Keep The Aspidistra Flying

My notes tell me I finished George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying in March of this year.

Orwell wrote it in the 1930s, so in the dark years before World War II.


The central character is a would-be poet hell-bent on self-destruction who works in an advertising agency. He hates life always kowtowing to money and he describes London in the evening as a vision of hell.

He quits his job and works in a second-hand book store on lower wages. He reviles the customers and he sinks into poverty. He wants to sink to be with the people who have no hope of rising or desire to rise.

He wants to get comfortable in poverty as the only way not to give in against the money that controls everything respectable and aspiring.

His long-time girlfriend gets pregnant and he gets back his job at the ad agency. He tells himself he always knew he wouldn't go the whole way and sink completely.

He learns to listen to the music of time and join in the human race.

The Buddha said something along those lines - of how he had starved himself in an effort to find enlightenment, but all he had got was thin and unhealthy.

Thinking about this idea of self-denial, I wrote in 2010

He said, “I cut up the cushion of my dreams.”
The other replied, “Yes, but why do you sit in such a hard place? This also is an illusion.”

Iraq - Discussion On Channel 4 News last night 7 July 2016

Discussion led by Matt Frei - with Emma Sky, who governed the Iraqi province of Kirkuk and served as a political adviser to the US military, Colonel Tim Collins, British Army Commander in Iraq 2003-4, the Iraqi journalist Nermeen al-Mufti, from Kirkuk, and Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, a Kurdish diplomat.

Matt Frei putting to Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, Kurdistan Regional Government Representative to the United States, that she saw the Iraq War as a liberation.

Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman
We did see it as a liberation because Saddam was a warmonger. He created wars in the region. He was a destabilising factor. Eight-hundred thousand, maybe a million people died in the Iran-Iraq war. He invaded Kuwait. He killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them Kurds. He used chemical weapons. Even today we discover mass graves going back to the 70s and 80s.So we see it as a liberation from a dictator.

Iraq as a whole could have been a winner. I don’t want to get into internal British politics and the debate over who said what in the UK context. But what hasn’t been part of the debate from what I have heard - and obviously I am in Washington - but I have been following events on the internet and on television - what I haven’t seen is that the Iraqi leadership needs to take a great deal of responsibility for what has happened.

Also, many of the Regional players in the Middle East did their utmost to make sure Britain and United States failed. Perhaps that is in the Chilcot report, but I haven’t seen that being reported by the Media.

Colonel Tim Collins
We had advisers who were targeted by Baathist militias and we dealt with them.
In the end the failures came down to disbanding the army and not listening to Iraqis who knew what we should have been doing.

Emma Sky
I don’t believe that any of this was inevitable. As Bayan said, there really was hope for a world without Saddam Hussein. The big mistakes in 2003 were dissolving the Baathist Party and the military, which collapsed the State and led Iraq into civil war. From 2007-09 was the only time in the whole war that the coalition had the right strategy, the right leadership and the right resources and helped bring all Iraqis together and tool Iraq out of the civil war.Iraq went back into civil war after the 2010 elections were so tightly contested. It is all about Iraqi politics and the Iraqi political elites themselves must take huge responsibility for what we see today

Farage At The EU

I think it was Farage's intention to outrage the members so that he would cut the ground from anyone who wanted talks to go slowly and in a friendly way. He doesn't want any backsliding.
That, and he wanted to say what the then German Chancellor said eighty-odd years ago 'They laughed at me, and they're not laughing now’.

And I think he wanted to savour saying it precisely because Hitler said it. That isn't fanciful. He "marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs..."

Letter from a teacher when Farage was at Dulwich College

Dangerous man.

IEX Stock Exchange Defeats Skimmers

First, a definition:

What is a 'Payment For Order Flow'?

A payment for order flow is the compensation and benefit a brokerage receives by directing orders to different parties to be executed. The brokerage firm receives a small payment, usually a penny per share, as compensation for directing the order to the different parties.

Quote from The Verge article
"This evening the Securities and Exchange Commission approved an application by a startup called IEX to become a full-fledged stock exchange. By approving IEX, the SEC was giving its stamp of approval to one of the most high-profile challenges to the current Wall Street regime. Co-founded by a Canadian trader named Brad Katsuyama, IEX is designed to be a market free from high-frequency traders who use their speed to skim profits off the orders from ordinary citizens."

Full Article:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/17/11957258/iex-sec-approves-stock-exchange

The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini in 238 Words

Reciprocity

We are more likely to be persuaded to do something when it involves repaying an obligation. Example of giving a mint to customers in a restaurant

Scarcity

Point out the benefits - tell them what's unique about what you are offering - show them what they stand to lose by not taking up the offer

Authority

Signal to others what makes you a credible, knowledgable authority before you attempt to influence them. Get someone to praise you. That someone can even be related to your business (e.g. receptionist who refers to your expertise) or likely to benefit from it.

Consistency

Once someone is persuaded to make small voluntary,active, public contributions towards something, it is easier to then get them to do something bigger towards that goal, which they do to be consistent with their own model of themselves.

Liking

We prefer to say yes to people who are similar to us, who pay us compliments, and who cooperate with us. Do these before negotiating or talking about business.

Consensus

We do what others do when we are told what they do.

Examples:

• 75% of our guests reuse their towels, please do so as well.
  
• 75% of our customers order again within a month. Please use this code when you reorder….
  

Tools To Prune and Trim Your Writing

I have more writing apps than a person should rightly have - including Ulysses, Writeroom, and Byword.

Ulysses is where I keep everything - notes, books I’m writing, references.

Writeroom is for when I want a black page with nothing else on the screen.

Once I have finished writing I paste the text into the Hemingway app, which nudges my writing with on-screen prompts. It tells me to cut down a sentence, get rid of an adverb, think about using a shorter word for a longer one.

I bought the desktop version for the princely sum of $5.00 a while ago. Now it is out with version Two, which was a free upgrade.

If you don’t want the desktop version and are happy to use the web version, it’s free.

I recoiled when I first read that ‘adverbs are nature’s way of telling you you used the wrong verb.'

Now I am getting used to looking for stronger verbs.

The Hemingway app highlights the words and sentences it thinks you ought to look at - adverbs in blue, long sentences in yellow, horrible ones in red.

Once I have pruned my prose, I run it through the test on the Test page of The Writer’s Diet.

I came across The Writer’s Diet on the BookBaby blog. The test will tell you whether you writing is as tight as you and the Hemingway app think it is.

It has a scale from ‘lean’, through ‘fit & trim’, to ‘needs toning’, to ‘flabby’, and all the way to ‘heart attack’.

I was worried Hemingway would destroy my style or the flow, but it hasn’t. I have a converstaion with it as I trim my prose.

I use it for articles and I also use it for pages like ‘Privacy Policy’ and ‘Terms of Use'

Ernie Pyle - American War Correspondent

Ernie Pyle was an American war correspondent during World War II. He was very well known across a great cross-section of the American public - a real celebrity in his day - and very well liked.

In his newspaper columns and in his book Brave Men, published in 1944, he describes the minutiae of army life in wartime from the perspective of the common soldier.

He described the way the war machine works - from engineers pulling captured tanks off the line with giant earth moving machines, to bomb loaders preparing bombers for a mission, to cooks cooking up thousands of meals for the troops.

The book describes the push from North Africa and up through Italy, then the waiting period in England before D Day, and then the invasion and the battle through France.

Here’s an example of those small touches of detail that he describes. American soldiers were stationed in London in the lead up to D Day, and the US Army established rules for one-way foot traffic for soldiers when walking along the pavements.

It was done in order to minimise how often soldiers would have to meet and salute one another while approaching from opposite directions.

Apparently, there were so many soldiers that before the rule was in place soldiers were having to salute every five steps or so and getting sore arms from all that saluting.

Another scene that he describes is of captured German soldiers on D Day standing on the cliffs and staring in disbelief and resignation at the sheer number of Allied ships that stretched to the horizon.

He wrote the final chapter in August 1944, about the war being more or less over.

That was, of course, before the German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes in December 1944, which was the last major offensive against the Allied forces in Europe.

It's hard to tell you exactly why or how the book is so touching and sad. Certainly the tone changes when Pyle goes with the invasion forces on D Day, and he becomes more sombre and in the end, lyrical.

One passage is particularly poignant. It is about the jeep ride that he and another journalist and the photographer Robert Capa took into a town near Cherbourg.

The Germans has only just been pushed out of the town, and there was always the risk of snipers or of Germans left behind - manning a machine gun somewhere by the roadside. So Pyle was nervous, and he talks about the fearless Capa, who would push on whatever the risk.

Robert Capa was one of the original Magnum photographers. I know his work well and I also know that Capa was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a mine in South East Asia, in what was then called Indochina.

when reading up about the background to Brave Men, I learned that Ernie Pyle was killed in 1945 by Japanese machine gun fire on an island off Okinawa.

Ernie Pyle Theater

After the war, the Takarazuka Theater in Tokyo was taken over by the US Army headquarters and renamed the Ernie Pyle Theater - and retained its name until 1955.