Diet tip

From PaulR

New short story

I've posted a new short story on my Haart Writes blog called Dr Bluett. As usual, it can be accessed through the Short Stories tab on this blog.

A life too brief

Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900)

There is the finest of poetic imagery in the suggestions subtly conveyed by Crane's tricky adjectives, the use of which was as deliberate with him as his choice of a subject. But Crane was an imagist before our modern imagists were known.

Vincent Starret on Stephen Crane.

Fortunately, the typos in my Kindle copy of Stephen Crane's works seem to be restricted to the novel Active Service, which isn't his best work anyway. Now I'm free to enjoy his writing, although I have experienced a little thread of disappointment - not with Crane, but with my own writing pretensions. Crane died of TB at the age of only twenty eight when he was already a fine, innovative writer. Ah well! 

Had he lived, what else would he have offered us and given his interest in wars, what would he have made of the First World War? Anyhow, here are a few miscellaneous quotes, beginning with his approach to writing.

I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision--he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition.

Crane was criticized for his use of language, his way of defying the more stuffy literary conventions to paint his word pictures. He even invented his own adjectives begad!

Suddenly a little boy somersaulted around the corner of the house as if he had been projected down a flight of stairs by a catapultian boot. 

Actually, I'm not sure if Crane actually invented catapultian, but it's the kind of deed he was criticised for, as well as his unconventional lifestyle and iconoclastic approach to his craft. 

A man properly lazy does not like new experiences until they become old ones.

In London Impressions, he makes a number of references to what he calls drill. The word obviously derives from his interest in military matters, but Crane applies it much more widely - a useful word for behaviour acquired by repetition. At one time it had a place in education where such things as multiplication tables were drilled into us. We never forgot them either. It's a useful word - we could do ourselves a favour by dusting it off. 

This London, composed of a porter and a cabman, stood to me subtly as a benefactor. I had scanned the drama, and found that I did not believe that the mood of the men emanated unduly from the feature that there was probably more shillings to the square inch of me than there were shillings to the square inch of them. Nor yet was it any manner of palpable warm-heartedness or other natural virtue. But it was a perfect artificial virtue; it was drill, plain, simple drill. And now was I glad of their drilling, and vividly approved of it, because I saw that it was good for me. Whether it was good or bad for the porter and the cabman I could not know; but that point, mark you, came within the pale of my respectable rumination. 

Another observation, this time on London policemen directing traffic at a major intersection.

This truth was very evidently recognized. There was only one right-of- way at a time. The police did not look behind them to see if their orders were to be obeyed; they knew they were to be obeyed. These four torrents were drilling like four battalions. The two blue-cloth men maneuvered them in solemn, abiding peace, the silence of London. I thought at first that it was the intellect of the individual, but I looked at one constable closely and his face was as afire with intelligence as a flannel pin-cushion. It was not the police, and it was not the crowd. It was the police and the crowd. Again, it was drill. 

In a not entirely dissimilar vein, we have Crane's idiosyncratic view of a railway journey from London to Glasgow. 

The crowd of porters and transient people stood respectful. They looked with the indefinite wonder of the railway-station sight-seer upon the faces at the windows of the passing coaches. This train was off for Scotland. It had started from the home of one accent to the home of another accent. It was going from manner to manner, from habit to habit, and in the minds of these London spectators there surely floated dim images of the traditional kilts, the burring speech, the grouse, the canniness, the oat-meal, all the elements of a romantic Scotland. 

A final quote - this time on dying. It's a comment Crane made to his friend Robert Barr when Crane and his common law wife Cora Taylor were about to leave England for  Badenweiler, Germany, a health spa on the edge of the Black Forest. Crane had been persuaded to try it as a possible treatment for his TB. 

It didn't work though - as both Crane and Barr knew it wouldn't. As they shook hands on the quayside, both men were fully aware that they would not see each other again.

Robert, when you come to the hedge--that we must all go over-- it isn't bad. You feel sleepy--and--you don't care. Just a little dreamy curiosity--which world you're really in--that's all.

Implications

I don’t know if it’s me, but sometimes I divide people into two classes – analysts and realists.

Analysts have to analyse everything, particularly issues remote from daily life such as political questions.

Realists don’t bother. They get on with life, enjoy what they are able to enjoy and make the best of the rest.

Most people seem to be realists, while most bloggers and blog commenters seem to be analysts. My question is this. If you had a button which once pressed would turn you from an analyst into a realist, would you press that button?

I ask the question, because it sometimes seems to me that the realists get more out of life than the analysts. They brush aside or ignore those issues they can’t influence, the very same issues that analysts spend so much time analysing. At the very least, realists may be making better use of their time - although that's just me analysing realists.

So wouldn’t life be better for we analysts if we pressed that button? Would we at least save ourselves some mental effort and worry if we were not so concerned about the implications of every little social or political nuance? Do these things actually matter if we can’t do anything about them?

It’s the other side of the optimism coin I posted on earlier, but not entirely. This is about what is best for me – not the wider community. Or in your case, what is best for you, because you must be an analyst too or you wouldn’t have read thus far.

So would you press the button? Or maybe we should analyse the implications first? Maybe a list of pros and cons.....

Height restriction

From AlanH.

Warmer winters?

With EDF raising the price of gas and electricity by 11% as another winter approaches, it may be worth a brief look at those warmer winters we were so confidently promised. Is there a risk we won't get them? Surely not.

In many ways, climate change is a global political attempt to skew our perceptions of risk. From this angle, it isn’t so surprising that climate propaganda is both state-sponsored and scientifically unreliable. There are many precedents for state-sponsored skewing of our perception of risk, from passive smoking to alcohol to drug addiction and crime.

Yet a simple risk assessment is one way to look at climate propaganda, rather than delving too deeply into the science, which is worth doing, but only accessible to a technically proficient audience. So how should we assess climate risks?

Because the behaviour of our climate is so uncertain, the risks are ironically, very easy to assess, at least in broad outline. To begin with, I think it’s worth saying that we cannot put numbers against climate risks because climate uncertainties are too great, in spite of what we are often told. The big climate lie is buried here:-

Uncertainty.

It can hardly be stressed too strongly just how uncertain the reality behind climate propaganda really is. What do we mean by uncertainty? Well climate science is inherently uncertain – even global temperatures are uncertain, but to my mind it’s worth beginning with climate theories.

We don’t know which is the best climate theory.

That’ll do as a start if we’re looking at uncertainty. Charlatans and their useful idiots talk about CO2 while genuine scientists will admit that we don’t actually know which is the best climate theory. The CO2 theory was just a guess which became entangled with the ambitions of powerful global bureaucrats.

So why the confident predictions?

Ask away until you are blue in the face – there is no rational answer. Theories based on solar activity moderated by ocean currents seem to be a good bet, but with lots of caveats and uncertainty still to be resolved.

The CO2 theory is largely discredited and probably only worth pursuing by a small number of researchers in case CO2 does have some measurable impact. So far the consensus seems to be that it may have some impact but not much. Possibly not even measurable.

So back to risk.

Firstly – likelihood. How likely is it that the global climate will warm or cool over the next few decades? With no significant global temperature rise so far this century, we are probably justified in assessing the risk of future warming and cooling as equal. Nobody knows what the climate will do even next year, so the state of our knowledge may be represented by the toss of a coin.

There is of course the possibility that it will neither cool nor warm for years to come, but I’ll ignore this possibility, if only because climate change does seem to be cyclical. However, it remains a possibility.

Secondly – impact. The outcome of a few degrees warming has been grossly overstated, largely by wildly exaggerated claims about sea levels and storm and hurricane frequency. On the whole, moderate warming would be beneficial for global agriculture and energy costs. This is a matter of common sense and historical experience – not just science.

Cooling on the other hand, would lead to crop failures, lower levels of agricultural output, more deaths among the vulnerable and higher energy costs. Another common sense conclusion.

So a rational climate strategy based on risk would ignore warming and have us prepared for at least moderate cooling. The cheapest actions we might take if sanity ever returns are obvious.

Remove all climate-related subsidies and tax breaks based on warming.

Repeal all climate laws and regulations based on warming.

Grant fracking licences.

Insulating homes and conserving energy are worthwhile and it’s a pity such measures became entangled with lunatic climate propaganda. Subsidies and tax breaks for erratic and unreliable energy sources such as wind and solar are not worthwhile. These technologies may be worth a limited amount of further research, but that’s it.

Climate propagandists are not only pushing scientifically absurd policies, but policies which do not even address climate risks in a rational way. We may not see global cooling, but it’s a risk to which we should pay far more attention than warming.

Demise of the telly

Interesting post from cityunslicker about the number of people who don't own a TV set and how surprisingly common it seems to be among bloggers. Certainly that's my limited experience, because at least two people who comment here don't own a TV. That seems to be a high percentage compared to the 96.2% of households with a TV - according to Ofcom.

Early in our married life, we didn't own one either. Now our TV viewing has declined to almost nothing, I'm beginning to wonder why we have the thing. In fact we have two, which is even more a cause for head-scratching introspection because we can watch it on our laptops anyway. We hardly ever do, but we could - we don't need the great flat screen thingy in the corner.

In the evening we read, we browse the Web and we listen to music - watching TV is restricted to an increasingly thin list of films we've recorded. As we don't really like films, most of them are switched off shortly after the start. Our evenings hardly ever involve settling down to watch a good film. In fact hardly ever seems to be turning into never.

It's not a good idea to project one's own situation onto the rest of society, but I've spent almost my whole life with a TV set in the corner of the living room as part of the furniture. It was always the main domestic entertainment medium with the BBC dominating the field. As of course only the BBC is able to do because of its licence fee scam.

We still buy one of those TV guides each week and I still give it a peruse to see if anything is worth recording, but I hardly ever find anything to arouse even mild enthusiasm. I'm sure my futile searching is a residual habit, a form of conditioning which isn't easy to shake off. A very small number of almost worthwhile programmes keeps me searching. Intermittent reinforcement - it's how gambling works.

Maybe it's not worth the effort though, because even a spot of aimless Web surfing is more interesting and enjoyable than gaping at the TV. The TV set is technically outmoded but TV content is pretty dire too. Somehow it feels like a fatal combination.