Showing posts with label BOM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BOM. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Happy New Year!



We were in Army married quarters in a North German village, when this was first screened in June 1963. Since then, it's become a German New Year's Eve ritual. Drink, absent friends, defiant celebration.
Pic: Wikipedia
Although penned in the 1920s by a British author, Lauri Wylie, the skit is said to have been inspired by Prince Albert's step-grandmother, Duchess Sophie Caroline Amalie of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. From 1841 onward, the widowed Duchess celebrated her birthday in the Gotha Winter Palace, surrounded by her four long-dead friends – a publisher, an entrepreneur, a professor - and a colonel, whose part was played by her servant.

Because of post-WWI anti-German sentiment, the scene was transposed to an English country house, but in Wylie’s original script, the names of the protagonists and the food and drinks on the menu remained Germanic.
Thanks to Prince Albert, we now celebrate Christmas German-style, so why not New Year's as well? Prosit Neujahr!

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Internet links accessed 22 September 2013. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Errors in the field

Some years ago I investigated errors generated by people collecting environmental data while out in the field. In those days we had computers and databases back at the lab, but field data was collected manually.

I’d written a range of error-trapping routines to pick up errors during data input at the lab so all I had to do was link errors to people. The survey included several hundred field workers and hundreds of thousands of items of data. These were not major errors by the way, but they had to be corrected.

Findings
I suppose I was most surprised at how many errors were being made and how consistent each person’s error rates were.

Firstly, line managers working in the field to keep their hand in. They tended to generate more errors than anyone else. Many should have been locked in their offices and never allowed into the field under any circumstances.

Secondly, there were a few people who were extremely meticulous, making a very small number of errors day in day out, but there were not many like that – maybe five or six at most.

Thirdly, there were people at the other end of the spectrum who routinely made a large number of errors.

So – not particularly surprising really, but what did strike me was the difference between the best and the worst. The worst field workers regularly made at least twenty times as many errors as the best.

Yet that did not mean that the worst couldn’t care less about the work – far from it as far as I could see. People doing environmental field work tend to be interested and conscientious.

I don’t know what became of the survey in the longer term, because I moved on. My reports were greeted with surprise and not a great deal of enthusiasm, but I always remember just how consistent people are when it comes to making mistakes in largely routine work.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

German election: a question

Should Greek, Italian etc citizens not also have a vote in deciding who will be Germany's Chancellor?

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Doomster report: be prepared

Graph: Karl Denninger (2013)
Karl Denninger graphs the S&P share index against total public and private debt in the US and concludes that, volatility aside, they match.

If, for some reason, the ratio between debt and GDP reverted to that of 1980, the implication is that the S&P would approximately halve (which would be the third time since 2000, as I've said before). The consequences for pension funds etc would be dire, and this is the point at which, perhaps, the printing presses start to roll in earnest. Houses have inflated and popped, so have the banks, all that's left is the governments themselves - and the value of your savings.

As reported by Zero Hedge, Marc Faber predicts "a total collapse, but from a higher diving board", so he sees gold as an safeguard, not an investment in the usual profit-making sense: "I always buy gold and I own gold. I don't even value it. I regard it as an insurance policy. I think responsible citizens should own gold, period." Back in May, James Dines took much the same view: cash plus gold as a backstop.

But as I said last year, if "total collapse" means what it says, gold won't help either - otherwise we wouldn't have found the Lichfield Hoard buried in a Midlands field hundreds of years later. Which is why Investment Watch now reminds us of the need to prepare for truly serious emergencies.

I know some "preppers", but part of the preparation is not telling people who they are. It is going on.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The Armageddon text

Today, Yorkshire people in Easingwold will be the first place in the UK to receive sample disaster warnings by text message to cellphones.

What emergencies can you envisage (the Daily Mail suggests nuclear or terrorist attack), and what would your suggested message be?

Would it be available in dialect, slang, textspeak?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Stop the play and save your life

Stop reading Liz Jones' diary!

For those who don't know, Liz Jones is a fashion columnist with a weekly confessional page at the back of the colour supplement of the UK's Mail on Sunday. Her life is the emotional equivalent of one of those slow-motion gorefest sequences in a Sam Peckinpah Western.

The dirty secret is that she wants it that way.

It'll go on as long as you are suckered into watching. You are part of it; you are complicit. Though your face is hidden in the dark beyond the footlights, the performance is for you. “You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!” said T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, inviting you to share his nervous breakdown.

There's a parody of Eliot's drama-queen gloom somewhere in Richard Adams' rabbit-saga Watership Down, where one of the bunnies takes on the manner of a prophet and foresees inevitable disaster - I can't track it down quickly but it's there, I promise you. Adams' book started (like some other great children's stories) as a series of adventures told to his children as he drove his car, and, sane and sensible man that he is (he lives yet, praise the Lord), he wanted to give them a positive outlook and so mocked the wrong-headed negativity of the doomster. Similarly, H.G. Wells' Mr Polly discovers:

"... when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you - you can change it."

To break through the paper walls, the first thing you have to change is you. Easy to say, so hard to do. But until you start using your egg tooth to peck at your shell, it doesn't matter what's going on outside, for the inside will always be the same.

One reason it's so difficult is that what you think of as your essential self is a pattern that's wrapped around your innermost consciousness, and even though it may keep on driving you towards unhappy results, you're afraid to get rid of it because it kids you that to lose part of your identity is to die. So it redirects you to externalities - once I'm rich/thin/famous it'll all be OK. And off you and I go into displacement activities, acquiring skills, knowledge, possessions, money, status etc; and somehow it's never enough. Because however wonderful the car, if the person behind the wheel is self-destructive he's going to wrap it round a tree.

No wonder childhood is so important. "You belong, you are loved, you're going to be just fine": that's what we need to hear. First train up the driver.

Eliot's French quotation is from Baudelaire, whose decadent poem makes Boredom the chief devil. But from what I've seen in life, and in what I do as a teacher of "special needs" children, that's not the driver. It's anger: anger at being cheated emotionally, leading to a lifelong desire for self-justification and revenge. It's a Ring Cycle, though in real life the ring is forged not because love was renounced but because it was withheld. The pattern is set, and unless it's broken it will lead not just to slow-burning personal tragedy but to Götterdämmerung.

Which is where we, the audience, come in. I once took part in an amateur dramatic production which, owing to publicity failings, got just two people on the auditorium seats. When they left at the interval, the show stopped (I was for carrying on, out of sheer stubbornness). Every actor knows that even if the public doesn't clap or cheer, they're participating; it's a dialogue with their energies. "Waves of love", the old variety performer would say as he got his applause, giving it back with outspread arms. So we're partly responsible for the performance.

Which is the central insight of Eric Berne's book "Games People Play" (may it never go out of print). You don't have to get into Transactional Analysis and the Child/Adult/Parent diagrams that echo Freud's Id, Ego and Superego. Man is greater than anything than comes out of him, goes the ancient Chinese saying, and such is our wish not to be imprisoned that if there was a perfect answer to anything I'd be looking for a second option.

The main observation in Berne - the thing you can take away with you and apply elsewhere - is that we write scripts. These have a part for the author, but parts for others, too, and the writer tries to recruit actors for the drama. The "play" itself has an agenda, like feelgood or downer films: the conclusion is that the principal is right, attractive etc. But he or she must be seen as such by others, without any essential change in the star of the show (because change is death). And so the play is good for an indefinite number of performances, like The Mousetrap, so long as the audience keeps the secret.

All the plays have at their core the principle that inner change must not be allowed to happen. The useless offerings pile up at the altar as, one after another, the bit players come in and perform their parts, some of them ending themslves discomfited, wounded. Over the past few months we've read how Jones has taken up with an old musician she call the RS (Rock Star) and once she's got him to declare his love and admit his vulnerabilities, she's rejecting him in various ways, including taking up with another person she had a crush on when she was young. It's compelling reading, but the reason why that is so for us - for me - is worrying.

Berne says, spot the script and ruin the punchline. Don't act Part B to Part A. Break the pattern. It needs to be more than that, of course. That will save you, the secondary actor, from an emotional mugging, but the scriptwriter still needs what we all need and should have had from the start: unqualified love.

Not love flavoured with pity - Jones wrote some time ago about having no cash and was highly embarrassed when loads of readers sent in bits of money from their own much more constrained budgets. Not love based on shared weaknesses, or common elements of unfortunate past life histories. That's why it's so hard to be a therapist - so many traps to fall into.

The hope is that if you don't play along, you make little breaks in the shell that the occupant can widen and climb through. The children that I see come to us very anxious, angry, disruptive and full of defiance and resentment. We try (and don't always succeed, because we're human) not to react to them as other people have before; to accept them while addressing their toxic behaviour patterns; and gradually, most calm down a bit and begin to respond. It doesn't happen all in one go, and there are backward as well as forward steps; but you can't give up. Essentially, though we have to follow the godawful National Curriculum and its bureaucratic assessment and recording procedures, this isn't about education in the academic sense; it's about an opportunity to heal.

And no, I'm not saint or angel. It's damn tiring and I'm not sure how much more of it I can do. Remember that as in psychology, many working in special needs education came to it as catchers in the rye who first needed saving themselves. You have to be careful not to work off your own neuroses onto others - and who is completely free?

We can't directly help Liz Jones. The audience is not a personal friend. But we can perpetuate her difficulties, by rewarding this weekly display. I choose not to be complicit any longer; I still get the paper, but I'm not reading the column. I hope someone throws her a lifebuoy, and that she chooses to reach out for it.

Same for you, same for me. Go save your life.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

5:95

An anecdote I heard years ago concerned prisoners of war captured by the Chinese in Korea.

When a new contingent was caught, the men were taken to an initial holding facility, officers not segregated but mixed with other ranks. Then they were all carefully watched, to see who showed any signs of initiative.

Only 5 per cent demonstrated get-up-and-go; these were put into small, heavily guarded units. The rest went into large, lightly patrolled POW camps.

A small minority starts everything, and if it's tightly co-ordinated, runs everything, for good or ill. So the challenge is how give rein to the good and restrain the bad - and who is going to do this?

Many of the 5 don't understand the 95. Some, judging by their own lights, fear competition and oppress people who generally wouldn't dream of challenging them anyway. For the same reason others set up schemes, imagining that the majority can't wait to take advantage of new opportunities, and then become irritated:"Why don't they get up off their backsides and do x?" Still others understand that there is a divide, and simply despise the 95 for not being like themselves.

We hope that someone among the five per cent will lead, yet understand and value the majority. We look for someone with heart.

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Friday, September 13, 2013

Frogs In Space

Pic: Yahoo News

Poor old frog. But Classic fm asked for frog-themed titles of science fiction movies and one wit suggested "I, Ribbit".*

*For non-fans of SF: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(film)

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Monday, September 09, 2013

Damascus gas attack - "children were killed earlier by jihadists"

Syria: it's alleged that the children dying of gas poisoning in Damascus were in fact Alawites kidnapped by the jihadists - and that they were killed before the 21st August event.

(htp: Tap blog)

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Sunday, September 08, 2013

Islamic radicalisation - a straw in the wind

Several years ago I spotted a slogan painted on the door of a box of a building on Highgate Road: "KILL DA JEWS". The "da" was clever, designed to appeal to the would-be South Central LA homeboys. It was soon painted over, of course, but.

I used to work with a project not far from there, that got 15-year-olds off the streets who'd been out of school for some time. We gave them basic maths and English, and practical work in the form of carpentry and joinery (they made some great doll's houses). The idea was to settle them and get them ready for sixth form college so they could get some qualifications and vocational training. It worked well, and still does.

One boy was a very genial lad who wasn't that bright but corrected my bad work when I tried to clean the project's fish tank and filter. He was hooked on cannabis, "bud" or "Bu-ddha" as he would put it. He knew he wasn't going to get anywhere till he kicked it, but giving up was hard. He needed a core, something to surrender to, just as with the twelve-step program. In his case, he decided to get religion.

So he began his daily discipline through Islam, breaking off from study or play to pray at the right intervals. To help him with his meditations, he had an unlabeled recording he'd got from somewhere and we found him a portable player. It was devotional Islamic song and the voice was exquisite, a calm, pure tenor. I listened with him and our minds went into a blue space.

Maybe five or ten minutes after the start, another voice joined in, preaching hatred for the Zionists. The speaker, in his twenties by the sound of it, also had a pleasant voice, and timed the phrases to blend with the hypnotic beauty of the chant. On and on he went.

I was horrified. This decent lad, young, not academic, impressionable, in need of guidance and leadership, was being groomed, I thought. I spoke to the other staff, and they pooh-poohed it - he was such a good-hearted kid that we couldn't imagine him doing any harm to anyone; and they were probably right.

But the intention of whoever had burned that CD was clear. And with a cleverer adolescent, ambitious to get some adult status and respect, it would work, given time. There are many young people without jobs, money or much to do, but they can have coffee at each others' houses, swap recordings, surf the Net. It'll start from where they are, in a teen culture of ghetto-speak and weed, then it'll become more serious and focused, bending the twig as it grows. It's not Hitler's health and exercise bands any more, or the uniformed rallies; it's bedroom fantasyland gradually taking on reality.

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Syria update

Looks as though the West, through the Saudis, is trying to buy off the Russians to clear the ground for an attack on Syria:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html

(htp: Tap blog)

But in that case, why bother?

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Friday, September 06, 2013

Syria: yet another pipeline, yet another enemy

David Malone looks at Qatar's interest in extending the Arab Pipeline (not to be confused with the TransArabian Pipeline) through Syria into Turkey.

What a curse oil and gas have been. US, Israel, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood vs.  other Islamic sects and political parties... how could anyone keep on his feet in a boat everyone is rocking?

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US complicity in Syrian chemical attack?

"Yossef Bodansky [...] was, for more than a decade, the Director of the US House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare," says the bio on OilPrice.com. His 28 August article states that US intelligence was involved in meetings with Syrian opposition forces before the 21 August chemical weapon detonation that has been blamed on the Syrian government.

"Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and representatives of Qatari, Turkish, and US Intelligence [“Mukhabarat Amriki”] took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors. Very senior opposition commanders who had arrived from Istanbul briefed the regional commanders of an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development” which would, in turn, lead to a US-led bombing of Syria."

The link to the OilPrice.com article comes via the August Corbett Report video, republished on The Tap blog.

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Thursday, September 05, 2013

Belief in experience

I’m not a close follower of Santayana’s philosophy, not making much use of his ideas on modes of being for example. Yet I greatly admire his wisdom, his elegant insights into the human situation.

Take this quote for example:-

Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence : it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science.

This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.

For me, a key phrase here is not having the courage to believe in experience. Surely it does require courage to believe in experience – often considerable courage.

What Santayana does so extraordinarily well is draw our attention to it without the need to illustrate his meaning. He writes as if he is fully aware that there will be those who know just what he means and those who don’t. He isn’t writing for the latter group.

Maybe we experience told him there was no point and he had the courage to write on that basis. After all, the courage to believe in experience isn’t something easily instilled in others merely by words. Santayana knew he wasn’t likely to stiffen the rational backbone of anyone lacking this most necessary brand of intellectual courage.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood.

Indeed - they still are.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Decision time for America - and the free world

“By 930, most arable land had been claimed and the Althing, a legislative and judiciary parliament, was initiated to regulate the Icelandic Commonwealth [...] The Commonwealth lasted until the 13th century, when the political system devised by the original settlers proved unable to cope with the increasing power of Icelandic chieftains.” - Wikipedia on Iceland

And the implication for the USA?
Say 930 = around 1910, 13th century = 21st century.
Karl Denninger fulminates on the illegality of mortgage transfers into those bundled swindle-packages - and the banks could still win anyway. Jesse reflects on Frank Church's warning from 1975 that the nation could head into a spy-ridden society, and it has; and John Kerry says war can now be declared without Congressional approval, though that is still being sought.
You will have the rule of law, or the rule of persons. You will be citizens, or subjects. You will be safeguarded by a Constitution, or ravaged by untrammeled power.

This is the three-century decision point.

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Wednesday, September 04, 2013

FACT: dragons really do exist

"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament."
 
 
In mythology, there are dragons or wyrms, but also two-legged or legless, poisonous or fiery wyverns, or lindworms. I have seen long ago but cannot now find on the Internet an engraving, possibly sixteenth century, of one of the latter, destroying whole villages with its fiery breath. I wondered then how someone could dare invent something on that scale, so disprovable.
 
And then on St Valentine's Day 2013 (or 15th February, depending on the time zone you were in at the time), one visited Chelyabinsk.
 
This time the evidence was direct and undeniable, not merely reconstructed with an artist's imagination. According to James Higham, Russians commonly drive with dashcams because of the risk of fake, compensation-seeking "accidents" like this. And so at last we got the proof, for the world to see.
 
Down it flew, a long, fiery shape with a snake-like body and no legs, its deafening roar sufficient to blow in windows and doors and knock down walls, the flames of its breath bright enough to cast shadows. Had it not landed in an ice-covered lake, but hit solid ground, the destruction would have been enormous, as it had been a century ago in Tunguska.
 
Here be dragons.
 








Images taken from this video compilation, and this.
 
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Bumbleberries

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blackberry_fruits10.jpg

That's what we heard a little girl call blackberries, or brambleberries, growing wild by the Wye at Tintern. Possibly it was a confusion with bumblebees, but we insist this goes into the dictionary.

Or be used as the proprietary name for a mobile phone for the elderly.

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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Cities - greener and safer than the countryside?

We tend to think of cities as dirty and dangerous, but both these perceptions may need qualification.

In a book published earlier this year, William Meyers argues that although high-density population areas consume a great deal of energy, per capita energy consumption is higher in extra-urban areas, and drops as population density rises.

He accepts that cities pollute, but "the world’s worst air pollution anywhere is in rural areas. It’s in rural areas in the third world, and it’s indoor air pollution. It’s because rural areas depend upon smoky biomass fuels, so you get higher levels of that kind of pollution indoors in rural areas. You breathe it in very directly. It’s the biggest contribution to air pollution doses for people, but it’s not visible." Rural pollution from burning wood and coal was a major contributor to the huge smog in the region around Beijing in January.

Similarly, a 2005 paper by Brian Christens and Paul W. Speer (pdf) suggests the incidence of violent crime is negatively correlated with population density. Their study, centred on Nashville, Tennessee, concluded that not only was it a factor, but "this environmental characteristic – population density – predicted more of the variance in violent crime than the majority of the other population  characteristics in the model."

There are other considerations that may affect one's choice of where to live, such as vulnerability to disruption of services; but ceteris paribus, it seems city living could be the beneficial model for the future. 

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Hashish hoo-ha hots up

And now Lee Child adds his weight to the cannabis legalisation lobby:

‘I’ve been smoking weed for 44 years, five nights a week,’ the author confessed. ‘I’m the poster boy to prove it doesn’t do you much harm.'

Yes, he is a successful writer, with compelling powers of description. I've read a number of his novels and the best for me was 61 Hours, set in the bitterness of a South Dakota winter. The cold and snow are major characters in the book, realized with extraordinary precision. I recall how at one point "spicules" of ice are blowing into Reacher's face and when he enters a house and warms up his visage is all bloody.

But smoking weed doesn't make you a great author, any more than hurling bags of empty whisky bottles into Sepulveda Canyon turns you into Scott Fitzgerald, or poking your fingers up your wife's nose and half-throttling her makes you a millionaire art patron.


Also, it's a bit chicken and egg, but Child's glittering prose covers a cold, cold underneath. Even as you read his work spellbound, you are aware of the utter bleakness, darkness and hopelessness at its core. He says he writes for angry people, and his first book was composed in spitting fury against those who sacked him from Granada TV. Now whether it's that type that turns to "bud", or the causal relationship is the other way round, I don't know. It's well-known that alcohol can induce temporary or longer-lasting changes in character, and maybe the cannabis has firmed up Child's laser-sharp vision and starved heart. All I know is that his books are a habit I have to break, a thought that came to me before he made his drug revelation.

Like the one about climate change, the drugs debate is so polarised that it's more like rival gangs of football hooligans howling at each other. And it misses the real issue, which is how things get decided.

Popularity is one factor, hence the watershed release from the law's clutches of Keith Richard and Mick Jagger in 1967. The general millenarian mood among the young at that time was such that the Beatles felt they had to disassociate themselves from it the following year with their song "Revolution". Their influence could so easily have been used to spark a full-on revolt; I remember feeling disappointed, betrayed. Now, I feel thank goodness. They could have been the Pied Pipers for a suicidal anti-establishment Children's Crusade.

The bigger factor is power cliques. I think it's uncontroversial to say that we have a sham democracy and events are determined by a very small minority, the rest of us clucking away impotently. Otherwise, how do you explain the way our MPs feather their own nests while imposing austerity on the masses and robbing savers and pensioners blind with inflation and low interest rates?


Similarly, the elite who developed a drugs habit in the Sixties and Seventies have social and financial safety nets that aren't available to the poor, and Peter Hitchens is right to point out that they are shaping public policy simply to make it more comfortable for themselves, so that they don't have to put "Watch Out - There's A Fuzz About!" stickers on their study doors.

Like alcohol, marijuana is certainly pernicious for some, and perhaps not for others. There's also the question of how socially acceptable drugs are socially controlled. Lawrence Durrell's "Bitter Lemons" recounts how the old men would smoke dope under the Tree of Idleness in Kyrenia - but this was not for the young and the working population to do all day. And Carlos Castaneda's books about drug initiation in Mexico are cast in the mode of psychic pilgrimage and exploration, not daily casual use.

But to come back to the main point, it's not what I think that matters, or what you think; it's what they think, the people who currently run politics and the media - and business, doubtless with a grinning Richard Branson hopping impatiently from foot to foot to get started on the marketing campaign for Virgin Spliffs or whatever. The powers-that-be have overseen an explosion in gambling and loansharking, they've progressively loosened the leash on the beast alcohol since the 1960s, and legally available "soft" drugs are a-coming, like it or not, good thing or not. The news stories and celeb interjections are just part of the softening-up process.

As ever, the real drivers in the "debate" are power and money, and they'll tell you you're exercising your freedom as you bind yet another chain around yourself.

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Totnes: Cats Cafe


"I'll bring your coffee and then you can meet the staff," said the proprietress to my wife. There are six of them: a big black tom who lives under the counter, a woolly ginger who spend most of his time stretched full-length on his favourite chair, a b&w with a tail shortened by mishap (yet still named Felix), Glee the torty, a pretty grey-and-white affair called Lilac and Rolo, a bluish tabby whose favourite game is Scrabble "(especially in the litter tray)", as the profile scrapbook reveals.

Out came the cat treats for the customers to offer, and up came the staff, all cupboard love. This is when I entered the café, via the door-release airlock that seals in the workers until home time. Mango the ginger hardly stirred as I stroked his head; Lilac and Glee competed for the cat biscuits in the plastic containers we held.

Another lady sat next to my wife and we compared the cats we had owned, and how long they had lived; she now had five of them. She was a little disappointed at the obviously ulterior motives of the ménage here, but as I explained, they didn't know us from Adam.

I sipped my tea and glanced through the second book, full of cuttings about the therapeutic benefits of cats. We are such a valetudinarian lot these days, are we not; even sex is to be performed for the sake of your health. I simply like cats - and dogs, and so on.

But as the posters in the window informed passers-by, cats' cafes started in Japan for high-rise dwellers who couldn't keep pets. Cat lovers, the Japanese: Hello Kitty started there, and Maneki-neko, the lucky waving cat (I have one myself). I asked the owner how she had selected her team. She said she'd previously run a hotel-cum-cats' rescue and so had had the opportunity to assess their temperaments.

Children can't come in - because of insurance ("the White Man's Burden", as the Goon Show called it). Some visitors have asked if the café is for bringing their own cats; that would be something to see: even in a Pupil Referral Unit, group dynamics change radically whenever someone joins or leaves. The experience of a bring-your-own-cat playgroup would certainly be educational. Perhaps the café could charge corkage (or Korky-age, for Dandy readers).

We cleaned ourselves with the alcohol hand sanitizers and left, but we'll be back.

http://www.totnescatscafe.org.uk/

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