Kensington Garden Fountains

 

Yep, it's catch-up time again. I've been delving from one rabbit-hole to the next for a while, with results that will be described when they happen.

Candid Snaps

 

I love snaps like this: it's the range of things going on. The concentration of the delivery driver, the expression on the passenger's face, the foliage, the glimpse of sea front, and the White Cliffs in the distance. And that intrusive level crossing barrier.

"Experts" and "Authorities" - Not

One of the more darker corners of the culture that the Lockdowns shone an unintentional light on, was the idea that Government enquiries, official investigations, and explanations provided by high-ranking officials and academics with their hands on the money-tap, form a coherent officially truthful story of the major events in our society and economy. Disagreeing with the details of this story makes one a dissident whose speech should be restricted from general circulation, and offering competing stories makes one a 'conspiracy theorist' who should be denied access to the media in any form. These "authorities" include "the distributed network of knowledge claim gatherers and testers that includes engineers and politics professors, security experts and journalists" according to Professor Neil Levy, one of those philosophers who appears now and again to suck up to an indefensible orthodoxy.

"Politics professors, security experts and journalists" are not "experts" at anything, but some engineers might be.

If there were "experts" and "authorities", who might they be?

One group of people they could not be is Government, Civil Service and other institutions of the State. It's not a Government's job to tell the voters the truth. Never has been, never will be. One job of Government is to maintain civil peace and order, and all sorts of abuses get hushed up for that reason. Another job of Government is to relate things to "broader interests and issues", which also leads to all sorts of hush-and-lousy-compromise. Governments are rubbish at knowing which issues really need to be played down and which need to be made public, but it's still their job to try to get it right.

For this reason, anyone who holds a Government position, for example Chief Medical Officer, or who is in the pay of the Government, such as every academic in every university, agrees with Government propaganda policy, not because it might be right, but because it's part of their job description to do so. That disqualifies their opinion on any subject in which the Government has an interest.

One rule of thumb is that anyone who says they are an "expert" on something, isn't. Those who know, know how little they know and how ambiguous that little is: it takes real ignorance to be certain and authoritative about anything.

Another rule of thumb is that when a journalist cites an "expert" without also citing that "expert's" name, source of income, qualifications and relevant experience - as would be required in any court - the person they are quoting is a paid shill pushing a policy.

"Experts" must be un-connected with any commercial enterprise, political cause, social movement, religion or other such organisation that has an interest in the issue. Else their support of that institution's position will be considered to be bought-and-paid-for.

"Experts" must only give evidence about the matters-of-fact on which they are "experts", which is generally a fairly narrow range.

Outside that narrow range, "experts" are as ignorant as the person sitting next to you this morning on the bus / train / coach / traffic queue / Zoom screen.

Even within an "expert's" subject, just because someone knows a lot about the facts of an issue does not mean they will be any good at devising the relevant social or legal policy. The Lockdowns showed us that most "experts" are fanatical left-leaning socialists who think more Government-spending and monitoring is the answer to everything.

Did it always used to be like this?

Yes.

But the world wasn't as complicated, inter-connected, and highly populated. There weren't welfare states, and there wasn't as much money to be made by quite so many people. There was no pharmaceutical industry, and the media was way smaller than it is now. Fewer people depended on the Government for their salaries, so the influence of Government was not as all-enveloping as it is now. Your GP routinely made house calls.

Back in the Good Ol' Days<™> it didn't matter that the experts knew even less than they do now. Governments didn't do dumb things, unless it was to invade Russia or attempt to occupy Afghanistan.

Now it matters. And Governments do dumb things year after year after year.

Chasing The Tone

Everyone goes on and on about tone (1). It's in the fingers. It's in the wood, the pickups, the pots, the fretboard, and even the nut and tuning heads.(2) It's in the pedals and the settings. It's in the amp and the speakers.

John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter both played tenor sax. Tenor saxes are made to sound the same, because it's a band instrument. The player can make a slight difference with their choice of reeds, and their breath control. So you know how you know it's Wayne Shorter or John Coltrane playing?

They play different notes. They play different phrases. They structure phrases differently. They sound different not because one uses a Selmer and the other some other make: they sound different because they play different.

Tone is in the music.

Play My Favourite Things, with fuzz, blues drive, lots of reverb, chorus, slow drive, whatever... it's still My Favourite Things and it's still a showtune. At no point does it become a metal anthem. It has a mood all its own, and turns all the tone-gear into a sound effect.

There's a video of Jimi Hendrix playing an acoustic guitar. He sounds like himself, playing an acoustic. Because he's playing Hendrix phrases and chords.

Bad news for people chasing that SRV / Hendrix / Beano Album / Dave Gilmour / whoever tone: if they want to sound like Dave Gilmour, they will have to play like Dave Gilmour.

All those pedals and amps are sound effects. The sound effects are an extension of the electric guitar - and in John Martyn's Glistening Glynbourne, the acoustic guitar as well.

Ambient is all about the sound effects, not the tone. So are a lot of post-rock instrumentals. The guitarists in rock bands don't have a tone, they provide the sonic backdrop required for the song, which changes from song to song. They might have a personal style of soloing, or creating fills, or a distinctive rhythm attack, and that's how you know who it is. Not because they of the distortion setting on their RAT pedal.

Learning what sound effects are available is part of learning to play the electric guitar. Every guitarist should know how to get a Blues tone, a fat jazz tone, a biting bridge rock 'n roll tone, and so on. Even if they never use them. That's knowing your instrument. (The Katana is outstanding in making that possible at a stupid low cost compared to buying a valve amp, interface, mic, pedals, and supporting gear.)

The search for tone is partly learning your sound effects, but it's really the search for your voice.


(1) Defined as the distinctive sound of a given guitar or guitarist, that only vanishes after excessive amounts of metal distortion or ambient effects.

(2) According to John Lill, the sound of a guitar is in the scale length, the position of the pickup(s) from the bridge, the height of the pickups, the pickup wiring, and the settings on the tone and volume pots.

Turn Up The Subwoofer For Older Classical Recordings

So for some reason, I turned up the little Rel T-Zero while playing some Dvorak the other night. It's usually on 9:00 - 10:00 for jazz, dance, rock and pop. It could take 10:00. Since classical music doesn't have loud bass, I turned it up to 3:00. (Maximum is about 4:00.)

Everything became fuller, the sound-staging was clearer, and the damn violins stopped being so shrill.

The LS-50's start to fall off after 80Hz, being 6dB down at 47Hz. 3dB is neither here nor there, but 6dB is noticeable. I've set the crossover for the T-Zero at 120 Hz. If that sounds bad, it amounts to the range between the open sixth-string E of a guitar and the 5th string B-flat. Four notes in the key of F - and not the popular ones.

Most of the lower end of the big orchestral instruments get some help from the subwoofer (all the open strings of a double-bass are below 120Hz). As I found when experimenting with the EQ on the Katana, the sub-harmonics make a difference, so all the notes from A below middle-C down will get thickened out as well. Why the violins stop being so shrill, I'm not sure, but it happens.

Older recordings, especially analogue recordings that are subsequently digitised, respond to this well. Modern recordings have more bass in the original signal, so the subwoofer doesn't need to be as loud.

Well worth experimenting, should you have a subwoofer and older recordings of orchestral music.

iPhone SE vs Fuji X-E4

Take a look at these photos.

The first is from the X-E4. The colours are rich, the details and sharpness are out of this world, one can zoom in and get all the details. But the sky is blown out. That might be me being incompetent, but I don't think so. That's what happened with film, and Fuji are all about making digital photos feel like film. So the sky blows out.

The second you will have guessed is from the iPhone SE. The detail is almost all there, the colour is almost all there, but it doesn't have the presence of the Fuji photo. It does have, however, a detailed sky with clouds and blue bits. I've noticed this before: my iPhone camera seems to be good at not getting blown out by skies, and I'm thinking that's because the iPhone is a way more powerful computer than the Fuji, and the camera software can identify and treats skies differently to the rest of the photograph.

Thing is, call me old-fashioned, but I find the iPhone picture almost unrealistic. That's not how I saw the scene, as I was concentrating on the loco, not the background. I don't want all that background in such detail - it's a distraction. I deliberately have my lens at f4 (f8 equivalent 35mm) to blur the background for that reason. The iPhone gives me detail all the way back. (There's probably an app for that, but I don't have it.)

I didn't do these consciously as an A-B comparison. So maybe if I had filled the iPhone frame with loco to the same extent that the Fuji frame, the iPhone would have blown out the sky.

Beyond that, there is something about iPhone photos, or at least those from the SE. They just don't have the weight or the depth of a real camera, and I grant that's partly because the Fuji has about four times as many pixels. I hadn't been able to see it quite so well before.

How Good Times Make Weak Leaders

Remember that saying Good times elect weak leaders; weak leaders make bad times; bad times elect strong leaders; strong leaders make good times? Let's start by discussing good and bad times.

These apply to the personal and professional lives of the upper managers, administrators and policy-makers (to include the elected legislators) of the major social, media, cultural, State, political and business institutions. Ordinary people can be suffering financial crises, unemployment, dramatic changes in the labour market, and all sorts of other stuff, or of course none of that, and it doesn't count. As long as the upper-middle class (roughly) is having a cushy time, those are "good times". In the UK, that was from the passing of the Maastricht Treaty to the end of 2015: The Second Belle Epoque. Their professional lives were easy, their dominant assumptions about society, culture and economics were unchallenged. China and Russia were behaving themselves, and EU made travel easy, and legislation even easier - all one did was tweak whatever Brussels threw out.

Your kids can't afford a place of their own, that's just the economy. A journalist's kids can't afford a place of their own, that's a serious flaw in the housing market.

If life gets too hard for the Rest of Us, we will start to object, misbehave, go on strike, and make the lives of the UMC (upper managerial class) difficult. That gives them an incentive to make sure that life isn't too hard for the common people.

We can complain about the economy all we like, but one thing we must not do is question the UMC's assumptions about the society, political institutions, and culture. That is perceived not as a threat to their survival - that would be mere economics - but their vision of themselves as Good People who deserve their privilege as a reward for their Goodness. The form that Goodness takes can vary from decade to decade, but since about 1990 it has been about having Broadly-Left social views and ideals. Before that, it was about having Broadly-Right ideals. Challenge whatever is their claim to moral superiority and you threaten them with the disintegration of their identities. In Good Times, the UMC is complaisant and herd-like, and jolly comfortable that is too.

Let's turn to what leaders are. A 'leader' in this discussion is someone who gets to set policy in a particular institution, so that following that policy protects us from sanctions imposed by that institution. A strong leader can bring people along with them, and isn't scared of imposing sanctions: a weak leader is unconvincing, and won't impose sanctions. (Yes, this applies to street gangs as well as Governments.) `Leadership' is contextual: someone can lead in one institution, and follow in another.

Leaders depend on holding an institutional position, and one gets to be a leader by occupying one of those positions. Having got there, it's up to the incumbent to do something, or collapse exhausted by the climb up the greasy pole.

Most of the rest of the people in the institution will follow a strong leader - though some will resist - or they will goof off if they spot a weak role occupant - though some will throw themselves behind policies they see advantage in.

Where do the strong leaders come from in the bad times? They were there all the time, but they weren't attracted by the jobs in politics, the upper reaches of public administration, and other high-profile institutional roles. In the good times there is too much go-along-to-get-along. Too many third-class people. Too much consensus. So the strong people go to where their qualities of character can be useful, or they find a lucrative niche somewhere and enjoy the decline.

Where do the weak leaders come from in the good times? They were there all the time as well. They didn't want the jobs when times were tough, and they wouldn't have been chosen anyway. But when times are good, suddenly good chaps who go along with other good chaps are exactly what seem to be needed. Strong-minded people are all very useful, but they can be a nuisance. In good times, we need co-operation, not conflict. Weak people love co-operating. There's nothing wrong with co-operating, as long as it's with people who share your goals. 'Co-operating' with people whose goals conflict with yours is called 'giving in'.

It's possible for one institution to have strong leaders, while another has weak ones, at the same time. Think of Sweden in 2020: a weak Government of consensus-driven politicians who fortunately were not in charge of public health policy. Anders Tegnell was, and he turned out to be nobody's go-along guy. The Swedes were the only country who did not succumb to the hysteria.

One way weak leaders damage their institutions is failing to fight back against strongly-led activist groups advancing avant-garde goals that threaten the current aims and values of the institution.

Weak leaders can be distracted by internal disputes and high-profile non-issues. This is what happened to the British Parliament between 2016-2021 (Brexit) and the US Government between 2016 and 2020 (the wonderfully named 'Trump Derangement Syndrome'). It's no co-incidence that various avant-garde activist groups made so much progress with their causes during that time, or that the UK and USA Blobs started taking on lives of their own.

How do the required strong leaders get back into the institutions when they are needed? In the UK, it's not by coup or vigorous campaigning. it's by a slower process in which the people who select and elect the candidates for key positions decide that the current lot are a bit wet, and some drier people are needed. A major donor to an activist organisation decides it no longer advances his various goals (it may have become a liability to their social standing or business interests, for instance) and withdraws their money. A Board of Governors decides the last CEO got on perhaps too well with everyone, and now they need someone who can focus on the business needs. These decisions will be made against the backdrop of what the various people sense to be a prevailing sentiment amongst the public - whatever that 'public' might be.

That mechanism relies on the general population containing a range of views on almost everything: this is why enforced consensus is a liability. A variety of views is needed, so that when the time demands this or that view, there will be people ready to explain, publicise and propose ways of implementing it. If everyone thinks, or makes a show of thinking, the same, when circumstances demand a response outside the permitted range, that society will fall victim to those circumstances. This is all basic On Liberty.

The idea that society consists of homogeneous 'Generations' is an artefact of the media and academic obsession with certain institutions, that are able to impose the appearance of a high level of conformity on the behaviour and opinions of the staff. As soon as the institutional control slips, so does the conformity.