Anonymous. The First Country Life Picture Book of Britain (Revised third Edition 1953) Ninety superbly printed photographs, illustrating mostly towns, villages, and landscapes. Large format, technically excellent and well composed photos, which don’t pretend to do anything other than show you their subjects. First published in 1937, and by that date already more of a nostalgic record of the Britain that was. About ten years earlier, Roye England had arrived in England from Australia, and was horrified that the English didn’t value their rural heritage. His nostalgia for an England he never knew resulted in Pendon, one of the best public model railways anywhere.
     The magazine Country Life celebrated the upper middle and upper class county. Up to half of its pages were given over to real estate adverts, many half page, also superbly printed, which extolled the properties as ancient infrastructure ideal for supporting the country gentleman’s lifestyle. My grandparents “took it”, as they said, in large part I think because Grandpa was a realtor and needed to know the market.
     I thoroughly enjoyed this book. About half a dozen of the photos showed places or buildings that I visited when my Uncle took us on extended Sunday drives in search of surviving royal arms in Midlands country churches. ***

Post 2019 election comment

The election confirmed regional divisions. Alberta especially feels aggrieved that the rest of Canada doesn't want to bail them out. Yet Alberta is still better off than the rest of Canada, despite its oil-patch downturn. It also has a far more diversified economy than the oil-funded spin doctors will ever admit. It has reliable wind power, the knowledge base for a thriving high-tech economy,  and oil capital sloshing around looking in the wrong places for investment. Its agriculture thrives. In other words, Alberta is well-placed to lead Canada in the conversion from oil to renewables. It should begin to do so.

Quebec's Bloc will push Quebec interests and priorities. Quebec like Ontario, has a nearly green electric grid. both export much of their electricity, and could export more. Both  have a sound manufacturing and service economy. Both have the knowledge base, and Ontario the resources,  for a high tech sector that could compete internationally. IOW, these Provinces could co-operate wth Alberta in rebuilding Canada's economy. They should begin to do so.

Is the above image of a rosy future justified? Objectively considered, yes. However, regional grievances could, I fear, prevent the inter-Provincial co-operation that would heal those grievances. I hope  that co-operation and healing will happen. All it takes a few people to start talking to each other instead of past each other

 William Cole, ed. The Punch Line (1968) A collection Punch cartoons from the 1960s. Funny, wry, satirical, humorous, allusive, straightforward, in short whatever your desire in a cartoon, you’ll find some here. The book shows off twenty-five Punch regulars, many of whom also drew for The New Yorker. Cartoons are and odd kind of art: they rely on cultural knowledge, sometimes esoteric. Much of their meaning is contained in the bits and bobs included in the drawing, and even in the shapes of the lines used to mark the expression on a face or the attitude of a body. Words point the point of the drawing, but often aren’t needed. Stereotypes abound: gardeners wear shabby pants well past their best before dates. Racy women have almond eyes and lush lips. Snooty people look down their noses. Husbands often cringe. And so on. In fact, cartoons remind us that stereotypes are used to signal status, character, personality, life-style, and so on. They often don’t work as intended, or even do harm, because they simplify, and because they change more slowly than the culture that made appropriate sense of them in the past.    
     In their use of cultural signals cartoons resemble Medieval and Renaissance pictures, which were made for people who could read the symbols included in the image. How much contemporary cultural knowledge do we need to understand the art of our own time? I’d say, a lot. We don’t realise how much until we see the art of a generation or two past. Art marks generational change as much as fashion does, but fashion lags, and usually has to catch up to art. I liked all the cartoons in this book, but some more than others. Here’s one of my favourites. The caption reads "Come back - I haven't finished with you yet! "

The hidden expense of private sector bueaucrats

Hershel Hardin. The New Bureaucracy (1991) A thorough account of the state of bureaucracy in the private sector, where its malign and expensive effects are well hidden. The private sector strenuously denies the existence of its bureaucracy, successfully diverting attention and anger to government, which actually costs us a lot less. Chapter 1 reviews the escalation of CEO and other senior management pay. Nowadays, almost 30 years later, Hardin’s figures would water eyes even more. The rest of the book surveys the structure and operation of the bureaucracy piece by piece. By turns amusing and appalling.
     I encountered the private bureaucracy in one of my first summer jobs, but I didn’t realise it at the time. I worked for Linde Gases, then a subsidiary of Union Carbide (which was done in by the release of poisonous gases from its plant in Bhopal, India). I discovered that each invoice or “gas shipping order” cost the company about $8 from placing an order for a new batch until its eventual destruction. Every day, I wrote up several of these GSOs for customers buying about $6 worth of oxygen and acetylene. I suppose the company thought that the information was worth $2. I began to wonder about the cost of moving information within a corporation, and concluded that beyond a rather small size, an organisation spent more of its resources moving information than providing goods and services for its customers.
     A worthwhile book. Read it. ***

Four puzzles for Nero Wolfe, Two books.

    Rex Stout. Three Witnesses (1956) Three short stories, Goodwin does his usual good work reporting the investigation step by step, but this time the reader figures the plot well before he does. Nero Wolfe also seems a bit slow on the uptake. In one of the stories, Wolf and Goodwin are possible witnesses. Wolfe figures that the prosecution is wrong, but their case rests in part on his testimony. He doesn’t want to contribute to a miscarriage of justice, so he absconds and within about 36 hours produces the real culprit, a feat that also renders moot the charge of contempt of court.
     One attraction in Stout’s books is the careful adherence to law and process. Goodwin and Wolfe skate on pretty thin ice sometimes, but their knowledge of the rules helps them avoid falling through. I have no idea whether their ploys would work in real life, but they do raise the entertainment value. I’m a fan, so my rating may be higher than yours. ***

   Rex Stout. And Be A Villain (1948) Wolfe’s bank account is low, so he offers to find the murderer of a radio talkshow guest. A nicely complicated plot, including unusual co-operation with the police, and miscellaneous digs at the publicity racket, advertising, the effects of fandom, etc. We don’t learn much more about Wolfe and Goodwin, but since the secondary characters are as well drawn as these two, we hardly notice the cardboard. Not up Stout’s usual standard, I think. **½

Does God Exist? (Hitchens on God and religion)

Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great (2007)
    Search online for “unanswerable questions”, and you’ll find many websites. You’ll also find a lot of nonsense. Many unanswerable questions are merely badly phrased. Or the asker doesn’t understand its terms. For example, Thomas Frey asks Why do logic and reason fail to explain that which is true? Let the confusing use of “explain” go, and parse the question as about the failure of logic to guarantee truth. Then the answer is that logic can guarantee only that a conclusion follows validly from its premises. Logic cannot tell you that the premises are true. Hence it cannot tell you that a conclusion is true. And that, to make a rather large jump, is why God’s existence is unprovable. So is God's non-existence.
    Does God exist? I don’t know what that question means. Does the Christian god exist? Which Christian god? What about the Muslim god? Again, which one?
     The question may seem clearer if we ask about the gods of polytheistic religions. Does Zeus exist? Aphrodite? Hermes? Etc? And what about Thor? Osiris? Believers in these ancient religions certainly believed these gods existed. Like believers in the monotheisms, they also believed that their god(s) could and would intervene in the natural world, and to one’s advantage if properly propitiated. It was very handy to have some god on your side.
    I think these days most people assume they are referring to the same entity as anyone or everyone else: a nature- or reality-transcending entity which caused this limited reality to come into being. Presumably, we all have the same concept in mind when we ask the question. That’s clearly not so. If it were, there would be no arguments about what "god" means, still less about what "god" wants us to do.
     It looks like the only answerable form of the question is Does this god exist? And the answer to that question is always the same: No. Because if God is transcendent by definition (as theists claim), and if you admit (as theists do) that God is beyond human understanding, then your and my concepts of God are so far from anything resembling adequacy that they are not even wrong.
    Which in turn means that any discussion about God's existence will be about the inadequacy of someone’s concept of God. This is the task that Hitchens has set himself, and he succeeds brilliantly. His discussion implies that what matters is not whether some god exists, but what your concept of God leads you or permits you to do. He notes the sad fact that religious people generally conceive of a god that allows (or more commonly commands) them to act on their worst impulses to exert power and control over other people. In a word, to commit evil.
    There is a difference between faith and religion. Faith (as its root meaning in Latin should remind us) is trust. Trust in what? In the most abstract and general terms, trust that our lives have meaning because we live them with our loved ones, and because we can understand and delight in the world. This faith implies, I think, that we ought to do all we can to prevent evil, and to comfort and help each other when natural catastrophe overwhelms us. How you express that faith is up to you. Most people prefer to express it in religious terms, and that's why faith is too often replaced with religion. We make idols of our beliefs.
    Hitchens uses “religion” throughout. I prefer “religionism”, by which I mean the attitude that one’s religion is the only true and complete account of who and what "god" is and what he/she/it wants from us. That attitude is the pride of a very clever animal asserting that it has god-like knowledge of good and evil. Hitchens might have parsed the Genesis story of the Fall as agreeing with his critique of religionism. Since he didn’t do so, I’ve done it for him. I’ll also note that Pride is considered the first and greatest of sins, which encompasses all others. Would that the religionists understood this.
    Worth reading. ****
    Footnote: Unanswerable questions are everywhere. Here are 60 of them. Some edits for clarity made 2019 11 15.