Thoughts of the week.
1) The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics seems to give a more coherent view of Strong Nuclear Interaction than other models. See http://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/161-quantum-chromodynamics This may even provide a basis for discriminating between rival interpretations. We mention this because of the very significant metaphysical and magical consequences of quantum transactional mechanisms underlying reality.
2) It seems particularly bizarre that a secular state such as Britain should fund faith based schools of any kind*. This seems either to arise out of a sense of fairness gone mad, a failure of confidence in its own secular values, or perhaps even a quiet overconfidence that they must eventually always prevail. Faith based schools will always prove socially and culturally divisive. Perhaps the famous British traditions of politeness, compromise, and even-handedness now do it a disservice. Liberalism should not extend to compromises with illiberalism.
*Secularism has become the foundation of British Culture. The ‘established’ Church of England no longer plays any significant role in governance. It now follows rather than leads moral culture. It remains as a merely decorative appendage to state occasions and as a service provider to a dwindling minority religious interest group.
A secular, science based, and evidence based culture like Britain should have a religious studies school curriculum which requires familiarity with the overwhelming evidence that all religions without exception have evolved by syncretic processes in which bits and pieces of older religions became cobbled together by humans for various social and political purposes.
This could do more than anything to reduce religion based social decisiveness and home grown terrorism.
Historians and archaeologists should cease to remain the custodians of hard-won and uncomfortable information that we keep away from young people.
3) Leon Brittan dies. The British establishment will however probably wait for a few more of his generation to die before it seriously investigates the allegations. I distinctly remember asking a friend in Reuters about all the accusations in the graffiti sprayed on the walls of London back in the late seventies and early eighties. Everyone in Fleet Street knows, he replied, but it’s unprintable. I also distinctly remember Brittan getting kicked upstairs to the European Comission by Thatcher after his peculiar sudden resignation as home Secretary.
4) Cameron, ever the brilliant tactician, goes to Scotland bearing insufficient devolutionary gifts, so the SNP will drub Labour and the illiberal dimocrats there in May.
5) The European Central Bank decides, Weimar Republic style, to print a trillion euros but this may not persuade the Greeks from taking the sensible route of leaving the EU. If this initiative fails as seems likely, expect the EU to begin unravelling. Hooray!
See Varoufakis here.
http://trumanfactor.com/2015/varoufakis-interview-2-14800.html
"Currency Union can not prosper due to the lack of any deficit/surplus recycling mechanism." Indeed.
In any nation, capital transfers from richer to poorer regions have to take place to prevent the richer regions from further impoverishing the poorer regions and stimulating rebellion. Basically - if the Germans want Greece they will have to buy it first and then force the Greeks to live and work like Germans. (I assume here that they won't try to invade it again.)
The power-crazed Synarcho-Federalists who put the EU together knew full well that monetary union without political union would not work for long and hoped that the first crisis would end in the political union they sought, however the first crisis turned out rather larger than expected and the appetite for political union within a euro-bureaucracy has diminished markedly.
A european union consisting solely of East Germany and West Germany, with the rest of us doing our own thing now seems like a much better idea.
6) Lake Chad has apparently shrunk disastrously due to climate change and excessive demands on its waters. Boko Haram appears as a probable consequence.