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Notes from Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

August 29, 2022 – 9:08 pm

p. 4 Given the importance that Caesar attributed to the Bruids, and their apparently centrality in Gaullish society, one would expect them to feature prominently in his long and detailed description of his conquest of the region; but they are completely invisible in it. Nor do they appear at all in his account of his two expeditions to Britain. They are only mentioned , in fact, in that self-contained survey section on native customs, which does not seem to have any relevance to his practical experiences in Gaul. That this is not simply an authorial policy on Caesar’s own part is strongly suggested by the fact that his history of the Gallic war was continued after his feath by another Roman politician, Aulus Hirtus, who also made no mention of Druids in his depiction of the action,

p. 5 Cicero “ commented that he had met a Gallic Druid, Divitiacus of the Aedui tribe. This man had claimed to Cicero to be learned in the ways of the natural world, and he made predictions, sometimes observing the flight of the birds and sometimes spontaneously,,, Caesar wrote quite a lot about him, because he was the most steadfast native ally of Rome. He never, however, called him a Druid; Diviacus is represented rather, as a leading Gallic politicians and spokesman for his tribe in an assembly of chiefs…. Sean Dunham has made this one prop of his argument that Caesar’s account of Druids as a special caste is misleading and that druides was in fact simply a Latinisation of the native term for the religious functions of chiefs and leading aristocrats of Gaul. Roman senators, after all, doubled as priests just as Diviciacus seems to have done.”

p. 9 “It was once suggested that Strabo was adding a little extra information to a medly of Caesar and Diodorus, and that Pomponius was just a rehasj of Caesar with a few imaginative flourishes. The last of these arguments may still stand, although it is also possible that Pomponius was quoting another authority or authorities, now completely lost. In the case of Diodorus and Strabo the situation has been made to seem simpler. Since the 1950s there’s been a widespread consensus that behind the description of Gaul given in both lies a single lost source: the work of a Greek philosopher from Syria, Posidonus, who visitred southeastern Gaul in the early first century BCE> It has also been proposed that Posidonius represents the earlier authority who Caesar might have been quoting for his set portrait of Gallic society. If this is the case, then pretty well all that is recorded of Druids before the Roman conquest disrupted their society and authority rests on the indirect testimony of one traveller.

Specialists of the period have therefore come to speak of a Posidonian tradition of Greek and Roman writing about the ancient Druids … were at once quite sophisticated thinks and scientists, with a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, and practitioners of large-scale human sacrifice by a variety of cruel means … suggested that Posidonius exaggerated the sophistication … by imposing Greek concepts of philosophy on it… accused him of acting as a propogandist by tainting the Gallic tribes with barbarism. Piggott noticed that the description of human sacrifice by shooting to death with arrows is off, because archery is not mentioned in any accounts of the warfare of the Gauls or related peoples.

p. 21 Suetonius and Loiny both stated that the Druids had been suppressed by imperial decree, but Pliny then proceeded to write as if they still existed, raining the possibility that only their political power and religious role had been destroyed. If that was the case, it would explain the remaining references to them in ancient texts, three of which appear in the series of potted biographies of Roman emperors known collectively as the Agustan History. In each of these a Gallic dryas or drydis, or a group of druidae, makes a prophecy to an emperor or future emperor that turns out to be perfectly accurate… the prophets concerned are clearly female. In one case she is the landlady from whom the emperor-to-be is rending a billet during his service in Gaul. These are the first and only appearances of female Druids, by name, in the whole of ancient literature. It is possible that they had always been present in Gallic society. It is possible that, with the annihilation of their religious and political role, the Druids as a whole were reduced to local healers, soothsayers and folk magicians, and came to include women as part of this loosening of their society identity. It is also possible that terms related to Druid were being applied by Roman authors who knew little of Gaul and the Gallic language, to kinds of magical practitioner very different from the original Druids.”

p. 48 “This is how an Iron Age Druid is fashioned: from selected parts of Greek, Roman, Irish or Welsh texts usually mixed with archaeological data. The process made to compose the result is more or less an arbitrary one, determined by the instincts, attitudes, context and loyalties of the person engaged in it. Virtually none of the ingredients employed have the status of solid material… The manner in which these ancient and medieval images of them have been put to use is therefore a perfect case study of the way in which the modern British have liked to think and feel: about humanity, nationhood, religion, morality and the cosmos.”

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Books Politics

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionise Everything

August 29, 2022 – 8:36 pm

A title with which I profoundly disagree, but useful to see what claims being made. And no, there is no reference to the environment.

p. 10 For all the success of Second Life, it was the rise of virtual world platforms Minecraft and Roblox that brought its ideas to a mainstream audience in the 2010s. In addition to offering significant technical enhancements compared to their predecessors, Minecraft and Roblox also focused on children and teenage users, and were therefor far easier to use…By the end of 2021, more than 150 million people were using Minecraft every month – more than six times as many as in 2014, when Microsoft bought the platform. Despite this, Minecraft was far from the size of the new market leader, Roblox, which had grown from fewer than 5 million to 225 monthly users over that same period. According to Roblox Corporation, 75% of children ages 9 to 12 in the United States regularly used the platform in Q2 2020. Combined, the two titles amassed more than 6 billion hours of monthly usage each, which spanned more than 100 million different in-game worlds and had been designed by over 15 million users. The Roblox game with the most lifetime plays – Adopt Me! – was created by two hobbyist platers in 2017 and enabled users to hatch, raise and trade various pets. By the end of 2021, Adopt Me’s virtual world had been visited more than 30 billion times  – more than 15 times the average numbers of global tourism visits in 2019.

P 17 The very idea of the Metaverse means an ever-growing share of our lives, labor, leisure, time, wealth, happiness and relationships will be spent inside virtual worlds, rather than just extendedor aided through digital devices and software. It will be a parallel plane of existence for millions, if not billions, of people, that sits atop out digital and physical economies, and unites both. As a result, the companies that control these virtual worlds and their virtual atoms will likely be more dominant than those who lead in today’s digital economy.”

p. 39 Almost all the most popular virtual worlds today use their own different rendering engines (many publishers operate several across their titles), save their objects, textures and player data in entirely different file formats and with only the information that they expect to need, and have no systems through which to even try to share data to other virtual worlds.  As a result, existing virtual worlds have no clear way to find and recognise one another, nor do they have a common language in which they can communicate, let alone coherently, securely and comprehensively.”

p. 48 We don’t want virtual worlds in the Metaverse to merely persist or respond to us in real time. We also want them to be shared experiences. For this to work, every participant in a virtual world must have an internet connection capable of transmitting large volumes of data in a given time (high bandwidth), as well as low latency (fast) and continuous (sustained and uninterrupted) connection toa a virtual world’s server (both to and from)… perhaps the greatest constraint facing the Metaverse today – and the one that is hardest to solve. Simply put, the internet was not designed for synchronous shared experiences. It was designed, instead, to allow for the sharing of static copies of messages and files from one party to another.”

p. 53 “there are no simple, inexpensive or quick solutions. We will need new cabling infrastructure, wireless standards, hardware equipment, and potentially even overhauls to foundational elements of the Internet Protocol Suite, such as the Border Gateway Protocol.”

p. 55 Even nonpersistent virtual worlds that are less than 10 square kilometres in surface area, severely constrained functionally, operated by the most successful video game companies in history, and running on even more powerful computing devices still struggle to sustain more than 50 to 150 users in a shared stimulation.. Fortnite’s famous 2020 concert with Travis Scott. “players” converged on a much smaller portion of the map, meaning the average device had to render and compute far more information. Accrdoingly, the title’s standard cap of 100 players per instance was halved, while many items and actions, such as building, are disabled, thereby reducing the workload. While Epic Games can rightly say more than 12.5 million people attended this live concert, those attendees were split across 250,000 separate copies (meaning they watched 250,000 versions of Scott) of the event that didn’t even start at the same time.”

p. 75 Most online games try to send as much information as possible to the users in advance, and as little as possible when they are playing… files are so large because they contain nearly the entire game, namely its code, game logic and all the assets and textures required for the ingame environment (every type of tree, every avatar, every boss battle, ever weapon)”

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Books Environmental politics Science

Notes from Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps

August 29, 2022 – 4:18 pm

p. 31 Current estimates put insects at around 479 million years old, making them the oldest land animals. One hundred and 30 million years later, homometabolous insects appeared: these are the insects that separate youth from adulthood with metamorphosis… When the first hymenoptera came along a mere 280 million years ago, it was a wasp. The prototype wasp was a vegetarian, and a rather inelegant-looking like creature without a sting. We know this because this is what its ancesteors – the sawflies – are like… also known as wood wasps or horntails… the name refers to the sawfly’s lack of the wasp waist. They also lack the agile flight and hard-cuticle armour of their more waspish relatives… the broad-bellied maiden aunts of the wasp world: stumpy, fierce and functional, they trail a clunky ovipositor on their rear, corrugated like a saw to cut into the plants in which they lay their eggs.”

p. 42 There are about as many fossil ants as there are fossil dinosaurs: over 750 described species of preserved anys have been found from at least 70 locations across the planet… in the Cretaceous period, a huge diversity of crazy-looking ants evolved, and scientists have had a lot of fun naming them. Take the ‘hell ant’, for example, with scythe-like mandibles that jutted menacingly upwards from the jawline… There are also the ‘iron-maiden’ ants, with ferocious mouth pasts covered in spikes designed to immobile prey. And the ‘beast ants,’ so called because of their colossal forelimbs, enormous alien eyes and many-tooth mandibles that swivelled open to receive what must have been very large prey… all went extinct in the late Cretaceous mass=extinction event, over 50 million years ago.”

p. 43 What makes an any an ant, and not a wingless wasp… Ants are the only stinging Hymenoptera that have a metapleural gland, a slit- of pustule-like opening found on the back of the thorax in workers and queens. This is a rather clever invention as it exudes a range of antibiotics, which help combat diseases in the colony. It also produces chemicals used in communication. Ants also have ‘elbowed’ antennae (‘geniculated’ if you’re an any taxonomist), made possible thanks to an extra-long first antennal segment. Another any giveaway is that the second abdominal segment in node-like, being constricted at front and back; in wasps, this segment is just a smooth and simple waist.”

p. 44 “The bee fossil record remains scrappy and sparse compared to that of ants. Most of the bee fossils are solitary species, while most of the fossil specimens are social bee workers from species that lived in damp forests and fed on resins. Since social bees didn’t evolve until 60 million years after the first solitary bees, the vast majority of bee fossils are not especially useful for revealing how wasps became bees. Despite this, we have two fossilised contenders for the star role as wasp-bee – they come from  Burmese amber that formed in tropical forests 100 million years ago. Fossils of Melittosphex burmensis and Discoscapa apicula … are so different from each other that they delong to different biological families … there are no living representatives of their families.”

“Another candidare for the closest living relatives to bees are the Ammoplanidae, tiny wasps barely 2-4 mm in length… the wasp-bee fossils that have been found are also extremely small. Since the flowers of the early Cretaceous would have been very small, it would make sense if the first bees were sized to fit. Intriguingly, Ammoplanidae hunt tiny pollen-eating insects called thrips.”

p. 63 “bradykinins are the key neurotoxin component of wasp venom. They give the hunter the power to ensure that its prey victim is properly paralysed.,,, Ants also have ‘wasp kinins’. Bees, however, appear to have lost them. .. Intriguingly though, not all wasps have these magic peptides. Apoid wasps, Eumeninae (such as potter wasps) and Pompilidae (the spider hunters) all appear to lack bradykinins in their venom, but they still manage to paralyse their prey effectively. The jury is out on which ingredients they use. … The ‘mammoth wasp’ is a European species… the largest wasp in Europe… Stocky, with large abdomens… these colids spend their time digging around in the dirt, looking for scarab beetle larvae… series of landmark papers used cockroaches to show that wasp kinins can irreversibly block synaptic transmission across nerve cells. … the neurone pathways that are disrupted by bradykinins are the same as those targeted by the group of widely used pesticides (known as neonicotinoids) that have contributed to the declining populations of pollinating insects around the world. There is now overwhelming evidence that  these pesticides have a detrimental effect on the cognitive functioning of insects… It seems that the pharmaceutical industry has been mimicking the pharmacological secrets of solitary wasp venom without even realising it.”

p. 72 “We tend to forget that the antibiotic products of microbes and fungi are a natural phenomena: organisms produce them, along with other useful bioactive agents like anti-fungals, anti-virals and immunosuppressants, to combat other microorganisms they come into contact with…Beewolves have made a surprising contribution to our understanding of this are. The mother wasps inject their swaddled babes with antibiotics from their antennae. Beewolf mums are nosts to Streptomyces bacteria.. a species of Streptyomyces produces the antibiotic Streptomycin, the second most medically useful antibiotic to be discovered after penicillin, in 1942. Today 80% of medicinal antibiotics are sourced from Streptomyces… mother excretes Streptomyces bacteria from gland openings between her antennal segments and deposits it as whitish masses onto the walls of the baby’s cocoon… these helpful bacteria kill any fungi inside the cocoon… the wasp larva spreads the bacteria around its nursery, like an diligent toddler. If the larva happsn to be female, it adopts these bacteria as a lifelong companion .. she is equipped to keep her own offspring fungi-free. This clever evolutionary mechanism (known as vertical transmission) ensures that the bacteria stays closely hooked up with its host across generations. Its worked like this for 68 million years.”

p. 86 Plant volatiles produced in response to herbivory are widely used to draw in natural enemies, like wasps, flies and beetles, to rid the plant of its own predator… Few organisms can help their poos being a little smelly; it’s the nature of host products.. a form of chemical eavesdropping and one that parasitoids have become well known for.” Frass- term for insect excreta. “There is even a technical term for a chemical that is emitted by one organism and detected by another species which then benefit from it – this is called a kairomone.

p. 87 The olfactory skills of wasps have made them patentable property, thanks to the creation of the ‘Wasp Hound’, a handheld odour detector that uses the sensory powers of parasitoid wasps to indicate the presence of explosive materials like TNT, or illicit substances like cocaine. The work enghines are the tiny parasitoid wasps Microplitis croceipes, which respond to chemical cues in the frass of their host, the moth Heliothis zea, in order to local it. In the 1980s, scientists discovered that the females of this wasp could be taught to associate a specific type of molecule with a reqard through associative learning and so could be trained to detect very specific odours, even very closely related chemicals.”

p. 100 Spiders parasitised by Homonotus wasps soon recover their faculties and go about their business, oblivious to the fact they now have a wasp egg attached to their abdomen… even when that egg hatches and the wasp larva begins to chomp its way through the less essential body parts, ensuring that the spiders vital organs remain intact until the larva is ready to pupate. … she appears to only select gravid female spiders to parasitise. She positions her egg in exactly the right place so that the hatching baby wasp larva can dive straight into the spider abdomen and feast deliciously on the developing spider eggs. Pompilus is even cleverer, as she also manipulates the weaving skills of the spider to provide safety for her offspring. The spider spends her days in the terminal cell of her burrow, ever decreasing in form thanks to the fattening wasp larva. But during this time she inadvertently spins a protective envelope among the sand, making the burrow a safe haven for wasp pupation.”

p. 110 “Together the social insects account for about 75% of the world’s insect biomass. But wasps tell the story of sociality better than do ants and bees. There are no solitary ants and all ant species are superorganisms; they’ve left nothing in their evolutionary wake to tell us how they got there.  Honeybees, bumblebees and stingless bees are socially diverse and exciting, however, bees are just wasps that forgot how to hunt.”

p. 123 joneybees “Young bees start off their working life as nurses. As they get older, they graduate to out of hive work as foragers. Age is a steadfast regulator of behaviour in many social insects, not just honeybees, so much so that the process has its own name ‘age polyethism’. Does it also remind you of our solitary wasp, with her clock-like nesting cycle? Build, lay, provision, repeat. Chronology determins when she behaves in a particular way… honeybee cycle can be accelerated if a sudden demand arises for more foragers and fewer nurses and no matter how old they are, foragers can retreat to in-hive jobs should they be needed. .. some foraging honeybees specialise as nectar-foragers, while others are pollen-collectors… what they do, when and why is determined by a co-regulated set of four connected traits that all matter: ovaries, forage type, sugar cravings and age.. solitary reproductive insects forage on pollen and feed it to their brood, while they forage on nectar for personal delectation… this suite of linked behavious appears to respond to the instructions of a master regulator gene .. Vitellogenin is a precursor to egg yolk, and fundamental for reproduction in all egg-making animals…acts within a whole network of genes, producing molecules like hormones that carry instructions for the endocrine system.”

p. 128 Potter wasps perform some insect chemical wizardry while coiling the pots, enriching their walls with essential minerals such as magnesium, zinc and iron. Undoubtedly these garnishes contribute antibiotic properties to the nests, ensuring the brood is kept free of disease while it completes its lonely childhood, sealed in a pot… people in remote tropical parts of the world rely on these nests to distill essential minerals.. geophagy … eating insect-transformed earths is a traditional practice in parts of Africa, Asia and South America… provides women and children with the very same mineral supplements that you might buy in your local pharmacy… if an appropriately aged woman starts scratching the earth in search of a termite mound or wasp nest, it is taken as evidence that she is pregnant. These women have described how they ‘felt need’ or ‘strong desire’ to each insect earths.”

p. 164 “In some American populations of Poistes, wasps do seem to be able to recognise individuals by their facial markings, and they can learn new facial patterns… only insects known … not even honeybees can learn to recognise fellow bee faces. … not that useful for a honeybee, as every worker is (largely) equal. For a small foundress group of Polistes females .. crucial to the establishment and maintenance of the social hierarchy … the reproductive (dominant) foundress at the top and her subordinates forming an orderly queue below her… a few judiciously applied splashes of yellow face paint could upset the social pecking order… after an hour or so, however, social order would be re-established, suggesting that the wasps had learned the new look of their nestmates.”

p. 246 Bees distinguish between the concept of ‘same as’ and ‘different from’ in unconnected and contrasting objects… if it had learned that colour-matching produced a positive reward (such as sugar) … also vertical over horizontal lines… using a similar approach, bees could be trained to follow a ‘difference’ rule, if they say tallow at the entance, they didn’t choose a yellow branch. .. even more amazing… these visual cues could be replaced with odours and the bees were able to apply the sameness or difference rules they had learned …. Bees can transfer their abstract relational learning to different visual and olfactory cues. .. they can tell whether there is ‘more or less’ of something, and whether something is above or below another thing. He’s shown that bees count, and that they also have a concept of what zero means. Can be trained to respond additively – if trained that blue is good and yellow is good, when presented with blue and tallow they respond with twice the enthusiasm … known as configural learning.”

p. 249 Bees are reasoning, numerate, perceptive, complex cognitive organisms just like us. Despite their small brains and limited number of neurones, they have conceptual cognition. Just like you, they can link past experiences together for a future interaction with the world. This body of work has made scientists question what the minimal neural circuitry is for ‘higher-level’ cognitive function.”

-. 277 Biological control (or biocontrol) is a method of pest eradication that exploits pre-existing predator-prey relationships. It is a key ecosystem service, alongside pollination, and has an estimated value of well over $400 billion a year. In the US alone, the value of natural biocontrol provided by insects annually is estimated to be $4.5 billion…. Parasitoid wasps… account for almost 50% of the 230 invertenbrate species that are commercially used as biocontrol agents. For the price of a good bottle of wine, you can be the proud owner of enough Trichogramma wasps to strip your house clean of clothes moth eggs. Let them run free- don’t worry you won’t even see them, their wing span is about 0.5 mm 0 and within a few weeks, you’ll be moth- and wasp= free. The wasps lay their eggs inside moth eggs, which then hatch and feed off the moth egg, killing it. The wasps can’t survive without the moths.”

p. 278 Mealybugs adore cassava. In their homeland, the mealybug populations are kept at bay by the 1mm-long parasitoid wasp Anagyrus lopezi, which lays its eggs in mealybugs and nothing else. When cassava was first introduced to Africa and Asia to help feed hungry humans, everything went swimmingly,… until the mealybug arrived, causing 60-80 per cent reduction in crop yields… only saved by the rapid introduction of A. lopezi”.

p. 274 88% of flowering plants are pollinated by insects… thought to be worth more than $250 billion a year worldwide, contributing to almost 10% of the value of the world’s agricultural production . These figures are based on contributions to farmed crops and so overlook the value of pollination and predation that these insects perform in natural ecosystems.”

p. 279 The use of solitary hunting wasps for biocontrol in non-native regions has not been very successful. This is probably due to a poor understanding of their life histories and behaviour … when they are introduced to a new environment they often shift their prey preference… the best approach seems to be to adopt a local, native species.”

p. 290 The first Vespula vulgaris was spotted in New Zeland in 1921 but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that populations became properly established. Within 30 years, these invaders had completely altered the ecological balance of one of New Zealand’s most precious native habitats, the beech forests. The sooty beech scale insect is a true bug – a hermipteran … excrete a sugar rich honeydew from their behind which attracts an eclectic mix of invertebrates and vertebrates who feast on the sugary droplets; in return, they defend the sugar bug from predators… sugar actually comes from the plant, the bug plunges its mouth parts into the tree, tapping into the sugar-rich plant juices… being very long, the anus serves to keep the sugar hunters a safe distance away from the actual insect.. any honeydew that isn’t slurped up drops onto the bark, providing the perfect breeding ground for the black sooty fungus …. Beetles and moths feast on the fungus and its own secret microbiome of microorganisms. Along come the birds and lizards, many of which are found only in these beech forests, who munch on the moths and the beetles. Then along came the alien Vespula – she feasts like a hungry teenager at a sushi bar who knows they’re no picking up the bill, slurps up the honeydew but also picks off the protein feasts.”

p. 300 Over the course of the colony cycle in the UK, nests of the common yellowjacket produce an average of 9,600 adult wasps… total estimated pest biomass needed is 6.5 kilograms, which comes in at just shy of 130,000 insects per colony… Vespula wasps are likely to be removing over 30,000 arthropods per hectare and up to 234,000 per hectare in a good wasp year. .. unfussy opportunistic predators who are likely to be creaming off the most abundant invertebrates they encounter. This makes them rather useful as general caretakers of ecosystems; they help keep a diverse community of arthropod populations in check without hunting any to the brink of local existence.”

p. 307 Per unit of consumable protein, insect farming is twice as efficient as rearing cheicken… for every gram of protein insect-farming uses 17 times less water than cattle, and give times less than pig or chicken farming. At least 2 billion people across the globe consume insect protein as part of their diet. Over 2,000 insect species are eaten, with beetles (31.1%), butterflies and moths (17.5%) and wasps bees and ants (14.8%) being the most prominent. Wasps are usually eaten as larvae or pupae, and social species, like the Asian giant hornet, are especially popular because of the bonanza prize of thousands of brood from a single nest.”

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Books Early modern history History

Notes from Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money

July 27, 2022 – 11:18 am

p. 55 “In 1237, the bankrupt Latin government of Constantinople mortgaged Christ’s crown of thorns to a syndicate of Venetian and Genoese merchants for a loan of 13,134 bezants, or iperiperi (coins of African gold)… The relic was despatched to Venice but was redeemed by that pious monarch Louis IX of France. On August 18, 1239, it was borne in triump through the streets of Paris, the King himself leading the procession , barefoot and in his shirt. To house the crown and other relics, St Louis built to famous chapel in Paris known as the Sainte-Chapelle at a cost of 20,000 marks.”

p. 58 End of feudalism “For Georg Simmel, the greatest German philosopher of money, writing in about 1900, that was the magic moment of human emancipation… “The lord of the manor who can demand a quantity of beer or poultry or honey thereby determines the activity of the latter in a certain direction. But the moment he imposes a merely amoney levy the peasant is free, in so far as he can decide whether to keep bees or cattle of anything else.”… Yet even within the world of money, the tenant is still liable to his lord if he fails in his money payments. Final liberation comes, Simmel believed, when all the payments in a foreseeable future are rolled into one payment, a process known as capitalisation… Those who cannot free themselves lose even the thgreadbare protection of feudal reciprocity. Eventually, in England for example, they may be evicted from the common land by a provcess known as enclosure.”

p. 127 The word millionaire, which is French, was invented in the open air in a little street near what’s now the Centre Beauborg in Paris known as the Rue Quincampoix or Quincenpoix in the autumn of 1719. That it was not admitted by the Academie Francaise until 1762 merely shows the caution of that body. It is the legacy to the language of the world of a moment when the world turned and of the master and instigator of that manouevre, M. Quincampoix himself, the Schotsman John Law of Lauriston.”

p. 131 “”In the memoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon we can see Law flattering the vain old thing much more clearly than Saint-Simon himself. Law finally captures the duke by financing the purchase for the French regalia of an Indian diamond “the size of a greengage” then being hawked around Europe at a price of two million livres. (It is now in the Louvre.” With the collapse of the System in May 1720 and the death of the Regent three years later, the rentiers that Law despised were restored. French finance fell into the hands of his business rivals and his reputation into those of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who disapproved of him. Law’s ideas languished until thtey were revived in the asignats and the mandats of the National Assembly; the enthusiasm of 1790 produced an excellent edition of Law’s writings… but the hyperinflation of the assignats had its reaction in Bonaparte, whose mind was closed to credit and, with his sanguinary conquests and pictereqsque titles was everything Law was not; he sold Louisiana to the Americanms for four cents an acre; an oceanic discount to the future earnings of the Mississippi basin.”

p. 138 At some point, he gains a partner, a certain Lady Catherine Knollys, who left her gusband for him. Of her surivivng portraits, that in Het groote Tafereek sgiws a cery handsome woman in a tricorn gat captioned with a corase riddle … “Je suis ni epouse, ni veuve,,, She bore Law two children, but they never married, even after her husband died: when the scandal became public at the fall of the System, the Refent cancelled the annuities Law had bought for her and the children and left her destitute.”

p. 164 “The English and French literature of the 19th century gives an impression of stability, even smugness, in the social order. In 1888, Kipling wrote in “The Education of Otis Yeere” “All good people know that a woman is the only infallible thing in the world, except Government Paper of the ’79 issue, bearing interest at four and a half percent.”  .. confidence in money, in the form of British Consols, reached its peak in 1896. Two years later, the West Shore Railroad in Chicago issued 4 per cent bonds maturing in AD 2361: in other words, the bond buyers assumed money had been made eternal. At which point, it fell to bits.”

p. 173 In 1906 my grandfather, though still a young man, gave his siste Anna an allowance of £100 a year. It had an effect he hadn’t foreseen. The next year, Anna went to India, wrote a novel and supported herself and several other people from her royalties for the rest of her life.”

p. 176 – the invisible hand – In Defore’s Moll Flanders, printed in 1722, it is aeupemism for for ill-luck or retribution “an almost invisible Hand that blasted all my Happiness. In Smith’s first use of t he phrase, in his juvenile History of Astronomy, it is the supernatural agency to which primitive people attribute irregular or alarming natural phenomena. By 1759, when Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that malign and unpredictable force has become the good god of the Stoics, who has arranged the universe fo that all events, even the most alarming, work towards the prosperity and perfection of the whole … Fourteen years later, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s wonderful machine is promoting GDP… How soothing to ruthless minds and bad commercial consciences… converted the self-serving business slogans of the 17th-century City into a creed.

p. 178 “In the two centuries after Smith, more mental effort was wasted on objectifying his system of belief than on any other in history, not excluding the immortality of the soul and the rentability of civilian nuclear power.”

p. 180 Such is the prestige of mathematics, and the charm of talk about money, that the economists have imposed their arithmetic on the world. Though, in their own existences, most people recognise that money and happiness or not co-terminous: yet they will accept whatever money quantities are fashionable with the economists – national product, balance of payments, consumer price indices or wahetever – as measures of national welfare; and because those sums, being sums, have a technically rational sound about them, people forget there are other goals of national, as there are of individual, aspiration. That the economists can’t measure any of their quantities even to their own satisfaction, can explain neither prices not the rate of interest and cannot even agree what money is, reminds us that we deal here with belieg not science.”

P. 278 “Money, far from being the harmless arena of human emulation as its apologists hold, is a great destroyer. Because money is eminent desire, there is no satisfaction in the external world unless it is conveyed in money, until the world is possessed in monetary garb … Columbus sucked a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean in two or three, and then extinguished all of its human life. The Conquest he not so much inaugurated as carried to the New World now ranges all over the globe, including its polar regions. Woods are paved, mountains mined, seas eaten, species annihilated. All the large land and sea animals of the weather and most of its birds, are under sentence of extinctions. They are being killed not by the rifle, but by a more lethal invention, money.”

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Books History

Notes from Fallen Idols by Alex von Tunzelmann

July 27, 2022 – 11:16 am

p. 23 “Congress approved the final text of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. Two days later, John Hancock sent a copy to Washington, asking the general to read it aloud to his army in New York. Washington received the broadside on 8 July. He gathered his troops at the common (now City Hall Park) the following evening at 6pm…An excited crowd headed down Broadway to George III’s statue. The crowd included perhaps 40 or so soldiers (and sailors) led by Captain Oliver Brown, as well as the New York chapter of the Sons of Liberty, the revolutionary party that had been responsible for the anti-tax protest known as the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Accounts differ as to how many civilian New Yorkers joined in or spectated. The protesters climbed the fence, attacked ropes to the statue and pulled it off its plinth… Special humiliations were reserved for George II’s severed head. John Montresor was a loyal British captain in New York at the time… sent a man to steal it from the tavern and bury it. Later, her dug it up. “I rewarded the men, and sent the head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend, in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed country.”

p. 27 “The images of the mob as a manifestation of American heroism bore striking similarities to those of Black Lives Matter protesters pulling down statues in 2020. When that happened, two famous paiontings of the pulling down of Geroge III’s statue were turned into memes. William Walcutt’s 1857 version was overlaid with text that reads “July 9 1776: After hearing a reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, New Yorkers ‘Destroy History’ by toppling a statue of King George II. And that’s why no one know who won the American Revolution”.

p. 29 William, Duke of Cumberland… “ a man who was once celebrated with statues, flowers and song, yet whose reputation fell fo far that in 2005 historians voted him the ‘Worst Briton’ of the whole 18th century.” Culloden “commenader ordered ‘no quarter’ be given to injured or fleeing Jacobites, or to any civilians, including women and children, who were unfortunate enough to live nearby.. thousands of wounded soldiers and ordinary people were murdered in a spree of vengeance. Some were executed by firing squad. Others were burned alive in buildings or clubbed to death.”

p. 31 “By May 1746, people were beginning to ask why, if Cumberland had won such a decisive victory, there were so few Jacobite prisoners in British prisons. Tobias Smollett, then a surgeon in London, published his first poem shortly after the news of Culloden reached the capital. Entitled “The Tears of Scotland”, it was a haunting evocation of what we would now define as war crimes: “when the rage of battle ceased,/The Victor’s soul was not appeased;/ The naked and forlorn must feel/ Devouring flames, and murdering steel.” Cumberland acquired a new nickname, “The Butcher”. An engraving of the time showed him, dagger in mouth, using his bare hands to skin a Highlander alive.”

p. 37 “In 1868, the 5th Duke of Portland took Cumberland’s statue down from its plinth in Cavendish Square. The official explanation was that its lead body had deteriorated badly, and required restoration or possibly a full recasting. This was probably true, though it may not have been the only reason. The Portland estate promised Cumberland’s statue would be back soon. It has not been seen since.”

p. 38 In 2012, the equestrian statue of William, Duke of Cumberland, reappeared on its plinth. It was a replica made of soap, installed by the Korean artist Meekyoung Shin. … In addition to Shin’s comment on the changeable nature of historical memory, her statue’s sent recalled Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1. Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, hallucinates bloodstains on her hands that she cannot scrub off.”… Cumberland’s scummy remains were finally scraped off his plinth in 2016.”

p. 55 while Stalin projected political power with his monuments, Rafael Trujillo projected sexual power as well.. ruled the Dominican Republic for three horrific decades… a sadist, a torturer and a murderer…by the time of his death in 1961, there were 1,800 public statues and busts of Trujillo, roughly one for every 27 km2 of land… built his power upon appropriating national wealth, business and industry, and on horrific violence. His regime’s violence was so stylized that some historians have described it as theatrical. .. He created an atmosphere of terror by humiliating both his favourites and his enemies… Random disappearances were common… He was said to throw the mangled bodies of his enemies to the sharks. In 1937, he ordered the indiscriminate slaughter of black people, presumed to be Haitians. An estimated 17,000 to 35,000 people were beaten or hacked to death with clubs and machetes over the course of two to five days. Officers had been ordered not to waste bullets on Haitians.”

p. 60 The Monument to the Peace of Trujillo was dedicated in 1955, proclaimed the ‘Year of the Benefactor’ by Trujillo to mark a quarter century since he had come to power. The celebrations were termed the ‘Free World’s Fair’. Trujillo – while running a vicious dictatorship himself – curries favour with the United States by posing as a champion of freedom and enemy of communism.”

p. 62 “Successive administrations had tolerate and even supported Trujillo. Now, though, Eisenhower’s government was worried about Castro’s administration in Cuba. It hoped to build an international consensus against Castro, but was struggling to do so – because Latin America widely considered Trujillo to be much worse.”

“resistance was growing inside the Dominican Republic – and part of that was due to four young women known as the Mirabel sisters. Patria, Dede, Minerva and maria Teresa Mirabel were part of the anti-Trujillo underground. … In November 1960, three of the sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, were ambushed in their jeep and beaten to death. The jeep was pushed off a cliff in an unconvincing attempt to make the deaths look like an accident… Eisenhower sent emissaries to persuade the dictator to step down, offering him asylum in the United States,, In early 1961, a new president, John F Kennedy tried again. Kennedy was told ion February that the CIA was arming revels in the Dominican Republic.”

p. 90 “The African American journalist and politican George Washington Williams travelled to Leopold’s domain in 1890, and was horrified by what he saw. He wrote an open letter to Leopold detailing failures and brutalities committed in the name of the Congo Free State, including the enslavement, torture and murder of Congolese people… found that existing language was inadequate to describe what he had seen. He had to invent a new term for what Leopold was doing – “crimes against humanity” – which was later used to describe the Nazi holocaust, and is now part of international law.”

p. 91 “Outrage spread across the world and was picked up by writers including Mark Twain, Booker T Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Felcien Cattier of the Uniersity of Brussels investigated in the late 1890s and early 1890s, concluding that it was “the clear and indisputable fact that the Congo Free State is not a colony in the proper sense of the term; it is financial speculation.” Its only purpose, Cattier said, was to make money for Leopold.”

p. 213 In recent years, there have been movements in Britain and the United States to raise more statues of women and people of colour. These campaigns are no doubt well meant, but they do not address the fundamental problem that statues represent the Great Man theory of history. Supplementing Great Men with a few Great Women represents a cosmetic change, not a meaningful change, in how we think about history… Statutory itself is the problem. It’s didactic, haughty and uninvolving. In the modern world, its links with the history of tyranny and racism are regrettably strong.”

p. 215 “The Monument to the Laboratory Mouse in Novosibirsk, Russia, honours those mice that have (involuntarily) contributed to scientific research, with a bronze statue of one in spectacles knitting a DNA double helix. The statue of Charles La Troke at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is upside down, balanced on its head with the plinth in the air – because the scultpro thought universities should turn ideas on their head. One of the few political statues that Londoners treat with genuine affection is the ‘Allies’ sculpture of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a public bench in New Bond Street… It invites visitors to sit between Churchill and Roosevelt and interact with them in any way they like.”

p. 216 “A symbolic moment such as pulling down a statue may have resonance. What it does not do – at least, not by itself – is actually change anything. Pulling down a statue does not create liberation.”

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Notes from Elizabethan Democracy and Epistolary Culture by Elizabeth R Williamson

July 17, 2022 – 8:05 pm

p. 37 “the embassy undertaken by Sir Amias Paulet as resident ambassador to France from 1576-9.

“The ambassador’s wife, Margaret, and their six children were part of the embassy, and accordingly were expected to take leave from the Queen in person. Though most ambassadors travelled without their wives, the practice was increasing: Gemma Allen puts the percentage of 16th century ambassadorial wives on embassy at 25%, rising in the 17th century. Hilliard [miniaturist who could sketch Elizabeth’s potential suitor Francois, Duke of Alencon] was recently married and so his wife Alice accompanied him in the embassy train, and the household’s chaplain, Arthur Wake, brought his wife and departed with her when she became pregnant. .. It is telling of the general perception of the wife of the political man that one place she does appear is in a fondly recalled domestic vignette, written by Francis Bacon, years later, where she cures a wart on his finger. The meeting of female domestic responsibility and political activity in the embassy in glimpsed in Hotman’s single reference to the role of the wife in The Ambassador. After warning that care is to be taken concerning who is accepted into the household, since there are ‘so many spies”, he syayes: “It shalbe the best way, if he can, to bring his wife with him, whose eie will stoppe infinite abuses amongst gis people, and disorders in his house, unlesse hee can trust there with some one of his owne followers, that may carry an eye and charge over the rest.”… she is in charge of internal security and supervision of all who come into the household; this is a key role, particularly for a large embassy, and one that places her firmly in the diplomatic world of information gathering and political communication.

p. 38 There is a brief mention of Lady Paulete in her husband’s correspondence that hints at an even weightetier, though subtle, role in diplomatic activity. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth on 22 June 1577, Paulet describes his recent audience with the French King and Wueen Mother, stating “and thus I was dismissed from the K and the Q mother, after that I had thanked Q mother for the good intertaynement which she had given my wife on Sondaye last, as indeed bothe shee and the Frenche King’s wife did use her with great favor and familiatitie, and amongst theire other talke made great protestacions of theire sincere affection towards your Majesteie”… it is a political statement to entertain the wife of the English ambassador… both a ceremonial activity and one that contains the opportunity to negotiate on an ostensibly informal level ,,, women in court could find it easier than men to conduct diplomacy with other women in power during leisure time; it is thus even more relevant to search for women in diplomacy in embassies to France around this time, considering the powerful political presence of the French Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.”… one of Paulet’s daughters and his eldest son Hugh died during his appointment.”

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