nothing to do with anything other than clear the government of making a ‘wrong’ decision in the first place. It wasn’t wrong of course but the green lobby must have their way on all matters these days and the government has caved in to their demands under the pretext that there have been ‘further developments’ since giving the go-ahead; anyone who believes that needs their bumps felt.

This proposal was to extract coking coal for steel production and had new emission control production facilities but as usual it is never enough for the green lobby, so now, probably after a protracted and expensive inquiry we will stop the mine producing and purchase our coking coal from elsewhere - from a country that can pollute the planet on our behalf, so that’s all right then.

No doubt the calls are going out to likely friends/candidates to run this nice little earner as we speak.

The Jay report into the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal was actually achieved in good time and its conclusions left no doubt as to what had gone on and who was to blame, both perpetrators and police and local government. Despite all that good work the result is a resounding zero, the same thing is still going on and the court cases are still being hushed to protect community cohesion. The government report on the Jay report has been kicked down the road for so long that when it was not released to the public few cared, as was the whole purpose in the first place.

So what is the point of them? Very little is achieved, in fact nothing in the vast majority, people say they are sorry years later, well some do, and it all goes down the memory hole, that’s the way to do it.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/15/public-inquiries-ignored-lord-bichard

And waiting in the wings is potentially the biggest longest most expensive one yet, the Coronavirus Inquiry; what a feast of milking the system on public money that will be!