what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label new links and blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new links and blogs. Show all posts

Thursday, November 12, 2015

All in a day's "work"

One of my favourite bloggers - Duncan Green – makes the important point that –  
regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates. Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.

Green is spot on about the help a blog like mine offers in finding a reference you know you have but can’t remember…....you just type in the keyword – and, hey presto, the relevant post with its quotes and hyperlinks generally appears immediately – a record of your (and others’) brain activity that particular day. 

I also have a file of more than 100 pages for each year with raw text and  thousands of hyperlinks which didn’t make it to the blog……an amazing archive of months of brain activity which, of course, needs a bit more time to access…… 

As I’m being more parsimonious in my blogging these days, I thought it would be amusing  simply to copy and paste one of these pages.....links which have so far not been incorporated into any post.......
It gives an even better record of my “saves” and brain activity…

Like all blogs, it starts with the most recent……sometimes the subject of the link is clear, sometimes it is a "lucky dip"......


English poets -
Kingsley Amis

Philip Larkin

WH Auden



Helmut Schmidt Obituary 

a couple of years ago  we got a glimpse of Helmut Schmidt’s long love affair with painting - http://www.zeit.de/2013/20/kunstsammler-helmut-schmidt/komplettansicht - not least those of the German Expressionists. 
See also this video
and, for those, not familiar with Germany this little E-book of mine - “German Musings
In autumn 2008, shortly before his 90th birthday, he gave an extraordinary, 70-minute television interview, publicising his new book, Ausser Dienst (Out of Service), a reflection on a long life. The programme revealed as never before a man who not only had no religious convictions but blamed clerics – Catholic, Protestant, Islamic – for the mutual intolerance he identified between Christianity and Islam.
 He admitted that he was not “a seeker after truth” but he took an interest in all manner of philosophies and was a particular admirer of Confucius. He developed a friendship with Hans Küng, the progressive Catholic theologian whose views antagonised the Vatican. In a masterly analysis of the world financial and economic crisis, he regretted that none of those responsible for the credit crunch would be brought to book. As an experienced economist, he dismissed the generality of contemporary politicians, including George W Bush, as economic “dilettantes”.
 He revealed that his political hero was Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian president, who had been a close colleague and friend.One of his watchwords (and another of his English puns) was: “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” This could have served as Schmidt’s political epitaph when his eight-year chancellorship ran down to its frustrating end.
 He was not a “conviction” politician and his heart never got the better of his head, but a democratic leader needs a party, and in both Hamburg politics and his own family tradition, the SPD was the only place to be. In exchange for a power-base, Schmidt gave the party eight more years of power in Bonn and two federal election victories before the inevitable falling-out between the ideological left and the centrist master of realpolitik. But in the constrained art of government in difficult times, there was never a safer pair of hands.


Heimat



 “There is no question that the prevailing temper of the Democratic party is populist: strongly sceptical of what we like to call capitalism and angry about the perceived power of the monied elite in politics,” said PPI president and founder Will Marshall.“But inequality is not the biggest problem we face: it is symptomatic of the biggest problem we face, which is slow growth.”

tony hancock’s half hour


About God 
another 50 academics speak about god

Saturday, April 3, 2010

the itinerants


A second post today - freezing fog (and light snow) has reduced visibility to 20 metres - and supplied the atmosphere to do a ot of reading, most of which I;ll summarise tomorrow.
One of the daily delights is selecting a picture to go with the blog – but it has an element of what the Germans call “Die Qual der Wahl” – the torture of choice! I am building up a stock of pictures I can draw on – and found that the Uzbek photo perfectly fitted the notion of philosophical discussions which comes later in today's earlier blog. But the first part of the blog is actually about a poem called Smuggler – so I surfed to find such a picture and was reminded of the great Russian school of painters who went by the name The Itinerants. I've supplied a link to the list on the right of the site.
I had to practice my first censorship just now - on an engraving by Albrecht Duerer no less! I wanted it to be the pic for today - but when I uploaded it and saw it, I knew that it just too risque! Instead, I've selected one of the Itinerants - Bogdanov-Belskiy - and his
Mental Arithmetic In the Public School of Rachinskiy
Quite superb! It's a much more powerful painting than the one I had to use in my recent posting of the report on the English primary school system.

I've uploaded two new papers to my website. One fits uneasily with all the jargon of the professional paper - it's 40 Tips for 2010 but fits nicely with the tenor of some of the recent postings. It's paper 9 and is more a New Year thing. But I thought of it since I determined yesterday to (a) read each day at least 2 of the hundreds of professional papers which I;ve downloaded but lie unread in folders and (b) skim at least one of the googlebooks which have been equally downloadedwith enthusiasm but then languished. There is no beating the sensuality of a book between your hands!
I also came across a little pamphlet I produced for a Conference the European Delegation in Kyrgyzstan asked me to attend in late 2006. I've included it because it's an example of the sort of policy analysis I like to write - which tries to find a pragmatic approach to issues in the local context. It was called Building LG in a hostile climate – it's paper 7