Bananas and Coconuts

Something Fishy?

The rain beats down on a small Irish town. The streets are deserted. Times are tough. Everyone is in debt and living on credit.

A rich German arrives at the local hotel, asks to view its rooms, and puts on the desk a 100 euro note. The hotel owner gives the German a bunch of keys and he goes off for an inspection. As soon as the German has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher hurries down the street to pay what he owes to his feed merchant. The merchant heads for the pub and uses the note to pay his bar bill. The publican slips the note to the local hooker who's been offering her services on credit. She rushes to the hotel to pay what she owes for room hire, and puts the note in the hotelier's hand. He thanks her and puts the note on the desk in front of him. Less than a minute later the German appears, says the rooms are unsuitable, picks up his money and leaves town.

No one did any work. No one earned anything. But everyone is out of debt. And the German still has all his money.

Is there or is there not something fishy about the above account? Please email me and help my poor brain to sort it out...

The Government Wants To Help You

In A.N. Wilson's book The Victorians, he points to an important difference between a prudent and sensible government (whether conservative or liberal) and the whining, interfering nanny state supported by today's prissy leftwingers. A government which tries to improve the quality of things like pavements and roads and parks and tapwater and drains and beaches and public libraries and facilities in schools may occasionally be thanked for its efforts; but a government whose odious and tiresome mission it is to improve the people themselves (or to try and "protect" the people from themselves) will receive at the least irritation and ingratitude and at the most abuse and contempt.

And so it should be.

Get Over It

Whenever I see a poster that says:

     Some people are gay - get over it

I imagine another poster that says:

     Most people are not gay - get over it

Toad of Towed Hall

American education on the decline:

American Airport Security

Bruce Schneier, talking about the history of American airport security:

"We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear (PETN is a kind of plastic explosive). We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn't have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces -- the level of magical thinking here is amazing -- and they're going to do something else. This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it."

The Israelis have much better airport security than the Americans do, with far fewer delays. Your homework is to find out how the Israelis have achieved this...

The Young Skeptic

Calmly and patiently listening to what others have to say and recognizing when they are feeding you

a load of crap.

Helen the Younger

The actress Helen Mirren is 62 years old. If you click on the link below, you will see a picture of her on the beach, wearing a two piece bathing suit. What is her secret? - five hours in the gym each day?? Many women aged 52 would envy Helen's appearance...

Helen on the beach.

He's in a Meeting

Terror Warnings

The American government could have been a bit clearer when they sent out notices advising people what to do in terrorist situations...

Schooldays

Schooldays in the year 1957 were certainly different from what they will be like in 2015. Were schoolchildren in 1957 better off? You decide...

Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" video, about the earth in perspective:

Lewis and the Moral Law

Do you agree with C.S. Lewis' famous statement about the moral law? Here goes:

Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole; and that consequently there is no mystery about it. Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently. Now, of course, it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point. If we ask: "Why ought I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is good for society", we may then ask, "Why should I care what's good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have to say, "Because you ought to be unselfish" -- which simply brings us back to where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any further... If a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, "in order to benefit society", for trying to benefit society, in other words being unselfish (for "society" after all only means "other people"), is one of the things decent behaviour consists in; all you are really saying is that decent behaviour is decent behaviour. You would have said just as much if you had stopped at the statement, "Men ought to be unselfish".

And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the behaviour we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behaviour we find inconvenient, and may even be the opposite. Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing -- a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.

And yet it is not a fact in the ordinary sense, in the same way as our actual behaviour is a fact. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely real -- a real law, which none of as made, but which we find pressing on us...

(From C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1943, chapter three)

Old Russia

Some color photos of old Russia, taken (believe it or not) between 1909 and 1912.

Dumb or Dumber

Mocking Postmodernists

Here is Ophelia Benson mocking the strange views of postmodernists and their fellow-travellers.

The Looney Left

What do we know about the British politician George Galloway?

In this picture, George is the fellow with the dark glasses...

Max Dunbar says:

Galloway has said that "the disappearance of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of my life". To Saddam Hussein, he said, "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem!" We know that Galloway signed a petition demanding the release of Saddam's number-two Tariq Aziz, with whom Galloway once danced in a North African nightclub. The Iraqi "resistance" (jihadis who kill civilians, socialists and aid workers) is "defending all the Arabs, and they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony". When trade unionists broke down in tears at their recollections of torture under Iraqi Ba'athists, Galloway sneered that their visible emotion was "a party trick".

Galloway said of the Syrian dictator that "Syria is lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her President".

Galloway fascinates as a symbol, a freakshow, a grotesque parody of leftwing politics. And one of the qualities I admire about Galloway is his resilience, and his ability to make a comeback; he walks away from the smoking ruins, whistling, cigar in hand, already thinking of the next opportunity, and planning his next big score.

Christopher Hitchens says:

"Galloway looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class wideboy and proud of it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels - all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse like a lot of them are, puffed up like a turkey. He has managed to fuse being a Baathist with being a Muslim sectarian and a carpet bagger in the East End. He's got the venomous riff-raff at one end and your one-God fanatics on the other. Wonderful. Just what we need..."

Tony Judt

Tony Judt, the author of Postwar, a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemical essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday 6 August at his home in Manhattan.

The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. The cause was complications of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which he learned he had in September 2008. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.

Judt said a few months ago: "Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable."

Last October, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr Judt spoke about social democracy before an audience of 700 at NYU. During the lecture, his last public appearance, he told the audience that some of his American friends felt that seeing him talk about ALS would be uplifting. But he added, "I'm English, and we don't do 'uplifting'..."

History remained uppermost in his mind. In his book Ill Fares the Land, he turned his attention to a problem he regarded as acute: the loss of faith in social democracy, and the power of the state to do good, that had brought prosperity to so many European countries after World War II.

Wordsworth

From Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

From Wordsworth's poem Ode on Immortality

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream...

But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth...

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day...

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Recruitment

Have a look at one of the ways in which the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party) attracted and recruited ordinary Germans in the early 1930s. Here follows the song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me":

Worth Watching

Paul Potts was a worker in a cellphone warehouse in England. He decided to enter a talent contest:

Integral World

You want theories of everything? Go for it...