May 14th; Balint mentions his camera hire business.
May 13th; A nifty graph about American government spending, via Zdravko. Seemingly military spending has proportionately halved over 40 years - in other words, all the other spending has gone up even more quickly than it has. Such a clever infographic stops short of being really good - why not scale each bar to also show the absolute size of government spending in those three years?

May 12th; Eerie image of our sun looking like a large bacterium. Finish Marion and Paul's copy of 'A Very Short Introduction - Ancient Philosophy' by Julia Annas. She dives into an ancient (Greek) philosophical debate about moral conflict as a way of avoiding the usual timeline narrative. A chapter on how Plato's 'Republic' got reread in the 19th century as a book about an ideal state, despite that being a small part of the text, is interesting. Annas in the middle mounts a good defence of Aristotle as much more open-minded than later Aristotelians made him seem. Her closing summary mentions a lampoon by second-century AD satirist Julian, he of the 'True Story' adventure about travelling to the moon. In 'The Runaways' Julian compares Greek philosophy to other Oriental traditions as a wild goose chase by the gods - not particularly favouring Greek ideas.
May 11th; The mysterious Josh in England tells me that this Australian poster was not real. It mocked another Australian poster with the same meek cartoon Jim, this time not putting his feet on the seats. Perhaps a bit too good to be true.

May 10th; Finish Robin's copy of Dion Fortune's 'The Mystical Qabalah'. A clear walk through the Tree of Life diagram so central to this Jewish tradition. Ideas are explained in crisp, precise prewar prose, so much less apologetic or anxious to please than English writing since the 1940s. Fortune sorts out some of the muddling differences in terminology between Crowley and Waite. Less bewildering than the last time I looked at this.
May 9th; This advisory advert from an Australian railway network seems authentic. Especially enjoy the meek way Jim is sitting.
Solomun: see how in the photo the blissed-out producer dude with the name of the wise king gazes inward, grooving with the ineffable. Presumably, he transcends through the beat. Or something.

May 8th; I'm not sure why, but during last week's day-into-night-back-into-day picture-editing session on the book it was helpful to play this track again and again - indeed for much of the night. More of a mantra than a tune. Somehow doesn't sound so bad when you haven't slept and aren't thinking normally. This morning finished Robin's copy of 'Nemesis' by Peter Evans. This is a book by a dogged journalist from England who seems good at getting people to talk to him (perhaps he seems so dull & harmless his interview subjects underestimate him). He wrote a biography of Aristotle Onassis in 1986, but afterwards got told by some of the family & men close to the rogueish shipowner that he had "missed the real story". So he went back and did it again in 2004. The real story turns out to be that Onassis loathed Bobby Kennedy with a passion and paid to have him assassinated. I've never read a book about the colourful plutocrat before and was always mystified that with the pick of the world's women any healthy man would want to marry the unappetising Kennedy widow, but this book at least explains that. Onassis hoped for political & commercial leverage in the US and also just couldn't resist the showiness of marrying the world's most famous woman. She in turn liked his money very much indeed, wanted to leave America for a few years in case she got assassinated as well, and for all his rather serious faults Aristotle Socrates Onassis does emerge as having been quite a lot of fun to be around. Still, the assassination claim is the book's crown jewel. The problem with it is that the second Kennedy's killing so much has the fingerprints of an intelligence agency on it that all we really learn is that Onassis and his Greek colleagues were naive enough to think he had had Bobby offed for money. The sly PLO terrorist Hamshari who took his cash to "organise" the killing seems to have read Onassis like an open book. Either the Arab heard Bobby didn't have long to live, or just had the neck to touch Ari for money the same way he "called off" a threatened bombing of Onassis's Olympic Airways that was probably never meant to happen either. The fact that the PLO themselves finally passed a death sentence on their man Hamshari for misappropriating funds, as Evans dutifully reports, itself rather suggests the wily extorter didn't have the reach to get the second Kennedy taken out.
Overall reads like Onassis, devious to the point of gullibility, repeatedly pushed his gambler's luck. He sounds constantly full of himself, buffoonishly out of his depth with his grand plans for taking over Monaco or Haiti, yet almost touchingly sure that he was the sneakiest hoodlum on the block. It's clear that compared to the Kennedys or the CIA he was a bumbling amateur. Sweetly, most Americans thought Jackie was marrying down to pair up with the dwarfish billionaire who fled Pontic Smyrna aged 14 in the 1920s. This book unwittingly makes clear that, for all Onassis's vices, he was the one scraping the bottom of the barrel to be marrying her. Indeed, for such a famed seducer of stylish women, Onassis obviously had something of a tin ear for what women actually want. He repeatedly misjudged the point when he'd pushed a girl too far. His first couple of women sound like decent people and if he had to move on he should probably have stopped with Maria Callas, who seems to have been both exciting and genuinely devoted to him right to the end. Likewise, though he piled up cash from lots of very big deals, he repeatedly came to grief on a handful of even bigger deals. Bobby Kennedy doesn't emerge well from the story of how Marilyn Monroe died. No clear link between the Palestinian Hamshari and either Sirhan Sirhan, the hypnotised Palestinian shooter of RFK, nor one of the hypnotists who might have programmed Sirhan Sirhan, is shown. (Mind you, Evans hints so cleverly you think he's proved his case unless you read closely.) I'd have liked some diagrams showing who married and divorced whom & when. Like many good researchers, Evans writes slightly confusing prose. He knows all these names so well he keeps forgetting to remind the reader. Many pages of complicated sequences like her-lover-met-her-cousin-before-she-married-that-other-man... whose-uncle-who-had-earlier-married-the-younger-sister-of... could have been edited into a more readable state with only a little work.
Poignant to think of Onassis & his cronies racked with guilt and anxiety in the shipowner's final years over their big scary secret: a crime they all thought he'd commited - but almost certainly hadn't.
May 7th; Work much of day in Robin's studio doing a pen & paper translation of the prosthetic-hip article. Jellyfish seem to be fashionable, but are the ones in this short film being shown upside down?

May 6th; Several of us sit much of the afternoon on wooden chairs in the long grass in the garden with beers chatting about this & that. I suggest Constantine, as an aid to his trading, try to psychically tune into a commodity with some ancient resonance, such as silver or wheat. Having already kindly given me a fern in a pot, Georgina also has found a rather lovely old copy of a magazine for me from 1975 called 'Elet es Tudomany' ('Life and Science', in the broader Continental sense of "science" being any body of organised knowledge, from engineering to history, even literary scholarship ....to my slight surprise the journal seems to be still going). Rich in line drawings and black & white photographs, this exercise-book-sized publication has a remarkable range of content. There is an article about identical twins, an article about Ethiopia, a comprehensive profile of the small Hungarian town of Abony, an article on passive heating & thermal design of school buildings, a piece suggesting cancer is a disease of the immune system (If I'm not mistaken quite up-to-date for 1975?), a piece on the physics of weights suspended in glasses of water, and a long lead about some 19th-century radical called Oszkar Jaszi. The back pages have shorter articles, including a sample of written Carthaginian script, a crossword, a small column about an English Nobel Laureate for chemistry noticing his wife's diabetes caused gold jewellery touching her skin to make it go dark, and lots lots more.
May 5th; Letty's school-leaving ceremony goes well at church and school hall afterwards. Constantine & Edit are there. So are Robin, Georgina, & two of the other children. In the big hall we have to stand again because, as with the church, we are too slow to grab seats. Interestingly, most chairs face the long side of the school hall, but Letty's classmates having the leaving ceremony are seated at right angles to the main audience in a narrow strip along that wall. The 18-year-old school leavers, all girls, are in perhaps twenty rows - each row maybe 4 chairs wide - ten rows facing one way, ten rows the other, a lectern in the middle, halfway down that wall. The effect is as if just the seating from two buses or aeroplanes nose to nose with the lectern in between has been extracted and set down in the hall. The proud parents in the main body of the hall therefore can see their very pretty daughters in profile, all dressed in dark short skirts, 3"-heels, and matching jackets, creating a strong air-hostess effect. There are many flowers. We all get some bouquets to give Letty at the end, who has too many to carry really. Then we return in several cars to the house, where Marika and Georgina have prepared a huge buffet spread of sliced meat, salads: a groaning board of provisions.

May 4th; Having worked all night on fusion book, am in slightly strange state of mind by late morning. Sleep one hour around lunchtime, meet Nationalism Bea, buy train ticket, print out prosthetic-hip text, get on train. During half-hour change of trains at Kecskemet, look high up on the walls of the station's ticket hall. It has 1950s/60s tiling with multicoloured panels, each of which is made up of hundreds of half-inch-square pseudo-tiles of red or white or yellow or blue or green or black etc. Instead of the exciting Mondrianesque mood this was supposed to evoke close up, the overall effect is strangely drab. A number of Hungarian railway stations got these subtiled tiles (for example, the tiny waiting room at Lakitelek) and the effect is that of public lavatories or urine-scented underpass tunnels on British housing estates built by socialist local councils. Somehow, modernist municipal use of Krazee Kolor just adds insult to injury. It removes even the remnants of dignity from attempts to give clean usable buildings to the less well off. If you have to live around decor like this, you're subconsciously having it rubbed in that it is provincial plonkers who are patronising you: the people who rule your life don't even have taste. Nonetheless, in Kecskemet station hall, if you squint a bit, the tiny randomly-arranged squares of primary colour almost disappear and merge into a sort of shimmering beige. Looking up I see that most of the height of the hall is taken up by three tall windows at front and back, just blank walls at the sides. In one corner near the ceiling the sunlight of early evening makes three much smaller yellow lit-up versions of the front windows writhe on the blank (though tiny-tiled) walls. These golden projected window shapes fidget and move gently, as if in the wind, because there is a park filled with trees outside. You can almost hear trees moving while looking at the light effect, though there are really just station noises inside the building. Blurred blobs of light inside the window lozenges stir slowly back and forth on the inside wall as leaves & branches in the park move about softly. I go outside. The light rays of sun stretch across grass, only getting in among the trees in a few places. I cannot immediately see how it is that the sun makes smaller windows of light on the back wall inside the ticket hall. Perhaps it is that not the sun, but a patch of sunlit grass, is what is shining light so oddly through the big windows. But something, maybe chance placement of trees and the setting sun, would have to accidentally shape a sort of reversed cone of sunshine pointing inward. How else could big windows cast smaller, higher silhouettes of light? Strange effect.
May 3rd; I think yesterday woke from extraordinary vivid dream about stripy aeroplane. Work rest of day on fusion-energy book.

May 2nd; Ugly image hopes to make fingerprint-based biometric security seem safe & cosy. Of course in reality it's deeply unsafe and utterly creepy. Like having your bank cash card PIN tattooed on your forehead, only not as sensible. Notice how the clever-clever picture unwittingly admits that biometric authentification makes your home cramped & deformed, condemning you to squirm through claustrophobic darkness like a cockroach in a wall cavity. Actually quite an accurate metaphor for homo database: forever trapped inside the maze of your own whorls & ridges.
May 1st; Everything is very shut. Sun shines. Intriguing story from a US May the 1st in the 1970s.

April 30th; Sunshine today could officially be described as "hot". In recognition that tomorrow is May 1st, everything is shut today. One of those parsimonious tunes built out of an ultra-deep bass line, high breathy vocals, and a black-and-white photograph: Sweeter Than Sweet by Lulu Rouge. English friends recommend this green business portal, which looks rather natty and comprehensive on the content side. I really should be able to build that kind of site by now. Must learn to code. So lazy. Delicious dinner at Marion & Paul's. I manage to fling one of my cufflinks across the room while re-enacting being stung by a wasp in Robin's car. Marion says two of the boys she teaches at school have as parents an Italian porn actor who married a Hungarian porn actress. She adds that the mother seems, in the decade plus since this picture of the husband and wife was taken, to have become even prettier and almost Hepburn-like. Apparently both lads are very sweet & utterly charming at all times.
April 29th; Meet Salih for green tea. With Tatiana's help, fusion-book page loads quicker, and now has space-age line-drawing instead of colour photo. A few days ago, all-afternoon Diplomacy game at Jeremy's (I am Turkey, Austria-Hungary, & Germany). He describes one Christmas years back on duty at his police station, all the boys in blue playing Escalado and Pit, adding it got loud enough the fire station across the road asked them to keep the noise down.

April 28th; Lily finds some truly fascinating research: people think more rationally in a 2nd language.
April 27th; For anyone who didn't know already, Women Prefer Arrogant Men: someone checked. Still reading Robin's fine book about the French Revolution. Here's a print of the extraordinary moment called the Tennis Court Oath. Due to a misunderstanding, the indignant deputies of the Third Estate have crowded into an indoor tennis court (now 'Real Tennis', then 'Royal Tennis') on the Versailles complex. They drag in a couple of tables and, agitated, open debate. It's morning on the 20th of June, 1789. Believing (incorrectly) that Louis XVI just an hour earlier snubbed them and might even be about to dissolve the session, in high dudgeon they open what was to be a meeting with the king, but in his absence. They improvise and make history there and then. Passionate deputies' arms outstretch in what for us strikingly resemble stiff-armed fascist salutes as they swear jointly, from their hearts, that they shall be in session wherever they might meet together from then on. They will assemble wherever they can until a new constitution for France has been created. However dark the consequences proved to be not long after, hard not to feel the thrill - just from the picture - of that hour when 576 Frenchmen (out of 577, one man abstained) reinvented England's Long Parliament. Meanwhile a link from Lily in Oxford, a chatbot with remarkably lifelike facial movements and an endearing squint, called Evie. The AI element still as dire as ever though. Evie, despite looking like a pleasant young desk clerk from anywhere in Britain, is all over the place in terms of rational discussion. Several of my questions she/it completely mismatched ("misunderstood" would be giving her creators far too much credit, there's nothing approaching understanding going on in there). All that has changed since the days of Eliza in the 1960s is that her coders have put in some more aggressive tricks for Evie to change the subject when the bot cannot handle the incoming text strings. I type "What does this mean? markgriffith@yahoo.com" and Evie types & speaks back "Marry me." Cheeky little hussy.

April 26th; Moody Sapphic musings from Chinawoman, a sort of torch singer: I'll Be Your Woman / A Woman's Touch / Party Girl.
Surveillance State update:
"The NSA Is Lying" says former NSA official / New US Law CISPA / hotly followed by CISPA Strengthened & Voted Through Ahead of Timetable / How To Delete Yourself From The Internet / Flying Zappy Things.
April 25th; Haircut, sunshine, chores around town. Good radio chat about Neoplatonists.

April 24th; Skippy little tune from a man letting a woman go: 'Man Of My Word'. Apparently you need to spell out for a girl that you have standards. Their famed intuition doesn't detect this, I've noticed.
April 23rd; Update webpage for physics book.

April 22nd; Diverting ten-minute film claims that a smallish but still big dinosaur (a sort of scaled-down brontosaurus) still thrives in the jungles of Cameroon, central Africa. Naughtily, the film-makers paste animations of the creature ("mokele imbembe") into re-enactment footage without writing 're-enactment' on the screen, so if you don't pay attention you might think the creatures have been filmed. They haven't. Charming idea some might still be around. Professor Challenger lives on.
April 21st; Green tea with Nationalism Bea, back from San Diego.

April 20th; More management-training work with Jeremy. Finally check the RAF airmen sketches I've heard about ("Not like Gracie Fields, she mings bad.") Intriguing effect - not always clear which bits are different from how people talked off the record in the 1940s, when 'chap' rang closer to today's 'geezer' or 'dude'. Subtly show that slang changes mostly matter where they reveal changed attitudes. A few of them do. Also raises the question of whether British humour is coming full circle from the first RAF pilots comedy scene. That celebrated moment where Jonathan Miller & Alan Bennett on stage at the Edinburgh Festival in the late 1950s, and again on television in 1960, mocked reverence for British wartime bravery just 14 or 15 years before.
April 19th; Jerry Ganey covers Righteous Brothers song with film-theme horn section.

April 18th; Bogus graph claims reading of books has doubled since the 1940s. Based on lumping together several separate poorly-designed self-assessment studies of course, with an unremarked 33-year gap in the middle. Classic misleading chart.
April 17th; Quite tight animation sync to 'Once I Was The King Of Spain'.

April 16th; Slightly stressful drive back into Budapest for Robin & Bela to catch a cross-Continental bus to England. A traffic jam a couple of miles outside Pest has Georgina jumping out and persuading a lorrydriver to back up about five feet to let Robin squeeze the car through the gap and off onto a slip road. At the coach station which we reach with two minutes to spare we park in the central loop where traffic is banned. Georgina runs in one direction to sweet-talk the cashier, Robin & Bela set off in another direction with luggage, and I stay behind with the car to chat to the irate official who turns up to berate me for being parked there. When I tell him it's not my car and I have no driving licence, he looks frustrated. Georgina strolls back, gets in, sits behind the steering wheel, and seems to genuinely not even notice the speechless official standing by the car glaring in at us.
Here's a beguiling but ultimately unsuccessful idea - represent philosophies as simple graphics. I tried this a couple of decades ago: it's hard. Click on the page to get the full set of twenty-odd images.
April 15th; Gloomy cloudy weather continues as I answer Bela's questions about physics. Find two curious books hiding in corners of Robin's house.

April 14th; A friendlier introduction to app-writing. Take three connecting trains out to Robin's village in the Great Plain. Dull overcast day, until deep in the countryside a feeble sunset appears on one side of the train, and on the opposite side of the train a deep cornflower-blue sky appears behind trees & farmhouses, hanging down just out of reach like a mid-to-dark-blue curtain. While looking out of both sides of the carriage, on the 2nd & 3rd train get a strangely vivid set of pictures in my head for a peculiar low-budget film - a sort of Tarkovsky-style film in English, set in England for three male actors.
April 13th; More about Amazon megalomania.

April 12th; Amusingly, four days ago on Easter Monday I accidentally, that is to say completely unintentionally, dyed some eggs. Not easy for Gentle Reader to imagine perhaps, but I decided to hard-boil my last couple of eggs in the same boiling water that was softening some pasta. For a few years now I have been gently singeing the dry spaghetti sticks on the hot-plate before putting them in the water, creating blue puffs of smoke, and filling my flat with a curiously pleasant scent halfway between the smell of burning toast and the aroma of baking bread, but not really either. Slightly overdid this, and the boiling water became brown-grey. My eggs emerged gently tinted darker, as if seen through the 70s-style brown-tinted sunglasses of the tea expert Rob once described meeting in Gyor. By night a delicious dinner at Terri & Alvi's. Alison & Stephen Zeigfinger join us, and I see videos for Alvi's alarm-clock smart-phone app.
Sometimes ethereal, quite dreamlike, here is some music by 'Burial'. Seems they take themselves desperately, from the name to the strenuously grim record covers, not to mention Nouvel Gloom song titles like 'Fostercare', 'Wounder', 'Homeless', 'Untrue', 'Stolen Dog', 'Ashtray Wasp', 'Etched Headplate', it just goes on. Here is their almost upbeat 'Loner', 'Near Dark', and the positively cheery 'Shell of Light'.
April 11th; Forthright author declares "Let's not make deadly supergerms that could wipe out humanity!" Hard to disagree, really, for anyone who remembers this film. Watch for depixelating one-eyed man part-way through opening credits.
Lovely dinner with Writers' Group at Esther's, where we watch a curious DVD of 'Showgirls', with a voiced over commentary by David Schmader. Schmader is a self-appointed expert on the film who lives in Seattle. He explains why he thinks this is the ultimate film-so-bad-it's-good, and his observations on the dire plotting, wooden acting, & atrocious writing of Verhoeven's Vegas-set dance extravaganza are surprisingly funny & sharp. In the interview section of the DVD I get to see the face of highly-paid Hungarian-born Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Am oddly shocked to realise he really is a Mitteleuropan oik. Resembles the overweight but cunning truck driver who works out how to rob the warehouse.

April 10th; Easter Tuesday. Intriguing, very bold two-hour film about an American mythologist, or folklorist, as they'd call him round here: David Talbott. I read a couple of Velikovsky books from the public library as a small boy and found them fun but not backed up by anything else I'd heard, but it seems some people never gave up on the renegade Russian scholar. Dr V thought that the catastrophes of many/all ancient civilisation's legends were literal accounts of close approaches by our local planets that today seem to sedately trundle along calm orbits. Talbott has a worked-out theory that surprisingly recently, perhaps even just 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, the planets had different positions. A hauntingly beautiful suggestion is that the golden age remembered in ancient myths of every culture was a literal reference to a time when Saturn appeared huge in the sky and hung there 24 hours a day. He claims that Saturn's older name was the name of the 'sun god' in many languages (for example 'helios' in Greek originally meant 'Saturn' not 'sun') and that other evidence from myths suggest it was very large in the sky, revolving at the pole-star position. Perhaps at latitudes like the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean a big disc could reflect enough sunlight or even warmth at night, like today's moon times ten, to ensure a kind of mild summer all year round. Some of the texts call the Jupiter era, if that's what it was, a time when each year had many harvests and the northern hemisphere was warm & pleasant. Talbott has found a couple of astronomers who say the gravitational dynamics are possible. Certainly a refreshingly clear yet unorthodox theory, and a very enjoyable couple of hours. For anyone interested by this, there are other films where Talbott asks plasma physicists about glowing signs in the sky the ancients reported which might be electromagnetic effects of large bodies passing close to earth.
April 9th; Easter Monday. This pseudo-spring is toying with us. An hour of warm sunshine here and there, but also chilly winds, and strange dark afternoons. Almost as bad as England. The neon light tubes got a note attached to them addressed in a handsome feminine script to 'Dear Somebody' asking them to be removed, and about four days later they vanished, leaving only a plaintive hand-sized scrap of wrapping plastic on the walkway, like a feather after a bird fight. More irritating news on the civil-liberties front: President Barry appears quite chuffed with the new American remotely-kill-anyone-anywhere approach. Balint comes over and we chat about strange collective nouns in English, like a 'parliament of owls'. Could that phrase have started out as a mis-remembering of Chaucer's 'Parliament of Fowls', almost certainly a loose English adaptation of Attar's 'Conference of the Birds'?

April 8th; Lunch with Jessica at the Alfoldi restaurant, so she can enjoy (apparently) the best fish soup in town before leaving for Brussels tomorrow. I finish Jeremy W's copy of 'Enter Psmith' by P.G. Wodehouse, the 2nd of his books I've read. Very readable, and plotted with artful simplicity. Striking how knowledge of cricket is simply assumed of readers before the Great War. Also interesting to see how Wodehouse started off with a straightforward leading character called 'Mike', but the cameo role of Psmith (the P being silent of course) comes to later demand whole books to himself. Since Jeremy explains Psmith to me as a blend of Wooster & Jeeves, the obvious thought is that Wodehouse first brought Psmith into the foreground as a character, and later had another idea. That he could create more narrative tension and natural plotting by then splitting Psmith into two separate people, a likeably foolish toff and an unflappable high-IQ butler.
April 7th; Instal & try QT Creator. African film from a couple of years ago: described as a sci-fi satire set in Cameroon in 2025. Pic by photographer from down the road again, Xenia. The girl in this picture holds a tiny picture of a girl ...which I think is a cigarette lighter.

April 6th; Tea with Jessica. Hear about a new US film distributor. Magazine illustration from half a century ago. Looks quite fresh & sharp compared to now.
April 5th; More role-playing for Jeremy W's management students. Another week of sunshine, though still a slight chill in the air. Mermaids ahoy. Funny how just two colours, that dusty blue & orange, date a printed illustration.

April 4th; Fat cat with steely will defies snowscape.
April 3rd; Got teeth descaled at the dentist few days ago. Next chore: haircut.

April 2nd; Quick coffee with Jeremy W who is in good spirits. On an unrelated topic, no-one who uses "private number" to hide their phone number has any right to expect that people will answer their calls, and they don't deserve to be picked up. I answer only calls from numbers that identify themselves to me. Semi-detailed article bravely tries to get to bottom of McKenna's timewave-ish novelty-theory thing. Yet I still see no proper algorithm showing how one spiky line turned into a whole set of jagged sawteeth apparently soaring across billions of years, and yet still somehow fractally working when you zoom in on one century or one year. As the arithmetic teachers say, show us the working.
April 1st; In this little musical film, Lykke Li hunts down a man over open country until the poor wretch collapses from sheer exhaustion, suggesting Nordic girls are formidable and to be treated warily.
I finish Jessica's copy of a book by Pat Buchanan, who is apparently a well-known politico in the United States. This is his very recent 'Suicide of a Superpower' and reprises themes of the demographic shrinkage of the white European Christian core nation making up almost all of the US as recently as 1950. It is replete with those four-or-five-word sentences American editors and speechwriters like so much. One sentence dongs through the text - "We were a people then" is repeated at intervals through the book at weighty moments, perhaps five times altogether. His case is simple and not unreasonable: 1) other nations believe in ethnic nationalism, and it's no shame for the USA to embrace it too, 2) the rapid diversification of America's ethnic mix came from immigration encouraged since the mid-1960s by the political party which stood to gain from reducing the previous homogeneity of the country (namely the Democrats at the moment when Nixon's Southern Strategy was upending the old link between the Democrat party and white segregationists in the Dixieland states), 3) the US is overextended internationally and should cut military spending, 4) economic protectionism is no shame for the USA and was how the US and every other other country got rich originally (he sees the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs to the Far East as also damaging the core nation of thrifty, white, English-speaking Christians who previously gave the country its main identity), 5) all of this can (still... just about...) be reversed & repaired because the Democratic party's strategy is more fragile than it looks at first, especially during a recession, when government vote-buying largesse has to be cut back. There are a few signs the book was written in a bit of a hurry. "Ours is the world's oldest constitutional republic, the model for all that followed." (No, actually the Swiss Confederation is much older, and earlier republics like the Netherlands or the one-and-a-half-thousand-year-old Republic of Venice were in fact the models followed by recent republics like the US and France.) He quotes Goethe saying something "well over a century ago", which is lucky since the German poet turned 63 years old two centuries ago in 1812. A typo turns an ethnologist into an ethologist. The bit where he reveals himself as a loyal Catholic at the same time as apparently regretting the passing of a 99% Protestant USA is curious. Given how he dates the whole downfall to Lyndon Johnson, one can imagine a Protestant WASPish version of Buchanan setting the start of the decline two or three decades earlier and saying it was the Catholics who had been the thin end of the wedge. Nevertheless the whole thesis makes sense on its own terms. It's a coherent argument for economic & ethnic nationalism. Probably only embarrassment stops most Americans from agreeing with him.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact me and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?