We moved house recently and all sorts of forgotten, random objects keep turning up in unexpected places. For example, this 1935 commemorative coin from God knows where, featuring a stylised St George slaying a very streamlined, wingless dragon. You hear a lot about Victorian gothic, but not so much about deco gothic* which, it seems, was also a thing once.
This sort of defeatist talk needs to stop now. We live in a dangerous world, where Britain's reputation abroad lies in the hands of a foreign secretary with a lifetime's experience of personally insulting almost every nation and ethnic group on the planet to which he doesn't belong and who seems intent on alienating those few remaining parts of the globe which still hold this nation in any kind of regard, with his trademark combination of instinctive bigotry and buffoonish incompetence.
So of course we need the to retain the capacity to incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings and wipe whole cities from the map - the threat of brute force and intimidation are now the only things we've got left that might conceivably make foreigners carry on respecting us.
Besides, it was only a test. For crying out loud, there was no warhead on the damn thing. And even if there had been, it wouldn't have been a problem. Think about it. Who do we have those things pointed at? I know we're not supposed to say and nobody's supposed to know, but we all really know that it's Russia. Now, back in the days of the Cold War when the Russkies were our enemy and Uncle Sam was on our side, flattening the odd American city would have been a tad embarrassing. But these days, what with the Trump-Putin axis, it's a lot simpler. Fire your missile east and you hit the bad guys. Fire west and you hit the bad guys' closest ally, which is practically the same thing.
Of course, the usual prophets of doom and moaners will start carping that recklessly launching a nuclear strike against a massively better-armed adversary would inevitably invite a retaliatory counter-strike that would turn these islands into a smoking radioactive wasteland. These people have frankly lost touch with political reality. To hear them talk, you'd think it was government's job to try and make life better for the people who live in Britain. These dinosaurs clearly haven't noticed that we gave up on that sort of old-fashioned socialist rubbish in the 1970s.
In the Twenty First Century we have a far more mature and sophisticated way of doing things. Forget trying to improve things for the ungrateful proles and concentrate on distracting them by blaming everything on foreigners, then picking unnecessary fights with them, preferably from a position of overwhelming weakness and with the minimum of forethought and preparation. Our position on nuclear confrontation should echo the wise words of our warrior queen, the Boadicea of Brexit herself, when she almost said:
I’m interested in all these terms that have been identified – hard nuclear apocalypse, soft nuclear apocalypse, black nuclear apocalypse, white nuclear apocalypse, grey nuclear apocalypse – and actually what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue nuclear apocalypse.
That is the right apocalypse for the United Kingdom, what is going to be the right relationship for what remains of the UK with the charred ruins of Earth once we’ve left. That’s what we’re about, that’s what we’ll be working on.
Johannes Gutenberg is best known for having an amazingly clever idea that changed Europe and the world for ever but, as his Wikipedia entry notes, his experimental printing press wasn't his first attempt at a tech startup:
I don't know what to make of the fact that the guy responsible* for one of the modern world's most fundamental, ubiquitous, era-defining pieces of technology was also taking a punt on an idea as bonkers as the recent, infamous £160 Internet-connected hairbrush. On the whole, I find it kind of comforting to think that people who can have brilliant ideas can also come up with something which, with the benefit of hindsight, looks totally insane.
Hindsight, of course, is the key - everybody now knows that printing with movable type worked out really well (even if it never made Gutenberg rich), whereas most people with enough sense to avoid homoeopaths, televangelists and crystal healers would now run a mile from somebody trying to flog them a holiness-infused mirror, allegedly activated by having once been in the vicinity of an splinter that reputedly came from the True Cross, or a finger bone purported to have belonged to St Thomas. But, at the time, printing was new and untried and, for people with a devout upbringing (which would have included almost everybody), the efficacy of relics was probably seen as being as commonsense and uncontroversial as the idea that aspirin works is to us.
People in the past weren't stupid - they just worked with a different level of knowledge and a different set of assumptions. Sure, they had ideas that now look daft, but, as the smart hairbrush reminds us, technically competent people can still do sophisticated versions of daft to this day.
The astronomer and mathematician,Johannes Kepler, who was born just over a century after Gutenberg died, took the new and controversial Copernican notion of a solar system with the sun at the centre and worked out how the planets moved (in elliptical orbits) in order to produce the motions that astronomers actually observed.
Like Gutenberg, though, he didn't just have a brilliant idea or insight from nowhere. Before coming up with his laws of planetary motion, based on the mathematics of elliptical orbits, Kepler was looking for a simple underlying principle which might explain why the planets orbited where they did. If our world was just another planet, as Copernicus had suggested, there were (as far as anybody knew then), six planets in all. There were other things in nature that were strictly limited in number, thought Kepler - for example the five Platonic (regular) solids:
The Platonic solids, on a tourist T-shirt I bought in Skiathos (an island with no particular connection to Plato, AFAIK, but it looks good and, hey, it's Greek).
Six planets with five intervals between the spheres of adjoining planets. Kepler's first attempt at explaining the orbits of the planets involved assuming that the spheres to which the planets were presumably fixed were separated by volumes corresponding to those taken up by each of the Platonic solids.To modern eyes, his model looks contrived and artificial:
But, up to a point, it seemed to work, sort of:
Interval between planetary orbits
Platonic solid
Ratio in Kepler's model
Actual ratio
Saturn to Jupiter
cube
1.73
1.73
Jupiter to Mars
tetrahedron
3.00
3.42
Mars to Earth
dodecahedron
1.26
1.52
Earth to Venus
icosahedron
1.26
1.38
Venus to Mercury
octahedron
1.73
1.87
Although Kepler realised that his figures were close, but no cigar, he never abandoned the idea that the regular solids played some role in ordering the orbits of the planets. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see that one simple, underlying, principle (6 planets ordered by intervals corresponding to the 5 Platonic solids) was an illusion, whilst another (planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus) matches reality. Not only do the elliptical orbits agree exactly with observation (well, almost exactly - there were still anomalies which weren't explained until Einstein came along), but the approximate correspondence between planetary distances and a system of nested Platonic solids definitively fell apart after 1781, when William Herschel discovered Uranus and proved that the number of planets which could exist, unlike the number of regular solids, wasn't limited by some fundamental law.
Because we've all been taught at school about ideas and innovations that changed the world, versus those outmoded ideas that nobody believes in any more, we tend to imagine that we're smart enough to recognise the good stuff and discard stupid ideas, but I'm not so sure.
Without hindsight, we could just as easily end up looking like Jeremy Paxman in that famous 1999 interview with Bowie, where the self-appointed voice of common sense pours cold water on the pop star's airy-fairy notion that this over-hyped Internet nonsense is somehow going to be important, rather than being just another of those silly fads that doesn't impress an experienced member of the commentariat who's seen it all before:
Although, having said all that, I'm still going to stick with my original assessment of the smart hairbrush as a self-evidently stupid idea. History will be the judge of that.
*OK, the Chinese invented printing some 13 centuries before Gutenberg and beat him to movable type by 400 years and some Dutch people will tell you that Laurens Janszoon Coster beat him to it in Europe, but it was still a big deal, for all the qualifications and squabbles over precedence.
But Brexit also takes control away from the executive. If an administration finds that one of its policies isn't working, it can usually think again - tweak the policy, quietly kick it into the long grass, even do a U-turn.
But with Brexit, the government loses that control. Once Article 50 is triggered, it's committed. The course of action and the timetable have been set elsewhere. The executive isn't in charge any more. It just has to run alongside, desperately trying to keep up. When it all goes pear-shaped, there's no opportunity to think again, to change course, to do something less damaging. All the government can do is brace itself against the cab of the runaway train and hope that the crash won't be too bad.
Britain - whether by "Britain" you mean the British electorate, or the British government - hasn't "taken back control." It's lost it - big time.
Maybe it's not as obvious as I'd thought but, to me, the logic is quite straightforward:
failing a Trumpist one-party coup, Americans are stuck with Trump for four years max, before getting their chance to fire the bum
if Mrs May isn't stopped from going through with Brexit, it's just going to stick around, like an unflushable turd. However bad it gets, we Brits are stuck with it for ever.*
Some poor choices are hard to reverse...
*OK, nothing's "for ever", but a generation-long omnishambles with no bearable alternative is quite bad enough.
Here's a new maxim for the bone idle. No matter how obscure the question, somebody on the Internet has already researched it first, so you don't have to.
the existence of war lassos would be far more widely known, to the point of being general knowledge, and
the "wings" themselves wouldn't have been unique to the winged hussars, because other cavalry would have had to use similar countermeasures to defeat a common lasso threat.
Well, it turns out that somebody else took a look at the extraordinary winged hussars and actually spent some time looking up references to the use of lassos on the battlefield. Namely, Lars-Peter Otzen, who blogged until recently* as "Neo Survivalist" (but who doesn't actually seem to be any kind of far-right gun nut - in fact, just an interesting guy - despite the stereotypical survivalist/prepper profile).
Otzen cites several instances of people using lassos as weapons of war. I hadn't read most of his sources, except for a passage in Herodotus' Histories, in which I'd overlooked/forgotten about:
I'm not particularly surprised or ashamed that I forgot, or skimmed over that bit - it comes at a point in Book 7 when Herodotus is exhaustively cataloguing the contingents forming the multi-national task force Xerxes deployed against the Greeks who opposed him and it's easy to forget some specific details in that huge list of allies (Parthians and Caspians and Lydians and Thracians and Paphlagonians and Cappadocians and Asiatic Dorians and so on and so on) and which of them brought cavalry, or camels, or triremes, or whatever, to the party. Most readers probably find their attention wandering at this point, just as it tends to do in the begetting and begatting bits of the Bible.
Apart from Herodotus, Otzen dug up references to lassos as weapons in the works of the Greek geographer Pausanias, in the Persian epic poem The Book of Kings by Ferdowsi, and, in pictorial form, in a 15th Century Ottoman miniature painting of the Battle of Kosovo.
Quite interesting, although that's still quite a sparse list of examples to be dredged up from the extensive history of humans and the ingenious ways they've devised to kill one another over the millennia. Otzen concludes that, even if a few people over the years did adopt the lasso as a weapon, that doesn't explain those wings, which he reckons would have been a feature, not a bug, for enemy lassoers:**
I could do a bit more research of my own but, frankly, I'm not that bothered, so I'm grateful to Mr Otzen for satisfying my microdose of idle curiosity.
It's like a badly-written version of something an exasperated parent might say to a child ("If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times...") ... except that most real parents quickly learn not talk like that, because it's just asking to get diverted into that inevitable, diversionary argument with a literal-minded child about the exact number of times he or she has been told about whatever it was.
And this bad impersonation of what an adult authority figure sounds like comes from somebody who's lying like a five year old with no grasp of plausibility. Because there is no doubt at all that he did what she said he did. The video is out there, and if you want a bit of easy muti-tasking you can just watch him doing it while you read him saying he never did it:
"Donny, nobody else has been in the kitchen and the cookie jar was full when I left. Now the jar is empty and there are crumbs all over the floor."
"But, Mom, I keep telling you, I never did it!"
If this was just about Trump being a horrible, immature, dishonest person, this wouldn't be much of a story. What depresses me is the unspoken ideology which has normalised this sort of thing. Specifically, the public relations mindset:
“I’m a brand,” she said, every minute or so. “I’m always thinking of
ways to promote my brand.” It was all brand, brand, brand, brand,
brand...
...“Get your message and repeat it OVER AND OVER. Just
keep saying your message OVER AND OVER in the same way. Just tweet it
and put it out on Facebook OVER AND OVER.”
Our modern mantra. It starts with trying to promote your product* by ditching tedious facts and argument in favour of incessant repetition. It ends with a guy who's days away from becoming the most powerful human on the planet behaving like a child who's been caught red-handed stealing from the cookie jar, but who sincerely believes that if he denies it loudly and often enough, he'll get away with it, as if mommy's inconvenient knowledge can simply be wished away.
Shame on liars like Trump for trying it on, but more shame on the alleged adults who keep giving in to the pester power of incessant repetition, even when it obviously contradicts the evidence of their own eyes and ears.
*If you're busy self-branding (heaven help you), then you are the product.
Stick some bacon round your sausages and you've got pigs in blankets. If you've got more cash to splash, you can stick your bacon round some oysters and amuse your bouche with angels on horseback. If you're more diabolically inclined, you can substitute prunes for oysters and snack on devils on horseback.
Stick a pair of angel wings from a child's Nativity play onto the back of a strapping great calvalryman, however, and you get something like this:
This isn't artistic license, or a picture of horsemen dressed up for some sort of parade or pageant. Apparently, there were real people who actually charged into battle kitted out like this. Specifically, the "winged hussars", who formed the elite cavalry force of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the 16th and 18th centuries. This is what Wikipedia has to say about those wings:
The Hussars were famous for their huge "wings", a wooden frame carrying eagle, ostrich, swan or goose feathers. In the 16th century, characteristic painted wings or winged claws began to appear on cavalry shields. The most common theory is that the hussars wore the wings because they made a loud, clattering noise which made it seem like the cavalry was much larger than in reality and frightened the enemy's horses. Other possibilities included the wings being made to defend the backs of the men against swords and lassos, or that they were worn to make their own horses deaf to the wooden noise-makers used by the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars.
I'm not convinced by the theory that the wings were some kind of anti-lasso countermeasure - I'm no expert on the history of warfare, but I do know that cavalry's been around for a very long time and I've never heard about any battle where the attacking cavalry were thwarted by lassos, or of any other example of cavalry equipment being developed to defeat a specific lasso threat. If this had happened, you'd think that the lassoers would be as well-known as, say, the Agincourt archers.
As for swords, well, those were around on the battlefield for a long time, too - if they were a serious threat to cavalry, and if big sticky-out wings neutralised that threat, why didn't any other cavalry sport protective wings (at least in the pre-firearms period)?
The idea that these were a form of psychological warfare, intended to intimidate and impress, sounds more plausible to me - it would also fit in very neatly with warrior elites' typical love of extravagant display and generally showing off. The idea of getting the horses used to, or drowning out, alarming noises on the battlefield also sounds as if it might work.
Bizarre though they look to modern eyes, the winged hussars seem to have been effective in their day, most notably when they scattered the Swedish forces at the Battle of Kircholm in 1605.
These days they look as bonkers as Batman going off to fight crime in a mask, tights and a big black cape. At least to most people - if you're a follower of the aptly-named Mad Monarchist site, you probably think the world's gone to hell in a handcart now that a chap can no longer charge about on his horse, wearing dirty great angel wings and administer a jolly good thrashing to any commoner disrespectful enough to find it funny.
Scott Alexander, on Batman as a triumph of personal branding over effectiveness, here:
There’s an old joke about Batman. Suppose you’re a hypercompetent billionaire in a decaying city, and you want to do something about the crime problem. What’s your best option? Maybe you could to donate money to law-enforcement, or after-school programs for at-risk teens, or urban renewal. Or you could urge your company full of engineering geniuses to invent new police tactics and better security systems. Or you could use your influence as a beloved celebrity to petition the government to pass laws which improve efficiency of the justice system.
Bruce Wayne decided to dress up in a bat costume and personally punch criminals. And we love him for it.
So true, although I'm guessing that a comic strip about a socially-responsble philanthropist who doesn't wear moody fancy dress, drive a fast car and biff crims probably wouldn't have fulfilled nearly enough adolescent male fantasies to launch the franchise in the first place.
From 2016's seemingly inexhaustible back catalogue of weirdness, here's one local news story that I inexplicably missed at the time:
A young woman has told how she had food shoved into her mouth by a mystery ‘feeder’ on the train home to Milton Keynes.
The stranger grabbed Victoria Adam’s scarf and started pushing his takeaway meal into her mouth.
The strange passenger then upset other people on the London Midlands train from Euston, causing a brawl to break out.
Parliamentary research assistant Victoria, 22, said the man sat down next to her after boarding the train just before 6pm on Saturday.
“I decided to put my headphones on as he was getting a bit annoying.
“He was getting annoyed that I didn’t want to interact so I decided to pretend to go to sleep.
“A few minutes later he started shoving food in my mouth and then began pulling at my scarf.”
Passengers huddled together in the next carriage after a brawl broke out with Victoria’s ‘feeder’.
Milton Keynes Citizen, October 2016
Given the way 2016's creeptastic political celebrities have been busy recalibrating normal standards of public behaviour to way below what what was previously considered rock bottom, I wouldn't be surprised if shoving your carton of fries into an unwilling stranger's gob has become everybody's default way of saying "Hi" by October 2017.
I'm not expecting anything quite so real to happen to our established church in Brexit-addled England any time soon, although some, more thoughtful, Anglicans, including the Archbishop of Canterbury,** admit that disestablishment might not be such a terrible thing.
One of the advantages of disestablishment would be to make thoughtless Anglicans seem slightly less embarrassing. I came across a good example of thoughtless Anglicanism this Christmas, when children from my son's school held a Christmas show with carols, songs and assorted readings at the local parish church. Just a normal primary school production for kids a bit too old for a nativity play.
It only got kind of embarrassing right at the end, when the new rector came forward to say how good the kids had been (which they had been - nothing wrong with that), then started gushing about how wonderful it was that they'd actually dared to mention Jesus, because too many schools these days, he alleged, are terrified to mention The Real Meaning of Christmas for fear of offending somebody.
It takes a extreme lack of self-awareness to come out with this sort of War on Christmas whinge when you're a cleric in the established church, presiding over a retelling of a specifically Christian story, which children and families of all faiths and none are expected to participate in as a matter of course. Sorry, Reverend, but Christians, and especially members of the Church of England, are not a persecuted minority in England. The head of your church is the head of state, your clerics get an automatic block of seats in the upper house of parliament, you have an extensive network of publicly-funded faith schools with which to indoctrinate young minds - that's not what a persecuted minority looks like.
What you are is a privileged minority and what you experience as oppression by political correctness is really just the steady erosion of your privileges. People don't leave Jesus out of Christmas because they're terrified of causing offence and falling foul of some humanist Gestapo. It's way simpler than that - most people just aren't that into Him. In fact, there's evidence to suggest that a lot of people never were.
If anybody's afraid of causing offence, it's non-believers like me. I could object to your incessant proselytising, I could decide not to sing carols containing words I don't believe in, or sit through a church service that doesn't reflect my beliefs, or object to attempts to indoctrinate my child. But I don't, partly because I'm generally too damn polite to go around upsetting people who do believe in this stuff (except when provoked beyond reason) and partly because I'm not so doctrinaire that I can't appreciate some of the trimmings of religion, like the music, the architecture and the words of the scripture and liturgy (at least when they're not being mangled in some tone-deaf primary school-language happy-clappy iteration).
There's nothing very dignified about pretending to be a persecuted victim when you're nothing of the sort, but at least if the C of E renounced its existing privileges, this sort of pretence would look slightly less ridiculous.
Although maybe a better solution would be for those clerics with a major persecution complex to leave the Church of England and take Jesus with them. They could then be left free to lecture anybody who cared to listen about how they'd totally be preaching to packed pews if only it wasn't for all this politically-correct fear of causing offence. Meanwhile, a network of buildings cleared of all those off-puttingly paranoid God-botherers might be a more attractive and welcoming place for people keen on the "religious, not spiritual" benefits of getting together with other members of their community and having a good old sing-song once a week. Who knows, it might even reverse the C of E's Incredible Shrinking Congregation problem.
If the Archbishop of Canterbury wants me to flesh out my radical plan for reviving the Church of England, he can contact me via the comments section of this blog...
After 2016, it might seem that there's no such thing as a safe political prediction, but I'd still be pretty surprised if Andrew Rawnsley has got it wrong when he forecasts that 2017 will be the year when our gilded new generation of self-styled anti-elitist politicians abandon the ("low grade")* people (AKA "morons")* who voted for change to the tender mercy of the same old status quo that's been making people like Trump richer and the rest of us poorer for the last forty years:
What are stock markets telling us when they respond to Mr Trump and Mrs May by sending share prices to record highs? They are telling us that they think that the British prime minister is a phoney and the incoming American president is a conman. They are wagering that President Trump will betray the poorer voters who helped put him in the White House. They are betting that Theresa May will not deliver for the less affluent Britons whose Brexit votes helped elevate her to Number 10. That’s what the cash is saying. The “forgotten men and women” of America will be no better remembered in the Trump cabinet of tycoons. Mrs May’s “just about managing” will find out she is all jam tomorrow, never today.
I'm less sure whether people will start to realise that they've been conned in the coming year, or whether the scammers can successfully carry on misdirecting their marks with yet more of the bluster, trolling and scapegoating that worked so well for them in 2016.
No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.
Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion, Brexit and other odd belief systems.
I am not really called Robin, nor have I ever been.
Occasional tweets at twitter.com/2primates
