Category Archive: POLITICS
While I breathe, I hope
Marcus Tullius Cicero (3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) Before Cavanagh QC, before Matlock, before Perry Mason, there was Cicero, one of the greatest orators in history. He more-or-less invented the attacking closing address, pointing the finger at real culprits whilst fiercely defending his clients. Lawyers inevitably stray into politics, with varying degrees of success: Cicero repeatedly condemned Marc Anthony as far worse than Catiline. It cost him both his head and his hands – even his tongue was ripped away, a symbol of the power of his words. He went to his death calmly, like a true Roman of the Republic. …
Continue Reading →When Empirical Observation is Dangerous
"Gee whiz, I only said I THOUGHT I saw Neptune..." (painting by Rubens)
28 December 1612: heretical heliocentrist Galileo Galiliei (1564 – 1642) observes the heavenly body later identified as the planet Neptune. Twenty one years later he would be punished with permanent home detention because he would not adhere to the received wisdom that all moved around the static earth. “And yet it moves…” Galilei, in the play by Bertolt Brecht*, says: I offer my observations, and they smile. I place my telescope at their disposal so they can convince themselves, and they quote Aristotle. But the man had no telescope!…Truth is the child of time, not of authority. Our ignorance is…
Continue Reading →Prohibition Ends
The Twenty-first Amendment was adopted on December 5, 1933 and became became officially effective on December 15. The (1920) 18th Amendment (that “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited”) was thereby repealed and such activities (albeit subject to regulation) became legalised. This wowser-inspired law conclusively demonstrated that when you wish to ban a well-established vice, be careful what you wish for… Repeal was enough to justify reaching for the nearest bottle of really good…
Continue Reading →Red Sails in the Sunset
(photo by Marcelo Montecino)
Fidel Castro (13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016) Like his father, Angel Castro (who was certainly not angelic), Fidel was never particularly faithful. A communist from his student days at Havana University, he and his followers were generally wealthy scions, the kind of folks that formed the vanguard of the French Revolution. They were not Communists; they were ‘Marxist-Leninists’. So on taking power in 1959, Castro and his cohort set about doing to Cuba what Marxist-Leninists do best: economic liquidation by the trashing of large scale private enterprise, ‘agrarian reform’ through the forced appropriation and division of land into meagre allotments, monopoly control…
Continue Reading →Mourning in America
As the dust settles from the US election, the clearing horizon fills, not with limousines heading towards the Canadian border, but with enemies of democracy, carrying torches (on a sunny day). Democracy isn’t easy and supporters of the losing side will generally feel there’s been a mistake. But short of a kind of existentialist dictatorship – each of us having plenary power for a short burst, akin to Swiss round-robin rule – it is the only way. Churchill recognised this, although he suggested that brief time spent with the average voter would put anyone off democracy, and to paraphrase Tom Paine, even…
Continue Reading →