Another One

….Thought I’d better add the picture as I mention it.(Courtesy of the C A Roy Archive)

I was just about to post a blog about nettles, but in the meantime there came the news of the sudden death of an old, dear, friend, so I’d better leave my blog till I’m in more of an editing mood. Damned nuisances, dear old friends dying, disrupting our timetables, what do they mean by it….

Anyway, Charlie’s magnificent portrait shows him craggier and more venerable than I’ll probably remember him, but appropriate enough I guess, for one who has “passed on”.

Thud

Whichever side of the wall we’re on
We persevere
Sometimes an echo from beyond
Reminds us
Surprises or confounds us
But nothing we can clearly hear

An apple thudding from a bough
As we sit placidly
With the coffee can and not much thought
May turn our minds
Towards the indisputable grounds
Of science laws, like gravity

But then the other moments come
When all is mystery
And we see the solid wall’s been built
From nothing but mistakes
Miscalculations, strikes
Into thin air – and suddenly

The bough shakes
And the air fills with falling rain
That suddenly rises up again
And we say “mist”, but what we mean
Is mystery, the echoes from beyond
Become a clamour
And we old men put off our armour
And dance around in the scud –

All from one apple’s thud
We thought we could hear
Maybe, behind the wall
(Or not) where we, dimly, persevere.

In memory Alan,  (Biggles, or –ha ha – Tin Man, no longer appropriate….), who died on Monday

Of Slaters (and other Creepy-Crawlies)

Ben was up this last week to do some serious work he’d been planning on the old cottage, where a substantial section of roof had rotted at the point where the “original” slated section met with the “new” (dunno, hundred-year-old? maybe more) section finished with Welsh slate and had conspired with the activities of too-high farm machinery parked inside the building – breaking roof-joists etcetera – to render the place not even a lot of use as a store. Ash (Goody, as was) was his right-hand man and while the youngsters (ha ha, Ben’s not yet 50) endured some pretty intense heat both aloft and on the ground, learning the noble trade of slatery as they went along (I shouldn’t forget the rest of the team, Rachel, Robin, Kyle, maybe more – nor the not completely irrelevant fact that I ran into Micky Small yesterday who, also slating somewhere on a building not far way, reported setting up a thermometer on that roof and recording 50 deg) – anyway, the old guy (ie me) was left to sniff out the odd bit of shade on the pile of slates we’ve one way or another (but all honestly) accumulated and try and find replacements for the considerable number of broken or damaged items.

I put “original” in quote-marks because I assume, in part from the number of reed-beds hereabouts, that the original roof was thatched. There’s a tin-roofed cottage not far from us which is much prized by the Planning Department because the tin was found to cover an originally thatched roof. Thank goodness our building was no such historical treasure or we’d have had no end of trouble. Whenever it was that our old cottage was “modernised” from its thatched state – anything up to a couple of hundred years ago – I suppose the fancy new roofing material was Scotch slates – heavier, less industrialised-looking than the – later – rectangular and regular Welsh slates, being made of much softer material and tending to be tear-drop-shape, though with the bottom edge straightened off, and hung from a single nail, which would have made repairs much easier as you could swing the things back and forth if you needed to work on an adjacent slate, but against which the more crumbly nature of the material meant you were more likely to have to do repairs than with the Welsh. So I suppose you could say the introduction of Welsh slates was a similar level of “progress” to the introduction of Scotch slates to supersede reed thatching.

The material, in process of organisation (more pics below)

Which is all a preamble to the cogitations I was left to as I tried to find suitably-sized, unbroken slates while Ben and Ash sweated and worked out chopping and distancing techniques (the end result looks pretty good, I’ll try and find if someone’s thought to do a photo). My cogitations? Well, I was pretty bored, but in addition I found a barrow-load of the things as much as I could manage to push up the not great distance and very slight gradient towards the work-site (I mention here, a bit irrelevantly, that because of this gradient, in common with some of the older cottages hereabouts the cottage roof-ridge runs parallel to the gradient of the ground, ie is well off the horizontal – which means that for any building or joinery or maintenance work you do you have to throw away your measuring instruments and use your eye instead).

Anyway, cogitations…. These centred not so much on the heat and discomfort as on that sheer weight of the barrow-loads. How long, how many man-hours of digging, breaking, lifting, shaping, had gone into the production of these – well, well-designed, well-thought-out, objects? Tons and tons, months and years – the sheer amount of painstaking hard toil, all that sweat and brawn, seemed almost too much to contemplate. And this for one tiny cottage! Multiply that up to the various scales demanded by what we now call the Industrial Revolution – when of course it soon became obvious that Scottish slate was insufficient in quantity, but when luckily we found that carving our way into the Welsh or Spanish mountains more than made up the shortfall – and the thing becomes quite incalculable. I’ve often wondered about the numbers of Welsh slates countable in the grey streets of central and suburban Aberdeen, which is not large as cities go. Just the sheer amount of material pulled out of the ground, transported and worked and laid on roofs and then forgotten about, all so that people, and their various enterprises, domestic and industrial, could stay dry! And then multiply that to the scale required by the whole industrial north….

I’ve no particular gripe against regarding the world, your environment, “The Environment”, as a treasure-trove of “resources”. I guess every animal does it, and of course anyone who doesn’t make use of resources could be rightly regarded as an idiot. I suppose you could argue about “proper use of resources”, not to mention “respect for the environment” which might – well long ago I’m sure it did, to an extent – take into account the needs of your fellow-creatures and whether or not they clashed with yours. I was conscious, as I was lifting out my piles of slates, of the fact that I was disrupting the existence of the many hundreds of occupants of the slate-pile – which is not me virtue signalling, because as far as I’m aware this is something that passes through the mind of any resource-extractor, and the lower they are on the social scale the more likely they are to feel some empathy with the various six or eight-legged, crawling or sliding or otherwise sectioned creatures of our daily underworld – I think of an old film, I thought it was called “The Ants”, tho in what language I can’t remember (my online searches for it have been fruitless, or lost in the flood of offerings on the giant man-eating ants theme) which finishes with a scene of two of the protagonists, the world as they knew it substantially destroyed by whatever bunch of Supremacists were around at the time (Nazis, probably, in this case), kneeling on a road watching as a colony of ants goes diligently about repairing the damage done to their nest by some casual passer-by.

Those who have power, and those who for one reason or another have to do the bidding of those with power, belong essentially to two different species. I don’t know if they are both exactly what you could call “human” species, but if one species is closer to the ants, then one wonders what the other must consider itself closer to? The Gods? The Annunaki? The Aliens? – something “up there” anyway, the sky’s the limit for our nonsenses. I think of this latter human sub-species as the Supremacists, and though I don’t know exactly how long it’s been around to trouble the world, I think it’s fairly clear that it’s received an evolutionary boost since the coming of industrial technology.  Ants (real ones, I mean) we can watch and admire: but what do the Supremacists, those found at the core of our Power Elites, tell us about humanity? There’s a myth current among many of the young – it may have some basis in actuality, what do I know? – that the “Epstein class” indulges a passion for sacrificing and eating human babies. I call this a myth because, whatever the reality, I think these youngsters see with considerable clarity that a rejection of moral standards, a repudiation of guilt or of responsibility towards others, doesn’t place you amongst the gods, as their simple-mind aspirations presumably intended, but rather among satanists and their presiding demons.

One thing is certain; the rate at which we extract resources grows unabatedly, exponentially; the conflicts over who gets the best share of them likewise; the justifications for the need for all this extraction pour on as unabatedly – but justifications are not the same as real reasons. I guess everyone knows somewhere, deep down, that a very simple, a very basic way of life – maybe what was once honoured as, and is now despised as, “poverty” – is perfectly adequate; that that knowledge indicates Reason, as in what is reasonable. We know this (I imagine it’s why we like to keep pets, for example, or grow a few plants in front of our house – fellow-creatures whose “simplicity” we value), but we certainly make sure we train our children to forget it asap – and why? because they wouldn’t get very far in life if they didn’t, they’d be at a disadvantage, wouldn’t they, in our “competitive world”.  The myth is that society – which generally means someone telling them what to do – would collapse without their efforts to do their bit, otherwise understood, by the majority, as scraping a living.

The world is currently engulfed in a war which I imagine is, like most wars, over resources. While oil/gas may be the resource in question in the immediate short term, the real goal (food supply excepted, that’s a no-brainer) appears to be what you could simplify as “control of choke points” in connection with, on the one hand, data storage/manipulation, and I assume artificial “intelligence” and robotics, and on the other hand “money markets”, whatever that means – analysts like Michael Hudson give a pretty good run-down of the economic realities, all a bit above my head, though the choke-points issue is clear enough: Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab, Suez, Malacca, Panama, all come into focus, and are all real places with real people living nearby – not to mention the newcomer, the Atlantic sub-Arctic passage, which is a bit too close for comfort, if you live in Scotland, not nice and faraway like those in “foreign parts”. Trace the choke-points to the actual theatres of the current war and you pretty soon see that the outrages of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine are all part of one picture.  I haven’t been keeping up with the News too much of late, but I imagine western Governments and their colluders in the media (which, of course, shape the actual words – equals thoughts – that the general populace gets to use) are still managing to hoodwink said populace into thinking of the wars in Ukraine (bad Russia) and West Asia (bad Iran, or maybe not-so-bad) as separate issues. So far the global death tolls are being more or less limited to these tragic regions, but the old “when elephants clash the grass gets trampled” maxim could apply pretty much anywhere. It’s also hard to predict what suicidal urges the various religious fanatics involved may have – I suspect that old prophecy about “the abomination of desolation” is a turn-on for a few of them and some of them think of a bit of nuclear desolation, a bit of “fleeing to the mountains”, might be a pretty cool outcome, as long as they have their well-appointed bunkers – and, in the minds of the madder ones, could even encourage those Celestial Powers to come down and do some celestial magic.      

John Mearsheimer points out how rapid is the flow, the to-and-fro tide, of empires, how fluid and unsettled the relations of the global “great powers” have always been and continue to be. Those relations tend to be about the extraction of resources and who “controls” it. I suppose the control of the “money-markets” is a weird substratum of this – I certainly don’t get it, but then I’m poor. But I don’t think even Prof Mearsheimer takes fully into account the new element that creeps in with the advance of technology. Viz:

The Imperialist mindset has to be said for it that it recognises a degree of care for people – its people, as it would probably formulate it. This is because every empire, as so far known, is built upon people, their abilities and their toil. The imperialist mindset includes, and may even to a degree care for, The People, and even ethnic cleansing has tended to be more a case of imperial re-organising (sometimes with a bit of slaughtering) rather than an attempt to eradicate entire peoples. Its bastard offspring on the other hand, the Supremacist mindset, requires people to an ever-diminishing degree: I would think it’s not exaggerating to say that its ultimate aim is the destruction of humanity. I can only assume, as hitherto in history we have only really witnessed empires and their ways, that humanity is still largely unaware of this characteristic of the Supremacist mindset. We have seen it evinced naked and unabashed in the Nazis, certain Zionists and certain Christians with their weirdly suicidal tendencies, but before these phenomena not too much (unless, I suppose, you count in the Zealots and Sicarrii of Judaea’s first century CE): British attitudes to the peoples of its “colonies”, immigrant European attitudes towards the American “natives”, bear elements of it, but the destruction of peoples has tended to be to some extent balanced by an empire’s need of – or at least use for – them. With the new Supremacist mindset, basing itself increasingly – exponentially so – on technology, large swathes, if not all, of the human race can contemplate the reality of its own extinction, being no longer needed. Why would it be? Humanity is smelly, disorderly and – once it’s been (as now) trained into a rapacious attitude towards the earth’s resources – very expensive to maintain. In the language of old pop-movies, the (rather comfortable) nightmare scenario of The Matrix, which is where we are now, will with little doubt soon be superseded by the nightmare scenario of Terminator, which is far less comfortable..

I don’t think one has to be much of a prophet to make such a prediction. For centuries, all over the world, the populations of country areas (which have an irritating tendency towards independent thinking) have been systematically pushed towards ever-larger conurbations (quite handy for Eradication purposes, don’t you think?). Ray Kurzweil’s nonsense about the Singularity tends in exactly that direction, as surely as, in another sense, did JRR Tolkien’s mythical warning about power (“one ring to rule them all”….), that particular “singularity” being because all humanity disappears into one all-enveloping power “blob”, from which individuality is indistinguishable.  

Does it matter? And if it does – as some of us believe – what’s to be done about it? well, I should say, probably nothing. There’s a chance it will burn itself out in the fires of its own kindling (as in Tolkien’s myth), the only question there being whether it first achieves the destruction of humanity, which is its ultimate aim. One thing is sure; it thrives on opposition, it loves to be hated: hatred is what it lives on. We look at the heroism of the Palestinian people as they struggle for justice, of course. The heroism of other doomed peoples, from the Tatars of Crimea to the clans of the Scottish Highlands to the tribes of north America, are all remembered as part of that same cry for justice. Where are they now? Their deeds, their fight for justice, at least lives on in history as an inspiration to all who love justice, perhaps? I doubt it. I actually can’t think of anything that can be done, apart from what ordinary people have tended to do up to now: remain ever-sceptical of the Power Elites, never cease to quietly despise them, and if possible try not to take up arms for (or against) their causes.

 This last is difficult because people in general don’t understand the power of language, of words. Advertising understands this: with some well-placed words people will readily abandon ancient domestic skills, yield to the promises of progress and convenience and become increasingly more inept – “it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves”, as Bob Dylan once noted – and their ineptitude makes them all the more malleable. In the political arena, a few words can overnight change the outlook of an entire nation. I mean not the content of the words that are used to persuade them into actions that go against their standards of decency or their better judgement (like going to war), but the form of them: the sound of the words (generally very few of these, so that discourse can be avoided) their rhythm, their “catchiness” – all aspects of poetry, it has to be said. With poetry used this way the People can always be subverted, manipulated – unless they can train themselves out of the habit. Amidst all the seemingly insuperable obstacles that surround humanity, learning to see through the verbal blandishments of the Power Elites is probably the least impossible course. The only Revolution with any chance of succeeding is the revolution of whispers.

1 – the task (Scotch on the left, Welsh on the right – the pic doesn’t really show it, but marrying the two is biggest challenge)

2. looks alright – till you poke it!

3. new substructure (this actually on the other side, the north – or cool, ha ha – side)…

4, getting there…

5. just needs a ridge

Playgrounds Are Just For Games

One of the interesting things about the somewhat ridiculous incident in the English Channel (where, by all accounts, a Russian frigate attempted to spark off World War 3 by firing on a couple of our plucky pensioners out yachting, who would have fired back if they’d had any weapons) is the fact that the furore was allowed to die down so quickly. I think it was Michael Walker of Novarra Media who suggested that this (the dying down, I mean) was at the behest of the Admiralty, who apparently had a moment of rationality such as our leaders and various power-brokers do not seem to experience much these days. I’m pretty sure that in the good old days of the Cold War (which for decades has been considered past history until said power-brokers decided it was time to stir up the embers – sorry, getting mixed up in my metaphors – stirring up the embers of the Cold War? Weird imagery even for a populace well versed in trashy fantasy sci-fi…. Where was I? ah, close parenthesis –) – in the good old days of the Cold War, when I was growing up – the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties I suppose you’d say, before the Good Times came along and softened everyone’s brains – the incident would not only have been blown up out of all proportion but more to the point kept going for several weeks, why? because people at large had longer and less distractible memories in those days and the good power-brokers of our nation were making sure we were being kept in a state of constant war-preparedness.

Whether the British populace was at that time really susceptible to being talked into going into another war is probably dubious. The armed forces, British and American, were still a force to be reckoned with, and I’m pretty sure the threat from Russia of a nuclear retaliation was actually known to be a lot less than our good media made it out to be – and of course the Russians were acting out their part as only Russians can, growling at all the appropriate moments and generally sounding very scary. There was a strong pressure from the power-brokers to go to war with Russia there and then because the USSR was deemed to be so weakened from its struggle with Germany that a little push would send it into a state of collapse. Sound familiar? Well, you might ask what prompted Napoleon to do something as crazy as invade Russia – it’s probably just part of the Western mindset, a bit like Mount Everest back in the ‘Fifties, which “had to be” conquered, or the Moon a bit later which “had to be” landed on – immerse yourself in the atmosphere of fear and frenzy and sweat and fart in an old-fashioned all-boys playground and you might understand why such things have to be – Russia had to be destroyed, or at least dismembered, “because it was there”.

Now I won’t disguise that I believe the best way of weakening Russia is in all likelihood to establish decent diplomatic and then trade relations with her/him (depending on how your regard the sex of bears). Not that I’m interested in weakening Russia as such, but I am interested in this whole concept of strong or weak nations, and how you measure strength and weakness. We still – almost universally, possibly, mothers possibly excepted – think that a young guy who can “handle himself” is a bit admirable. That doesn’t mean he’s violent, or even prone to violence, it just means that if it came to the bit, he’d be able to deliver a sucker-punch (or come back and keep standing when he’d been given one). Where would he have learned to do this? I suppose you’d have to search about the various bodies littered around the boys’ playground. Of course a really smart young guy will probably be able to earn one of those sucker-punch reputations without ever having to land a blow, but I suppose even the reputation-makers require something solid to build on. At any rate we’re all well versed in what “being a man” involves.

I’m not quite sure when the change came in Europe-Russia relations. Going back to the “Cold War”, I guess that, while it was a time when the military top brass in Britain and America and the various associated power-mongers would have liked to go to war to “finish Russia off”, it happened to be a time throughout Europe when governments, a bit shaken by the realities of modern warfare, and cognisant of the fact that the Working Classes had behaved themselves really rather well and helped deliver us from the Nazi Threat, had got busy introducing many measures which were – er, a bit socialist really, and the Working Classes might not actually have taken too kindly to going to war with a nation that championed the socialist ideology – especially when they were just starting to get some nice pats on the head for all their help, in the form of Welfare States galore and all kinds of other social Benefits. It was possibly time for a recess, but the true reality remained: because Russia was still “there”, ie. still required to be destroyed. And the other side of the coin shouldn’t be forgotten: Russia’s own sense of its “there-ness” meant that he/she was in constant anxiety of getting destroyed – was paranoid, in other words, because of course no-one really wanted the destruction of Russia (oh yes we did! – hush, be quiet down there).

I don’t know if the history of Western Europe shows us to be more violence-prone than any other culture, but the truth is that we are demonstrably very violent, and see violence and power and authoritarianism as basically the only way to “get along”. We have exercised this penchant for violence on most of our fellow-creatures, and certainly on those of our fellow-humans who, by some sleight of logic, we have deemed less able to “handle themselves” than we are (take carpet bombing of cities with inadequate air-defences for example – which puts me in mind of that old Specsavers ad – see? you should have invested in a PATRIOT system…..) The rising of the Dragon of science-based technology some five centuries back (I call it a dragon because I certainly couldn’t call it, say, a faithful Hound) has seen us pretty quickly talked into believing we are better able to “handle ourselves” than any other culture on earth – and the rest is history.

Things are changing of course, as they were bound to. The Dragon holds more of the world’s peoples in its grip and I assume will continue to lead them by the nose, but the possibility of a levelling out of “power” amongst the peoples of the world could eventually mean a sign of hope for some time in the not-too-close future. The best thing for us in the “West” would be to recognise what the new ascendant “power” means – I mean the “crescent” (it’s not a real crescent  but is no less crescent-shaped than the old Fertile Crescent, though a bit bigger) of China, Russia, Iran. We can fight tooth and nail to “stop” it, and the various heirs of the Nazis and their supremacist brethren have realised that, no longer having the open, naked military might to impose our will by sheer terror, our only way forward is through what used to be called Terror-ism – that is, the attempt to control events by spreading chaos everywhere in the hope that most of the chaos elsewhere will leave us in relative peace, apart from the poorer sections of our communities, who are always a nuisance and not always controllable by naked force alone (try pandemics maybe? – particularly slow-creeping ones), and might on occasion have to be paid off if they can’t be otherwise bamboozled.

If the Naval Brass kind of squashed the story of the brink-of-WW3 incident in the English Channel incident I imagine they had a good reason for it. Wisdom (ie why would we want to go to war with Russia?)? Maybe. Self-interest (ie we’ve got better ways of persuading the government to increase military spending than military brinkmanship – and, maybe, the main purpose of increased military spending is to ensure that the junior officers, towards whom the Top Brass still have a quaintly paternalistic attitude, can be assured that their career and pension prospects are honoured)? Well, maybe again. Maybe the priority is buying time, while we grow lots of scary new teeth in the form of various hi-tech tubes with explosives on top, and anyway we’ve still got a hold on the Ukrainian people and can get them to go on fighting till there’s none of them left, and then we can move on to the people of Georgia and Armenia and wherever else we can stir up trouble. These mature-sounding plans may be heading in a completely different direction, of course, you never know. I have a fantasy of some smart and cool-thinking Top Brass guys actually trying to push the power-brokers into ever-greater belligerence, in the full expectation that Russian patience will snap and the British and German weapons facilities that are currently contributing to the attacks on Russian soil will be directly targeted – as, in case you missed it on the news, is currently under consideration in Moscow. The thinking could bifurcate from there: either there would be the “Israeli” solution, ie we could drag America into a nose-to-nose war with Russia – whether nuclear or not would depend on the size of Russia’s reaction to the current attacks, and I imagine the Russian leaders are currently trying to work out exactly what size of retaliation against western facilities would be most appropriate, as in most effective in ending the whole nonsense. Or else (my favourite fantasy, because I love the thought of there being some – retired, or near-retired – old-school fuddyduddy Admiral who publicly points out that the butts of the upcoming lot aren’t even worth kicking) the whole nonsense would fizzle out and some leader of some authority come along  (not your standard degenerate, not in thrall to the Secret Services Triad and, I fear, not Andy Burnham, nor the other one with the bulgy eyes) and do a Willi Brandt (or even a Mikhail Gorbachev?), as in reach out and initiate diplomatic and trade “feelers”, perhaps even sensible fiscal and economic policies, vis-a-vis Russia.

– And Nicola Sturgeon is teaming up with Michael Gove to play out some “war games” against Russia? Well, we really need that. Someone’s got something on someone, I would guess…. Unless…. unless the war game looks at real scenarios, I guess that’s faintly possible – though, with the BBC in charge….. well, I don’t want to be a wet blanket

Hard – Then Gone a Bit Soft….

I assume that one of the swarm (cloud?) of robotic Watchers must have “noticed” my mention of Denis Noble in my recent post as a representative of “hard” Science (Biology, in his case), because there in my Youtube list of offered Entertainments was a talk by someone calling himself Professor Dave entitled “Denis Noble is a Clown”, with a thumbnail of the old fellow with a red plastic nose superimposed, presumably in case anyone didn’t know what a clown is.

I must say Dave looks far too young to be a professor, but then that’s probably just my old-fashioned bias, and everyone looks a bit too young to me these days to be whatever it is they are, including the Police. Of course maybe all these guys, from professors to policemen, get trained along the same lines as the kids you hear about in Ukraine who get hauled off the streets, given a gun, kicked around in boot camp for a week and then sent to the front line – more than a week’s training being a waste of resources as a week is about the length of time they’re expected to survive. But of course that may be a calumny, and certainly the amount of factual knowledge our Dave displayed was enough to entirely bamboozle me (not to mention the speed of his delivery) – but then, again, he appeared to be claiming at one stage that all this biological bamboozlement was what kids learn in sixth grade (which I think means when they’re ten or eleven) so maybe that puts things in perspective; however he also proved his point with many explanations of modern developments in Biology, Genetics and Evolution, some of it centring around the once-vexed question of the Darwinian versus Lamarckian evolutionary models. I think it’s only fair to point out in passing that Darwinism, or a version of it, was warmly espoused by the Nazis, whereas Lamarckism was, for a time at least, favoured by the Communists. I don’t think this says anything about the factuality of either line of thought, but I think it does say something about the History of Ideas, about how ideas get formed in the first place. …Which may be relevant to what follows, or may not.

Professor Dave has, apparently, 4-odd “M” followers, which I think means four million, which certainly appears to be a lot more than old Noble the Clown commands. I notice this feeling of majority, of being a mainstream, seems to be a trend among the True Scientists, especially those who like to style themselves Debunkers – what they’re debunking being of course old fogeys, people who haven’t kept up with The Science, people who complain about the attitudes of “mainstream” science, politics, media or whatever, and of course who lean towards conspiracy theories.

Just as an aside re the Mainstream, I don’t really keep up with much of the Mainstream Media reporting, but I have a distinct impression that the European – or certainly the British – Mainstream media isn’t saying an awful lot about a current talking-point that is shifting into the Mainstream in Russia, both in government circles and amongst the general population: this is the question of if, or indeed when, a nuclear attack on the West may be necessary to dissuade our Western leaders from their current policy regarding repeated drone attacks on Russian infrastructure and installations. Just a thought – and irrelevant as far as Professor Dave goes, except maybe insofar as the Mainstream has become a potent force in what we regard as democracy – or indeed of thinking of any kind. The clash of these two mainstream views, Western and Russian, will I think not be resolved by “democratic” means (as in, which view has the bigger following) but by hard facts, and let’s just hope the facts won’t be too hard and that western leaders can get past their default ooh, that was such an unprovoked attack! position. Nuff said. Anyway, Prof D’s 4 million I guess makes him a representative of a Mainstream – especially when he exclaims about one of Prof Clown’s nonsensical statements “nobody believes that any more!” a view which I guess will pertain at least until another, maybe bigger, Mainstream comes along and whacks him, because in this sphere I doubt whether Hard Facts ever actually will – though that will probably depend on what manner of cool practical things you can do with your theoretical knowledge..

The scientifically right-thinking, or mainstream – or whatever you like to call them – bloggers, or post-ers, as in the debunkers, do seem to have one thing in common: they tend to be young (though I do remember one lady with an annoying lapdog who used to spend a lot of time tearing John Campbell to shreds over remarks he’d made about Covid, and who wasn’t exactly what you’d call a spring chicken – as in not the way Prof D looks). The young debunkers tend, like Prof D, to be quite amusing (sometimes almost, but not quite, to the level of a real comedian, who as a breed tend to be of a more sophisticated mind-set) but are invariably brash, disrespectful and indeed generally insulting to whoever their particular target is. This may be because they are genuinely angry at the unscientific nonsense that they feel bound to contradict, put down, ridicule, or whatever is involved in the art of Debunking. I think when one particular Grand Old Man of science, Richard Dawkins, took to debunking in his later years, it was out of genuine anger at the Creationist movement in America – but I have to say it wasn’t a pretty sight, and probably best left to the youngsters to play the fool in this respect. I always found The Selfish Gene itself pretty convincing (apart from the title, which was stupid, but I think the author admitted that), but then the convincingness may have been because he claimed – and the claim has been well supported – that he understood “the Math”, whereas I definitely didn’t and so bowed to his superior skill. I forgive our Richard a lot however because he has been known to say that he loves taking part in carol-singing at Christmas: Christmas carols always make me cry, so my sympathy is naturally excited, but I have yet to try and analyse the whole weeping phenomenon: I hope Richard never tries to, as the result would almost certainly be disappointingly facile. But I stray again – as old fogeys tend to do.

Dave’s efforts at comedy aren’t too funny, though they might appeal to – for all I know the audience they were intended for – fourteen-year-olds. I prefer a bit more style in comedy, and I also don’t find angry comedians very attractive:  I seem to remember Ben Elton managing to hold a balance, back in Thatcher’s days, whereas that Australian guy (Tim something, I think), denouncing the hippy girl for her New-Age nonsense, was embarrassingly unfunny – presumably he was angry on account of his dearly-held Materialism being impugned. And maybe, who knows, Prof D is a bit pissed off because of the adoring girls, which I come to now….

 I first came across Denis Noble in a Youtube interview led by a young woman of clearly scientific capacities (ie I couldn’t understand a word she said, but the old Prof seemed to.). But what interested me was the something that tugged at my memory on watching the interaction of this pair: the withered old man being treated with – not even respect, more adoration – by this strikingly beautiful young woman. It came to me eventually that there was a book written by my friend Paul, which I must have somewhere about here in the extensive lumber-room that is Coldhome and whose title I forget (no disrespect to Paul there – I notice even as I look back on what I’ve written here, that there are gaps everywhere in the text, sometimes highlighted with **???! decorations, where I’ve forgotten the word that was the whole point of the sentence I had been writing and will have to return to before I publish this post. Paul’s book explored various – I suppose you could call them recurring – instances in which there appears a pair of strangers (actually historical characters out of philosophy or the history of thought), one of whom is a wise old man and the other a beautiful – and sometimes somewhat disreputable – young woman. I can’t give any more details, though I shall try and winkle out the text at some stage from whatever pile of dust and debris it’s hiding in: suffice it to say that this pair appeared as something archetypal – and that, in a word, was the thing that most struck me about this interaction between Noble and his interviewer. I don’t imagine that Professor Dave has any idea what’s meant by an archetype, but no matter, I’m not writing this for him.

What I’m interested in is in fact not the matter, the content, the truth, of what either Prof D or Prof Clown are saying, but more their manner (or lack of manners, in Prof D’s case), because it strikes me very forcibly that there is a major, and quite consistent, phenomenon here: it may even represent the “meaning” of the archetypal pair, in as far as archetypes have meaning. I found myself saying the other day to one of my daughters “it’s the job of the young to know stuff, and the job of the old to be witless wanderers” – so my mind must have already been straying along these lines before I was paying any attention to either of the Profs. Professor Dave bluntly states that Noble is one of a line of scientists who make their mark when more or less young and then in their old age when they’re resting on their laurels and still considering themselves Real Scientists, go on to adopt cranky or crackpot ideas and generally suspect conspiracies around every corner when they’re not taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community (who I must say on the whole give more and more the impression of a rabble that could do well to get a training in decent etiquette – maybe their adherence to Scientific Truth makes them feel above any of that kind of stuff). He cites the “water-memory man” Luc Montagnier as another example of what he reckons Noble to be, Montagnier being a gone-cracked Nobel laureate..

I was waiting, some years back, for a bus at the Dundee bus Station. It was very crowded, all the benches had been taken and even the low steps bordering the platform were occupied. I was one of the ones left standing, but suddenly a young fellow – a student I guessed, probably Thai – leapt to his feet and offered me his place on the low step. I managed to restrain my (typical, probably) first reaction of “what, do I look that decrepit?” and his English wasn’t up to my explanation of how, though I might well get down to the step, I wasn’t sure if I’d manage to get up again (ha, I’m a lot fitter now, though I will say that my hair started to go grey in my late teens so I’ve played the age card for many a year); anyway he left me standing with a slightly worried expression on his face, and I couldn’t but wonder how many of my own young compatriots would have even thought about making such an impractical, but touching, offer. It struck me quite forcibly that the boy was probably from a culture that had a different attitude to the elderly and – coming up to the present instance, I wondered if in academia you would get many far Eastern academics laying into an old, even dottled, colleague in such a disrespectful way.

So what is this thing about respect for the aged? Professor Dave clearly thought – may even have suggested it – that Prof N had become so dottled, so adherent to ideas that were outmoded – or even, by his estimation, disproved – that the old idiot needed to be swept out of the way. I don’t know if he’d have been wrong, but I do know that we look on the mental disintegration that starts (actually) when you’re somewhere past thirty and begin to run on a reasonably sound autopilot for a bit as, if not just a shame, then practically a sin. I call my old pal Calvin “good boy” when he manages to stagger out to piss on the grass instead of on the rug, and it does seem to be a point of honour for him, caught up in the human hierarchy as he is; I’m not sure that we don’t think the same way with the old of our own species: there’s more honour in being able to do a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle than in rambling over some old memory that you’ve confused with some other more recent one. We just don’t have too much time for the articulations of the disintegrating mind.

But I actually I wonder if it really comes back to the business I mentioned in my last post about moral consciousness. Take the business of the frog I touched on there. You assume, as a proper (materialist) scientist, that the frog won’t have any idea why another living frog, or one of its limbs, has been sewn on (successfully sewn on, yes!) to its body, and even if it did wonder and you tried to explain to it that the whole thing was part of a very important experiment the benefits of which would far outweigh any inconvenience to it, an individual frog, you would probably finish up frustrated and fall back on look, I’m doing it to you because I can. This doesn’t come into the same category of depravity as making it part of your Sunday afternoon picnic entertainment to select some random nigger-boy for the sake of watching him getting lynched, but I would argue it’s on the same spectrum of indifference towards our fellow-creatures. I would suggest that such actions, which both, in their different ways, demonstrate defective moral consciousness, would tend to be something more likely to be observed among younger humans: that’s to say, among those who believe that they exist in the fullness of their own prowess, that they understand, or press on towards understanding, how the world Truly Is (sometimes harsh and brutal, but they’re up to that too) and, in the case of young academics, are exulting in the glory of their brilliant minds, which I’m sure Professor Dave’s is and his students’ are too. Sometime, as the years go by, that glory seems to fade a bit, the realisations are a bit more slow in coming, you may feel a strange admiration for, or resentment of, younger colleagues, and you realise, if you’ve been paying attention in your biology class, that your brain is starting to deteriorate. You are getting old, and the outward mark of this, which you sometimes try to cover up, are the white hairs that appear on your head. And more importantly perhaps even than the slowing-up of your once mercurial mind, you find that your mind becomes assailed – sometimes you resist this too – by greater feelings of gentleness in your outlooks and attitudes to others. You might even find the idea of sewing living frog-bits together a little repellent, however great the scientific advisability of such procedures, and you might even find yourself speaking in a respectful or even affectionate way of colleagues with whom you fundamentally or even violently disagree. These are, indeed, early signs of the Death Process, whereby you take leave of life, looking back on it with fondness and even a sense of wonder that you saw such importance in things which now seem a little irrelevant. This change of stance goes with the change to white hair to the extent that in times past this particular hirsute state was termed white-ness, or in older form wis-dom.

It could well be that a typical mark of “wisdom” is the development, as Professor Dave suggests, of “cranky” ideas. A culture that sees no value in wisdom will undoubtedly try to purge it as unnecessary, irrelevant and potentially harmful. After all, isn’t the progress of Science of ultimate importance? Rather like the stance of military readiness, when I think about it, which very much begins as the province of the young. If you’re some gone-gentle old dodderer how are you going to be any use in your country’s defence? This has become quite an issue in the various crises currently swirling about us. The voices of reason – as in, the advocates of peace – seem again and again to come from the retired military personnel, those who have seen action, have seen war, are far from pacifist in their outlook, yet seem to have a view of the preciousness of human life that has apparently passed the younger politicians by and is not expected of the still-serving military. People like Danny Davies, Douglas MacGregor, Scott Ritter, Lawrence Wilkerson are in many respects not un-hawkish, though they abhor what they see as bad tactical judgement, but – ha ha you can’t but notice it – you’re sounding a bit soft, old guys! Should we sweep them aside or should we attend to their wisdom?

I personally feel the growing gentleness is the default position; but I think the steps taken by many of the aging to control it may result in something that looks very different. Resentment of the young, abrogation of the gentle, a general stop put on the mind’s natural disintegration by means of a sort of forced fossilisation. Some favourite lines from T S Eliot:

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

You get some pretty nasty old types in academia, sitting in high places, clinging on to their reputation or whatever they call it and exercising whatever power they still have in keeping the science “hard”, keeping everything as it should be. Maybe there’s some sort of intellectual Viagra that enables them to do this, though I imagine comparable forces also apply to the military brass. I can’t remember the name of that military goon – navy, I think, might have been air force, it certainly wasn’t land army – who recently was urging British parents to be prepared to “sacrifice” their children (ie send them off to war with Russia, I assume); and I couldn’t but think, yes, this is one angry guy – he’s not even that old yet, but he feels the process starting, and what he actually wants is to see mangled bodies of youngsters scattered about a battlefield, especially the ones with pink or blue hair…. It was

It looks to me as though Professor Noble gets quite a kick – perhaps his main one – out of having a devoted following of young – well, he thinks they’re scientists, I guess he could be wrong, and I imagine a good few of them are quite pretty. That could be a piece of small, and harmless, vanity – though I dare say Prof Dave would regard it as a dangerous case of leading the young astray (like Socrates was condemned to death for) – or it could be that something is going on which “hard” scientists, with their heads full of numbers, could never really grasp. Personally, I think it’s right and proper that even a “failed” system such as Lamarckism should be remembered by young people – why? because they are young, because they represent the future, or one possible future, some of them may even (though unlikely) get funding for research; but more than anything else they represent the unpredictable; and perhaps, just for them, the gentleness and “crankiness” of their aged mentor may be of more value than all the scientific correctness of the bellowing Daves.

I keep thinking of Hoelderlin’s little poem “Sokrates und Alkibiades”, whose second half I’ll do a rough translation of (I don’t currently feel I have the mental capacity to do a proper metrical version). The first verse asks Socrates – another old soldier, when I think – why he spends so much time hanging around with handsome young Alcibiades (yes, I hear you young hecklers – grow up, will you); Socrates replies:

He who has thought the deepest loves what is most alive
he understands high Youth who has seen much of the world
and the Wise, often,
are inclined to Beauty in the end.

Oops – and almost forgot another old fave from TSE:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise….

In my end is my beginning