An expansionist’s rant ...

A fistful of dollars 

"If we’re going to be here as a species 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billon people".

     ... Ted Turner (b. 1938), American media mogul, comments on the impact of demographic trends on future greenhouse gas emissions, a little discussed subject given its political sensitivity.

Pattern recognition

Cricket fan

"I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations".



     ... Godfrey Harold “G. H.” Hardy (1877-1947), prominent English mathematician (number theory), an excerpt from "A Mathematician's Apology" (1941).

The great divide

... a dead ringer for Andy Rooney

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of  them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration?, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had."

                ... C. P. Snow (1905-80), English physicist and novelist, excerpt from his published essay "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" (1959).

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day ...

Lolita creator

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."

 ... Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-American novelist ... excerpt from his memoir "Speak Memory"

Epitaph for a dead waiter: "God finally caught his eye.”

Dorothy Parker would have been proud

“Do you have any unexpressed thoughts?”

   ,,, comment made to a woman endlessly chattering at a dinner table.

George Kaufman (1889-1961), American playwright,  humorist & social commentator. 

From Here to Eternity

"... we had four tons of grit in our mouths--and other places"

"It had to have rocks in the distance, so the water could strike the boulders and shoot upward -- all very symbolic. The scene turned out to be deeply affecting on film, but, God, it was no fun to shoot. We had to time it for the waves, so that at just the right moment a big one would come up and wash over us. Most of the waves came up only to our feet, but we needed one that would come up all the way. We were like surfers, waiting for the perfect waves. Between each take, we had to do a total cleanup. When it was all over, we had four tons of grit in our mouths--and other places".

                ... Deborah Kerr (1921-2007), referring to her famous romantic beach scene with Burt Lancaster (1913-94) in "From Here to Eternity" in 1953.



A strangeness of sentiment ... a constituent element of all great art

"the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone"

"I was only interrupted by my work on a new painting representing the exterior of a night café. On the terrace there are small figures of people drinking. An immense yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the facade, the side walk and even casts light on the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone. The gables of the houses, like a fading road below a blue sky studded with stars, are dark blue or violet with a green tree. Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colours itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges".

           ... Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), Dutch painter. Excerpt from a letter to his sister about his painting  “Cafe Terrace at Night”.

 A recent photo of the same scene in Arles, France
[note: "the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone"
are gone, replaced by dull pavement, sadly]

Popular music in our time

... so modern music sucks eh?

"What does our popular music say about our society? Not much that is admirable, I would venture to suggest. Its aggressive banality, irritating repetitive beat, emphasis on ear-destroying volume, obsession with sexuality and violence, and almost total lack of nobility or intellectual content, creates a pitiful contrast to the music of previous centuries.

It is probably futile to struggle against this phenomenon, for it is only a symptom of the spiritual and moral emptiness of our civilization. Lust for money has ruined the arts, just as it has ruined so many other things. Schubert and Van Gogh poured out their hearts on paper and canvas, displaying an expertise of craftsmanship developed and handed down over centuries expecting - and in their particular cases receiving - little or no remuneration. The new pop stars, on the other hand, have almost no technical abilities - other than what may be supplied by their producers - and are inflated mostly through promotion, gimmicks, manipulation and an unwholesome desire to thrusts themselves before the public and earn obscene amounts of money".

... Anton Kuerti (1938-), Canadian musician and concert pianist

The essence of consciousness

"Don't Try"

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”

... Charles Bukowski (1920-94), American poet, novelist

Acceptance is relative ...

Sartre´s buddy for a while

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal"

... Albert Camus (1913-60),  French Algerian author, philosopher and journalist

Thinking and language ... the cart before the horse.

defined six functions of language

“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”


   ... Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), Russian linguist

... very large numbers have very large implications

 "the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations"

"The large numbers hypothesis concerns certain dimensionless numbers. An example of a dimensionless number provided by nature is the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron. There is another dimensionless number which connects Planck's constant and the electronic charge. This number is about 137, quite independent of the units. When a dimensionless number like that turns up, a physicist thinks there must be some reason for it. Why should it be, well, 137, and not 256 or something quite different. At present one cannot set up a satisfactory reason for it, but still people believe that with future developments a reason will be found. Now, there is another dimensionless number which is of importance. If you have an electron and a proton, the electric force between them is inversely proportional to the square of the distance; the gravitational force is also inversely proportional to the square of the distance; the ratio of those two forces does not depend on the distance. The ratio gives you a dimensionless number. That number is extremely large, about ten to the power thirty-nine. Of course it doesn't depend on what units you're using. It's a number provided by nature and we should expect that a theory will some day provide a reason for it.

How could you possibly expect to get an explanation for such a large number? Well, you might connect it with another large number - the age of the universe. The universe has an age, because one observes that the spiral nebulae, the most distant objects in the sky, are all receding from us with a velocity proportional to their distance, and that means that at a certain time in the past, they were all extremely close to one another. The universe started quite small or perhaps even as a mathematical point, and there was a big explosion, and these objects were shot out. The ones that were shot out fastest are the ones that have gone the farthest from us. That explains the relationship (Hubble's relationship) that the velocity of recession is proportional to the distance, and from the connection between the velocity of recession and the distance we get the age when the universe started off. It's called the big bang hypothesis.

There is a definite age when the big bang occurred. The most recent observations give it to be about eighteen billion years ago. Now, you might use some atomic unit of time instead of years, years is quite artificial, depending on our solar system. Take an atomic unit of time, express the age of the universe in this atomic unit, and you again get a number of about ten to the thirty-nine, roughly the same as the previous number. Now, you might say, this is a remarkable coincidence. But it is rather hard to believe that. One feels that there must be some connection between these very large numbers, a connection which we cannot explain at present but which we shall be able to explain in the future when we have a better knowledge both of atomic theory and of cosmology".
 
... Paul Dirac (1902-84), British theoretical physicist (interview excerpt, 1970)

A curious conjunction of giants



wrote 39 operas before he was 40

This rather jocund-looking gentleman pictured here in 1858 is the famous Italian composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) who wrote 39 operas before he was 40, and retired thereafter to a leisurely life in Paris where his house was a centre of artistic society. His best-known operas include the The Barber of Seville and William Tell. He was also a well-known gourmand and an excellent amateur chef his entire life. Even to the present day there are  dishes named with the appendage "alla Rossini" that were either created by him or specifically for him, probably the most famous being "Tournedos Rossini".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloXRhesab0



his music "has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours”.

It was in Paris around the time that the above photo was taken that Rossini was visited by a much younger Richard Wagner (1813-83) [left], the only time these two giants of the music world would ever meet. Even though Rossini maintained a rather ambivalent view of Wagner's works, amid a wide-ranging conversation when they lingered on the subject of another music giant, Beethoven (1770-1827), they both readily agreed he was the most influential composer of all time. Rossini shared with Wagner vivid recollections of the great composer having paid him a visit, also a one-time event, some 35 years earlier in 1822. He was then aged 51, deaf, cantankerous and in failing health. At the time the operas of Rossini were the rage, and Beethoven [below] was both irritated and fascinated by the phenomenon, curiously a somewhat similar stance that Rossini held for Wagner's music, famously observing it "has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours”.  What seems to have struck Rossini most in his  visit with Beethoven, was the exceeding sadness expressed in the composer’s face. Even then, he was received kindly but with characteristic brusqueness, Beethoven opening the conversation by complimenting him on the “Barber” while also making condescending remarks about Italians, and telling him with sarcastic candor (communicated in writing) “never try to write anything else but opera buffa; any other style would do violence to your nature.”



legendary erratic irascible nature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRLV5BKFtg

Shocked by the squalid living conditions in which he found Beethoven, Rossini talked with Wagner about how he had tried unsuccessfully to organize a subscription for funds to assist the man. Apparently potential donors were skeptical about the practicality of such a generous gesture, given Beethoven’s legendary erratic irascible nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HjwDih-WtQ

... the 'left' versus 'right' divide

"We’re really regressing back to the dark ages".

"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists".

   ... Noam Chomsky (1928b), linguist and political activist

Lifestyle versus political views ...

"A cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing"

"The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many spare evenings"

... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

God is not great ...

"Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me"

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist…. I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

... Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), author, journalist, and celebrated atheist who wrote the best seller "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4s1nVm3mO8&feature=related

There is no cure for curiosity ...

"...a man must be handsome, ruthless and stupid".

"How like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard"





... Dorothy Parker, American poet and satirist (1893-1967)

Man's tragic flaw ...

From a statue in Rome

“We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.”




... Cicero (106 - 43 B.C.), Roman philosopher, orator and statesman

... the birth of the 'American Empire'

Sublime noble serenity

The noble Indian pictured here in full native regalia is the legendary Sitting Bull, a Sioux war chief during the years of resistance to United States government policies in the latter 1800s. This remarkable photograph was taken in 1885. He was to die violently five years later at age 59, apparently in a bungled arrest attempt, but more likely part of a deliberate elimination scheme by government authorities bent on suppressing every last remnant of native Indian resistance to a land grab of unprecedented proportions. It was the end of a remarkable life full of trials and tribulations, sadness, and tragedy.

A surly youth

Sitting Bull gained lasting notoriety in the infamous battle at Little Big Horn (1876), in which General George Custer (1839-76) [pictured right striking a strident pose as a cadet at 20] and his entire contingent of some 300 men were annihilated. The battle ("Custer's Last Stand") came to symbolize the conflict between new settlers and native Indian culture over lifestyles, land, and resources. The incident itself was nothing but a side-show compared to the willful slaughter of hundreds of starving, desperate native Indians who were being harassed by the likes of many a Custer. These self-styled agents of American “progress” marauding about in territory considered sacred by native Indians and solemnly promised to them in perpetuity in sham treaties, pillaged and killed innocents wherever they could be found, at will and with impunity.

Sitting Bull’s leadership skills and resilient dignity proved to be such a powerful obstacle to federal forces endeavouring to break Indian resistance that attempts to persuade them to sell their land were made in order to save the government the embarrassment of having to break treaties to get it. The attitude of the Indians was captured in a defiant gesture by Sitting Bull, picking up a pinch of soil and releasing it to the wind. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government – not even as much as this.” With regal contempt, he taunted government bureaucrats who demanded the turnover of coveted land for “acting like men who have been drinking whiskey”.

Although they were definitively not beaten on the battlefield, the Indian people were eventually broken through terror, political pressure, and the relentless logic of demographics, and finally reduced to abject poverty and starvation. The Americans were too numerous to repel, their government too powerful to resist, their rulers entirely without pity or scruple. Indians were subjected to harsh government controls over every aspect of their individual sovereignty. They suffered the indignity of having to accept government handouts just to survive and then insulted with the thought of needing to be grateful for it.

For his defiance, Sitting Bull was upbraided to his face by a powerful republican senator from Illinois, John A. Logan (1826-86) who was also a Presidential hopeful at one point, and whose legacy is still recognized by several prominant statues sprinkled throughout the land. His arrogant diatribe delivered to a totally defeated yet still proud Sitting Bull was nothing short of a mean-spirited bigoted totalitarian rant:

A mean-spirited bigot

“You are not a great chief of this country. You have no following, no power, no control, and no right to any control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all that you have and are today is because of the government…. The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.”

... and thus was ushered in the birth of the American Empire (quite literally, because it was a term used unblushingly in triumphalist literature of the period) which now girded the entire North American continent, its rulers ominously free to confer the blessings of civilization on untutored masses beyond its shores. [http://thewaywardtycoon.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-post_05.html]

In striking contrast, the sublime noble serenity of Sitting Bull so delicately captured in the photo [top] conveys a tale of a vanished way of life and a proud people unceremoniously and cruelly wiped out ... a shameful loss, but just the way things are when there is unbridled growth and mindless exploitation, rife with ignorance and careless insensitiviy to consequences.

Dignity in disgrace

Lewis Morley's 1963 portrait of Keeler

This iconic 1960s portrait of 21 year old English “party girl” prostitute Christine Keeler [b. 1942] relates to one of the 20th century's biggest political scandals known as the Profumo Affair [1963]. Her liaison with a prominent British government minister, 27 years her senior, entirely destroyed an illustrious and promising political career, and brought down a government, earning her fame and fortune and a jail sentence in the process.

The encounter was as brief as it was casual and the matter might have ended without public awareness, but for a bizarre set of circumstances. The affair advanced not by public disclosure but via a grapevine of rumour that got considerably bigger until the truth could be concealed no longer. It had all the alchemy of a TV soap opera and then some, quickly mushrooming into a media frenzy given a toxic brew of salacious high society shenanigans involving weekend house parties, call girls, and pimps in high places, with MI5, Russian spies and senior government ministers thrown in for good measure, against a backdrop of Cold War paranoia.

In the late 80s, Keeler's autobiography and the film, Scandal in which she collaborated revived interest in the events and raised doubts about the perjury charges made against her. Her latest book, "Christine Keeler, The Truth At Last (2001)" continues to raise questions about the case even after almost 40 years, which cannot be verified until 2046 when official papers will be released.





real shame

John Porfumo, who died in 2006 at 91, suffered scandal without reply. He made a vow of silence and never opened his mouth again to answer any criticism or misrepresentation, however unfair. Buffered from financial concerns by an inherited family fortune, he and his wife, the former film star Valerie Hobson (1917-98), disappeared from public life and London society, and cloistered themselves in their country estate. He quietly assumed a new identity and purpose through charitable community service work for the rest of his life. He did not cooperate with the inevitable books and movies about the scandal. A friend said of him, "No one judges Jack Profumo more harshly than he does himself. He says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt real shame."

Curiously, despite Profumo’s devastating fall from political grace and shameful loss of social respectability, his enduring legacy may well have been his vote  in 1940 (some 20 years before the scandal) against his own party... a vote which led to the downfall of Chamberlain (1869-1940) and the arrival of Churchill (1874-1965) as a wartime prime minister. Profumo's prospects some years later for the Prime Minister role were arguably within his grasp had events turned out differently.



Survival of the fittest?

"It is not clear yet that intelligence has any long-term survival value''.

... Stephen Hawking (b. 1942), theoretical physicist

Imperialism's legacy ... at least an important snippet

"genius is prolonged patience".

 

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

... Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), British Prime Minister at the height of British Vistorian imperialism. Indeed, the man was idolized by Queen Victoria herself. It was also the heyday of the mechanical industrial revolution, but well before electric power grids, instant communications, and the car with its all pervasive infrastructure and inherent oil dependence. Even then, the very seeds of present day political turmoil in Asia and the Middle East are arguably linked directly to the policies of his government almost 150 years ago. Curiously the British at the time, yielding to imperialist prerogatives, were stridently meddling in Afghanistan with a massive invading contingent of some 30,000 troops, stultifying and dismantling the fledgling country's established order, deepening the fractious tribal nature of the region that persists to this day.

A stage too big for the drama

Physics is like sex: it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama”.

... Richard Feynman, Physicist (1918-1988)

A rose is a rose is a rose

"Everybody gets so much
information all day long
that they lose their common sense"

... Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

In a flash ...

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."


... Hemingway's (1899-1961) answer when challenged to make a story out of just six words.

... an anti-intellectual take on age

"At fifty everyone has the face he deserves"

... George Orwell (1903-50) who died at 46