…………… But the BBC contains another hidden gem. One that is free, easy to access, and which you may not have heard of. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow us to present Melvyn Bragg and In Our Time. [1]
………… a golden trove of learning on every conceivable subject and every intelligent man or woman who has ever lived(except for the ones they haven’t covered yet) Aeschylus, the Artheshastra, Booth, the Bacchae……Shakespeare, Schopenhauer……we could go on. All presented in the same easily-assimilable 48 minute format where Melvyn gets in three of the top academics in any chosen field and lets them talk. ………… And every show since 1998 has been collected and archived so you can dip in to as many or as few as you wish.
Well, today Melvyn’s show hits 1000 editions. Right now, they’re talking about the old film The Magnificent Deadly Seventh Seal. Or something like that. No matter! What counts is that you tune in and absorb another dose of free, high level learning. We recommend
Gentle readers, we cannot help but express a tear of schadenfreude at the reported falling out of those two Titans of the Right, Rupert Murdoch and Donald J Trump. At least according to prolific author Michael Wolff they have. [1] Among his more lurid claims is that Rupert’s loathing for The Donald is now so visceral, that he “often wishes for his death”. The question is: how seriously should we take all this?
Like any good detective, we look for a motive. Money? Well, back in 2020, various employees of Rupert’s Fox News outfit hurled allegations that the recent election of President Biden had been due to fraudulent use of election machines supplied by the Dominion Corporation. For many on the Right, words are not carefully defined units of meaning to be arranged into logical structures. For them, they are mere sounds, emotional bricks to be hurled at anyone according to the immediate needs of the moment. It was just Fox being Foxy. Unfortunately, Dominion took the former view, and sued. Rupert calculated on a $50 million hit; instead he got $785 million. [2] [3]
And this matters. Murdoch needed that money, because his empire is no longer the all-conquering behemoth it was back in the 1980s. For one thing, the rival Daily Mail Online has seized the zeitgeist as the go-to news site for right wingers across the globe. According to insiders, he is also anxious to buy right wing newsmag The Spectator, as well as holding the line for his various new TV and Radio outlets against hungry rivals like GB News. All of which requires a fair amount of spare change. Which Trump and his pals have just cost him. And don’t expect The Donald to pay any of it back any time soon.
So, yes, Murdoch has a motive. And do not underestimate this intelligent, cunning man, even if he is alleged to be in his sunset years(his mother lived to 103) Watch your back, Donald-and listen to the Wolff.
Overheard in a cafe: a woman talking in quiet, bleak despair about her husband’s drinking. His Doctor had banned him from the addiction for six months (minimum). Instead of learning from the admonition, he simply saw it as something to count down, and from midnight on the last day he had resumed with glee. Now his stomach was so ravaged that the only way he could carry on was by taking malibu in milk. But it kept him topped up.
Because every addict we’ve ever known is like that. The booze, the fags-they’re not a bolt on, they are what the addict is-culturally, socially, personally. Of course they see every attempt to oppose reason and common and sense as an imposition from them, the others, the grown ups. They learned their addictions when very young. And in the pub, with their mates and booze and fags, is where they’re young again. And somewhere in that group is the worse mate of all. The facilitator. The one who offers another drink with a knowing leer. Or a cigarette with the ancient line “have a fag, Dave-one won’t kill yer mate” (every danger carries half a truth)
And so we come to Rishi Sunak, and his weasel proposals to water down the UK attempt to wean ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels.[1] Anyone who’s had a habit, or knows someone who has, will recognise what he is doing. He’s that one in the Dog and Duck with the ever ready packet of fags and one more for the road. Only this time it’s not the life of one foolish individual, it’s all of us.
the sub-editors would like to point out that Rishi Sunak is a good boy who neither smokes nor drinks. WE think they’ve missed the point!
Old hands on this blog will recall our interest in clean aviation (LSS 28 11 2022; 24 11 21) We like aviation, especially the civil kind, for its role in making the world smaller and bringing peoples and cultures closer. So it’s nice to see another group of brave entrepreneurs and engineers making a serious attempt not just at the technology, but thinking about the logistics of how it might be implemented
Based at Kemble in Gloucestershire UK pioneers ZeroAvia are staking their all on Hydrogen Electric technology. [1] It’s clean, it’s green, and as you might expect, their website waxes lyrical about all the advantages. Two points catch our eye. Firstly, they are trying to set up a carefully designed refuelling system so the hydrogen is generated by renewable energy right next to the plane as it sits on the runway. Secondly, they seem to be building up slowly, testing the technology first on small planes on short hop feeder flights, then slowly extending to short haul and medium haul with bigger power systems. No one is claiming to take over the Atlantic until about 2040, which to us seems eminently reasonable, yet sanguine.
And the moral of the story? Where you put enough intelligent people together, and give them enough working capital, there is hope that some of your problems might be solved. See our occasional blogs on medical science if you don’t believe us. But when you divide yourselves into warring tribes and fight viciously over dwindling resources (aided by entities like Fox News, for example) you will have no hope at all. Choose.
We saw this story on Channel 4 News in the UK, who are about as diametrically opposite to Fox News as one may wish for
Warning: the contents of this article may offend all those journalists and politicians who make their careers denigrating experts and anyone who is educated
Autumn is on us again, and pretty soon we’ll be covering the annual round of Nobel Prizes. But before we do, here’s another set of awards[1], brought to us by the pen of the excellent Linda Geddes of the Guardian. They are the Breakthrough Prizes,[2] and like the Nobels, seek to reward the very best in intellectual accomplishment. If you don’t believe us click, and discover the work of John Cardy and Alexander Zamolodchikov, whose mathematical reasoning has not only given us a new theory of matter, it might also help with Quantum Computing. Or how about the medical insights of Michel Sadelein, who has been training up T Cells to go after some of the most intractable diseases? There’s more like this in Linda’a article-so give it a click.
The world is full of well paid people like politicians and journalists who like to denigrate expertise like this. People who dispense half truths and insinuations about climate change. Or declare generally that “we have no need of experts” But you cant choose truth only when it suits you. We knew a few people who did that on the matter of cigarettes and lung cancer. We don’t know them now.
Those perplexed by the awful Present often invent a past Golden Age, when all was well. For the Senators of late Rome, it was the reign of Augustus. For elderly Britons, it is an imagined, monochrome version of the 1950s. For those of us of a vaguely progressive, liberal persuasion it has to have been that time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1991, those dozen -or-so years when reason appeared to have triumphed, and all things seemed possible.
One man who knew that time, was nurtured in it and seemed destined to occupy a gilded position therein was Rory Stewart, a sometime soldier, diplomat, Tory MP and Minister and now a soulmate of New Labour honcho Alistair Campbell, whose name is synonymous with the epoch. As an insider, Stewart had a privileged view of how those years crumbled to dust, in a saga of failures so awe-inspiringly catastrophic that no fiction writer would ever dare pitch them to a publisher: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Financial Crash, stagnant wages, Putin, the rise of China….and on to horrors like Trump and Johnson (whom Stewart at least had the fibre to oppose in a leadership contest) And through it all the British Parliament (both parties) sat in dazed, stupefied incomprehension, like cavalry generals suddenly faced with tanks. It’s all here [1] and if you want more, then you should buy the man’s book [2]
Stewart was different; he possesses a rare extra gift of self awareness, a quality not normally associated with those who have passed through Eton and the backbenches of the Conservative Party. It has led him to question every assumption of our desperately flawed interventions in other lives. And, courageously he posits new models of development and cooperation which might mitigate the damage. Time will tell. But for us the message of the work is much deeper. It is just when you think you are having a golden age that you are piling up the unseen errors which will lead you to ruin. We knew about climate change, We did next to nothing. We knew about inequality and corporate power. We did nothing. We danced, we partied, we raved, we bought the Daily Telegraph. Welcome to today.
Firstly, a big thank you to all our readers, contributors, and the considerable number of new joiners. However, you have probably noticed that the frequency of our productions has diminished somewhat. And regular features-like Cocktail Night and Weekly Round up have almost dropped out altogether.
This is for personal and business reasons, and we hope you will understand this. Neither will go away anytime soon, so please bear with us.
So once more, thanks for you frequent and much appreciated visits to our little site, Thanks also to those who send links to their sites and blogs. We wish we could spend more time immersed in them-but there are just not 25 hours in the day any more, and little sign that this will be amended any time soon!
Keep reading, keep writing and keep giving us suggestions and we hope something like a more regular service may be attuned round about blog number #1000
We once wrote a blog (LSS 8 12 22) expressing wonder at how some people in Cumbria were demanding to be put back underground into the dangerous job of coal mining. We ascribed this to nostalgia for a lost sense of community, and the lack of cultural tools to imagine anything better.
Which is why an article by the ingenious Larry Elliott of the Guardian[1] has caught our eye. As some of us predicted in 2016, Brexit did not reduce the flow of immigration. It simply shifted the sources to countries such as India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The introduction of a points-based system has effected one crucial shift, replacing unskilled European workers with skilled ones from the former Commonwealth. As Larry notes:
Data from Oxford University’s migration observatory shows migrants from India and sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be employed in high-skilled jobs and command higher salaries than those from eastern Europe.
The new system has certainly reduced the salience of immigration as a political issue. The sort of low to semi-skilled manual workers who voted Leave in such large numbers in 2016, may find their occupations and lifestyles unthreatened, while enjoying the services of more and more doctors, lawyers and IT professionals. But there may be a long term danger.
A culturally stagnant working class, content to remain forever in roles like builders and miners, could find itself becoming subservient to a new class of foreign born professionals. which they will perceive as alien. As Amy Chua pointed out in her excellent work Political Tribes, the real cause of the Vietnam war was that ordinary Vietnamese hated the largely Chinese middle class, who seemed to have cornered all the best opportunities. It was the same with Jews in many parts of Europe, whose values of thrift and intelligence were never enough to save them from the most dreadful persecutions. We have been wrong before in this blog (although we cannot think of a simple example right now) but we would watch this trend carefully. Particularly with regard to the negotiations with India.
What is Mad? Fifty years ago, if you had said “dinosaurs are still living among us”, people would have declared you to be mad. Now it’s accepted wisdom-our feathered friends are nothing more than a bunch of dinosaurs hiding in plain sight. So-what is a normal mind? Here’s a book which is more than usually interesting about how the mind works which takes a fresh look
Jurassic Beak When is a bird a bird, and a dinosaur a dinosaur? When we say so. The key learning from this new discovery is that there was a vast ecology of creatures displaying a mosaic of features some of which were more bird like than others. Learning is often no more than where someone has drawn a line. Nature Briefings Dino prompts rethink of bird evolution
The fossil of a bird-like dinosaur that lived around the same time as Archaeopteryx— considered by many palaeontologists to be the first bird — has been found in what is now southeastern China. Fujianvenator prodigiosusadds to mounting evidence that there were plenty of different birds living in the Late Jurassic period. Dinosaurs might have diversified into different kinds of bird to occupy different ecological niches, says palaeontologist Hailu You. Fujianvenator’s particularly elongated hindlimbs suggest that it was all about running or wading, instead of flying. “Early bird evolution is complicated,” says You.Nature | 3 min read Reference: Nature paper
Belief and knowledge are two different things As this article shows, the desire to believe something, especially if it confirms your deepest desires, can trash the effects of even a heavy dose of learning. Even when people have been scammed, they keep on coming back. So don’t expect any reversal of Brexit any time soon. The Conversation:
It’s too damn hot as Cole Porter would have it. Long before the sea or the wildfires get you, global warming may a start cooking you in your bed. This little piece from the BBC shows where the limits might lie
It is exactly a year since the Rt Hon Liz Truss began her brief period as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Including ten days of mourning for her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II , Ms Truss lasted just 44 days in office. And rightly so; her actions were not just bad, they were so horrendously abysmal, that they raise a question. How can we comprehend this catastrophe? What can it be compared to?[1]
We consulted many experts: economists, historians, media personalities, psychiatrists; but we found one group had the answer which most satisfied our curiosity and reduced our levels of cognitive dissonance to manageable levels. It was Bad Movie fans, and their choice of Robot Monster as the template paradigm for the Truss Government.
For those alien to the fraternity, Robot Monster was the one where they stuck a diving helmet on the head of a man in a furry gorilla suit. As the Director Phil Tucker explained [2]
“I originally envisioned the monster as a kind of robot………I talked to several guys that I knew who had robot suits, but it was just out of the way, money wise. I thought “OK I know George Barrows George’s occupation was a gorillas suit man When they needed a gorilla in in a picture they called George, because he owned his own suit and got like 40 bucks a day. I thought “I know George will work for me for nothing. I’ll get a diving helmet, put it on him, and it’ll work!” [2]
If you want to know why it doesn’t work, try combining the two images at the top of this article, or click on the links [3], [4] to see Tucker’s creation in its full glory.
Tucker was a reasonably intelligent man. And his premises were strong: people liked scary movies, especially about things like robots, gorillas and aliens. So, what was not to like in Robot Monster? Now click again. And try to keep a straight face. Truss was (is) a reasonably intelligent woman, and probably more honest than a number of her Parliamentary colleagues. And the ideas she loved (lower taxes, a smaller state) are at least defensible, if not always right. But it is possible to put right things together in a wrong way, especially if you are working fast, and on the cheap. The results are always the same. Robot Monster. And the Truss administration.
Learning, Science and Society 