2015 — 29 April: Wednesday
These days1 I'm grateful to Big Bro for his occasional NZ email. Having quickly (scuse the pun) 'dispensed' his pharmaceutical recommendations ("Hope you are piling on the vitamins!" — well, I ate two oranges, two plums, and a Kiwi fruit yesterday where I'm sure he might simply pop one of his fizzy Berocca tablets) on this occasion he moved on this morning, posing a question that requires a degree of what could be called family excavation... "BTW do you recall the years I was at CHS?" CHS is Cheadle Hulme School, where he spent rather longer incarcerated than I did.
Oddly (?)...
... though I still recall my first-ever day at infant school I cannot say I recall2 his school career in any great detail.3 Like me, he skipped a year while at Cheadle Hulme but, unlike me, that was only after he'd already started there. As it happens, I remember he skipped the fifth form having by then already been put into a fast stream and taken some of his 'O' level exams a year early to clear the decks (as it were) for his 'A' levels and prep for what I assume the school were certain would be his Uni. Unlike me, also, he was airplane-mad and firmly aiming himself at the RAF and Cranfield. I find it mildly interesting that I have absolutely no idea what our parents made of this career choice.
(Next, he will no doubt expect me to recall his subjects and grades — there he will be completely out of luck.)
I'm so stupid...
... I'm completely unable to grasp why "abandoning Trident" would be an enormous gamble, let alone why writing to that nice Mr Murdoch's "news" paper "The Times" on the topic should have any bearing on a defence spending review. Trident is (and always has been) unaffordable, criminally insane, morally indefensible, and not even under any real UK control. So where's the gamble? Anybody who can make a case for firing off nuclear missiles deserves no place on this planet. Killing people is wrong. Mass-killing people is, erm, mass-wrong. There, that wasn't so difficult, was it?
What? You disagree? 'aint just my opinion!
Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
RD Laing: "The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality', than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed."
Alan Bennett: "I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment."
Roy Calne: "The susceptibility to corruption amongst human beings almost certainly fits into a bell distribution curve, and like all other human characteristics, there are bound to be some individuals in possession of the
knowledge, apparatus and expertise of nuclear weaponry who are corruptible, and would sell their expertise and hardware to an unprincipled buyer..."
HL Mencken: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Carl Sagan: "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription
for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
I'm happy to thank the Duke of Edinburgh for my opinion, too. It was during my Civil Defence training in 1965 as part of his Award Scheme that I formed my ideas. I regard the expressed opinion "That deterrent exists, as you will know, not as a military weapon but as a political one whose very purpose is for it never to be used in anger..." as ludicrous. No wonder the acronym MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) lingers in my memory.
As a long-time fan...
... of King Crimson, I shall look forward to hearing this which is, I gather, to feature a re-interpretation of some of Crimson's "tunes" with piano and sax quartet. It can't possibly be as painfully bad as last night's (expensive!) Blu-ray, after all. <Sigh>
I see the April showers are still working things out, as it were. Still, it's brighter as lunch approaches than when I heard what little there was to hear of the dawn chorus.
I had no idea...
... that a chap who's been both a Congressman and an FBI agent in charge of (say) the Senate Intelligence Committee — if that isn't an oxymoron — could still manage to sound, or even possibly still manage to be, quite so, erm, erm, what's another word that means "stupid" but without the sting? Nope. Mind's a blank. (Link.)
Upton Sinclair, anyone? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary is dependent on his not understanding it...". Sadly, I knew a few managers in IBM who laboured under not dissimilar cognitive burdens.
I wonder...
... if this means I've successfully timed my departure from the sinking ship?
The ability to run Android apps on Windows — this utter capitulation — is not a "win" or a positive development, assuming it's happening as it sounds. It's a defeat, an avoidable suicide. And it makes Windows even less important than it already was...
Just askin'.