Times Past

The news has mention of two men aged 111, both born on 29 March 1908 one Scots and one English, Robert Weighton who is on the 1911 Census.

The information from the earlier records has his maternal grandfather, John Pitts, being born in 1849 with his father, Robert's great grandfather born in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo.

John was a cloth weaver in Yorkshire from a local family. The men of this trade were known to be politically active, especially in Yorkshire.

If only the family down the generations had been able to keep diaries and they had survived.

History As Pictures

     Europe Begins 1871 Kaiser Wilhelm I
        

      Europe Ends Kaiser Angela The Last

Sound Effects

This post, I suspect, will be disliked by some and others may not agree with my position on issues that for many are central to modern culture and the living of life. Also, it is returning to a subject that has been dealt with before.

But looking at a blog I saw an item where the writer was asking for advice on how to insulate his home because he did not want to affect the neighbours given that his listening,  music, was at levels going up to 120 decibels.

That is a lot of big, heavy sound for a head to take. The obvious issue is the hearing system but there is more to it than that. Like very many who want big sound they do not seem to register that the acoustic and frequency etc. impacts on the neural system.

The first of my posts that dealt with this was on Friday, 9 July 2010 titled "The Return Of The Mad Tankies", see here which takes a broad look at the matter. Then on Wednesday, 16 March 2011 titled "Cox And Box", see here goes into the science of hearing and the neural aspect. Also, there is on Monday, 13 May 2013 titled "The Rest Is Noise", see here which is short and to the point.

Time wears on and the longer you go the more you need your hearing and mind in order.

Decisions Decisions

Time for a poem on Europe.

There was a PM called May,

Whose mind changed day by day.

On one day a must,

The next became dust,

She was a lady who couldn't say nay.

How many hours of agonised thinking created this? Well, to be honest, about two minutes. The form is called a limerick. Limerick is best known as a former railway junction in Ireland.

Long ago trains first had to go past it to get into it. Sadly, there is little sign of the government going in any direction, right or wrong, that will take them anywhere.

Another Loss

From time to time there is an obituary which triggers memories of the past. You never quite know who might in the lists and how far the reports will tell you about how and what they did or why. There are occasions when there is the "I was there" factor, especially in sports when in the crowd. Sometimes there is something more serious.

Mary Warnock is a a person that I recall in relation to her major report on Special Education for children in 1978. She also was involved in other reports, notably on ethics, as well as having a heavy academic schedule. She could cut bad argument to ribbons in the nicest possible way. The link is to The Guardian obituary.

After the two major reorganisations of the early 1970's, Local Government and Health, the new authorities were faced with stringent central government financial restrictions as well as having to deal with all the serious problems left behind by the former ones. In many parts of the country for years small entities, often inefficient and limited in vision.

In the past had been that some local authorities and the local medical services saw themselves almost on different planets with the others as intruding aliens. Across the country there were local authorities and health authorities who failed to work together in services for the handicapped and disabled.

But there was one place, along with some others, which was taking effective action. It was the Inner London Education Authority, the ILEA, which existed from 1965 to 1990. The Warnock Report did not invent joint action and thinking, or for that matter statements, some places already had them in one form or another.

See this article from 2008 again in the Guardian giving a short summary of the work it did. For special education it was allied to and worked with some regional committees for this with an interchange of ideas and experience. It was needed, because things were going to have to change, politics and admin' or no politics and admin.

By the 1960's research, developments in medical practice over a wide field had meant many born with severe problems were now surviving, not for days or weeks, but for years and decades. Also, the 1944 Education Act was quite clear. Any child over five would be educated, how etc. was a matter for the local authorities.

For those with problems this came to mean at first special schools to which the children would be transported and serving a wide area. It was expensive but had to be done in a world of large classes in ordinary schools, in old buildings and limited facilities. But by the 1970's the drive to build new schools, expansion of teacher training etc. had changed this.

At the same time the rate of births dropped meaning many schools now having space to spare. The parents of the handicapped had become more organised and had come to dislike the long journeys, long hours etc. involved in special schools some of which served very wide areas. Those who in effect lost their children to residential schools would argue that the cost to the authority could be spent in other ways.

If the local school could be provided with the staff, teaching and non teaching facilities, if only on a small scale the handicapped could be taught there and with ordinary children. They in turn would become used to the handicapped who would no longer live in another separate world.

Forty years on from this we are again living in another world. Only we seem less  likely to come up with answers.

Brushing Up Shakespeare

Long ago when going to a play written by William Shakespeare, you would expect to see a more or less straight performance going literally by the book. As Stratford on Avon was a family town for some time, this meant the Memorial Theatre.

In the world of today this is strictly no go. Performances, notably in London, have to "mean" something else and there is a debate about what who where and how. The SJW's have stormed the stage and what you see is what you are now supposed to believe in terms of 21st Century ideology.

Which presents a problem, since when WS departed to the great dressing room in the sky in 1616 is a long time. This makes him history and that means what we are told was history. In the 21st Century we prefer to skip the detail and the facts for a collection of beliefs and theories of people who have little awareness of the realities of the early 20th Century let alone the 16th.

When you do look at the detail it is interesting on its own account, let alone any insights into the period. On 25 October 2011 I did a long post dealing with the actual complex of family and connections of WS titled "Shakespeare Family And Friends".

A follow up long post was on 15 February 2015 "More On Tudor Times" because the name Cumberbatch in a 15th Century document along with Shakespeare meant an extension of the discussion of who really was who for WS.

On 23 April 2016 a short item "Shakespeare In Brief And At Length" deals with his place in society at that time. There are a handful of others but they do not have anything to add.

Back a long time was  that at the end of one play although one of the first out I was still beaten to the bar of the The Dirty Duck (aka The Black Swan), by Richard Burton. We had a chat about the Cefneithin Rugby Club.

Are We In The Money?

Ever since money was invented and so the ability to move wealth readily from one place to another in various forms of acceptable goods, tokens or titles to goods or tokens the question of who should control this and how has been central to rulers and the ruled.

Some forms are more moveable than others. They might be precious metals or stones or they might be edible domestic animals which have other by-products. In primitive societies much conflict arises from raiding between groups as well as title to grazing lands.

For someone who grew up during the great age of the cowboy film much of the global financial system is explicable in terms of the Wild West of the USA. These bear a strong similarity to activity of earlier centuries.

Many of the riders and herders were the direct descendants from the medieval cattle thieves and raiders of the Atlantic Isles. We might recall that in the USA indigenous arable peoples lost out but later the ranchers lost out to the farmers.

As for our modern "capital" expressed in terms of modern  currencies and financial products they have become not just portable but moveable in vast amounts in a digital instant. A trader who has lunched too well can cause a financial hiccup or crisis at the tap of a key or a touch on the screen.

There are many reasons for capital to move. Some are the basic ones of investing in projects or activity in other states in an open and fully legal way. Others might be between or involving governments with a political purpose embedded.

Increasingly, there are very large sums moving arising from criminal sources, tax evasion and avoidance. More worrying are the surges of capital movement arising from the instability or collapse of either political systems or financial systems in one state to another reckoned to be more stable or at least friendly to those moving the money.

The term Lethal Liabilities is used about the human cost of debt and capital flight.  It is concise and its main reference is to The Third World contending that the ability to move wealth easily and at will has allowed extractive and predatory elites to grow very rich at the expense of leaving debts to the very poor.

What the various debates in the USA, Europe and the UK are about in relation to internal financial troubles have at their heart is that the same is happening in their own countries. It is not just one state preying on another, it is the financial sectors extracting capital internally to move elsewhere.

That this is now intermingled with high leverages and substantial speculation creates huge risks. Only it is not the movers and holders of the digital money who will lose it is the ordinary people doing ordinary work.

This is happening and it is getting worse by the year. When the next "Black Swan" event occurs we could all be in for a nasty financial shock.