"The Sons Of Martha" by Rudyard Kipling

“The Sons Of Martha”
by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
from “The Years Between” (1919)

The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

They say to mountains “Be ye removèd.” They say to the lesser floods “Be dry.”
Under their rods are the rocks reprovèd—they are not afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit—then is the bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

They finger Death at their gloves’ end where they piece and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his terrible stall,
And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad and turn him till evenfall.

To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden—under the earthline their altars are—
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city’s drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s ways may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat;
Lo, it is black already with the blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessèd—they know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessèd, and for them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the feet—they hear the Word—they see how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and—the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons!

Poems

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/text-march-11-the-prodigal-hamish-robinson-a-new-poem

The Prodigal
by Hamish Robinson
March 2011

Arriving at the airport I was sure
Of what I was about
To do: I had no doubt
I had to have this woman for my wife,
But she began to raise her voice and shout
(Some on-line check-in flaw
Meant seats not near the door),
And I thought fast and hard about my life.
Her shrillness passed through me like a knife
And left me somewhat shocked:
My confidence was rocked,
And I knew then what I had left behind
Was something I would find
I missed as soon as all routes back were blocked,
And there and then I turned and walked away
While she was busy trying to get her way.

I should have seen it coming from the first:
Her having such a lung,
And being highly-strung,
But then her beauty held me like a hook,
And every time I saw her I was stung.
I would have died of thirst,
Or shrivelled up, or burst,
Had I not taken all the steps I took,
But now I saw it plain as in a book:
The good life I had led
Could not be lived in bed,
And comforts that sustained me in the past
Were hardly going to last
Beyond the marriage I was keen to shed.
She knew how to inflict a wound, for sure,
But she herself could not provide the cure.

And so I took the holiday we'd booked,
The one my wife had planned,
And came to understand
How much my sanity and peace of mind
Were owed to her, and walking on the sand,
Or eating food we'd cooked,
How what I'd overlooked
Was that this was a marriage of a kind
That few of us can ever hope to find,
And that I was half-mad
To throw up what I had
For something that was really just a dream
Of licking off life's cream,
And think this harebrained scheme would make me glad.
The thought of it sends shivers down my spine,
Though sometimes I still think of her and pine.


http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/text-may-11-perfect-love-sarah-skwire-new-poetry

Perfect Love
by Sarah Skwire
May 2011

When we were young and did not know each other
When we were perfect in our perfect skin
When we loved heartlessly, and with our lovers
When we rejected any thought of sin,

Then we were pebbles shaken in a jar
Then we were noise and little-nothing more
Then we collided without any scar
Then we were shut like fists, a fan, a door.

Now love, now you and I are growing old
and now perfection's just a memory.
But now, my love, we've learned a thing or two

and I have, now, a truth that should be told:
Have I now softness, sins, and scars? I'll be
in time to come, perfectly flawed with you.

Global warming

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2008/08/figureheads-ghost-writers-and-quant.html

"From numerous informal observations over the past two decades, it seems clear that high status scientists are no longer required to respond to requests for clarification or to published criticism, but can ignore it with impunity. The traditional default that criticism was regarded as correct unless it was refuted, no longer seems to apply to high status scientists when a criticism comes from a lower-status scientist.

...

And high status scientists are now placed under no obligation to co-operate with their critics in discovering the truth – in the first place high status scientists usually do not need to acknowledge or respond at all to criticism; if they respond they are not compelled to provide relevant refutation but are allowed to bluster, change the subject, and make ad hominem attacks on their critics; requests for extra methodological detail or raw data can be ignored. Sometimes, criticism is met with legal threats – for example accusations of libel."




http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff152.html

"The State and Science in 1893 Britain"

"Official Geology was the group that had got it wrong. Unofficial Geology had got it right. But what was worse than its error was that Official Geology had suppressed Unofficial Geology and covered up its blunder for decades."

"Murchison had made sure that such contrary opinions did not receive wide publicity in the Geological Society as marginal notes in the minutes of the Council Meetings of that organization suggest. The strong statement of disagreement with and dissociation from Murchison's opinions that Nicol wished to append to his 1861 and 1862 papers was refused publication, and Nicol's achievements received little recognition in his lifetime."







http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22.html

"The unusual trustworthiness of science, despite the fact that scientists are humans and humans are not generally trustworthy, exists when (a) hypotheses are falsifiable, and (b) the professional institutions within which scientists operate promote, broadcast, and reward any falsification."



"To understand the impact of increased CO2, we need to know the climate sensitivity. Q: how can scientists, at least Popperian scientists, evaluate the climate sensitivity? A: they can't. There is no falsifiable procedure which can estimate climate sensitivity."



"We also have (one) answer to the first question of the AGW credulists: how a scientific consensus can produce a fraudulent result. The answer is simple: theentire field is fraudulent. In a fraudulent pseudoscience, there is no incentive at all for uncovering error, because the only result of a successful dissent is to destroy your job and those of your peers."



"What we're looking at here is mainstream pathological science. This is a basic and unfixable flaw in the entire Vannevar Bush design for federally-funded science. Once cranks, quacks, or charlatans get a foothold in the NSF and/or the universities, and establish their quack field as a legitimate department of Science, they are there to stay.

The mainstream cranks will not expel themselves, and there is no mechanism by which another department can attack them."

Against Universities

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html

"Computer science, I hasten to say, is no less a human garbage disposal than any department at any school. It is just slightly less obvious about it."

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html

http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/10/zdeno.html

http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/10/zdeno_part_2.html

Why do universities insist you pay and attend their tuition? Why are you not allowed to teach yourself and simply turn up and take the exams?

Reinventing University:

http://intellectual-detox.com/hackertopia-a-better-city/

"There are two main attractions of a university a) you are surrounded by like-minded people who are doing interesting things and b) you are disciplined to keep learning or producing. Note that neither of these benefits intrinsically costs money. The main weakness of the modern elite university is the extraordinary cost."

Private Eye is socialist

Ian Hislop clearly didn't like Nigel Farage or UKIP when they appeared together on "Have I Got News For You". Hislop usually refrains from giving political support, but has indicated a liking for Vince Cable.

"Private Eye" is subtly socialist. It is against firms making profit out of the public sector. It is against tax avoidance.

The current edition, number 1287, says that plans for a household "benefits cap" of £500 a week "don't make sense". Of course they do. The reasoning is that families living in big houses in Haringey with rents of £390/week would only have £110/week to live on. This argument is terrible. If people can't afford expensive accommodation in London, they should move out of London.

The government has also said that housing associations should charge 80% of market rents. This is sensible: there is no good reason to subsidise housing just to let people live in London. The article says that a particular housing association has chosen to only charge 80% of market rents on its one- and two-bedroom properties, but not on larger ones, with the perverse result that bigger properties cost less than smaller ones. This moronic decision is blamed on the government.

In the same issue, here is a confused protectionist article on farming which claims that pig farmers lose about £20 per pig, and bemoaning predicted decline in UK pig production. The architecture column expresses surprise "that it is possible to be both a banker and a civilized, socially-responsible human being". It questions why TFL would want to sell a property in an expensive area and move somewhere cheaper. It wonders why a skyscraper is being built in an area where rents are high. The magazine is also against prostitution and striptease (Eye 1283).

Political Correctness

Or Ideological Correctness

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/04/draft-epigraph-and-new-introduction-for.html

"Political correctness (PC) is the dominant ideology of the Western intellectual world – PC is what the West has instead of a religion.

Political correctness obviously dominates its core territory of politics, public administration (the civil service), law, education and (especially!) the mass media. But PC also substantially shapes everything else: foreign policy, the military, policing, the economy, health services, and personal life: the mating game, friendships and even family life.


Therefore political correctness is objectively totalitarian. Just as with the cruder totalitarianism of the mid-twentieth century, PC has created a population that lives in fear: fear of being denounced and losing everything – committing a thought crime or uttering a hate fact for which there is no defence, and the sanctions against which range from social ostracism, through loss of job, financial penalties, impoverishment, mob violence and imprisonment (for ‘hate crimes’).


Consequently the mass of people, especially those of status - with power and influence – have learned and internalized the constraints of political correctness, so that it is now something inside us, as well as pressing upon us. The lies, shabbiness and wickedness of PC now permeate our very thought processes.

So, political correctness is the ruling ideology of the West, and it is everywhere, so it cannot be attacked or overthrown without attacking and overthrowing pretty much everything. Political correctness is therefore de facto unrefutable, immovable, expansile... and yet, of course, as we all recognize, PC is self-destroying.

Am I saying that Western civilization is doomed? Yes, very probably it is doomed.

Can anything be done to prevent this, anything political perhaps? No – I don’t think so."

Pseudo-objectivity

http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/papers/LHCE/dilnot-analysis.html

The Drive to Audit Everything

"Summerhill School -- successful even by conventional measures such as examination results, and widely respected for its extraordinary contribution to democracy and for fostering of all kinds of intelligence, creativity, enterprise, and adaptability -- was put under threat of closure for no other reason than daring to take a stand against the rigidity of audit-culture principles"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jun/29/terence-kealey-vice-chancellor-buckingham

"The only cloud is a bad report from the Quality Assurance Agency – which has the power to recommend Buckingham lose its royal charter – but Kealey says the agency never went into classrooms, and just looked at paperwork and committee minutes. "It's really a process assurance agency." He points out that Buckingham consistently tops student satisfaction surveys. That is probably because its student-staff ratio is the best in the country and, since they're paying full fees, students have to convince themselves the courses are worth it."

" Patent examiners `measure their own performance in terms of their output', which of course is the number of patents approved, regardless of whether the patents make sense... Goodhart's law cuts deep."

http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/mcintyre/papers/LHCE/goodhart.html

`When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html

"So, for instance, a typical neo-Benthamite public-policy construction needs a measure of national utility, such as "GDP" (roughly, net business-to-consumer sales)...

For instance, America has built an enormous debt by consuming beyond its income - thus maximizing GDP. Oops."