Cast a cold eye, on life, on death

Ben Bulben dominates Drumcliff churchyard where Yeats is buried

To Sligo a couple of weeks ago, and WB Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff churchyard.  Church of Ireland, the church of the protestant ascendancy.  His great-grandfather had been rector.

A lot could be said about Yeats, some good, some not. I recommend BBC's In Our Time, on Yeats and Irish politics. [1] He was proud of his protestant heritage. As a member of the newly created Irish Senate in 1925 he made his We are no petty people speech. “We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.”

I lean on Yeats's headstone

Yeats penned his epitaph a year before he died:

    Under bare Ben Bulben's head
    In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
    An ancestor was rector there
    Long years ago, a church stands near,
    By the road an ancient cross.
    No marble, no conventional phrase;
    On limestone quarried near the spot
    By his command these words are cut:
        Cast a cold eye
        On life, on death.
        Horseman, pass by!

And here's Eileen at the Yeats statue in Sligo town. His clothes are covered in his poems.

 Soon:  ...   I read The Second Coming.

[1] If you want to download the episode, do it from this page. Search for “Yeats”

A day I hoped to see but never thought I would

A significant day ... Coulson, Brooks and 6 others charged with phone-hacking. Two years prison is a possibility.  Rebekah Brooks was courted by a Blair, Brown and Cameron. All were desperate for Murdoch’s backing.  It's getting close to Cameron now!  He made Coulson the Tories' director of communications, six months after being News of the World editor, and after one of his reporters was already jailed for phone hacking.

We need to remind ourselves this story is more than just good knockabout fun.  Two years ago, The Guardian reported that MPs had backed down from summoning News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks to testify to a parliamentary committee after being warned their own personal lives would be investigated.  The issue was the same then as now: illegal phone hacking.

So Murdoch was beyond the reach of politicians.

Thank goodness for The Guardian then!

A beetle and a deformed tomato

 

A shield beetle has caused this New Zealand tomato to become deformed.  

My uneducated guess is that its full name is the Australasian green shield bug which according to a website devoted to New Zealand arthropods is native and widespread in North Island, where Albert took this photo in February.

In southern Britain, the Southern Green Shieldbug attacks various food plants including tomato. It arrived there in 2003 (not sure about Ireland). Native to Africa, but frequently imported in food produce.

Southern Green Shieldbug

I think the two bugs are one and same species, and it's the same bug known in the USA as a Southern Green Stink Bug.  Latin names aren’t as helpful as they should be because the same bug seems to have at least three different ones.  Can't be sure, and I've given up researching, don't actually know why I've even gone this far!  I wonder if this beetle has been spread around the world by human trade? That's something that would be worth knowing ...

Wikipedia

Austerity widens inequality - latest

Income of Ireland's poorest households fell between 2009 and 2010 by over 18% in a single year, while the income of the richest rose by 4%. This is the fruits of the Irish government’s austerity programme according to Social Justice Ireland, a Catholic think tank.

They have issued a policy briefing today; though it doesn't seem to be available yet on their website.  This news was on today’s Morning Ireland programme.  (Link includes an audio clip also a video.)

I think we can be confident that austerity programmes have this effect everywhere.

TUC After Austerity conference

Next. In this 8-miunte video from The Guardian, the American economist Dean Baker and the TUC's Nicola Smith discuss why the UK's economic gains of the past 30 years have gone disproportionately to the wealthiest section of society. They weigh up the arguments for tax credits, capping executive pay, and increasing the minimum wage. Interviewed by Tom Clark at the TUC's After Austerity conference.

Irish inequality deepened spectacularly in 2010

Next, one from the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO). Probably covering the same ground as the Social Justice Ireland briefing paper, the CSO found that inequality deepened in Ireland spectacularly in 2010. The likelihood is that this worsened in 2011 and will again this year. The Survey in Income and Living Conditions data for 2010, published in late March 2012, showed a devastating disparity in the impact of austerity.  The survey measured impact on people in the lowest income decile (the 10% of households earning least) and the richest decile (the richest 10% of households).

The report states: “Those in the lowest income decile experienced a decrease in equivalised disposable income of more than 26%, while those in the highest income decile experienced an increase in income of more than 8%.” (Equivalised income is derived for weightings, whereby one adult in a household is rated at 1.0, other adults 0.7 each; children 0.5 each.)

Foregoing extract from the CSO report courtesy of Vincent Browne writing in The Irish Times on April 4th, under the heading “Fiscal treaty will increase gap between rich and poor”.  Through the EU, he argues, Ireland has bought into a system of inflicting the costs of austerity on to society's poorer sectors.

I dispute irregular verbs with William Cobbett

John McWhorter

Some surprises in a New York Times piece on English usage.  John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University, says that what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion. 

First surprise.  He makes a fuss about using they in the singular as in Tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4.  Whilst he concedes that Shakespeare and Thackeray both did this, he seems to think it's unfashionable now. Huh? How else would you tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4?  Unless you used the ghastly he/she.

2nd surprise.  Apparently, in the 19th century it was the fashion to say a street was well-lighted: lit was considered vulgar.  And to this day it's the New York Times house style to use well-lighted. Reprehensible!  I know irregular verb forms have a depressing habit of dying out; but all right-thinking people ought to mount a vigorous rearguard action in their defence.

William Cobbett 1763-1835

It seems I would have had a fierce opponent in William Cobbett. In his 1818 A Grammar of the English Language (a series of letters to his 14 year old son) Cobbett denounced the past tense forms awoke, blew, built, burst, clung, dealt, dug, drew, froze, grew, hung, meant, spat, stung, swept, swam, threw and wove. The well-spoken person, Cobbett instructed, swimmed yesterday and builded a house last year.

Now I've got this far, it's dawned upon me that I shouldn’t really have been so surprised by Cobbett’s preference for builded over built. Did not William Blake ask if Jerusalem was builded here among these dark satanic mills? I had always imagined that was merely dictated by the meter. And then I can call to mind a much earlier instance, from the 1611 King James Bible, where Cain builded him a city [1]. So these irregular verb forms have been dying out longer than I thought. Hmm.

That doesn't make it right however, and I shall persist in my campaign to retain them.

Another nugget from John McWhorter (unconnected with the foregoing). He gives an example from Charles Dickens to demonstrate “the magnificent evanescence of what is considered sophisticated”. In David Copperfield, Aunt Betsey (a distinctly proper lady) says “Mr. Dick is his name here, and everywhere else, now – if he ever went anywhere else, which he don’t.”

Thanks to Tom for drawing this article to my attention.

John McWhorter’s latest book is What Language Is, What It Isn’t and What It Could Be.

[1] Genesis 4:17

Lloyd George: 500 men chosen from the unemployed

House of Lords reform in the news. 70 Tory MP’s to rebel and refuse to support the Bill so dear to Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems; and much speculation that the coalition government will break up.

Lloyd George in 1908 the year before
he made two cracking speeches

During these past few months, whenever the House of Lords is mentioned, you can be sure to find Lloyd George describing it as a body of 500 men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed.

For example, Nick Clegg writing a comment piece in the London Independent on 21st June:

Lloyd George once described the House of Lords as being "a body of 500 men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed". In the years since he made that remark all that has really changed is the number – we are now pushing nearly 1,000 peers who get £300 tax-free a day just for turning up, more than half from the ranks of retired or failed politicians. For those retired MPs in the Lords, this amounts to a £1m top-up to their pensions.

A catchy phrase "chosen at random from amongst the unemployed", so what did Lloyd George actually say and when did he say it?   

It's in a speech he gave in Newcastle on 9 October 1909, in the course of the controversy over that year's People’s Budget.  The House of Lords had vetoed it because of a modest land tax to fund pensions for workers.  Lloyd George argued that the House of Lords had no right to the veto since it was an established constitutional principle that the House of Commons had the final say on budgets.  And he challenged the Lords thus:

Let them realise what they are doing. They are forcing a revolution, and they will get it. The Lords may decree a revolution, but the people will direct it. If they begin, issues will be raised that they little dream of. Questions will be asked which are now whispered in humble voices, and answers will be demanded then with authority. The question will be asked whether five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, should override the judgment, the deliberate judgment, of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country.

This is good stuff. There's more. And take note, this a Chancellor of the Exchequer speaking. 

That is one question. Another will be, Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite? Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth? Who is it who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labour to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when, at the end of his days, he claims at the hands of the community he served a poor pension of eightpence a day, he can only get it through a revolution, and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbour receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose finger inscribed it? These are the questions that will be asked.

Read the Newcastle speech in full.

Also worth reading is his Limehouse speech given a couple of months earlier. I remember the name from school history lessons. Write an essay on the reforms of the 1906 Liberal Government. 10 points to include, no 7, the Limehouse speech.  Limehouse, I know now from Wikipedia, but I probably didn't know then, was one of the poorest areas of the East End of London.

Higgs discovery a disappointment

So they’ve discovered the Higgs boson.  When I heard the news from Switzerland last Wednesday my initial reaction was a pang of disappointment.  Much more exciting had they failed to find it; or had they found conclusive data meaning of necessity it can't exist. 

By the way read no further if you want an explanation of what the Higgs boson actually is, because I can't tell you. The best is probably this video by Ian Sample in The Guardian.

But insofar as I do understand, the question at issue is: what is matter and why is it heavy.  Why in other words is the universe the way it is, and why are we here. And the answer, for several decades, has been the Standard Model of physics.  To make the Standard Model true, there must be a Higgs field.  So finding it, is a very significant step in confirming that the Standard Model is correct.

This is disappointing for two reasons. Scientific revolutions come about from unexpected results not from expected ones, as Stephen Hawking says in this BBC interview.

Moreover the Standard Model is ugly and unsatisfactory. It specifies a menagerie of particles which seem to defy any rime or reason, it doesn't attempt to explain gravity, and can't explain dark energy or dark matter; which by my reckoning leaves out 98% of the universe.

Here’s an article in the New Yorker Is the Higgs Boson a Disappointment?

I don't doubt that if the discovery of the Higgs field is confirmed (and I haven't seen anyone suggest it won't be) this is a crowning achievement of modern physics and a triumphal moment for science.  But still and all ….

One last point: the image I've used is highly inappropriate as it implies “god particle”.  An annoying expression which even Ian Sample uses and he shouldn’t.