Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Friday, April 01, 2005
Norm hath spoken. Squander Two hath spoken. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? Farenheit 451 so I can convince all the guys who want to burn me that they are themselves inside a book, then they will repent. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? I know it's kind of kooky to name both a father and son, but both Aral and Miles Vorkosigan are cute in their separate ways. And books. That's separate books separated by twenty years, OK? Robin Cook, writing in the Guardian, reminds me why I must oppose the UN even if it is reformed. No one is asking for Kofi Annan to be given a veto over whether Wolfowitz gets the job, but it does not seem unreasonable to demand stronger coordination at the centre to stop the World Bank pursuing neo-liberal policies that are in flat conflict with the development agendas of other UN agencies.You heard the man. He wants the UN to be one centre of power, following a unified development agenda that is not neo-liberal. His vision is entirely realistic and achievable. When and if it is achieved the great gains of the past three decades in average wealth, life expectancy, access to water, access to education, and freedom will slowly, slowly, slowly stop being so spectacular ... then stop altogether ... then imperceptibly slip into reverse ... and no one will be able to see it because there will nowhere left in the world outside the Unified Development Agenda. As I said here (one of the most deeply felt posts I have ever written) we might see "not the end of history, but its asymptote." And as I also said there, that scenario, a sort of permanent Imperial China sleeping safe from all outside influence (because there is no outside) under a fairly benevolent civil service, is the optimistic one. A pessimistic scenario might also hark back to Chinese history. The death toll in the Taiping "Great Peace" rebellion against the Manchus was second only to that of World War II. Under a unified government all wars are civil wars and civil wars are ugly. Later on in the article Cook says that: The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions. Since I fear very much being obliged to respect the collective decisions of the world's various regimes, I have considered, very seriously, taking up exactly that opinion, rather in the way that revolutionary socialists sometimes hope that capitalism will be as cruel as possible, the better to speed the revolution against it. ("Let it bleed", as Tariq Ali used to say.) But in the end I cannot go that far. It may well be better for the long term happiness of the world that the UN should cease to exist, or, my preferred option, should be a co-ordinating body and forum for negotiation with no power of its own, but I see scarce prospect of that happening. What we have in the real world, a powerful but badly dysfunctional UN, will exacerbate famines and wars, particularly in Africa. So I hope it is reformed. Then let us fight it. "This morning, the Holy Father's health condition is very grave." - statement from the Vatican. It says that he is "conscious, lucid and tranquil." May he have a good death. Zimbabwe votes. Some of it, anyway. Whether this translates into "Zimbabwe decides" is another question. Thursday, March 31, 2005
Knitting. The truth is out there. The full history of the Alsos Mission has not yet been told. The basics are well known: General Groves selected a team of civilian scientists and military personnel headed by Colonel Boris T Pash, and later joined by the discoverer of electron spin, Samuel Goudsmit, and set them to follow the Allied advance across Europe and uncover Nazi progress towards the atom bomb. Both Pash and Goudsmit wrote books about their experiences. But did they tell the whole story? There is a tantalising hint in the chapter of Goudsmit's book called The Gestapo in Science. (Chapter available separately as one of the essays in Martin Gardner's The Sacred Beetle.) This chapter touches on Himmler's Ahnenerbe, or Academy of Ancestral Heritage. The administrative head of this body was SS Colonel Wolfram Sievers, a man who felt it meet always to write the initial and final S's of his name in runic style, thus making the SS emblem. In 1943 Sievers wrote to a woman minion in these terms: Dear Fraulein Piffl: "Unfortunately for the future of science," wrote Goudsmit, "the records fail to reveal if Miss Piffl's mission was successful." I begin to wonder if the records are complete. Some bloggers, myself among them, were inclined to jeer at those who sought to bring healing to a world sundered by the US War on Terror by knitting willies. We were unkind. (There must be many lonely Al-Qaeda servicemen out there who would be much comforted by a knitted willy. Ladies, can you help?) We may also have laughed too soon. It could be that the courageous woman who runs these risks for all of our sakes, "guerilla knitter" Rachael Matthews, has stumbled on a secret kept for nearly sixty years. Consider. In 1943 as the slow crushing of the Third Reich began, Heinrich Himmler himself was willing to spend SS resources in searching out the knitting methods of the notoriously warlike Vikings. Was this merely a unique instance of harmless curiosity on the part of Himmler? Or was he searching for a Strickvergeltungswaffe or "Knitted-Vengeance-Weapon"? It's very odd that the trail goes suddenly cold at that point. Even more mysteriously, despite the fact that multiply cross-indexed records of the Nazi scientific war effort were kept by the compulsively efficient Osenberg, in no source that I can find does the word Strickpenisvergeltungwaffe even appear. Consider. I have always known that there is something mysterious about knitting, just as it has always been plain to me that the way a sewing machine sews things from underneath even though the needle is on top is simply inexplicable without reference to the fourth dimension. Last time I mentioned this some CIA plant tried to fob me off with some explanation about a sewing machine really being a knotting machine. As if! Could it be that the much-publicised way in which Werner Von Braun and other Nazi scientists were nabbed by the US or the USSR was nothing more than a "stitch up" to hide a much more ambitious project? Could the oft-heard advice to "stick to your knitting" actually be a coded exhortation to workers on this New Manhattan Project? Significantly, when I have tried to discuss my theory with scientists they have dared say only one word in reply: the last name of Fraulein Erna Piffl of the SS! In an important post Angie Schultz pulls together some very suspicious strands. (Strands! hah!) What is the real reason behind these Crocheted Hyperbolic Models? What is the Vauban fortress in the same image trying to tell us? Are you asking me to believe that the University of Bristol's crocheted Lorentz Manifold was made without NATO funding? By gum, there is evidence for the hyperspatial nature of knitting in my own home. We own a knitted Klein bottle. But I haven't seen it in years. It must be ... somewhere else. Wednesday, March 30, 2005
The EU arrest warrant might cause governments to race to the bottom. Ed Lud writes: Natalie, I was interested in your post about this. A synesthete couple. Jim Bennett writes: I always knew that Vladimir Nabokov had synesthesia, because he wrote about it in Speak, Memory. I liked the detail that Cyrillic letters had a different shade than Latin letters. However I only just found out that his wife Vera (Slonim) was synesthetic also.Apparently the couple would have debates about the color of Monday and the taste of E-flat. The Abode of Amritas has a seriously cool blogroll. And a seriously cool linguistics and politics blog to go with it. In an earlier post (OK, I admit it, an earlier post I can't find now) the author, Marc H. Miyake, argues that enthusiasts for the efforts to bring democracy to Iraq (like me) have set up an unfalsifiable argument. If there is a decline in terrorism we say, "This just shows that the Iraqis are rejecting terrorism. Democracy is working." If there is an increase in terrorism we say, "This just shows the terrorists are getting desperate. Democracy is working." There is some truth in his argument about the arguments we make. I would respond that, despite the occasional lapses of our partisans, the experience of other societies suggests that the liberal democracy / rule of law package does eventually bring about a peaceful society. Spain once had traditions of vendetta as strong as those in Iraq now. Scotland also: Johnson wrote of the Western Islands: This multifarious, and extensive obligation operated with force scarcely credible. Every duty, moral or political, was absorbed in affection and adherence to the Chief. Not many years have passed since the clans knew no law but the Laird's will. He told them to whom they should be friends or enemies, what King they should obey, and what religion they should profess.It can also be true that a dying belief-system never looks more strongly held than on the eve of its fall. I find it reasonable to hope that this is true of the Islamofascists: those who begin to feel that the caravan has passed them by become more fanatical in order to extinguish the doubts in their own souls. By the way, via the Abode of Amritas I found an essay on the new racism in education that I posted about at Samizdata. Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Patrick Crozier liked the new Dr Who. I’ve been trying to puzzle out how it was they got this so right. I imagine that the long break since the last series went out in 1989 was a factor. It gave a new generation the chance to re-invent it, to question every aspect of it and to give it a new feel. I also got the impression that after the (ahem) 1996 Dr Who movie there was an element of “we must not fail”. (Indeed, it’s funny to think how similar in many ways the two were - the difference between success and failure is slight indeed.) And I think there was also a deep desire to keep the tradition alive. To a large proportion of the people involved in producing, writing and directing the new series, Dr Who was something that they were brought up with, like Wimbledon and England World Cup exits. The ball was being thrown to them and they had to make damn sure they caught it. Fortunately, they did.I agree. Spoiler alert! Bits I particularly liked:
There is one strange fact that I can exclusively reveal. The street, ostensibly in London, in which the scene with the wheelie bin took place was actually Inverness Place, Cardiff. What this portends for the future development of the plot I do not know. Synesthesia. Random Jottings linked to the post below, and in the comments Andrea Harris said, Monday -- white, pale blue, gray -- three vertical stripes in that order from left to rightWow. I said in the earlier post that I didn't "particularly" see colours for days of the week. In fact, the days do weakly suggest certain colours to me, but it's a straight transposition of the cycle of months/seasons onto the weekdays (Sunday is white and pale like January; Thursday is autumn colours) rather than synesthesia. In contrast I can't see any metaphor or association that should make seven green. (No other number has a comparable colour-identity. Four might be pale yellow - or am I making that up as I write? - I can't tell, it slips through my fingers as I pick it up) Judging from the various comments on Normblog and Jottings my perceptions of this are watery and vague compared to some. |