Cicero's Songs

I wouldn't normally bother to comment on the resignation of a junior minister in the UK, but the fall of Grant Shapps is interesting for the light it sheds on the inner workings of the Conservative Party. The casual nastiness and infantile ruthlessness of the team that Mr. Shapps largely recruited has certainly rebounded on him- indeed has forced him to quit as a minister. That the bullying seems to have driven one young man to suicide is not merely tragic:  it reflects a culture as brash and excessive as much as Mr. Shapps' own brand of politics. For this is not the first time that Grant Shapps has been involved in the disreputable side of the game of politics- he has credibly been linked to Internet smears on other political figures, including some in his own party. He has also been found to have lied about his earnings from other sources, which he claimed had ceased when he became an MP, when they did not. Indeed there are allegations that some of Mr. Shapps' busines...

I heartily dislike the politics of identity. I believe in the politics of values.  The creation on a political credo based on some assumed identity is, to my mind an exclusive, dangerous thing. Making judgements of others based on identity very quickly becomes dangerous: national identities create nationalist a nationalist agenda, class identities creates a revolutionary agenda, religious identity - well, we have all seen what that can create. In fact all can quickly lead at best to discrimination and at worst to violence and death. The politics of identity builds walls. It diminishes our sense of collective responsibility. The politics of values, on the other hand is not an exclusive identity- one simply chooses to agree or disagree with a given position and there is no sense of intrinsic exclusivity- in fact the politics of values are inclusive and transcend national, social or religious identities. Scotland has been undergoing a convulsion over the past few years. The po...

The attacks against the innocent in Paris of course spur a deep compassion for those who have suffered and a righteous anger against those who planned this disgusting act of reckless violence. However, the inevitable call for immediate and violent retribution is giving me some pause. The fact is that with clear hindsight, the response to the attacks of September 11th 2001 was not necessarily the right one, in that the goal of eliminating terrorism was not in fact achieved, indeed the threat of terror has grown, even as the war on terror reaches new heights of violence. It is not that the West should do nothing in response to this outrage, but given the escalation of violence against ISIS is so predictable in the wake of these attacks, we should beware of being manipulated by the ruthless and reckless men behind this Islamic death cult. More to the point, there may be a yet greater conspiracy. There is a clear connection between the Chechens and the emergence of ISIS, and Chechens h...

One of the most positive aspects of life in Estonia is that the average level of education is so high that you get used to people making good quality decisions. Intelligent, well-thought out government services, innovative and interesting technology and so on. This is why, when one does encounter Estonian examples of stupidity, it can be rather shocking.  There are small examples, such as allowing graffiti to get out of hand, which in the end creates far bigger and more expensive problems than an early zero tolerance policy does. There are bigger examples, such as the Estonian Conservative People's Party (EKRE) whose small minded, identity based political world view insults the visionary thinkers, such as Jaan Tonisson, who understood from the beginning that Estonian identity must rest on universal, European values. The identity politics of the barnyard that EKRE, Argentina's Peronist party and the SNP all, to varying degrees promote, can quickly descend into racist or homo...

Students are meant to convulse - if one can not rebel during late adolescence, then pretty quickly you run out of time and the varied pressures of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and/or a family enforce a conformity of one sort or another. The inventive and occasionally wacky ways that students rebel stretch from placing traffic cones on the heads of statues, toga parties, to Trotskyism. Sometimes students get more serious and do things that require some kind of intervention, like an addiction to Class A drugs, attempted suicide and supporting Stalin (Yes, Seamus Milne, I am talking about you). So far, so juvenile. However, in both the US and the UK, there seems to have emerged a class of student whose infantilism rejects the entire course of Western civilisation. Someone has offended their feelings with statements that they disagree with. Yet instead of responding to a challenge to their point of view in the the approved academic way- with rational argument- th...

It is, or ought to be, true that a citizen who is full time employment should be paid enough to live on.  So, unlike many on the so-called progressive wing of British politics, I am not in principle a supporter of tax credits. To me. the fiendishly complicated system devised by Gordon Brown was not a "leg up to the poor" but a subsidy to corporations who would not or could not pay a fair and sustaining wage. So when the British Finance Minister announced in his Budget that he intended to phase out tax credits and institute a much higher minimum wage- the so called "living wage", I did not leap to the defence of the expensive bureaucracy that the tax credit system has created.  However, George Osborne enjoys the game of politics far too much to want to play fair.  His agenda of the abolition of tax credits has now been subsumed into a wider ideological battle. In principle Osborne believes in a small state. He has a stated preference for simpler and lower taxes...

That, over time, societies evolve is a truism.  Yet those that survive and prosper over the longer term seem to evolve in a specific way: towards greater social complexity. The point is that more innovative societies tend to amass greater wealth and thus the ability to deploy greater resources in their own defence. As a general rule then the ability to innovate is a critical feature in social progress and international power. Over the centuries we have seen an evolution from a hierarchical social order, to a more egalitarian order, which permits the freer exchange of information and thus greater innovation. Yet the exchange of this information was for long limited by geography. Until only five hundred years ago there was no knowledge of the European civilizations in America and vice versa. Even where contact existed- between the Chinese, Arab and European civilizations, for example- there was only limited technological transfer and thus it was by innovation, rather than by exchan...

The average Human brain consists of at least 86 billion neurons and perhaps ten times more glyial cells. Yet each neuron, through synapses, can connect to as many as ten thousand other cells. The estimated number of neural connections is thus in the order of trillions: in fact an estimated 0.15 quadrillion connections . Brain specialists believe that each Human Brain may be capable of processing as much as 2.5 petabytes of information through these synapse connections. This is about seven times larger than the entire library of congress .  Incidentally, to build a computer of similar power on current technology would require the power of a small city to run it. For the brain i t is not the total number of cells, but the connections between them that makes its processing ability so powerful.  As for the Brain so for other systems. In information systems, the value of an individual computer, no matter how fast its processing power or how large its memory, is as nothing compa...