Who Owns Taiwan?

A remarkable law case earlier this year in the United States was recently dismissed by the Supreme Court. I thought that I would draw my one demented reader's attention to it. In doing so, I should note for the equivalent people who sometimes read in East Asia that I mean no offence to anyone in doing so.

The case concerned the formal status of Taiwan. Japanese claims to the island were renounced in the treaty of San Francisco. The United States, in World War Two, essentially drove them out. The remains of the Kuo MinTang--Chiang Kia Shek's Nationalist Chinese--claimed the island as part of the Republic of China, and then moved there when Mao established the People's Republic. The ROC developed a military presence via which it governed after 1945, at one point suppressing an uprising in 1947 with some 30,000 casualties.

The US, in theory, moved out, though in 1955 it established a unified military command with Taiwan which was maintained until 1979. The United States has a very heavy presence in surrounding waters, and in clandestine bases. At one point during the Indo-China Wars, had as many as ten thousand CIA advisers on the island. In 2003, the US still had a large Signals Intelligence base there.

The official US position on Taiwan is that it is part of China, that mainland China is China, but that the United States has no position on who is sovereign over both. However, it has tended to put itself between the ROC and the PRC militarily at different times.

Hence the lawsuit. Roger Lin and another, who will be important in a moment, recently argued before the US Court of Appeal that, since there was no ROC government on Taiwan when the US liberated it from the Japanese, the USA owned Taiwan. It was absurd, they suggested, that a US military government should be seen as acting on behalf of a government that did not then exist and which was not based there, any more than the US occupation of Germany was really done in the name of the Weimar Republic.

Yet the United States does say that anyone in a possession of the United States is entitled to national, but not citizenship, rights. Taiwan, occupied by the US and liberated by it, could be seen as a possession of it; if its independence is still guaranteed by the US, the court could have taken a line on it.

That argument makes some sense, as nutty points that ought to be left to moots often do. It led to a new chain of legal logic, however.

Since there is a category of non-citizen US national which was last recognised before 1957 in the Phillippines, as a person under the control or authority of the US, and since this was recently upheld in the recent Boumedienne case involving the Bush administration, it followed that Taiwanese people could in theory apply for US passports. So Lin and others did. They were turned down.

That was sufficient to get the case into a Federal Court of Appeal. I was very interested in the final judgment there, which refused to have anything to do with the case on the basis that the court should not interfere in American foreign policy regardless of any rights involved, especially if the foreign policy was in appearance deliberately ambiguous. Lin took the case to the Supreme Court, which last month affirmed that it would have nothing to do with reopening it.

What if the Court had? The US economy in the nineteen nineties became one in which the standard of living that Americans in theory enjoyed was based on three premises. One was cheap oil; another was cheap credit; and a third was cheap immigrant labour. Together, these more or less constituted the pillars of globalism. In the twenty-first century, this false miracle of productivity and endogenous technological growth began to slow.

It was kept from complete collapse by a huge and uncounted reserve army of immigrants working below the minimum wages, and Americans were kept from confronting the reality of what happened to pensions and to companies guaranteeing pensions, and to asset values, after economic decline by the hidden contributions of those immigrants. In the meantime, the US used its apparent new wealth to fight wars rather than rebuild itself.

Now that game is up and the swelling US unemployment figures should be supplemented by all those in the country illegally without gainful employment, or for that matter all those who were part of the US economy and under its direction and control now unemployed.

What if Iraqis, Afghanis, Taiwanese, Cubanos, Mexicanos, and various Latinos had actually been made American citizens last month by the extension of a Taiwan doctrine? It's a mind game, but could have happened. They would have had access to US national rights by virtue of being in a possession of the US or simply by being in the US.

I can see a number of previous supreme courts having accepted the argument; it is a measure of how (properly) conservative the court has become that this one dismissed it as the equivalent of a mind game.

A mind game to me, anyway. The situation for Roger Lin is more serious. His lawsuit attracted very unfavourable publicity back in Taiwan. He is potentially up for the death penalty for treason, and many of his former supporters are backing away.

I think ultimately that Taiwan is going to have to accomodate with China because business investors and the situation suggest that this is all that it can do, but I would not be surprised at some future occupation that advanced the assimilation. After the failed Phillippine colonial experiment, and after Hawaii, could the US ever really have added another Asian state?

Spaced Out

I've been thinking about space quite a bit this week in my sickbed. It was partly the effect of the cocktail of flu drugs and stomach pills and so forth which I was ingesting--at one point I drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of Monty Python's Life of Brian playing in German on a laptop, fairly high in a legal way. Partly, I suppose, I wished to 'scape some of the more tedious and obvious thoughts about Britain's economic crisis.

That last line probably reads as typically pompous, but I was for a time caught in the credit crunch myself, until the video tutorials (which a surprising number of undergraduates seem to want) stepped in and began a little thousand-point reflation, as it were.

Anyway, three odd events have come together in my mind. The first is the Vatican's conference on evolution, life, and the universe which was held under the aegis of the pontifical academy. The conference debated astrobiology, and attracted many famous physicists, including Stephen Hawking. It has been, inevitably, reported by the more excitable in the media as a conference on Extraterrestrials. If you believe what you read in the press you really shouldn't be on this blog.

Bishops and science fiction tend to run together sometimes. It was Bishop Francis Godwin, after all, who wrote one of the first sci-fi stories, musing on how morning dew might transfer the mysterious essence by which it flew to its carrier and thereby allowing flight.

At the time, an Aristotelian delusion of essence was perfectly respectable, as was the later but contingent idea of ether. Godwin was around at just the right time, though, to know enough of gravity (and, probably, the still somewhat shady calculus that the likes of John Locke kept quiet about too) that he could joke about the inverse rule of gravitational attraction to distance. He really was between worlds, except that they were behind his eyes.

Godwin made me think of Josef Schumpeter. He was a somewhat bitter man, though he concealed it a little, who'd been ruined once, exiled twice, and who unsurprisingly came up with the idea of creative destruction in economics. I thought of him because Schumpeter thought that the most interesting people, and those who drive growth, stood in the overlap of convergent waves of change and time. Mad as he may sound, he makes in the twenty first century a better case for where growth comes from than, say, the Swann-Solow, Kaldor, or Keynesian models that were once so dominant.

There's an intellectual history to be written of the twists and turns of economic philosophies at the end of the last millennium, though how many would see the utility of allusions to episcopal whimsy I do not know. Many, if this flu gets round.

Other, and of course catholic, priests followed the Anglican Godwin with slightly more serious science. Between 1700 and 1750, Vatican observatories sprang up, which eventually had a great hand in the invention of the spectrograph, and by 1930, it was a Belgian catholic priest who came up with the idea of the 'big bang' theory of universal evolution.

Journalists, especially in English speaking countries, often don't realise these things, trapped in a post-protestant or anticatholic mindset as many of them are. Of course, what may be running through yours, as you read, are notions that Giordano Bruno was killed because he believed in many worlds, or that Galileo suffered because of some nonsense about a flat earth that Washington Irving made up after the event.

That's not true. Both suffered because they defied the iron logic of Rome, which is of perceived loyalty and overt obedience. Not even the worst version of Torquemada or Savonarola, however, could ever be said to be good catholics if they consistently defied physical truth.

I'm going to try and read the papers of the pontifical conference online, and if you have time you may wish to as well. They include Stephen Hawking on origin and destiny; Rudolf Muradian on numbers; Fotis Kafatos on evolution in the insect world; discussions of digital intelligence; and an intriguing set of papers on evolution culminating in one on the appropriate level of silliness to assign to the idea of intelligent design.

The second 'space story' that caught my attention and which made me think was this one. It suggests that the increasingly open, but not world-toppling rivalry between India and China in Space might ultimately be fruitless. Both countries have explored an idea which really appeals to me, of mining the regolith of the moon for helium-3, and then using it for fusion power.

Unfortunately, there seem to be serious doubts about the possibility of doing so with a tokamak reactor, and other reactors under perform or have not yet even been tested. It's absurdly early to call time on an intriguing idea, but it may have just slipped further away.

The third space story was a neato one; a couple of fridays ago, we all missed a collision with a largeish asteroid by the cosmic equivalent of a hair's breadth. It wasn't as big as Tunguska and wouldn't have done that much damage, but the news, coming as it did after the recent explosion of a meteor with nuclear force over Indonesia made me think. If Tunguska's 1000-Hiroshima object had entered the atmosphere a little later in the morning of June 30 1908, and hit Moscow, or Berlin, or London--what would the twentieth century have been like?

All good fun when you're ill. Here's a video with some serious people and some others. Mmmm crunchy nut.

Prestiti, Stuarts, Sunshine and Gold

From a History of Interest Rates, by Sidney Homer;

Confidence in the prestiti (the forced loans of the Republic of Venice) grew with their long record of repayment of interest in spite of war and disaster. It was helped by the growth in the prosperity of Venice, and her ability to service her debts....however, in the course of the hundred years war, both the King of England and the King of France defaulted on their debts. Most of the big banks in Italy broke, and this led to reforms; in 1374, Venetian banks were forbidden to trade in speculative commodities; in 1403, they were required to hold two fifths of their assets in public debt; bank examiners were appointed.

From King Charles I, on the forced loans;

That he would not leave to posterity such a mark of weakness upon his reign; and therefore his conclusion was non placet petitio, non placet exemplum. Yet with this mitigation that in matters of loans he would refuse no reasonable excuse, nor should my lord chamberlain deny the arresting of any of his majesty's servants, if just cause was shown. The Parliament, however, acknowledged at this time, with thankfulness to the king, that he allowed disputes and inquires about his prerogative much beyond what had been indulged by any of his predecessors

From the a legal commentator on the Government of California, which is enforcing a loan of ten per cent on all paychecks, to be returned without interest next April, starting this Sunday;

As part of California's annual budget ordeal, rather than enacting new taxes, the legislature enacted (and the Governor signed) various income shifting and tax acceleration provisions. Under ABX4-17, as of November 1, 2009, employers will be using a new state income tax withholding table to increase by 10% the amount of income taxes withheld based on existing claimed exemptions...

California is proceeding on the assumption that either employees under withhold income taxes through payroll or that employees will not be smart enough to adjust their withholding, and instead give California an interest-free loan of California employees' income.

Empires and states rise in different ways; they fall recurrently.

So much gold has now been bought as a hedge against collapse that the world supply by some estimates has run out.

Still--it could be worse. These people are selling their wives to repay debt.

Peter Fechter and the Cost of the Wall

There is no agreement on how many people were murdered to build actually existing socialism. Discounting National Socialists, as we properly should, the global figure runs to something of the order of sixty to two hundred million people, with most figures settling nearer to one hundred million. Of course, if you stretch things back to the French Revolutionary Wars, or even the Paris Commune whose flag Gagarin carried into space, you get a slightly expanded number.

I view this as a dystopian combination of the lunacy best articulated by Rousseau, materialism, the reformation, and industrial badness. Did this happen because western Christianity was so much mixed up with militarism?

All those lost lives...of course, many would by now be dead anyway, but didn't they have some basic right to a chance of life? I always wonder when I see an old picture what would have become of a person.

Ah well. The photograph is of Peter Fechter. He met God at eighteen, after an hour of agony. He was a bricklayer, shot in the pelvis by a DDR guard as he tried to get to freedom. It isn't the constant threat of nuclear destruction, nor the persecutions of the faithful, nor the wars, that bring home to me what happened after Proudhon and Marx. It's him, and the 136 who died with him and the 5000 who escaped.

The wall's been down twenty years, and life and God have broken out again. If the twentieth century was a horror story, I am glad for Germany and Russia, whom it was all about, that it ended the way it did.



UPDATE: After this post, I went looking for any equivalent wall which was established to keep a state's own people in. I found the peace wall in Israel--which has worked in stopping nutcases murdering Jews--and multiple walls in the Arab and Muslim worlds, not least in Iran. I found the European Union's walls in Mellila and Ceuta, which share a border with Morocco and from which many illegal migrants have been killed. I also thought about the anabaptists and the Paris Commune, and for that matter Waco, but all seemed inappropriate. The only near comparison that I could think of was the British Treaty Line with Native Americans established in 1763-4, shortly before the American Revolution to guarantee Indian land (and which, of course, drove the colonists nuts).

The Berlin wall remains the only one that I could think of dedicated openly to the proposition that a state had to be maintained as a sort of prison. 80,000 tried to escape it, 5000 succeeded, and several hundred seem to have died on it (the figures are disputed). People make you sad sometimes.

AeGukGa

Three thousand lengths of splendid rivers in mountains
Lined with Roses of Sharon.
The pine tree stands alone unchanged on the mountaintop
Armoured against the frost
As resilient as our spirit
And three thousand lengths of splendid rivers in mountains
Lined with Roses of Sharon.
Autumn Sky is void and vast
High and Cloudless, but the bright moon is our heart
Undivided and true...

동해 물과 백두산이 마르고 닳도록
하느님이 보우하사 우리나라 만세

무궁화 삼천리 화려강산
대한사람 대한으로 길이 보전하세

남산 위에 저 소나무 철갑을 두른 듯
바람서리 불변함은 우리 기상일세

무궁화 삼천리 화려강산
대한사람 대한으로 길이 보전하세

가을 하늘 공활한데 높고 구름 없이
밝은 달은 우리 가슴 일편단심일세

무궁화 삼천리 화려강산
대한사람 대한으로 길이 보전하세

이 기상과 이 맘으로 충성을 다하여
괴로우나 즐거우나 나라 사랑하세

무궁화 삼천리 화려강산
대한사람 대한으로 길이 보전하세

Well, a beautiful anthem it is. I thought for reasons of my own that I'd put it up here. It is one of the more soothing and less bloody anthems which I can hum. Do you have any favourites?

Go and read Conservative Cabbie

Because his blog is fun and he appears to like me. But also because it is excellent and I don't puff it enough.

A Little Late Night Yeats

And why not? Here's The Curse of Cromwell, from November 1936, which seems oddly close for no good reason at all.

You ask what—I have found, and far and wide I go:
Nothing but Cromwell’s house and Cromwell’s murderous crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen, where are they?
And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride—
His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone,
But there’s no good complaining, for money’s rant is on.
He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount,
And we and all the Muses are things of no account.
They have schooling of their own, but I pass their schooling by,
What can they know that we know that know the time to die?
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys,
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company,
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their setvant though all are underground.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

I came on a great house in the middle of the night,
Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight,
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through;
And when I pay attention I must out and walk
Among the dogs and horses that understand my talk.
O what of that, O what of that,
What is there left to say?

Maths aren't Life....

I've been very struck this past week by the ongoing capacity of the social sciences to fail. I am not, as it were, a disbeliever in their insights. I think that societies and peoples have from time to time been advanced by the discipline that a requirement to model and assess policy and action have placed on decision makers.

However, I've always been very suspicious of what I see as the pretensions of political scientists or econometricians. Building unreal models of the world and then judging people or developments against them seems to me precisely what most of the new philistines think Catholicism is--a platonic effort to hold reality to an unreal standard.

We've had three decades now of 'scientific, evidence based' policy making. The wreckage of the derivatives industry, and of the global warming cult are two of the most interesting consequences.

The two ideas are linked in numerous mathematical ways. Derivative markets, for instance, really took off on the back of David Li's industry-wide model in the mid-1990s. He allowed banks and financial institutions to convince themselves that they could identify what would happen if one or a number of variables in a set went wrong, and how their dysfunction would affect the rest. This allowed banks to assign risks to tranches of collateralized mortgages, or to derivatives of those derivatives. This then allowed them to trade them, and to take the nominal value as an asset, which let them avoid the rules on the amount of reserves that they had to hold in the amount of an economic downturn or a run on the banks.

What started happening was what anyone who has been through elementary school, or for that matter what anyone who has ever been asked what they'd like on a pizza when they were drunk, knows would have happened in their bones. Bankers thought of numbers, doubled them, spun them through a leverage wash, and hid behind the Gaussian copulation they had balanced on a series of knife-edges. Then there was a bloodbath.

It all sounds fairly seedy and psychotic. Knife-edges are terms associated with econometric modelling (in domestic and foreign aid policy)that have also been used in global warming. The basic idea is that some parameters must be limited in order for some models to work. They sit on 'knife edges' of assumption.

So, if one is seeking to establish where a market will stabilise--or, for that matter, whether or not a trend will continue--it is perfectly normal practice to make the numbers fit not only an observation but the condition for which you are looking. People convince themselves that they are just making a qualifying assumption, but the idea is that they know what they are looking for and change the facts to fit it rather than just being a passive observer. They can then compare the fruit of their hypothesis to reality, or prove it unnecessary, odd or false.

I think that the public explanation of global warming as a settled and provable thing, based on models employing forcing techniques like this and others, is now demonstrably invalidated. Not only is it unnecessary, and not only does it not correspond to the observed reality of contemporary temperatures, but it is clearly ignorant of the almost daily interruption of hitherto uncounted variables that prove it wrong.

On a day when antimatter has been observed in the atmosphere given the electrical energies there, and when cosmic wind and solar observations seem to be correlating with global cooling, who is foolish enough to pay any attention to crude, forced, carbon-related and behind the curve ideas?

Our political classes, that's who. They need the delusion of certainty. I suppose it's the same feeling they had when the monasteries were stolen, the church exiled, or the fields enclosed, let alone when Ireland, Africa, Asia, and Native America were raped, albeit with drugs rather than a Latin sword.

The British ones bear a special responsibility. They, and their cleverer mates in banking, were the ones who, for instance, invented derivative markets in swaps, options, futures, and debt-related products, and who perverted them, failed to notice what they were doing to bank leveraging, and who corrupted the world to the tune of thirty-four quadrillion dollars with them.

They were the ones who propagated, along with American liberals, the dangerous nonsense of carbon trading. They are the ones who thought the destruction of whole communities would lead to the elevation of investment into output via savings--just as they were smacking their lips and privatising the state whilst changing the law to encourage the greedy to destroy building societies. I'm sure that the Swann-Solow model of growth provided them with a rational excuse to do so.

They're the ones who are creating a climate of fear amongst parents about parental discipline, and school choice. They are the ones writing stupid rules about landfill and clogging magistrates courts with people who have infringed some social rule whilst Members of parliament defund the Treasury and stuff the bankers' mouths with fiat paper, their pockets with allowances, and their suits with self importance. They're lying to you about Afghanistan and Europe right now, mostly because they lie, and lie, and lie to themselves. Everyone here does. I'm no saint. It's how you get through a day.

English lumpenabiturienten; the ones who gave into the most dangerous delusion of all--that life could be mapped, and calculated, and that the conclusions could be applied as policy. History to them had no meaning, and a common corpus of culture that inculcated commonsense and drew on the wisdom of crowds was elitist. Communities were racist, and had to be diluted. The numbers and the policies had spoken.

Except, the numbers and the policies don't speak. Those are voices they hear, but they're inside their heads. They reflect the topography of their auditing minds, and feed their desperate need for certainty.

It's sad, when I reflect that more human things would have prevented so much pain. If more people in the Labour government had had at some point and for an extended period a proper job, for instance, or more people at the senior criminal bar had respect for themselves and for others, or more people in the Bush administration had really--and I'm conscious this is crude, but its a basic truth--got laid or drunk when they were younger, (other than the President) then no one would have fallen for the rubbish.

I exempt Bush; he of all of them knew what he was doing and did it simply and he'll be damned for that. The rest were driven by their psychological problems.

We wouldn't have been on mad campaigns to kill, or waste money, or grind the faces of the poor in fear and moral righteousness whilst heckling God with atheism and telling women they were free to be debt slaves by letting male and wannabe male members of the educated middle classes abort their children.

It was either Jesse Jackson or Willie Brown who characterised the Democratic Leadership Council as 'a bunch of white boys in suits'. That sort of practical wisdom, and the understanding it conveys, is worth a tonne of papers on the fibonacci sequence in bistro swaps.

The link, by the way, takes you to a socioeconomic video on logarithms and stock markets, beneath which is a link to 'animal porn'. I wonder which would tell you more about investment banks.

Perhaps I ask too much. Even if they did know what was happening, could the political classes have spoken over the rant of money, could they have been expected to want to put a smile on an old face over some cold-blooded rich one, any more than Friedrich Olbricht could have been expected to stop Hitler?

It might be too late now, though. The more I look at the west and its follies, which begin with an over-reliance on mathematics, the more I think about how much colder the world is getting, the more I think about the last time we had this peculiar concatenation of environmental change down the thermometer, political illegitimacy and corruption, economic crisis, and social hysteria born of deliberate ignorance, the more I want to head East or South. Very, very quickly.

Oh, sod it. Here's a video depicting some robust Texan political analysis. I have three weeks of nonsense in front of me and I want a good tune.

From Urizen to Eurozone

And Urizen read in his Book of Brass in sounding tones: --
`Listen, O Daughters, to my voice! listen to the words of wisdom!
Compel the Poor to live upon a crust of bread by soft mild arts:
So shall you govern over all. Let Moral Duty tune your tongue,
But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone....

And when his children sicken, let them die: there are enough
Born, even too many, and our earth will soon be overrun
Without these arts. If you would make the Poor live with temper,
With pomp give every crust of bread you give; with gracious cunning
Magnify small gifts; reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp.
Say he smiles, if you hear him sigh; if pale, say he is ruddy
Preach temperance: say he is overgorg'd, and drowns his wit
In strong drink, tho' you know that bread and water are all
He can afford. Flatter his wife, pity his children, till we can
Reduce all to our will, as spaniels are taught with art.'


Making things up about the past is a deeply human thing. I read a fairly astringent column in a paper yesterday suggesting that Europeans should never contemplate rejecting their currency on any notion other than the maximisation of their self interest.

That's a liberal, and an economic fetish, of course. The idea that human beings would ever maximise interest rationally, and not take account of tradition, or sentiment, or association, is psychotic. The reason it is psychotic is that it shares with liberalism the idea that we are, fundamentally, rational beings; it derives perhaps from Kant the idea that a being with a moral faculty would rationally be moral, and therefore improvable to the point of pure reason. Expression becomes delusional integrity, when it is in fact the deliberate extension of a flawed and irrational will into a world of others.


Sigh.Civilisation is a balanced series of repressions. How many times do people have to be told that?

Most people know that people are not wholly rational, and that when they meet people who claim to be so they should head for the wall and hold on to their drink. People need a variety of ways of understanding the world not because they are imprisoned by sentiment or tradition, but because in some way they sense that their nature requires self-protection.

Over time, cultures build up and reinforce themselves; lessons that are as natural and sensible and commonsense as one might think need to be learned. No culture, no given learning; the finger heads to the fire, and we learn things individually that we could have avoided if someone had just told us that to think is not to rationalise but to place thought in a box of logic and experience.

You can't sell or digest that any more than you can avoid irony when you erect a wall around a concert to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall. 1989 has become in memory a year of liberal revolution and rejuvenation; as time passes, the destruction of a Rousseau-driven and blood soaked folly in the east comes more and more to resemble the rising of a greedy, dreary and equally materialist kraken. Kalecki walks away and Schumpeter, Swann and Solow sidle up.

What I'm sure most people want is for them all to bugger off. People need or ought to have families and fulfilling jobs and children and faith. Hanging around in an extended childhood, enforced by financiers, ticket collectors, or communists, is never going to make people happy.

William Blake thought something of the sort in creating his mythology of Urizen. People need stories because they are probably not equipped to understand or process truth in a cerebral way. I believe in God, and in my church, of course, I'm not a fideist per se. But Blake, just like Burke (with whom he is not usually linked) saw how powerfully people responded to symbols and stories.

Blake and Burke, for instance, both bought into the idea that Americans were the products of a young culture, as much as Jacksonians later thought (wrongly) that men in buckskins using their own weapons won the battle of New Orleans. It suited everyone. However, American culture was in essence the western and more conservative half of an Atlantic world that mixed florentine republican traditions, the European enlightenment, and English-speaking liberalism and commerce over the ocean. America in many ways preserved older traditions, like the common law, English liberal republicanism, jury trials, robust but limited parliamentary action, and the legal restraint of political behaviour by constitutionalism much, much more than England does, or ever did.

There's a reason most English people don't know about Magna Carta and Americans do, and celebrate it. There was a reason that it was convenient for a newly empowered London middle class, safe in the island after the defeat of the Scots in 1745 and content to remove Philadelphia and New York from their role as an alternate centre of financial gravity, to depict the Americans as young and unlettered. For America--that child of Hamilton, and Franklin, and Madison, and Morris--the clothes fitted too. That doesn't make it true formally, just interesting. Markets didn't start to define American approaches for another fifty years or so; religion and electoral populism not for another sixty.

It's like when Jimmy Carter invented the Mujahedin, funded it, launched attacks on Iran, and left office, or when Robert Kennedy wiretapped Martin King and drummed Communists out of public life. It became convenient for both sides to have, as they say, an extended moment of silence and adopt different roles. A very human thing.

So when Europeans look at a currency, I can't believe that they are looking purely at a vehicle to drive their self-interest, even if on some measures they should. People fool themselves all the time.

If derivative traders had looked at swaps and collateralised mortgage vehicles and all that other intellectually exhilarating stuff, and actually said, for instance,

we wish to evade 'reserve ratios and stuff our mouths with gold and our noses with cocaine, and we wish to encourage a common European currency to promote derivative markets over government bonds which our mates are holding down the return on to control governments and we will tell ourselves that we are expanding freedom and defeating superstition when we do it'

they may have stirred some moral impulse in themselves that stopped them from doing it. No, maybe not. But can humourlessness and badness overlap? Surely the humoured might see what's good, and the bad see what's funny, and step back?

That's revealing and wishful thinking. Most of the bad at any time are humourless.

We need viable intellectual traditions, and the wisdom of time communicated through culture, to whisper in our ear. If men of peace acknowledged why they, like many before them, warred, they might see their limits; if rational minds understood that they were not always rational or clear, and that there was sense in institutions and tradition, they might be less angry.

How did it come to this; that we should tell ourselves that the notion that money can be controlled and representative is a delusion, whereas deliberate if poetic notions are things of no use, neither to be learned nor celebrated?

We should teach children tradition, and clarity of thought, and the madness of Urizen. Not that they can form their own conclusions about deep waters, or that they should prize their rationalisations over wisdom. We should stuff their heads with culture and things that they need to learn, and then let them play out their adult lives discovering what they want to do with it. We create new, soulless ways of living and pretend that they are free and open at our peril, and we lie to ourselves.

But then, that's what people often do.

A Scientist Explains Swine Flu--and her doubts about the vaccine

Dr Teresa Forcades is apparently a physician, who practised for several years. She holds a PhD in public health from Barcelona, and was a specialist in internal medicine in the State University of New York. She also holds a Masters in Divinity from Harvard, and a doctorate from the Faculta de Theologia de Catalunya.

She is now a Benedictine Nun. From the position of a scientist, she has uploaded six videos onto youtube, in which she attempts to explain the science and doubt behind stories of swine flu in the news. I am not qualified to understand her points, but the videos are fascinating. Dr Forcades is not inclined to charity with regard to the pharmaceutical industry, having written a pamphlet on their crimes and abuses, as she sees them.

Dr Forcades has also attempted to reconcile her feminism with Catholicism. This may upset many of my readers. She believes, as some American catholics do, (on what I have suggested before is a flawed reading of St Thomas Aquinas) that abortion of a non-viable foetus is a question inseparably bound with a woman's liberty, and that imposing a rule of no abortion necessarily limits the freedom of a woman in whose hands God has placed the care of a foetus.

I agree with her, but draw very different conclusions. I respect her intellectual honesty, though; at least she is not lying herself into some of the more strident feminist delusions about the body and the subordinate status of the foetus as a limb. She is also a 'liberation theologian', or could credibly be said to be one. I am not, in the normally understood sense of the term.

So, I thought that I would put the following video here for you as a pass-time, and for myself in the future. Dr Forcades wants very little to do with the swine flu vaccine. Some connected with the Holy See are not happy with her, and others have accused her of pseudo-science, though her credentials seem impeccable.