Questions & Answers: The End

I have, like many others, been educated and informed by Questions & Answers over many years but all that was almost set to nought by the unfortunate appearance of Brian Cowen on the final programme last night. John Bowman did not need it and I’m not sure whose idea it was. It was self-congratulatory and cheap. Even Bowman did not seem particularly enamoured of the unfortunate set piece designed to honour Bowman but which ended up giving a free plug to the nation by one of the three people responsible for the depth of our current financial woes. The other two being Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy. If no one is interested in inviting Cowen on air it’s because no one wants to listen to his childish denials of responsibility.

The Secret History of the World

This book by Jonathan Black has left me wondering and I’m not sure what I’m wondering about really. I read it quite quickly which is a fair indication that I enjoyed the reading itself and also that it presented no particular difficulties. That it was accessible as it were but yet I am wondering. Coming towards the end of the book I marked a series of paragraphs that I hope will illustrate my point.

Madame Blavatsky wrote that among the Carbonari – the revolutionary precursors and pioneers of Garibaldi – there was more than one Freemason deeply versed in occult science and Rosicrucianism. Garibaldi himself was a 33rd degree Freemason and Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry.

In Hungary Louis Kossuth, and in South America Simoll Bolivar, Francisco de Miranda, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juarez and Fidel Castro, all fought for freedom.

Today in the USA there are some 13,000 lodges, and in 2001 it was estimated that there were some seven million Freemason worldwide.

What has the fact that Bolivar and Castro fought for freedom got to do with the Freemasons? Yet by sandwiching this between a reference made by Blavatsky in the late 1800’s and a statistic about the number of lodges in 2001 Black is implying something that he provides no evidence for. And this problem runs throughout the book. Implications made without any supporting evidence at all. Not even any footnotes, just again the implication that the extensive list of “key sources” will provide all the supporting evidence we might require. Black knows well that none of his readers will trawl through his list and I expect he is banking on that.

I must declare an interest. I am a student of the Arcane School whose courses are based on the books of Alice Bailey. Alice Bailey’s books are channelled from The Tibetan and because of this are specifically excluded from consideration by Black in his book. That’s fine and indeed reasonable to a degree but doesn’t seem to prevent Black claiming certain historic individuals were reincarnations of various masters.

On page 515 he sticks in a reference to Lorna Byrne, which I found on Lorna’s website and which led me to The Secret History. Here again we have an idea being presented, something else is just dumped in and then something else is connected to it by implication.

Rilke is using heightened, poetic language, but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.

IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book, I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book,… …… Hers is an alternative method of perception, a way of apprehending the parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place. Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness­eaters were on the move again.

So Rilke, Lorna Byrne and the first War in Heaven are all linked together in some way which the author considers not to require explanation. I’m really not sure what is going on in this book. It is sloppy and may be an edited version of a much larger body of work which has been attacked by an editor who did not have Blacks level of knowledge. Black says that “THIS BOOK HAS ACCUMULATED EVIDENCE to show that through­out history highly intelligent people have immersed themselves in esoteric philosophy.” I’m not convinced. I will accept that these people have had access to inspiration derived from higher planes of experience but to imply that secret societies were passing on techniques from which such inspiration was derived is pushing it.

A far simplier explanation is that bright, intelligent people sought out other bright intelligent people with whom they could have interesting conversations over coffee, over dinner or over a bottle of wine. What we would today call hot-housing. The conclusions they reached may well have being inspired but in order to make use of inspiration you need to have created a fertile ground within which the seeds can grow. Given the nature of the societies within which they lived and the protectionist nature of the church authorities secrecy may well have made sense. Look what happened to Galileo.

Leaving all that aside and making good use of a highlighter there are some useful ideas contained in this book. The central one for me is that we cannot make the assumption that previous generations perceived the reality as we do. I would apply this idea to the recent past. As we pour boiling oil on those whose behaviour is laid bare by the Ryan Report we need to balance our anger with an understanding of the value system that existed in Ireland at the time. The 20th century saw the extermination of 6 million Jews. It saw the massacre at Nanking. It saw the more recent atrocities of the Yugoslav war and the killing fields of Cambodia. To the people who carried out this actions it somehow made sense. We assume individuals are evil at our peril and enable ourselves to ignore the conditions from which such behaviour arises. Behavioural Psychology has much to offer by way of explanation.

Black offers the following:

How to recognize Satan? Or any false prophet? Or any false, pur­portedly spiritual teaching? False teaching usually has little or no moral dimension, the benefits of reawakening the chakras, for example, being recommended merely in terms of selfish ‘personal growth’. True spiritual teaching puts love of others and love of humanity at its heart – intelligent love, freely given.
Beware, too, of teaching that doesn’t invite questioning, or tolerate ‘ mockery. It is telling you, in effect, that God wants you to be stupid.

Here is a very important message to readers of this book. Here is much food for thought. If your education system does not promote questioning of those in authority, watch out. If your media is getting dumber and dumber, watch out. If everything is based on feeling comfortable and not upsetting people, watch out. If your beliefs cannot support others disbelief, watch out. THERE’S EVIL ABOUT.

Special Occasion Speeches – Project 4

Presenting An Award

This project has a time of three to four minutes and this final version came in at 3min 55sec but that was only after pretty severe last minute cutting. As I practiced it and got the the pace and pausing right I kept going over time. Hence the cutting.

The evaluator raised a number of issues:

• Failure to liaise properly with the Toastmaster on the night. This arose because my follow-on speaker was doing project 5 and accepting the award. We hadn’t organised how we intended to handle that with the Toastmaster: where people would stand and so on.
• The two speeches were not properly adapted, one to the other. This was due to emails going astray more then anything else but I should really have made sure my opposite number had my speech well in advance.
• Signs of nervousness that may be due to lack of confidence which I should address. Not sure what I could do about this.
• Take more control of the room. Again I’ll have to speak to my evaluator to see what exactly he means.
• He also raised one other useful point about the difference between writing for speaking and writing for reading. He considered many of my sentences to be too long and complicated making them difficult to recall when speaking. This results in over use of notes. This is very good advice. I love language and especially well constructed phrasing but that does make remembering the exact phrasing hard and that causes me to panic a little. So this is one I’ll be taking to heart for my next speech.

While these may seem rather petty/severe by normal meeting standards, the speech was delivered at a club formed specially for speakers doing advanced manuals and wishing to progress to a high standard. The assumption is that we know the basics and want to address the small things. So if we can’t handle the heat, we need to vacate the kitchen.

—————————————-The Speech————————-

When people retire from community work wonderful things are often said about them which they wish they had heard before they had retired and which would have being of massive encouragement when things got that little bit tough.

So each year we recognise the contribution made to community over an extended period of years by a single individual who is still active in their community by presenting a lifetimes contribution award in order to recognise the excellent work they do.

This man’s involvement with the GAA started as it does for most people, as a participant.He himself was at the receiving end of a previous generations contribution to their communities. As a football player he won both Club and Junior titles.

While we were chatting earlier he told me he played both full back and centre back but while his playing position may have been defensive, his subsequent career and contribution to the GAA in West Cork has been to lead from the front.

I’d say he’s held every administrative position his club had to offer, Secretary, Treasurer, PRO and now Chairperson.

He has even found time to be a selector for teams from under 10’s all the way up to Senior club level.

As always with people who give so much of their time and who put so much effort into what they do, they end up being asked to shoulder additional responsibility on a broader stage.

Tonight’s recipient has served on the County Board, chaired the Beara Division Committee and has been on the General Purposes Committee without which, as many of you will know, the games would not take place.

Now Beara has some of the mildest weather this country has to offer, but you just can’t do GAA without getting very familiar with mud, and wind and rain.

You also need to like driving along some very poor country roads, eating sandwiches of various degrees of quality, endless cups of tea.

Here we have the quintessential community volunteer without whom community cannot and could not exist.

Volunteers like tonight’s recipient give not because of any high ideals or lofty convictions but because it comes natural to them. They enjoy what they do.

They might not admit it to your face but for me this level of commitment, this level of selfless giving can only be maintained if you really enjoy it.

In recognition of the many dark winter nights he has spent in the mud, the wind and the rain.

In recognition of the endless meetings he has attended and which make the GAA the wonderful organisation it is.

In recognition of the millions of miles he’s driven often, I’m sure, into the early hours of the morning.

But most importantly in recognition of a lifetimes contribution to the people of both his own community, to the wider community at large and in particular to the youth members of the Gaelic Athletic Association.

It is my great pleasure to present this award to Mr ???????.

The Return of the Economic Naturalist

Robert H Frank is a journalist and academic who writes a regular column for The New York Times. This book is up to the minute having been published in 2009 and including some of his articles up to November 2008. It is very accessible stuff and even includes alternative explanations of American terms for the Anglophile reader. The material is all the more interesting because it deals with much of the Bush years from an economic perspective and which we can now view with the benefit of hindsight and in the midst of the results of Bush type free-market neo-liberal thinking.

The basic premise behind much of his thinking is that a consequence of trickle down economics is the debt incurred by middle income earners as they aspire to match the consumption of their higher earning neighbours. Frank sets the context with his own experience.

As a young man, I served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. The one room house I lived in had no plumbing or electricity, and its thatched roof leaked during heavy rains. At no time, however, did I feel it was unsatisfactory in any way. Yet I could not live in that same house in the United States, even in the poorest neighbourhood, without experiencing a profound sense of humiliation. If I had to go into debt to escape that experience, I certainly would.

And I understand what he means. Today, once again my car has had to be towed to the garage and it had to be towed home last Friday evening. If I could get it fixed I would but it has an electrical fault that no one can find never mind fix. Every so often the on-board computer looses the key security code and just stops the engine. Is it a source of humiliation for me? Yes, it is. No matter how much I tell myself that this is not my fault I feel a sense of inadequacy at my inability to resolve the situation and that inability is paraded publically each time the car has to be towed.

The problem is that having taken out a five year loan on the car I am in a negative equity situation as it is not saleable in its present state. Mind you it’s scary how many people have no problem foisting the car on some poor sucker willing to buy it, faults and all. But am I willing to take on additional debt, scrap the car and get a different one? Going into further debt to offset the sense of public humiliation would work but would result in a profound sense of failure internally. Maybe I could live with the less public version. In any case I need to do the sums and compare the ongoing maintenance costs with the cost of the additional debt (assuming I can secure additional finance). Mind you the question may become academic as my NCT is due in August.

Another theme threaded through this book is the attention we need to pay to behavioural economics in the future. Frank suggests that

[Republican Senator] Gramm and Greenspan were like many other traditional economists in their uncritical enthusiasm for Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand – the idea that unfettered market forces will guide self-interested individuals to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Had they taken an active interest in the behavioural economics revolution, a lot of misery could have been averted.

Basically, behavioural economics tells us that people respond to the context of their financial lives emotionally and very often irrationally. What our mammies and daddies, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours think of us plays a much larger part in our financial decisions then any cost-benefit analysis we might attempt to do. Our perceived status within our social group weighs heavily on us. As Frank says

The problem is that many people have difficulty weighing the trade-off between immediate benefits and future costs. when confronted with easy credit access, some inevitably borrow more than they can reasonably expect to repay. Once they get in over their heads, they borrow more, if the law permits. It was thus all but certain that million’s of society’s most economically vulnerable members would borrow them selves into bankruptcy if confronted with easy credit access. If we are unhappy about that, our only recourse is to change the rules.

The reality is that those who voted FF in the last general election were perfectly happy with the rules as they were. One hundred percent mortgages and deposits borrowed from other lenders. Sowing and reaping come to mind.

Frank does make many interesting suggestions regarding taxation in this book so there are ideas as to how best to balance the burden/services books. He describes the Americans as being tax adverse which I think could also be applied to the Irish. We have not quite got the connection between the quality of services and infrastructure available to a people and the amount of taxes they pay. That connection was lost way back in the seventies when local rates were abolished in pursuit of one party government. Yes, another FF idea. History may well show that the advent of the PD’s did even greater damage then would have been done had FF being able to keep this more extreme economic element within its ranks. We support extremism of any sort at our peril.

In any event The Return of the Economic Naturalist is a good and informative read. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of this authors thinking in the future.

Ok, Phase One Complete

OK, well done everybody. Phase one is now complete.

We have reduced Fianna Fail to second place. We have exposed them as a rural, backward looking party. We have shown them to be in complete denial as to the part they played in the current economic meltdown. The voters now accept that the Celtic Tiger years were by and large a wasted opportunity. An opportunity wasted by Fianna Fail. We have reduced their capacity to pull strokes and do favours which was their modus operandi and as such their only way of gaining popular support. They are not much use for anything now as they have no capacity to think creatively.

They will now implode (I hope) due to the loyalty to leader thinking. Most of the top dogs were complicit in the Wasted Years so there are few, if any, Soldiers of Destiny to replace Cowen with. The idea of finding a new Duce would cause such internecine warfare as to make the description of “political party” redundant. They will become known as the Cumman Wars. Maybe Michael Martin as he got sidelined rather early.

The next step is to force a general election and consolidate the gains. In addition we need to get the various extreme elements on the left and right to bugger off and not be so stupid as to believe that there is any fundamental change in the slightly left of centre position of the Irish people. The votes for socialists are just our way of saying “I’m serious. I’ll really vote against you” but don’t represent any real ideological position. As many FF commentators have said the real challenge will arise when the budgets on councils have to be agreed. But I think Council Managers have the final say anyway so steady as she goes.

Phase two involves using the years of experience gained negotiating deals in national agreements and in the North to strike a balance between spending cuts and spending supports that will help people through this crisis without placing a burden on future generations through excessive borrowing. At its core it needs to ensure that people proposing spending in any area are made responsible for the outcomes. Extreme Socialists rarely have to take responsibility for their ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’ ideas. Everybody having enough to get by is not a long term option. They really do need to get real, study some behavioural economics, cost their proposals and while still holding to their long term goals, seek to bring people along with them rather than adopt ‘holier than thou’ attitudes. You will be dumped next time round unless you can get people on board.

The negotiating must continue after the general election with a view to getting that balance right between FG and Labour. That combination did the job cleaning up the FF mess before and should work better given the stronger support for Labour. I think Enda Kenny might have the management ability to do the business but FG need to get the message out that charisma is OK up to a point but the leadership style in cabinet is what counts. Right now we need people with organising ability. We need people to tell the truth.

You can’t run an economy like Big Brother or Britains Got Talent. People have to be allowed to express doubts about policy and it has to be OK for them to give something support in the short to medium term. Dump the PR people. We know spin when we see it. Communicate, explain, persuade but don’t try to pull the wool over our eyes. Tell us that your doing a deal and what your trading. We can take it. Explain that if people what more of your policies then they have to vote for you but twenty per cent of the vote gets you twenty percent of the policies. But above all expose the vested interests were you find them. Even your own.

If the weekends results mean real change then the people of this country have to take responsibility for the governments they elect. If they choose to vote on the basis of policies that are too good to be true then they will suffer long term. As a nation we now have to pay for the bouncy castles and the garden decks, the SUV’s and plasma screen TVs. The bill is now due and we must pay with effort, be it physical or intellectual. We must not only earn our keep but pay the ferryman too. He brought us here because we told him to. And Chris De Burg did warn us.