To whom it may concern . . .

Christmas is coming and the geese are . . . well, this goose, anyway, is getting rather bored, terminally bored, with the ongoing process of mailing.  So this is to announce that I will be taking a break from it, probably permanently.  There is much more that could and needs to be written about, but as I say one gets rather tired of it.

Anyway, thanks.

Goodbye.

Make of it what you will . . .

Ronan Ryan went to New York in 1990 when he was sixteen.  He went on to become a major player in the development of High Frequency Trading in the American stock markets.  Later he also became a leading figure in the movement to bring it to back to earth and to clean up the various scams and abuses that in the meantime had become associated with it.

He returned home to Dublin for Christmas 2011, something that Michael Lewis describes in his 2014 book Flash Boys:

‘He felt no attachment to the place.  “I don’t belong there at all,’ he said.  “There’s fucking fat kids everywhere.  When I was growing up there was no fat kids.  It’s lost its charm.”

Clickety Click 66 . . .

The government is turning its searchlight on the bingo halls.  At least that seems to be the case according to a somewhat garbled account today on Morning Ireland.  The idea seems to be that they want 25% of the takings (not the profits) to be handed over to charity, in line apparently with the National Lottery.

Now, whatever about principle, but certainly in practice, the state is not opposed to gambling, so long at least as it’s getting its cut.  Ideally, though, one suspects it would prefer to have it channelled solely through the ‘company store’ of the National Lottery.

Now whatever about the state, the prevailing politically correct philosophy really doesn’t support gambling at all, which is why movements are afoot to ban horse and dog racing, ostensibly on animal welfare grounds.  Yet underlying it all is a liberal distaste for the perceived irrationality of gambling, preferring instead a view of human nature along the lines of the ‘economic man’ of the old textbooks, whereby the sensible, reasonable, successful man was one who didn’t adventure his money, but squirrelled it carefully away towards profitable investment and later enjoyment.

The Irish writer Desmond Fennell published in 2001 a reminiscence of the months he spent in Sweden in 1960, at a time when Swedish liberalism and social democracy were engaged in laying down the programme that was to form the basis of the up-to-date liberalism of the present day.  It is worthwhile quoting from its opening page:

‘The first impression, if you arrive from Denmark or northern Germany, is of a tightening of the strings that control life, a largescale disappearance of permissiveness, imagination and common hilarity.  You are forbidden to smoke in trams or buses or when you go to a telephone call-office or enter a large shop.  In restaurants waiters give you directions about what you may drink or not drink, what you must eat if you drink this or that . . . To buy a bottle of liquor you must go to special state shops, massive and unadorned, where people queue at the counter and a notice warns them that they must be able to produce proof of identity.  You are made to feel that these shops are houses of shame: the big windows often display typewriters or tyres, disguising the truth within, and the assistant looks at you horrified if you make to leave the shop with an unwrapped bottle . . . in railway stations and outside beer-shops you sometimes come across beggars, men who have the smell of liquor on their breath and who do not look clean.  They are the pariahs of society, psychically defeated persons, whose psychic defeat expresses itself in an expensive addiction to alcohol.  They would not or could not obey the rules that the rulers set for those who would be successful and respected.  They are forbidden to buy liquor and must get it on the black market or through subterfuge.  Many more like them are being treated in special homes run by teetotallers, who amount to six percent of the population and have much power.  Later, you will discover that drink has replaced original sin as the alleged root of all evil in man.’

Now the first thing to say is that the word ‘permissiveness’ above is used in a purely non-sexual sense, something that you will quickly discover should you read the rest of the book.  The second thing is that Sweden had at the time ‘one of the highest reported suicide rates among the most developed countries’ (Wikipedia).

Fennell also quotes Ingmar Bergman, the film director:

‘“You see, in Sweden we have everything, or rather, we live in the illusion of having everything.  But in the midst of this wealth a great emptiness holds sway . . . In my films I describe this emptiness and everything that people think up in an attempt to fill it, and I believe that in doing this I am tackling the problem of the present time, that is, how to give a purely ‘welfare’ civilisation a spiritual and human content.  At all events this is the problem that I am personally concerned with all the time.  Don’t ask me to talk of other things—I couldn’t.’”

Now in terms of modern secular liberalism  the ‘root of all evil’ has divaricated beyond simply drink to include what you eat and what you wear and what you say and what you think  Not to mention how you travel or how you mate or whether you have an open fire etc. etc.  So that you need to be controlled or managed or re-educated in these things and all things like them—for your own good, of course, purely for your own good.

I have intended from the beginning of this current tranche of mailings to write about Desmond Fennell and Sweden.  It is purely fortuitous that it occurs in the present context.  Providing I don’t get bored with the whole thing, I intend returning to it again sometime in the future.

The book in question by Fennell is The Turning Point, published in 2001 by Sanas Press, and based directly on notes he took during his time in Sweden.  The address given for Sanas Press is PO Box 8607, Dublin 1.  The book is still possibly available in the bigger bookstores and maybe also through Veritas.

The Long Acre . . .

I have known quite a few asylum seekers down the years—'political refugees’ they used be called then—from Biafra (during the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s) and Eastern Europe and Chile etc.  The one thing they all had in common was the compelling desire to be back in their own countries, circumstances allowing.

Today’s asylum seekers seem different in that they are generally less running away from something than towards something.  They may well spin similar stories, but the last thing they want to do is return home.  They are instead coming for the duration.

Now the current wave of asylum seekers—defined as ‘spontaneous asylum seekers’—are those who arrive of their own volition and immediately claim asylum, under the terms of the various human rights and international charters, and who, unless stopped and refused entry at customs/immigration boundaries, must be admitted to the asylum processes of the country in question, irrespective of the reasonableness or otherwise of their claims for refugee status.

As for those who arrive in the backs of lorries etc. and via people smugglers, the reason for this roundabout method is obviously that they believe they would be sent directly back if they came via the normal routes, otherwise they would take the cheaper option of booking a flight and taking their chance in the normal asylum lottery.  On top of which is the possibility of disappearing into the illegal population of the larger European countries if things don’t go their way.

The fact of coming by such a backdoor route might also suggest that such people are not poor, otherwise they could not afford the fees the smugglers reportedly charge.  And the further they have travelled, the more likely is this to be the case: the various refuges agencies themselves recognise that the bulk of real and poor refugees are clustered in camps on the boundaries of the countries they’ve left, unable to afford to go any farther.

The argument might be made that because many people take out loans to travel, it would signify that they are not relatively well off at all.  Yet the fact is that loans, especially for such unpredictable purposes, are unlikely to be delivered without collateral.  The moneylenders of the Far and Middle East and Africa are more than likely to be intimately familiar with the circumstances of would-be borrowers.

Now why would they do it?  Why would families put themselves into debt in order to send a member on a problematic journey of some thousands of miles?  It can’t be extreme need, because, as I say, they must of necessity be already relatively well off.  In the case of the Vietnamese migrants found dead recently in Britain, they seem, most of them, to have been already well equipped with mobile phones and ways of keeping in contact with home.

It would seem to me that it really should be viewed as a deliberate investment.  And being an investment—something that has the potential to fail as to succeed—it is not likely to be embarked upon to the extent of ruining a family’s fortunes.  It is probably a calculated risk; one that if it fails is not likely to sink the ship.

But again the question is why would they embark on such a gamble, even if they could afford it?  After all, propaganda and hysteria aside, Europe is far from being a land of milk and honey—something of which those with access to digital technology should already be well aware.

And the answer, to me, at any rate, is that they are acting in response to a recognition of opportunity, and those who are being sent are being sent by way of staking a claim.

What is drawing the elements of the middle-classes of the world by hook or crook to Europe is a recognition of the weakness of Europe, demonstrated in the crazy faux-humanitarianism of its political elites, and its refusal in any meaningful way to defend its borders.

I say ‘faux-humanitarianism’ because I really do believe that it is motivated less by concern for refugees than by a desire to destroy the last vestiges of national identity and national culture; refugees being merely a convenient battering ram to that particular end.

I reckon, too, that it is a process the elites thought to control, by turning the tap on and off, according as it was needed.  But I think they overestimated themselves and their abilities—believed too much in their own propaganda.

I append also a perhaps more nuanced view from quite a while back, which may in ways be closer to the truth, much as I dislike the idea.

--------

The Long Acre

The whole world is going to become one.

The vessel of the foreign is bursting at the seams

and can’t be caulked

and is going to run through us

like a dose of salts.

And we won’t like it—nobody likes it—yet it is inevitable.

The illusions we’ve built up within ourselves

about our uniqueness and our future

will be blown asunder

under the pressure of events.

Real history is not a pretty picture,

it is a conflict of races

and cultures,

and cannot be resolved within an hour

to everybody’s satisfaction

as in an original episode of Star Trek.

History will grind down the bones of those that resist her

(and how many additional innocents along the way?)

and no matter how the atavistic urges

rise in us to passion,

the result will still be much the same:

after the turmoil, a new equilibrium, an altered world,

a continuation of the human race.

And those that live on from that moment,

if they are sensible,

will trace their ancestry

to the chaos of the 21^st century

and not beyond.

Those of us,

Irish individuals with foreign names,

and also quite a few of us with Irish names—

how many of us would be here now

but for the Normans

and the English

and the head-on effects of their collision

with the recalcitrant Gaelic septs?

15/2/2002

The New Priesthood . . .

Other than in the simplest things the crowd is usually wrong.  If you wanted to go to a Celtic game and were totally unfamiliar with Glasgow, the failsafe method would be to follow those with green and white scarves as they grew in numbers towards Parkhead.  But for anything more subtle than that the crowd is a poor leader.

Colin Renfrew in his 1973 book Before Civilisation detailed at length the fierce eleven-year resistance put up by the archaeological establishment to the acceptance of radio-carbon dating, whose conclusions threatened to upturn the apple cart of all their previously accepted theories and render their scholarship obsolete.  For the ordinary archaeologists, one imagines, the work went on much as before, simply unearthing the fragmentary evidence about which the theorists could wind their abstractions.

I remember being in London in 1994 and coming across the most marvellous book on the geology of Europe in an Oxfam bookshop: coffee-table size, scientifically-written, marvellously illustrated with charts and maps, altogether one of the finest presentations of a subject that I had ever come across in my life—and heavy, too.  At that stage I had a son who was a working geologist with the British Geological Society and I bought it for him and carted it home only to have him dismiss it with barely a glance.  ‘That’s all old hat now!’

Now the book had been published within the previous twenty or so years—officially published, if I remember correctly, with a European scientific imprimatur—and written by guy with a barrowful of academic qualifications and honorary titles behind his name.  I wanted my son to take it anyway, because it would have looked well on his shelves, but he dismissed it completely.

Now I am sure that the groundwork within it—the maps and charts and unformatted information—must still have been first class, except that it had been all bundled up in support of a theory that by this stage was out of fashion.

Still, I used to marvel at it—the work that went into writing it, the quality of the paper and the print, the detail of the illustrations, the binding—for, as I say, it was an absolutely beautiful production—yet all in the service of barking up the wrong tree.

The ‘bandwagon effect’ is the name given to the human tendency to believe things purely to the extent that they can be persuaded that other people believe them too.  Basically, it is another version of following the crowd.  And the great stampede at the moment is in the direction of an absolute belief in the truth of climate change.  A belief, so far as the crowd is concerned, backed up by nothing more than what they are told on television.  Time and again, when pressed to justify their belief, the cry goes up ‘but the scientists say it’s so!’

Now scientists aren’t God.  They are ordinary human beings with the same egos and needs and desire to get on as anybody else.  Nor are the primary concerns of academics necessarily to do with truth—as the long war over carbon-dating tends to show.  The vast bulk of scientists and academics are purely production line workers, packaging up what they receive and passing it on, often with little by way of added value.  Original thinkers are comparatively few.  Original thinkers who value truth above all personal considerations are even fewer.

Now archaeology, even with carbon-dating, is not really a science; or not certainly an applied science, which involves the possibility of plotting alternative futures and not just the past.  The technique used in the applied sciences is mainly modelling, which is to do with creating ‘what-if’ computer simulations of potential future outcomes, depending on the different variables you key in.

Now the fact is that modelling, properly done, is a hugely complex undertaking, full of, in Donald Rumsfeld’s words, ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’.  The most seemingly innocuous omissions or changes in data having the potential to change the whole simulation.  Not to mention the possibility of conscious or unconscious bias on the part of an emotionally involved researchers—for as someone said to me recently, ‘no one ever embarked on research without knowing in advance what they wanted to find’

Now as regards the present theory of climate change, I am, as I have said previously, not qualified to judge it. There are certain facts that seem immune to being challenged, such as the ongoing measurements of global warming and the increases in CO2.  The only theory in town at the moment is the one we are all familiar with—there may well be alternative theories, but if there are they are not being publicised.  So in the interim, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with what we have.

The problem is that it is not anymore simply a matter of climate—all sorts of other forces are supporting the current model to the extent that it scratches their own particular itches.  Rather like the disparate elements offering to back Jeremy Corbyn for prime minister so long as he supports a second referendum on Scottish Independence or Brexit or whatever, ancillary supporters of the present climate position include the vegans and the animal rights crowd and the greens, together with those perennial ‘Ministers for Hardship’, the soft and hard Left and their cousins, the modern secular liberals, whose shared underlying drive is a desire to micromanage everyone else’s life down to the very nitty-gritty.

There is also the question as to what extent the cure, as presently outlined, is perhaps worse than the disease.

More later . . .

Just another filler  . . .

[This was written about 2013 or 2014 and not published at the time.  I post it now simply as a means of giving myself some respite, so as to allow for the doing of other things.]

                                                                -----------------

On the news this morning was the information that the strong majority of people who are in trouble with their mortgages are between 41 and 65.  This would make you suspect that they were people who in the main took out second mortgages etc. in order to invest speculatively in other property.  And fair play to them for taking the chance.

Yet the fact is that if you look at it in the most stripped down terms, it was basically a selfish venture, as all such ventures usually are.  They were doing it for ‘me’.  It was a purely individualistic effort.  They weren’t thinking in terms of the general population.  They were doing it ultimately to make money for themselves.

Yet now that the gamble has failed—for those for whom it has failed—the message has become somewhat different.  ‘We have bailed out the banks, so why can we not be bailed out too?’  We have left the ‘me’ behind and are now talking in terms of ‘we’—and if not the Royal ‘we’ then certainly the Republican ‘we’; the ‘we’ of ‘We’re all in this together!’

Societies are not homogeneous.  They are split along various lines, depending on how you look at it.  And the one major split that developed during the so-called Celtic Tiger was the split between those who went mad and those who didn’t.

The fact is that we are all in this together—to the extent that the bill for the fuck-up is being presented to everyone, wise-head or fool.  But the fact is that the banks have no money of their own, they are ultimately dependent on the commonality of tax-payers and citizens.  In such a situation, the demand for a bail-out for the indebted, and especially the foolishly indebted, amounts to a demand for a transfer of assets from the cautious to the foolhardy in order to help compensate them for their gambling splurge.

Possibly a lot of the victims of the property boom didn’t see it at the time as being a gamble.  They thought—and were led to think—that they were on to a certainty.  As an analogy, one might speak of someone going off to Las Vegas confident that he had a sure system for winning at roulette.  But when he comes back broke, you would expect that he would have enough sense not to go looking for sympathy.  And even if he was to do it, he might expect short shrift.

Even the guy who goes into the bookies expects, or at least hopes, to win.  But he has also factored in the possibility of losing, which is why he is not up kicking the counter and looking for his money back when his horse finishes last.

Of course, there are hard cases out there.  No doubt, hundreds of them.  But I am speaking here specifically about people who got themselves into debt in order to take a punt on the broader property market.  And even for the hard cases, it is hard to envisage any amelioration scheme that could corral them off separately from the reckless.

In general, people in trouble are right to be angry about it.  They were in many cases suckered in by bank propaganda to ‘release the equity in your home’ and kept in there by promises of ‘soft landings’ etc. But it was not just the banks, the whole debacle was facilitated by total political bankruptcy and incompetence—and not just of the governing parties at the time.

Years ago, when the storm first broke, and people were protesting with placards demanding haircuts for the banks, I set about mentally devising one of my own, which would have read ‘Not haircuts—but guillotines!’  Five years on and nobody’s head has rolled yet, other than electorally.  And even more than the debts, I think, that’s what makes people mad.  Until we get guillotines, potentially less real than metaphorical, and on a swingeing scale, too, and not just for a few handpicked scapegoats, then there can be no possibility of a unified shoulder to the wheel, which is after all what everybody seems to agree is necessary to get us out of the mess we’re in.

Heated Discussions . . .

The Mayor of Venice blames global warming for the current floods, the second highest in over fifty years.  But then what was responsible for the record tide in 1966?

Now I do share some of the concerns that people have over climate and agree with some of the solutions proposed, too.  I am in favour of extensive re-afforestation and curbs on air travel—this latter on the basis of curbing the cultural suicide of mass tourism—and the protection of species and dealing with the plastic scourge.

But beyond that I am somewhat sceptical.  Because really I know nothing about climate change other than what I am being told.  Nor do I have the skills set necessary to reach any true conclusion on the matter for myself.  No more, I suspect, than do most people.

We are told that scientists say it is so, so it must be so.  But then the world is full of scientists—anyone with a BSc Pass being likely to qualify—and they are all active in an exponentially increasing multitude of scientific subdivisions.  Few of them would be purely climate scientists—to the extent that there are such things as pure climate scientists, and not just simply an amalgam the various core disciplines of the earth sciences—and few such climate scientists would, in turn, be in a position to take an ex cathedra overview of all the research, which, as I say, is complicated and fragmented across any number of fields and sub-fields.

But, then, of course, that still doesn’t mean that it is not true.

The thing that gives me pause for thought, however, is the extent to which virtually overnight popular certainty in the matter has turned into a stampede.  There is hardly anyone now that hasn’t got an opinion on man-made global warming, and it is generally one of absolute and unqualified belief.

Over roughly the past forty or so years, a new political strategy has developed on behalf of what might be broadly described as left-liberalism, involving what are generally called ‘social movements’ or ‘social cure movements’.  The purpose of these movements is to change the way people think by ancillary means—means other than political argument or rational debate etc.

Behind such movements lies the realisation that human beings are broadly conformist and are generally uncomfortable in being out of step with perceived majority opinion.  The strategy involves creating the illusion of a mass movement, David Copperfield-style, often with smoke and mirrors.  Most of these movements start out as small handfuls of middle-class intellectuals, students and academics, who by means of clever marketing create the idea that they are at the forefront of much larger popular movements, which in turn are driving them on.

Now this is not to say that some of these movements didn’t in their time do useful work.  But the fact is that down the years the process became fashioned into a ubiquitous weapon—a sort of one-tool-fits-all-type—capable of being adapted to all sorts of purposes, to the extent that there are any number of organisations around the world peddling a claimed expertise in such things as regime change and various lesser matters of liberal concern.

A core element of these programs involves the ‘weaponising’ of schoolchildren and college students and bringing them on the street as activists.  In general, argument or debate plays no part in this process, instead it seeks to exploit the youthful desire to be ‘cool’ and ‘alternative’—all as a means of adding an appearance of specific-weight to the overall movement, which in turn it is hoped will infect the broader population, and cause the whole thing to go viral.

Now, as I say, I am not in a position to make any statement on the validity or otherwise of the overall climate change position.  Instinctively, I would be to a degree sympathetic to it.  But I’m certainly not prepared to empty the cup in one go.  I remain to be persuaded.

But what I am clear about is the fact that the climate movement is at risk of being turned into a political vehicle by the usual suspects, who having time and again failed to implement their programme by other means, are now intent on hanging it on the horns of the self-proclaimed climate emergency.

Yesterday we had the schoolkids giving their advice on dealing with climate change in a Youth Assembly—a sort of junior version of the equally dubious Citizens’ Assemblies.  What is the point of all this, other than to encourage them by bestowing on them a sort of cut-price legitimacy?  What do they know about the matter more than anybody else?  And such being the case, why the fuck should anyone bother listening to them?

[It has been at the back of my mind for a while to write—though in more depth—about the various ‘social-cure movements’ afoot in the world.  It is just the speed with which things seem to be at this moment developing that has caused me to do so now.  For anyone who doubts the underlying validity of what I am saying, there are various books—mostly pro-social movement—out there in the marketplace.  Nor is the social-cure phenomenon the only strategy being pursued by those whose other strategies down the years have inevitably failed.  At some stage, and to the extent that I keep writing, I may deal with them, too.]