Marat

Michael Hesseltine ("Hessootine") is not dead, although he has a heart attack every week or so. Perhaps one way to assess the overall size of the English lisp phenomenon is to note the unique social response to it in England. While news presenters, politicians, major public figures with a lisp would be laughed off the public stage in America, in England no one even seems to notice that they have a lisp, since it is such a common phenomenon there.

I think one way to provide an objective measure of the complexity of a musical composition is to look at all the data bytes that go into instructing people how to reproduce the sounds desired. If you look at the conductor's score for Wagner's 'Goetterdaemmerung,' detailing all the music which has to be played by all the different instruments and subsections among the instruments (first and second violins), and you consider the work of interpretation that goes into synthesizing all this material to produce the conductor's distinctive approach, plus the interpretive work of each player, then the total complexity of the music is massive. I don't think that there is any way to indicate how a musical composition is to be played that is any more simple than the standard musical score, so the number of bytes of information in classical music is not artificially inflated by taking that as a measure.

You also cannot avoid teaching along with the infliction of physical punishment the meta-message that violence is the way to address behavior in other people that you don't like, or is generally an acceptable solution to disagreements with other people.

The whole history of the ontological implications of numbers is fascinating, since there has always been resistance to the introduction of any innovative quantities required by the internal structure of mathematics on the grounds that they were 'unnatural.' Just look at how clumsy Ancient Egyptian arithmetic was because they disliked having any numerators other than 1 in their fractions since they regarded these as unnatural! The Ancient Greeks were bothered by the irrationality of pi, no one likes the fact that 0.999... can be mathematically demonstrated to be equal to 1.0, and even zero was unavailable to early mathematicians because no one thought of it as being a possible quantity. Negative numbers seem quite natural, however, since if I am wearing skates and standing on ice, and I intend to skate three feet due West, but the wind blows me three feet backwards due East, then I seem to have moved -3 feet toward my goal. Martin Heidegger, the early 20th century German Existentialist philosopher, has an argument in his magnum opus, 'Being and Time,' that the absence of something can produce quite a powerful negative experience of emptiness, so this could be used to support the idea that negative quantities are natural. If you are expecting a letter from your girlfriend on Monday but when you open your mail box there is nothing there, you get a very strong, positive sense of nothingness, rather than just a neutral absence of something.

Is it true that fish don't age since their population is naturally so rapidly culled by predators that evolutionary processes don't require the elimination of earlier generations and the genetic experiments they embody? If so, then studying fish physiology might provide a clue to slowing the human aging process. A lot was written about a decade ago about a putative human 'death hormone' secreted by the pituitary gland, which sets the timer for us to age and die, but in patients who have had pituitary ablation for diabetic retinopathy in the 1960s the aging process continues. What ever became of the work of Aslan on Gerovital to slow the aging process? It also occasioned great interest some years ago but I haven't heard anything about it recently.

Try listening to Zeinab Bedawi for a while on BBC World News. It affects me like chalk screeching on a chalk board. But I think we do have a much longer list already, just on a cursory consideration, of Brits with lisps than of prominent people in other countries with the same speech impediment: Churchill, Karloff, Hesseltine, George VI, Field Marshall Montgomery, etc. I can still remember my bewilderment on first arriving at High Table in a British college and the server asking me if I wanted any "appoo cwumboo." I thought I heard 'apple' somewhere in there so I was tempted to say 'yes,' but then again, since I had just consumed a fairly stale, gray pigeon as the main course, I was hesitant.

Gold leaf can be hammered out to being one of the thinnest substances known, due to the great maleability of gold. Perhaps he is asking a similar question about feces, i.e., what is the thinnest spread that could be achieved with it by hammering, drawing out, etc. But since feces are a composite rather than a substance defined by composition by a single, distinctive type of atom or molecule, it would be difficult to determine whether maximally flattened out feces were still feces at every point, or whether some of it was now only water or some other composite substance which could not count on its own as 'feces.' Why are we discussing this, anyway? Is there a market somewhere for thin fecal leaf coverings of various materials?

The Canadian statistics say nothing about its national public healthcare system or about its healthcare generally, since they are greatly distorted by the enormous infant mortality rate in Native reservations in the far North of the country, where poverty, alcoholism, drug use, and lack of access to first-class hospitals combine to produce a uniquely tragic situation. In contrast to the U.S., Natives in Canada make up three percent of the total population, so the distortion of the typical picture is considerable.

Another possible source for the English lisp is the desire to seem upper class by altering pronunciation to make your English seem more French, since there was a long tradition in England of the Normans being culturally superior to the poor Saxons, whose consonants sounded so harsh and Germanic. This has even crept into the way some English names are pronounced, such as Magdalene College at Oxford and at Cambridge being pronounced as 'Maudlin College.' I may have experienced more of the English lisp since I lived only in English academic communities, where a snobbish accent was more cherished than in the normal world, and the lisp may have a snobbish implication. It is difficult to prove my assertion that it is much more common in England than in America, but there is a phrase, "the English lisp," though I know of no comparable phrase such as "the Australian lisp" or "the American lisp." If you watch BBC World News you will hear more than a few news presenters with very strong lisps, but you never see one on American news programs, but in America it would be seen as a bizarre oddity, while in England it is sufficiently common to seem acceptable. How many American politicians have you ever seen with a strong lisp? None, because they would be laughed out of their business. But in England, politicians often have a strong lisp and it doesn't seem to cause anyone to find them psychotically transfixed by their childhood and its baby talk, such as Michael Hesseltine, for example. Finally, I have nothing against the British! They are peculiar, and much more different from Americans than even Germans or Austrians are, but I can get along with most of them better than I can get along with people from most foreign countries.

Although I would guess that fewer than 1% of North Americans speak with a lisp, after living for 13 years in England I would have to say that about 10% of the people there speak with a lisp, often in such an extreme form that they are nearly incompwehensiboo. I wonder why a lisp is so common there but so rare elsewhere? One possible answer is that the English are psychologically fixated on the security and comfort they experienced as young children, and for this reason they subconsciously seek to reassure themselves by speaking baby talk all the time, the chief characteristic of which is a lisp. This is consistent with a documentary I once saw in England on different advertising techniques in England and the rest of the world. A certain cold medicine had been marketed quite successfully everywhere in the world with commercials presenting a "Get tough with your cold" message, but when this same message was run in England, the product failed to sell. After a while the company changed its ad campaign in England to "Baby your cold," and then the product sold as well as it had elsewhere in the world. The lesson from this seems to be that something about the English psyche clings to the infantile stage of development, and that this accounts for the predominance of lisping in English speaking.

The real problem with medicine in the Anglo-Saxon world is that it is so over-regulated by both government restrictions and professional medical society regulations that patients and their doctors are prevented from resorting to scientific experiments to address the patient's disease after all 'approved' treatments have failed. This is in striking contast to the situation in Germany, where patients and their doctors have much more freedom to try anything they both agree is scientifically worth attempting, so that health care is potentially much better for those for whom the most conventional, conservative approaches are not effective. It does the patient little good to have more MRIs per capita in the U.S. than anywhere else if his physician's license can be pulled by the state medical board if he dares to prescribe vitamin C.

Some have argued that music can lose its natural power if its rhythms stray too far from the variation in natural rhythm which can be achieved by the human heart. Classical music in the hands of composers like Schoenberg and Walter Piston seems to have become so abstract as to have become detached from what naturally gives music its power, and it seems to amount only to a theoretical tour de force, motivated more by experiments in music theory than anything which could truly have aesthetic appeal. Perhaps the real key to the special beauty of classical music is the fact that it is simultaneously extremely complex in structure but that structure still combines to produce a coherent net effect which is both intellectually intriguing and aesthetically powerful. Much modern music can achieve the complexity of nineteenth-century classical music but it lacks that aesthetic integration which gives music from an earlier period its artistic power. Some experimental jazz may be as theoretically complex as a Wagner symphony, but it seems ultimately to be only complex, like a disarticulated skeleton, rather than richly and powerfully complex, as a composition whose elements truly combine to a coherent aesthetic impact.

People tend to forget that the first great atheism debate was actually fought not on the ground of creationism vs. evolution but on the topic of whether the world was really just around 6000 years old as the Bible claimed or whether it was in fact much older as the geological record indicated. Religion lost that first debate with science -- which it once thought it had to win in order to survive as a valid belief system -- so decisively that it has since then moved on to the new territory of evolution, hoping that in a more complex field it might have a better chance to confuse people. But in a way all these debates between science and religion are silly distractions from the main point, since religious belief openly admits that it asserts the existence of supernatural beings and forces, so what does it matter whether science can prove that some of religion's assertions are indeed supernatural since they are not grounded in empirical reality? Christians say that Moses commanded the Sun to stop moving in the sky relative to the Earth and parted the Red Sea, both of which are just as confused (the Earth moves relative to the Sun in our solar system, not the other way around as Moses believed) or impossible as evolution being untrue, yet the science-religion debate never concerns itself with these issues. Since the existence of an infinitely kind, wise, and powerful being is contradicted by the existence of a world in which bad things happen for which human evil cannot rationally be blamed, why is there so much fuss about a relatively small point such as whether the creation myth is consistent with biology? You either start off believing in things supernatural, as religious people do, or you start off believing only in a positivistic approach to reality, as non-theists do, and there is no contact between the opposing premises of either approach to human experience. Atheism can claim only two clear advantages: One is that atheists reason consistently, since their most general beliefs about the universe and their most specific assumptions in dealing with the tasks of everyday reality accept the same positivistic premises of ordinary empirical analysis. The other is that there are no internal tensions -- such as the conflict between a powerful and good God who created everything and and evil world -- in their vision of reality.

Seen at a higher level of generality, this issue is simply the question: Which of the countless theoretical perspectives on reality become thematized? -- since the perspectives isolated for labeling, comment, and public obsession determine what constitutes the status quo and are also what determine the potential conscious back-lashes against it. The power to determine which issues are thematized has often been seen as the key to controlling society, since democratic processes themselves can only operate within the channels marked out for them by the elites which pre-select the topics for debate. Thus for example if 9/11 had been regarded as a single, extraordinary criminal act by a small group of people most of whom were dead as soon as the crime occurred, the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism' would never have been thematized in order for it to determine our basic political orientation ever since, or our new 'status quo' of hypervigilence, aggressive foreign policy, loss of civil liberties, huge investments in security, etc. But other equally important or even more important issues never emerge to public consciousness because the elites who could thematize them never choose to weave these issues into the status quo consciousness. The decline of high culture, the growing gap between rich and poor, the waste of national wealth in excess military spending, are all neglected as issues informing the predominant concerns of the status quo perspective on reality, and the decision to neglect them is as important in shaping the evolution of the world as the decision to over-emphasize other issues, like AIDS, childhood obesity, identity politics, polar bear population size, etc.

One way to improve social justice regardless of how the structure of taxes, deficit, and government expenditure is designed (and to answer Lemur's problem) would be just to do in the U.S. what most European states have done and cut the length of the average work week from 40 hours to 35 or 32 hours. The length of the work week has fallen historically with every improvement in productivity, going from 72 hours to 40 hours from 1880 to 1940, but has failed to fall with improvements in productivity since then. By cutting the work week, the available jobs would be 'redistributed' so that fuller employment could be achieved, at the cost of each person earning less, thus promoting social equality.

I think the main objective distinction between modern and classical music consists in the different degrees of complexity. An intellectual property attorney I know always complains that intellectual property infringements constantly recur in modern music since it has such limited variety and depth of structure. I can't imagine that ever happening in classical music, aside from deliberate homages such as Brahms occasionally inserted into his work to honor Beethoven's compositions. If the peak aesthetic effect of music is the sensation of the mind being drawn hypnotically into a composition by trying to follow and keep track of all of its complex structural elements unfolding at the same time, but then becoming transfixed and paralyzed within their meshwork, then the complexity of a composition gives us an objective criterion to judge that some music has more aesthetic power than other music. But I read somewhere that Paul McCartney couldn't even read music, yet he had no problem performing those thin tunes.

It seems that the key move in your reasoning is the assumption that the formation and collapse of ideologies is primarily driven by the response of people to ideas according to "their personal genealogies/discourse," thus giving primacy to psychological/biographical motivations over class interests, ideological indoctrinations, or other broader historical forces. It seems that you would have to prove the primacy of personal genealogies as a motive force for the adherence to or rejection of general ideologies before you could have a secure footing for the rest of your theory.

The problem with attempts to determine whether general cultural and social movements are best explained as reactions against or adherences with the status quo is that first you have to make sure you have identified the 'true nature' of all the competing movements, and oftentimes they are not what they seem to be at first glance. Sometimes identifying their true nature and locating them on the spectrum of conformist or anti-conformist, reactionary or innovative, status quo or revolutionary, can lead to an infinite regress of analysis which never gets us to the level of abstraction you want to focus on. Thus for example, we might wonder whether the big government/little government split now is really all about support for institutionalized power or opposition to it, since some might argue that big government, which is under the democratic control of millions of small-scale power sources -- the electorate -- actually winds up opposing the institutionalized power which most threatens the freedom of the electorate, which is the power of capitalist corporations. Or the fact that the green movement advanced significantly during the last Bush administration may be best explained by the theory that the whole environmentalist crusade is actually a right-wing movement in support of Bush, et al, because it serves to deflect progressive interest from the redistribution of wealth and social justice, and instead harmlessly channels it into fretting about things which do not directly argue for the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, such as saving polar bears, reducing greenhouse gases, not cutting down trees at Christmas, saving cute little mice from bad medical experiments, etc.

You can always get some economic stimulus and some job creation by directing more money via the tax structure to the rich to invest and create jobs or to the poor and the middle class to increase demand for products and thus also create jobs. Which end of the wealth spectrum you choose to stimulate with additional money to create jobs depends on where you want the most money to stick on the first pass through as it moves from the government and tax structure to the private economy. The Republicans want to make the rich richer so they argue for tax cuts for the wealthy to stimulate job growth and economic development. The Democrats want to help the poor and the middle class so they argue for more government stimulus programs which benefit lower income earners. But if you look at history, giving huge amounts of government money to the poor and the middle class via the GI Bill in the post-World War II period, which allowed people who otherwise would never have owned homes or gone to university to experience greater prosperity, produced one of the greatest economic booms in American history at the same time as it promoted social justice by helping those less well off. In contrast, all the Bush tax cuts did was produce the greatest downturn in the economy since the 1929 market crash. Naturally, the only sensible solution to get us out of that downturn and generate more jobs is to continue the program which created the problem in the first place. The only way you can explain this is to recognize that this is pure class warfare, with all the arguments about tax cuts stimulating the economy and creating jobs -- entirely disproved by the failure of the Bush tax cuts to produce anything other than a huge recession -- merely serving as a smokescreen to cover the Republican's protection of the economic interests of the wealthy, their political clients.

Four-star restaurant chefs will tell you that a major part of the enjoyment of food is the aesthetic effect of how it looks when you see it before you and when you sit down to consume it. If this principle applies as well to more simple fare, then we should ask what fast food restaurants are trying to sell us in aesthetic as opposed to just dietary terms. I think one of the things their selling is the aesthetic sensation of self-indulgence, satiation, sensory satisfaction, and the possession of bountiful resources of food -- all of which is promoted by buying a large-size drink so you can cradle that massive bowl of sticky sweet liquid in your hands and gulp it down with no sense of limit or self-control.

Hegel's quip, that "philosophy always arrives too late on the scene" to understand any culural evolution, since "the Owl of Minerva flies only at night," i.e., since historical changes occur invisibly to the critical consciousness of those caught up in them, seems relevant to your point. Since history is always changing by millions of incremental steps all over the world at all times, and we are changing with the evolution of the cultural assumptions and ideologies that contextualize our own capacity to perceive things and criticize them, we wind up endorsing and defending something as the 'natural' order of things without quite realizing how we got there or why this new order seems so irresistable. Thus, for example, when Barry Goldwater in 1964 espoused a political program of drastic tax cuts, heavy government spending cuts, a strong military build-up, and an aggressive foreign policy, he was defeated by the most massive electoral landslide in American history. But over the last 30 years his ideas have seemed almost irresistably entrenched in the national consciousness and they win one election after another, most recently the 2010 mid-term elections. How did this change to a new status quo occur? Was the issue between the old and the new worldviews ever explicitly debated and decided one way or the other? No: the change just snuck up on people by moves invisible to conscious rationality. So it seems we cannot clearly identify ideas as those of the status quo which we should resist or accept for that reason, since our critical capacity does not stand outside those general concepts of intellectual evolution, but is instead trapped within them in a position where such general perspectives are inaccessible to analysis.

But in the history of chess, have any great players also been great mathematicians? Paul Morphy, Harry Pillsbury, Bobby Fisher, Karpov, Kasparov, etc., never showed any mathematical talent, so far as I know. Perhaps Lasker was a mathematician?

When you consider that the Bush tax cuts have been in place since 2001 and through all this time they have not only failed to stimulate the economy but have even allowed the worst recession since the Great Depression to develop, it seems bizarre that some people claim we need more of the same to get us out of the recession. For capitalism to work, there has to be a balance between the disposable income of the workers and the investment capital of the wealthy, since otherwise the investment capital can't find sufficiently productive investment opportunities since the mass of the consumers don't have enough spare income to soak up what those investments are producing. Both the 1929 crash and the 2008 collapse were produced by top-heavy wealth distributions with too much excess wealth in search of too few profitable investment opportunites being generated by workers whose wages had been stagnant for a decade or more. The weath massively concentrated among the wealthiest by 30 years of right-wing policies had to contrive more and more unstable and risky avenues of investment to provide artificial sources of investment so this excess of capital would not lie fallow, and that is how we got so much money invested in subprime mortgages, derivatives, and credit default swaps. When the artificiality of these minimally asset-based investments became clear, the bubble burst, and now we are all paying the price for it. But since the 2008 crisis cleared about $55 trillion in wealth off the balance sheets (the total world economy only produces $66 trillion of wealth per year), the whole insane cycle can now begin all over again with investment opportunities developing to fill in the gap. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is only going to make the problem of excess capital having to generate flimsy investment gambles -- the problem of 1929 and 2008 -- return all the faster.

Sounds like orthostatic hypotension.

I still bet it counts as a common assumption among Americans that the Republicans are more inclined to favor the rich while the Democrats are more inclined to favor increased federal and state spending to achieve social justice. Isn't this why Labor Unions are always Democratic and why Westchester County and Orange County vote Republican? The only way this class interest voting is broken up is by the Republicans supplementing their appeal by posing as the party of religion to attract the cornpone crowd south of the Mason-Dixon line and as the party of international aggression to please frustrated, testosterone-driven old males shouting at television news pictures of Iran or other countries defying U.S. interests. The Republicans also used to make a covert appeal to racism until that became too unfashionable. The real problem in the economy is not excessive spending, as so many assume, but simply insufficient taxes to pay for the starkly minimalist expenditures of the U.S. federal government. Just look at the facts: France collects 46% of its GNP in taxes; Germany collects 41% of its GNP in taxes; England collects 39% of its GNP in taxes; while the U.S. takes in only 28% of its GNP in taxes at all levels of government. Of course there's going to be a huge deficit, but not because entitlement programs are generous, which they are not by international standards, but just because taxes are low. It's quite instructive to see how the Tea Party was screaming hysterically about government expenditures, the deficit, and taxes, but doesn't seem to notice the $800 billion just piled onto the U.S. government's obligations by the massive Bush tax cut for the wealthy being extended.