Restart 20240317 some projects am developing, having interesting interconnects

AI language model based on African corpuses, in view of negative biases in current AI models such as ChatGPT

Think Fahreheit 451, 1984, Brave New World and The Lord of the World - and many other dystopian pointers to the current situation; call me paranoid, but I think it's time for SamizData: a repository of good books, films, educational materials, art, and other treasures safe from cancellation, memory-holing, ideological bowdlerisation, shadow-banning and the panoply of fifth-gen warfare particularly aimed at the most vulnerable: the young, ignorant, badly-schooled or disadvantaged. It can be done simply with free open-source software that is mature and stable and widely used by large organisations. Satrting with a group of a few like-minded individuals who could host an instance of Owncloud hosting their own local collections, we could quickly move to federating servers, pooling collections, duplicating collections for backup, etc.

Publish and be blessed

Whatever the reasons for the block that has prevented me for a long time from publishing here - or elsewhere for that matter - it feels like time to start again.

The reasons for stopping and restarting are both mysterious: if it was self-doubt, fear of not being read or - if read - being misunderstood and misquoted, depression, anxiety, none of these have changed. If anything, the wanton way Pope Francis is being interpreted, and his apparent PR blunders would tempt me to further caution and silence.

Perhaps the benign interpretation of the Pope's baffling policy - or absence thereof - is a twist on the hackneyed phrase "publish and be damned"; for there may be a blessing in "just being yourself" and having a healthy disregard for what the hack pack will do with your words: no matter how shrewdly crafted your words, there will always be an abundance of knaves who twist your words to make a trap for fools (pace Kipling) and a vast ready audience of fools.

Perhaps the blessing in not being too careful about expression is that the truth will always transpire no matter how it is kacked: in the process it becomes possible to discern which members of the pack are trustworthy and led by honest principles; a fool remains a fool no matter how much we bend over backwards to help him, so why waste our own resources beyond a reasonable caution and a quick prayer for all those who, like the dwarves in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle, will not see the feast so generously laid before them?

Death often leads to a flow of inspiration, and yesterday my friend Stratford Caldecott died. More than a friend, he has had a really fatherly role over the thirteen years since we met at a time of huge upheaval in my life. In so many ways I would be far worse off today without his inspired, generous but discreet support.



[This post is in development: I will add to it as inspiration comes.]

Orc work in Woldingham: destruction of beech trees behind my cabin

In his poem Binsey Poplars, Hopkins mourns the thoughtless destruction of loved trees:

My aspens dear...
...

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve or hew - 

Hack and rack the growing green!

Since country is so tender

To touch, her being só slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her, ...

Ronald Tolkien described the wanton felling of trees as "orc work" and near the end of The Lord of the Rings, the destruction of the trees of the Shire marred Frodo's return, overclouding it with depression and horror and an enduring empoverishment of his world.

Daniel Nichols expresses the same sentiment in his Caelum et Terra blog: Mourning the marring

And I too have my beautiful beech trees to mourn (yes, Daniel, even the same type of tree) and such wonderful tall flawless ones at that: felled by a neighbour just behind my cabin for a construction project which they were not even in the way of. My cabin had until now been a peaceful retreat at times essential to maintaining my sanity.

Even though the sound of power saws and heavy machinery will eventually go, once they have given fruit to a new ugly commercial extension, this cabin will never feel the same: even as I sleep, I can feel the absence of those trees, and it will take a long time for my anger at the orcs with their brash machines to fade. It is harder still to describe and cope with my anger against those who ordered the quite unnecessary slaughter.

Nature studies and kinds of reverence

"...there is a sense in which the development of Baconian or Cartesian science led us to view the world reductively, to murder by dissection, and so to give priority to death over life." Stratford Caldecott The Radiance of Being, p58 

As a boy, urged by teachers to read Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, I was irritated by the title. Even allowing for my excessive literal-mindedness, it seemed to imply something more sinister than a casual joke.

On attempting to follow my teachers' advice, the relentless flippant jocularity I found only confirmed the initial suspicion that there was a lack of reverence in Durrrell's approach. This on the one hand seemed to make no essential distinction between the funniness of humans and that of animals, while on the other - in books such as The Bafut Beagles - it made arbitrary distinctions between this knowing ironic author and those comical foreigners or natives and their quaint ways. There is an edge in Durrell wich betrays not kindly irony but rather an assumed superiority and irreverence.

The apparent exclusion of seriousness - an essential aspect of reverence - the very relentless and indiscriminate quality of his humour also seems to betray a denial of some underlying fear: the emptiness gaping beneath the smile and bonhommie of the bluff individual, leading to the peculiar repulsion that such people induce at least in me.

What transpired in his books is that Durrell was a naturalist of the old school, an adventurous collector, dissector, classifier and analyzer. A contrasting style is fashionable now: David Attenborough in his nature documentaries observes with a kind of reverence supported by exquisite production values, but marred by a distinct though no less cloying ideology.

Recently I came across a beautifully produced Dorling Kindersley book on nature study which I snapped up, as something likely to inspire reverence and wonder in my children. Later, looking through it, the emphasis on collecting, killing, bottling and analyzing left me chilled; these  discoveries led to second thoughts about letting my children see it at all. In choosing the book I had "judged the book by its cover" but would have done a better job had I read the author's name printed there as one of the key selling points: Gerald Durrell.

The production values of Durrell's The Amateur Naturalist were as lavish as those in Attenborough's nature programmes, but the reverence that might have been induced by the the stunning photography and videography is overshadowed by the underlying spirit: in the one case a deadly analytic domination which brushes beauty aside, and in the other an environmentalism that despairs of preserving beauty because of the inevitability of man's destructiveness. Neither mood is right, or desirable, for my children; even I - with my insight into the ideological roots of these works - am scarcely able to brush aside the painful and unwanted moods that they induce.

My children love to go around with sticks and "hack and rack the growing green" with them. They are not unaware of my distress at their slashing even nettles in the woods, but the tenderness for even the crushed reed that I feel and try to project does not seem to overcome that urge to destroy. Yet I observe that they also have an undeniable sense of wonder for things of nature.

Perhaps my fear is that the destructiveness will overwhelm and mar that other facet of their spirit that I so much want to foster; and I want to find works of art and reference that will reinforce the gentle and reverent side of their spirit.

The matter becomes more complicated still when I explain to them the need to kill the butterflies that lay the eggs of caterpillars which devastate our cabbages. It is a teachable moment, but I am not sure that I am doing it well. I explain that it makes me sad to bat a cabbage white from the air (with a tennis racket, which makes an a excellent butterfly swatter) and then stamp on it, but that I am not doing it for sport but only because the butterfly is an "enemy" of our vegetables and I want the necessary death to be as swift and painless as possible.

It is even sadder that the cabbage butterflies are virtually the only ones that visit our garden, thanks presumably to the devastation of insect life bemoaned by the likes of Attenborough.

Henry pinned one of the dead butterflies to our family noticeboard. It seemed the thing to do, though his motivation remains mysterious. He must have been reading the Durrell book ...

He also loves collecting skulls. One of his prized possessions is a rabbit skull we found in the woods. His sadness at the death of an abandoned nestling seemed to vanish when I told him that once the corpse had rotted a while on our compost heap he could have the skull. He kept asking me when it would be ready. A fox got to it first, probably the same blighter that ate all the gooseberries off the tree, which brings me to another death we need to arrange ...

About "beating oneself up" and the alternative

Thanks to a suggestion from Stratford Caldecott, I discovered the blog of John Janaro, who writes wisely and engagingly on a wide range of things.

Here's something he wrote recently:

Self-Inflicted Violence: It Doesn't Always Meet the Eye 

I beat myself up all the time. Does that sound scary? Yet you won't find cuts or scars or bruises on my body. No... as is so often the case, I'm talking about something I do inside my head.

I think its important to take seriously the metaphor of "beating ourselves up" mentally and emotionally over our own real or perceived failures. These metaphors resonate for reasons that are deeper than we may realize.

Mentally ill people can develop even compulsive forms of interior violence, and repetitive psychological self injury. This can be even more crippling than visible, external self-inflicted violence, although I think the two often go together in life circumstances and illnesses other than my own.

Whatever the nature of the behavior, we need to become more aware of how damaging (and how potentially dangerous) it is to "beat up on ourselves."

I am not a medical doctor or a therapist. I am just a "patient" who has lived with my own mental illness for more than 40 years. All I can do is share what I have learned, what has helped me in my own struggles. And I have certainly learned that beating up on myself is very bad thing. Neurological dysfunctions in the brain can give rise to dark and distorted perceptions or feelings of doubt, which then strive to articulate themselves as compulsive thoughts and emotions.

This can break out into a cycle of interior self abuse that is not only painful, but that causes me to withdraw from my responsibilities and from others who need me. I know that I must try my best to break this cycle, by turning to God in prayer, certainly, but also by sticking with my medications, watching what I eat, following my routine, managing stress, exercising, using cognitive therapy, and relying on people who can help me get back into focus and stay there.

I have never been able to think my way out of this. Help comes from outside, and no degree of illness can take away the personal responsibility that I have to be receptive, to struggle to be open to the help that I cannot give myself.

I know that there are many people who don't worry about much of anything, and who would benefit from a good dose of sober self-criticism (n.b. sober, which means balanced, measured, realistic). And we all feel guilty and ashamed at times simply because we've done something wrong. This is normal and good. But its something entirely different from a pathological and constant interior assault that is all out of proportion to any fault, that seems to block out goodness and that leads to discouragement.

Don't give in to this. Move away from it, even if all you can manage is an inch. Do it one inch at a time. And search for anything that helps you to draw out of yourself. If some of those helps begin with "psych," don't be ashamed of that. Its awkward terminology, but when properly applied these "helps" encompass both corporal and spiritual works of mercy. And we all need mercy. 

It is essential to people with mental illness to remember that God loves them just as they are, and that they must learn to love themselves, to be kind to themselves, and to turn their energies outward in constructive ways. And they must not be ashamed that they need help from others.

From my own experience I can say: It is possible to live in a relationship with God, with joy and patience, and constructive engagement of work and relationships, even with chronic depression, bi-polar, OCD, and other neurobiologically based disorders. It is also possible to be healed greatly from much self inflicted personal damage.

It is an ongoing process, and you can't do it alone. You need help.

Drip irrigation set up and working

Thanks to some equipment inherited from my father dating back a couple of decades, plus a recycled submersible pond pump, we now have drip irrigation for our vegetable patch, just in time for the big heatwave.
Here is a snap, with the children's feet into the bargain (they like it but miss playing with the hose pipe!)
After it was all set up and tested, I turned off the pump (situated in one of the rainwater butts) and was surprised to see the water keep flowing: I had not taken into account the siphon action of the system. So strictly the pump is not necessary.

"Mum and Dad's lives could be in jeopardy ... or worse, their marriage!"

In the 2004 movie The Incredibles the elder children of Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl - Violet and Dash - are alone while their parents are off to confront Syndrome, the arch-villain of the piece.

When Dash seems to be letting his boyish side run dangerously free, Violet tries to remind him of what is at stake, when she says these words: "Mum and dad's lives could be in jeopardy ... or worse, their marriage!"

Watching this movie again after several years, having got married and had children since the first time, I understood far better the family life aspect of it and found moving the sharp precision with which the makers many times depicted the values that assert themselves with poignant spontaneity in the the different characters.

The film is about family values and a superhero story in about equal emphasis, but it is not agitprop for the "pro-family movement"*: it is more powerful than deliberate advocacy could ever be. It portrays the emotions, loyalties, and inner resources that arise spontaneously regarding other members of our family. I would go as far as saying that it does so with such unity and elegance as to be a work of genius.

For those who understand the good of the natural family from lived experience, as children or as spouses, it is frustrating and tantalizing to witness the accelerating attacks on marriage from ideologues and other pressure groups who "just don't get it" yet who mystifyingly seem to be carrying the day and may soon succeed even in browbeating an admittedly weak Prime Minister into changing the law of the nation to abolish natural marriage.

This move would trump the majority who know in their very roots why natural marriage is right but quite understandably are unable to articulate it, and so cannot even begin to assert it. Petitions and other initiatives by groups with more foresight and resources have helped to give them a voice, but may not be enough in view of the fact that postmodern "consensus politics" is increasingly replacing traditional play-it-by-the-rules democracy and ready to play dirty while mastering the arts of advertising, PR and spin to dupe and confuse the majority.

Given that the anti-naturals cannot or will not listen to reason and more frighteningly, will not even heed the instinctual and natural sentiments of their own hearts, what other means do we have in what seems already a hopeless battle?

Art cuts through more directly to the heart, but even this is not immune to tendentious interpretations or criticisms.

The unity of Shakespeare can still be undermined in this way by directors with a particular bent. In the recent BBC series of historical dramas The Hollow Crown, Richard II is depicted as a cardboard cutout camp gay (postmodern collage approach is a neat cop-out from historical unity and plausibility - "just bung it in, darling. Whatever!").

Perhaps cinema, anime and graphic novel have a unity and directness that cannot be as easily evaded as even drama can, by cutting out an intermediate reinterpretation. The power of graphic novel is a central theme in the new ironically named dystopic series Utopia; it will be interesting to see how the remaining episodes develop this theme.

What better way to cut short this ramble than by paraphrasing (too tendentiously for comfort!) the words of Violet to Dash: our society could be in jeopardy ... or worse, marriage!  .I did not promise you an answer: I am just trying to unpack some ideas inspired by The Incredibles that seem very relevant to the ethical situation confronting many nations, and - given the nature of the organizations undermining marriage - from which no nation will eventually be able to shelter.

*Who would have ever dreamed not so long ago that such a movement would be necessary? Seen in a sane light, it is about as necessary as a "pro-food movement"; the only time you need to assert the good of food is when there is some serious illness that interferes with the natural instincts, such as anorexia. Convincing somebody who hates natural marriage is as difficult as persuading an anorexic to eat, just as it is is technically and practically impossible to argue for a self-evident truth: it's not just lack of practice, but the impossibility of reducing the issue to more elemental terms.

Symbiosis and win-win: aquaculture watercress under way!

Our modest living room aquarium has just acquired a watercress bed.

A plastic tray with a gravel layer intercepts the flow from the filter pump, channeling the water through the gravel where watercress is rooted. This way, waste from the goldfish becomes manure for the plants, and all are happy:

- the aquarium water is cleaned of nitrates and ammonia: the fish are happier and we don't need to change the water so often;

- the plants are fed and will provide us with a constant supply of fresh watercress.

This is just the very first experiment. I'd like to try growing edible fish instead of merely ornamental goldfish (you can just about see them in the picture) and scale it up: for all the optimism I doubt we'd get frequent harvests of watercress from such a small bed.

Netflix and Lovefilm - false claims about content

Started a free trial for the new UK Netflix, having been frustrated by Lovefilm's exaggerated claims about their content.

Films that have been on my Lovefilm waiting list for years have still not been delivered in spite of their availability being clearly declared in their catalogue. Plus my suspicion is reinforced by the fact that they keep urging me to increase the number of films on the list to assure frequent deliveries. It seems to me that if a film is not available for more than a few months it is not available full stop, and should be removed from their advertised catalogue.

Having signed up for a month's trial with Netflix, I searched for a few well-known films. Apart from the glaring absence of Ghibli titles, the database search seems unhelpful: search term "Totoro" for example, apart from revealing that this very popular film is unknown to Netflix, also shows that the search results comprise all films with "to" in the title (and some with no discernable connection at all with the search term). Of what use is such a stupid search algorithm to anybody except to a business that is trying to create a false impression of breadth of content? Offering utterly unrelated titles in the search results only succeeds in irritating the user even more.

A very bad start. Can anybody recoomend a film rental or streaming service available in the UK that delivers on its content promises?

Graphics fail: chocolate shop "In space no one can hear you scream"

Spotted in London Bridge station underground gallery of "cool" shops, this instantly evoked the poster for the first science fiction horror Alien film, with the catchphrase "In space no one can hear you scream":

Practise what you geek

Nemi on geek snobbery and hypocrisy, by Lise Myhre, spot on as usual:

By the way, if you haven't seen it yet, don't miss the interview (6 minutes) with Ben Stein where Richard Dawkins defends intelligent design. Yes, seriously, his answer describes intelligent design in all but name, and he goes further to posit extra-terrestrials as the intelligent designers. I would have thought that he would classify aliens along with the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, not to mention the despised Judeo-Christian God. Striking irony.  View it here.

Breast cancer campaign fail: it has made no difference because it has not addressed the root causes

The Pink Ribbon campaign, for all its high profile and huge investment, has led to no detectable reduction in breast cancer, for a simple reason: it is not encouraging women to do the three things known to reduce breast cancer risk:

- have children earlier in life
- refrain from artificial contraception
- avoid induced abortions

The likely reason for this failure is that to encourage these things would be to challenge the very foundations of the sexual revolution.

For better words than I can muster and references to useful sources, see Fr Tim's blog.

Eco-Farming Can Double Food Production in 10 Years, says UN Report

Masanobu Fukuoka, pioneer of natural farming

GENEVA- 18 March 2011, the Special Rapporteur presented his new report “Agro-ecology and the right to food” before the UN Human Rights Council. Based on an extensive review of recent scientific literature, the report demonstrates that agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty.

The report therefore calls States for a fundamental shift towards agro-ecology as a way for countries to feed themselves while addressing climate and poverty challenges.

You can download the document and read related material here.

Art discoveries - illustration - Anthony Vanarsdale

Thanks to the Catholic Illustrators' Guild, St Joseph and the child Jesus:

Fruity computers

Here's my laptop, a special edition Banana EeePC from Asus. I could not resist this cheerful picture so stuck it on to see if it would cheer up anyone else. So far not a flicker from other commuters on the morning train into London (perhaps they're too busy looking at their Blackberries and Apples to notice!).

Update: my little daughter Therese took a liking to the picture and tore it off so I let her keep it. I was touched by her appreciation.

Beautiful Ghibli-inspired short video: Out of Sight

The rightness of dancing, and the wrongness of forcing it

I heard the interpretation of the tune by Copeland on Radio 3 today, announced as Lord of the Dance. As I prepared to cringe I was pleasantly surprised to hear the following words of Simple Gifts instead of the trite and childish hymn lyrics:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Simple Gifts was written by Elder Joseph while he was at the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine in 1848.

It reminded me of the sentiment in Yeats's poem The Fiddler of Dooney:

...When we come at the end of time,

To Peter sitting in state,

He will smile on the three old spirits,

But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,

Save by an evil chance,

And the merry love the fiddle

And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,

They will all come up to me,

With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’

And dance like a wave of the sea.

"Lord of the Dance is a hymn with words written by English songwriter Sydney Carter in 1967" I've just learned from Wikipedia. Yup, I guessed the date within a year; it reeks of post-Vat 2 sandalism! And don't get me started on Michael Flatley's narcissistic cancan.

A poem to our ectopic child

"'til in heaven we take our place" - a poem to our ectopic child, 11 November 2010

("Ectopic: Occurring in an abnormal position or place.")

You began, unsuspected,
held within your mother;
only when you declared yourself in pain,
bursting your small confines,
we guessed
...then medical procedure took its sway.

We glimpsed you in the scan
"a live ectopic", the doctor said
and that was all we knew.

Your mother in theatre unconscious, I in darkness praying;
only dry dark groping thoughts; the moment of death unknown;
then quite sudden, inspiration: now you hold us, all is in its place.

A double loss: no body to see, to grieve;
nothing to bury, no liturgy of passage
only, lost in your mother's blood, anonymous cremation.

How name you, child, boy or girl?
No clue to sex or face, till, all reborn in that final place,
our earthly ectopia ended,
we hold you and hear from your lips
the name He gave you
when we too were but a yearning in the divine heart.

Baby steps towards thrift and wise living in a non-distributist world

A list I came across provides a helpful summary of “practical distributism” that may be implemented by families and individuals on a personal level. The list is below.

When I first published this post with the title "baby steps towards a distributist world", someone wisely pointed out that not one of these points is effective at bringing about distributism without systemic changes, requiring radical political work which no one yet knows how to effect. So I changed the title and removed the tag "distributism". I still love the list, maybe because I am at heart a bit of a hippy utopian and so it all looks like a lot of fun to practise, but I think chiefly because it tends to move us in the right direction, whether or not hippy frugality is our thing.

Connections: in a future post - perhaps, if I find the time and energy - thoughts on the life journey of Chris McCandless, thoughtfully portrayed in the film Into the Wild.

1) Create your own job.

2) If you cannot create your own job, join with others to create a cooperative or worker-owned business.

3) If you must work for a company, persuade it to allow you to telecommute.

4) Try to convert part-time employment for wages into a part-time consultancy.

5) Instead of putting all your eggs in one employment basket, ‘keep the day job’ while seeking to create multiple income streams using your own equipment and working with family members in home-based activities, preparing for the day when you can leave the corporate job behind.

6) Bank with a credit union.

7) Avoid corporation debt (borrow from credit unions); tear up your credit cards.

8) Patronize locally-owned stores, microenterprises, cooperatives, and worker-owned businesses.

9) Avoid sweatshop clothing and products.

10) Grow some of your own food.

11) Patronize a farmers’ market, or purchase food directly from farmers/producers.

12) Home school.

13) Avoid commoditized entertainment in favor entertainment such as local baseball, picnics, dances, social events, quilting bees, fairs, etc.

14) Start moving towards alternative, non-centrally generated power.

15) Shop at flea-markets, swap meets and garage sales.

16) Kill your TV, or at least grievously wound it (apologies for the violent language). If you have a TV, don't watch it - study it.

17) Make your own bread. Eat real food, and avoid like the plague the ersatz, mass-produced capitalist food that has ruined the health of millions, including children.

18) Bring forth life abundantly, trusting in God.

19) Breast-feed your babies.

20) Practice the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. The crisis of our civilization is a crisis in virtue.

Obama: Yes we can but I need more time

Yes, keep hoping for that change, guys. Keep up your faith in science, technology, the human will, the human intellect, the sexual revolution, the this revolution, the that revolution... Utopia is just around the corner.