The Impossible Fact

           

          The Impossible Fact

"And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
For, he reasons pointedly,
That which must not, can not be."
                         
Christian Morgenstern

SA Premier Jay Weatherill:   "This was a weather event not a renewable energy event."

Since the weather event Mr Weatherill (what an ironic surname) has unveiled a $550 million plan to boost state-based gas generation, increase gas supplies, reduce reliance on interstate interconnection and provide large-scale battery storage to try to prevent future blackouts and load shedding.  He is spending more than half-billion dollars on a problem he said didn't exist.

Iron Curtains

            
       From The Apocalypse of Our Time by the philosopher Vasili Rozanov in 1919, who had died that same year of starvation in the Troitse-Sergeev monastery:

                                 La divina Commedia

                                With clanking screeching an iron curtain is lowered over Russian History.
                                "The performance is over."
                                The audience got up.
                                "Its time to put on your fur coats and go home."
                                 They looked round.
                                 But it turned out that there were no fur coats and no homes.


      Google:  The expression Iron Curtain was coined by Winston Churchill, who was prime minster of Britain in World War 11.  Churchill first used the term soon after the war, when the Soviet Union was beginning to carry out its plans for post-war dominance of eastern Europe.

Andrew Lansdown: a poem - of regret experienced by many sons

        Dearly Departed

So much of it, my childhood,
departed this world with you.

Though I lived it, I can bring back
only brief moments of it;

candle-smoke and a blue trike,
a Band-Aid on a skinned knee,

your bosomy hugs during
nights of dread dreams about ... what?

Mother, I meant to ask you
so many things about me,

so many whens, hows and whys
that can never now be known.

The loss of both your presence
and my history presses on me

as an ever-present absence.

                   Andrew Lansdown

Mr Justin Milne's plan to provide consumers with objective resolution of complaints without debate

The appointment of Justin Milne, an NBN board member and friend of Malcom Turnbull as the new chairman of the ABC; preserving the subservience of the Coalition government and Malcolm Turnbull to the ABC, is no surprise.  But the appointment of Mr Milne should concern consumers in general, given his corporate record and the statements he has made in the media, after the announcement of his appointment.   The NBN fiasco is now generating a maelstrom of consumer complaint, through its monumental failure to deliver a commercial product.  Mr Milne was formerly an executive of Telstra, a company notorious for poor service and failure to act on consumer complaints.  Now he is chairman of an organisation which is subjected, on a daily basis, to the complaint, that it is no longer "Our ABC", being instead, an activist arm of left wing ideology.  Mr Milne is not so gormless to deny there are no complaints of political bias against the ABC.  Instead, he claims that there is no bias, at all, at the ABC, and complainants are mistaken.  He then goes on to say, that in the future, machines (computers) , will handle consumer complaints.  He claims that machines can read and understand information or news in a more objective way than human reviewers.  His view is that personal opinion should be discarded in favour of opinion manufactured by machines.  There will be no debate. The hearing and judgement of consumer complaints shall be the sole province of machinery.   Phew!  George Orwell's "1984" is no longer behind us.

Aristotle Book 11 of the Nichomachean Ethics

"We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."

"It is by acting bravely that we become brave.'

By doing the acts that we do in our transactions with others we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly

Of the same mind but not of the same taste or time

"Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce.  The first syllable of the latter word, being that which had coexisted with the image of the bird, so called, I may  think of a goose.  In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me, though I have never seen the two birds together."

Biographia Literaria  .......................... Samuel Taylor Coleridge............Born 1772 - Died 1834


"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were happening to me.  An exquisite pleasure isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this was not in me it was me ..... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?  And suddenly the memory revealed itself.  The taste was that of the little of madeleine which on Sunday morning  at Combray ( because on these mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her cup of tea or tisane.  The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.  And all from my cup of tea."

Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way..................Marcel Proust..........Born 1871 - Died 1922

Film Review: Things to Come (L' Avenir) - 2017 Alliance Francaise French Film Festival (Australia)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Blurbs:  "the profoundly moving story of a fifty something woman who, after living comfortably for many years, must suddenly reinvent her life."

"a must see Festival highlight."

The title "Things to Come" is profoundly misleading.  Nothing "comes" in the vacuous lives of the characters in this film.

The main character, "the fifty something woman", Nathalie is an arrogant, insensitive twit - a philosophy teacher who perambulates around her pupils in the classroom lecturing to the walls and windows, as though the classroom was empty.  Her presence radiates conceit.  I found these scenes in the class room particularly jarring, evoking memories of the conceited coterie of lecturers at the Melbourne Law School in the late 60's and early 70's, Gareth Evans, Ron Sackville, Marcia Neave and Cliff Pannam.  What a contrast that new breed were to the older, gentle, self-effacing Harry Ford, in his lectures on Equity.

At home, Nathalie talks over the top of her husband, Heinz and her grown up daughter and son, both muted by, and resigned to, the domineering presence of their mother. She fails to hear anything Heinz tries to tell her and there is a startling lack of body language in these unemotional domestic scenes.  The parents are as sterile and dull, as is their marriage, and their chosen profession of philosophy teaching.  Then, there is Nathalie's mother, a manipulative monster, mercifully in the last stage of her life.  More of her later.

Surprise! Surprise! Suddenly, Heinz tells Nathalie he has found "someone else" and he is leaving her.  Her only response is that she had always been sure he would never leave her.  In other words, she was not required to contribute anything to the marriage, and his role was to endure.  The marriage  had obviously been dead for years and their parting is unemotional and perfunctory.  The children are unaffected by their parents' split.  They are characters devoid of emotional shape, warmth or allegiance.

Nathalie's  former star pupil enters on stage, expressing his gratitude for her inspiring him, to pursue a career in - surprise! surprise! - philosophy. Eventually, nothing comes of his contact with her and he disappears into the French Alps.  He and some other drop-outs have purchased a house there - to commune, write and philosophise. ( There is no explanation as to how they raised the cash to buy this desirable estate.)  The star pupil is a pretentious, inarticulate, lazy, pot-smoking nobody, excruciatingly dull.  Temporary relief from this unpalatable character and Nathalie is provided, in sweeping vistas of snow capped mountain scenery, sparkling streams and waterfalls, set in virginal forests.  Nathalie visits the commune, maybe in the hope her former pupil would come on to her.  He doesn't. Again, nothing happens.

Beside being a  horrible caricature of every day life, this film doesn't come or go anywhere.  It has no continuity in narrative.   Inchoate episodes prevail.  For example, Nathalie is sitting in a picture theatre when a male viewer attempts to grope her.   The film, unlike this one, must have been engrossing, as Nathalie merely changes seats, to enjoy the rest of the film, unmolested, as though nothing had happened.  Leaving the theatre, she is followed by her assailant and assaulted again, this time in a darkened street.  There is no connection in this incident to what has preceded it in the film, and nothing comes of it - nothing.

We learn of her mother's death.  Suddenly, there we are, in an interview with a Catholic priest.  Natalie and her daughter persuade him to celebrate a mass in memory of the unlamented,  grandmother.  This event beggars belief.  What is an atheistic philosopher, an academic daughter of  Rousseau and the French Revolution doing, beseeching a Catholic priest for a Christian farewell to her  faithless mother?  Worse follows.  After the Catholic cathedral service, Nathalie and co. appear with grandma's coffin in a civil funeral service.  Nathalie delivers an eulogy, not from the heart, but by way of a reading from Pascal's Pensees!  Now - please - would anyone with an ounce of humanity or a modicum of sense inflict Pascal on a captive audience, let alone in the form of an eulogy, at a funeral. No one could be that moronic - could they?

After these assaults on credibility, the film introduces the one real character of the film, a black cat with beautiful eyes - Pandora. A symbolic lead into a  dramatic event?  No, just another abstraction.  The cat is an inheritance from Nathalie's mother.  This black beauty wins Nathalie over, and a warm relationship develops.  For the first time Nathalie responds to love; a spark of humanity flickers inside her emotionally-inert being.  Alas, the spark flickers for only  a moment.  Pandora is sent packing to the commune in the Alps.

Nathalie has now rid herself of her husband, her mother and Pandora.  She is free to get back to her books, philosophy and the eviction of the natural intuition resident in timid, young minds.  No doubt, she will have contact with her children and their families, only when it suits her.  No reinvention is necessary.  Everything is back to normal.  Actually better than before, for now she can enjoy: self obsession without hindrance. The only tears shed by her, in the film are in the company of Pandora.  And she won't tell anyone about this singular emotional lapse.

Oh dear! This is a profoundly boring movie, devoid of human feeling and incontinent in narrative.

Audience reaction:  An elderly lady with a walking stick, sitting in the row of seats, in front of ours, about half an hour or more, after the movie started, rose from her seat and left.  "Maybe", I thought, "she is just going to the toilet".   She may not have been.  For, she returned a little later, with a full glass of white wine.  Sensible woman!  When the film ended and I was leaving in haste, I  caught sight of her, asleep, with the empty glass still in her right hand.  Ruefully, I admitted to myself that she had spent her time more wisely than me.

At the urinals, some minutes later, a man on my left, turned his face to me and said, "I hope you didn't see the awful movie I just saw.  What a dreadful waste of effing time!"  "What its name, the title?" I asked.  His answer: "Things to Come".

Corporate Cupid

The recent outings of the in-house sexual encounters of two senior business executives with female staff members confirm my worst forebodings: that private love affairs are a phenomena of the past. The thrill of illicit love is no more.  Office gossip, dare I say it, emasculated.  Disclosure is not only appropriate, but also necessary, if you wish to enjoy a successful corporate career. It can't be long, before those contemplating a fling, will be "invited" to register their intent, or at least, within a short time after passion prevailed, to register the affair in a company register.  Appropriate behaviour between the sexes, in office hours will be proscribed.  Counsellors and guidance officers will run compulsory educational discussions to acquaint staff with company requirements -  for example, controlled smiles, no frontal stances, safe distance zones and monitoring of e-mails for suggestive language.    A registered affair, will confirm in writing, mutual consent, confirmation of protected sex only, and a release and indemnity from any legal liability.  Poor Madame Bovary, you were born in the wrong age.

'The Past' - Oodgeroo Noonuccal (The Dawn is at Hand 1992) and Be Advised - Geoff Page

 
                                             Let no one say the past is dead
                                             The past is all about us and within.
                                             Haunted by tribal memories, I know
                                             This little now, this accidental present
                                             Is not all of me, whose long making
                                             Is so much of the past.
                                              ...
                                             Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
                                             Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
                                             Of all the race years that have moulded me.

                                                                                                                    Oodgeroo  Noonuccal



                                             Be Advised
                                             You smoochy duos,
                                             I'm not sipping
                                             here alone.
                                            Solitude is
                                            not a danger
                                            when tapping on one's
                                           mobile phone.

                                          My friends encircle me on Twitter,
                                          Facebook and
                                          on Instagram.
                                          Like Descartes, I
                                          do not grow bitter,
                                         "I text," he pecked,
                                         "therefore I am."

                                                                                                         Geoff  Page

Weather or not?

 The Grattan Institute warned, prior to the recent power blackout in South Australia, that in the event of an outage of the Victorian supply link, "the prospect of a regional blackout in SA increases with more {dependence on} wind generation...The intermittent nature of wind, which now generates 40 per cent SA's electricity, creates challenges for the price and reliability of power generation...The increased penetration of renewables ...can have consequences for the security and stability of the electricity system".  the Institute conclude that state-based renewable targets are likely to drive up power costs 'for no net environmental benefit' and seeks a national lower-emissions policy, while acknowledging the impact of replacing coal at $50 per kilowatt hour with gas, wind or solar at beween$80 to $100.


Taken from an article written by Michael Baume in The Spectator Australia 8 October 2016.

 

It won't be long before we will not need to look outside, to determine the state of the weather.  Fog, strong cold wind, dark skies, and blinding rain, prolonged dry spells of searing heat, and days of burning winds and weeks of clear, windless, blue skies will, for the ill equipped or unfunded be accompanied by silence and muted light inside homes, as renewable energy sources fail to produce warmth or cool, castrated by the figure of weather, blind to, and unaware of our discomfort.