Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"The sight of the fleet brought all these [stories of famous sailors] into my mind in confused order, it is true, but with irresistible force. My heart was inflated with national pride. The sailors were my countrymen; the fleet belonged to my country, and surely I had my part in it, and in all its honours" - William Cobbett, 1783.
This is the essence of nationalism.

While England had been plundering the wealth of the world from Spanish ships, other nations had made giant strides in world trade, leaving the English trailing in their wake.

For centuries the sea made England poor and weak, not strong and independent. The events of 1588 appeared to change all that.

Yet in England there was a thriving iron industry that was producing in abundance guns that cost a fifth of the price of European cannon - 1550s, early military-industrial complex

For, after all [Spain's and Portugal's] pretensions to carve up the world between them were based on nothing more than the authority of the pope, an authority not just rejected by the English but now regarded as heretical.

The age of discovery promoted a revolution in oceanic navigation - techniques that were simply not needed by medieval seafarers who relied on hugging coastlines and on observation and on experience.

"Only when [Edwards I and II] dominated the English and Scottish seaboard could they prosper could they in their war to control Scotland." - the best part of this history so far has been its discussion of the naval aspects of the unification of the British Isles.

Actually the path selects itself. But is more convenient (so ego oriented are we) to talk of flow selecting a path - same problem Dawkins had with his 'selfish' gene. But is it a feature of us, or of our languages?

...during the reigns of Edward the Confessor and Harold. England ... had the potential to dominate the British Isles by the force of its ships...[after the Norman Conquest] Instead it became part of another empire, one that did not rely upon sea power.

Rivers were defended by bridges and twin burghs on each bank or an island.

The memory-surface no longer deals with information for its own sake, but only in terms of its usefulness. In terms of survival or adaptation this may be essential. In terms of maximizing information this may be limiting. - a new definition of the absolute conception, the selfless memory surface?

This self has unity of consciousness. And yet this is all due to the passive behaviour of information which is organising itself on the special memory surface. - Wow, really? Kant really struggled over that.

In Italy, there's no doubt - the core of the community is your immediate family, which presents a unified face to the world while waging its own internal struggles. - in Hungary, likewise

Why not flee when the world around us is a mad dictator's dream, made real?

...during times of famine, something breaks in the mechanism of the mind, or of the stomach, or in that mysterious "cavern under the bedroom of our brain" - the hypothalamus, and from that time on, the immemorial fear of starvation stubbonly turns into fear, ...

What a ridiculous it is to say that something "disappears into the library"! It's the things that stay unwritten, never noted down, that disappear.

...szóval O'Realyvel filmet néztünk (Charlie és a csokigyár, angolul, magyar felirattal)

Dictators keep their victims on a paper chain - if the papers get lost, they lose their power over them.

I for one sincerely doubt that a man who was truly hungry, who had been going hungry for months, would ever set in stone a childish statement like "thou shalt not steal".

And after Stalingrad, even the opportunists - the backbone and basis of Hitler"s rule - fell away.

The structure is similar to 'Empire of the Sun'

...because events will very soon turn [the author's] full-stop into a comma.

...medical science is only international in theory, in it's abstract principles. Beside the sickbed it is very much national.

...he didn't say "the fascists", he said "the Italians."

No wonder people are reading Zilahy, Körmendi, Földi and Marai instead

If totally unconnected events follow upon each other, then then the short-term memory effect can synthesize them into a pattern which again only exists on the memory-surface - the second analogy?

Communication by confusion is also the initial stage of the relationship between the memory surface and the environment. The memory-surface picks out its own individual patterns from the confusion offered it.

"America! It's a good country, built by Germans. All the breweries are German, all the sausages are German." - explains a lot.