I hate to keep harping on this topic, but the weather here in New York today has been particularly unpleasant. The air seems oddly compressed, and even more saturated and viscous than usual – as though it contained not just the usual summertime admixture of water vapor and filth, but also maybe some mule sweat or hog saliva. There was not the slightest breeze, most of the day, to stir the fetid broth, and the sun, visible at times through its nubilous veil, brought the whole dolorous mess to a slow and sultry simmer as the dreary day wore on. The psychological effect – to drain one of all joy, hope, or sense of purpose – is also deepened, for those who have spent a summer in New York before, and haven’t managed to repress the memory, by the certain knowledge that worse is yet to come.
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My lovely wife Nina and I spent the evening in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the New York Philharmonic Orchestra kicked off their summer concert series with a program of Tchaikovsky and DvoÅ™Á¡k.
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In today’s New York Times, former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who has forsaken competitive chess for pro-democratic political activism, challenges the Western democracies to take “a tougher stand” against the increasing trend toward authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Garik writes:
Opposition activists and journalists are routinely arrested and interrogated. The Kremlin, in complete control of the judiciary, loots private businesses and then uses state-controlled companies to launder the money abroad.
Mr. Bush and Europe’s leaders apparently believe it is best to disregard such unpleasantness for the sake of receiving Russia’s cooperation on security and energy. This cynical and morally repugnant stance has also proven ineffective. Just as in the old days, Moscow has become an ally for troublemakers and anti-democratic rulers around the world. Nuclear aid to Iran, missile technology to North Korea, military aircraft to Sudan, Myanmar and Venezuela, and a budding friendship with Hamas: these are the West’s rewards for keeping its mouth shut about human rights in Russia.
Read the entire essay here.
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I’ve finished reading George Beke’s book Digging Up the Dog: The Greek Roots of Gurdjieff’s Esoteric Ideas, and must recommend it again, not only for those who are curious about Gurdjieff’s teaching, but also for those who wish a deeper understanding of Christian symbolism. Many familiar Christian ideas – the Trinity, the Stations of the Cross, even the word Alleluia – represent much older knowledge and traditions that found their way to us by way of the Greeks. Gurdjieff, who sometimes described his teachings as “esoteric Christianity”, once said, when asked about the connection between ancient Greece and the modern Church:
Everything Christian came from old Greek, then they spoil. All, all, comes from Greek.
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As I’ve mentioned before, I am fond of books, and have a hard time passing an outdoor bookseller’s table (and here in Gotham they are everywhere) without picking something up. As a result there are books all over my house; I simply don’t have enough bookshelves to contain them all, so they tend to accumulate in piles in less-trafficked areas. Every so often I make some attempt at reorganizing them, and the process takes much, much longer than it ought, because exhuming them from their dusty desuetude is like meeting old friends, and I wind up just sitting on the floor reading.
Today, while looking for something in the computer room upstairs, I noticed a forgotten pile of books, and second from the top was an old favorite: the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, by David Wells (no, not the former Yankee hurler).
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My friend George Beke, a tireless and erudite scholar of esoteric teachings, has just sent me a copy of his new book Digging Up the Dog: The Greek Roots of Gurdjieff’s Esoteric Ideas. In this slim volume George shares with us the fruits of his decades of research into the occult legacy of the Pythagoreans and Plato – which are often considered by modern Western thinkers to be merely mathematical and philosophical teachings – and their relation to the complex system for inner development brought forth a century ago by Gurdjieff. I look forward to reading it, and I’m sure to be commenting on it here at waka waka waka. You can order a copy of your own here; I can promise you that if you are curious about such things you will not be disappointed.
Things should be getting back to normal around here tomorrow, but having just got home to Brooklyn after a long day of driving in the rain, I think that tonight we’ll just have a few links from the mailbag. First, from Jess Kaplan comes a patriotic little Java applet with an appealing Big Apple theme. Next we have, courtesy of Mike Zaharee (formerly of PubSub‘s Granite State Research Kitchen), further evidence, as if any were necessary, of what mischievous little imps the North Koreans are, and finally, thanks to Jon Mandell, we have a glimpse of the amusing discomfiture at Wikipedia as the fractious online organism tries to equilibrate in the wake of Enron blackguard Ken Lay‘s unlamented demise.
Happy Independence Day to all from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where, in a remarkable cessation of hostilities, even the local cetaceans made an appearance in today’s town parade.
One advantage of my having toiled for a couple of years at PubSub is that everyone who worked there keeps one eye on the Internet at all times, looking out for odd or interesting items, and when they find them they pass them right along to yours truly. From Jon Mandell comes a link to a vituperative article about Wikipedia, the online resource that seems to be emerging as America’s second-most-polarizing cultural entity, right behind George W. Bush himself (Righteous Swordsman of Freedom, or Chimpy W. Hitler, depending on which side of the aisle you’re on).
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My friend Eugene Jen, whose restlessly curious mind makes him a rich source of interesting material, has sent along a link to a story about the great logician Kurt GÁ¶del. Apparently GÁ¶del, in preparing for his U.S. citizenship examination, made a characteristically analytical reading of the document, and realized that despite the Framers’ aversion to tyranny, they had left in place a weakness that might lead, under the worst of circumstances, to the establishment of a dictatorship. It was GÁ¶del’s intention to mention this at his examination, but his good friend Einstein, who had accompanied him to the proceedings, talked him out of it.
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Apologies to all, but I am enjoying a much-needed respite from glowing screens today. As Groucho said, “I love my cigar, but I take it out once in a while.”
I wish you all a restful, safe and happy Independence Day weekend, and waka waka waka will be back within the next couple of days.
I do apologize for the lightweight content around here the past few days. I’m not sorry enought to do anything about it tonight, though: having just come at 11:15 p.m. to the end of a long, busy, sticky day of bustling about in the foul and dispiriting New York weather, I find that the little grey cells that I rely on for generating trenchant analysis, rib-tickling humor, biting social commentary, and up-to-the minute reporting are in a restive and mutinous mood, and I frankly don’t think I’ll get anything out of them until they’ve had a little R&R (I’m pouring some as we speak).
Also, bearing in mind Machiavelli’s advice that whereas good news should be measured out a little at a time, bad news should be given all at once, I must mention that we will be on the road over the weekend, and waka waka waka might be dark for a day or two.
But in keeping with our practice of exhuming, when I am too inebriated, shiftless or lazy to write anything worth reading, some bit of rubbish from the infinite landfill we call the Web, I offer yet another momentarily diverting wisp of froth – in this case a clever optical illusion.
It’s summertime, and the weather here is not conducive to ponderous thoughts, so this evening we shall amuse ourselves with a look at how our doughty pals the Finns make merry whilst the sun glances briefly upon their Boreal realm. I’m talking, of course, about the World Championship of Wife-carrying.
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The CNN website today carried an interesting little item: an interview with Saddam Hussein’s defense attorney, Ramsey Clark. For those of you who aren’t up on Mr. Clark’s curriculum vitae, he was United States Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, and played an important role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s, but since then has wandered farther and farther into the fever swamps of the extreme Left, and from the Vietnam era forward has happily made common cause with an sordid assortment of America’s foes. He also seems, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, to have an “inordinate fondness” for brutal tyrants, including Serbian thug Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević, Liberian despot and mutilator of uncounted thousands Charles Taylor, and of course the Butcher of Baghdad himself. Clark attended MiloÅ¡ević’s funeral, for example, and announced that “history will prove MiloÅ¡ević was right.” Right to wage a ruthless campaign of genocide, I assume he means.
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A lot of people have been asking me about recent doings at PubSub Concepts, the innovative Internet-search company where I spent the last two years designing and building client software. Word has got around that the company has fallen on hard times, and folks are wondering what’s up.
Indeed, as seems to be no secret, things haven’t gone so well lately. Given my staid British upbringing, however, and an innate sense of tact, I feel that it would be indecorous for me to say much about it publicly, other than to allow that I do find myself with rather more free time these days, as do some of my newer friends.
Though unfortunate, this sort of thing is hardly unprecedented. Think of World War I, or perhaps the Challenger disaster.
Well, it’s a strange business, and no mistake. For some reason traffic here at waka waka waka has spiked up dramatically – more than tenfold – in the last couple of days, and I have no idea why. I turned off the comment-spam blocker for a while, but that wasn’t it, and I can’t see any pattern in the stats. I’d like to think that suddenly the world just can’t get by without a daily dose of the waka waka Weltanschauung, but I have no illusions on that score. It sure is odd, though.
Have I mentioned that I rather dislike the weather here in the summertime? It reminds me of the popular television program Iron Chef, in which the antagonists are given some key ingredient – cuttlefish mantle, say, or babirussa tongue – and ring its changes by serving it up as hors d’oeuvres, soups, salads, entrees, desserts, and even beverages. Well, here in New York, the theme is humidity – enervating, spirit-breaking humidity – and the merciless Gotham microclimate dishes it out in every way imaginable.
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My friend Eugene Jen has brought to my attention a sad item: Harriet, a GalÁ¡pagos tortoise brought home on the Beagle by Charles Darwin himself, has died at the age of 176.
Harriet, we hardly knew ye.
Today I had an interesting lunch downtown with my brother, David Pollack, and PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, and afterwards walked with David, through sweltering heat and sweating throngs more evocative of Bombay than Broadway, to the Merrill Lynch headquarters at the World Financial Center, where he was to attend a meeting with the sultans of high finance.
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Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story about a website called Language Log, which I visited at once and had a hard time leaving. There is even a special introductory post written just for all the new visitors that came by as result of Monday’s article.
If you love English, you’ll love this blog. Onto the sidebar it goes.
Yesterday, I made a brief and rather positive reference to the communally written Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Today, my good friend David Pauley has sent me a link to an essay, posted at Edge.org by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, that makes some very pertinent criticisms of the increasing fashionability of such examples of Internet “collectivism”. Lanier’s argument is that “hive minds” like Wikipedia are good at some things, but very bad at others, and that the current trend seems to be toward an uncritical embrace of a kind of “digital Maoism” that he sees as potentially quite destructive. Lanier writes:
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
This is a fascinating and important discussion. Read Lanier’s essay here, and an assortment of responses here.
[P.S. As noted in my post of April 2, 2009, I’ve been puzzled lately by the steady traffic this post has been getting since November 2008. If you have come here specifically for this (now years-old) post, I’d be very interested to know what brought you here, and would be grateful for a comment or an email.]
I’ve got something else for you to worry about, if you’d like to take your mind off cyanide in the subways, North Korean missile tests, and bucket drownings.
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It is never the final word, but it is quickly getting to be the world’s best starting point.
Well, just as I feared, it’s here – New York’s estival death-cloud has arrived, and life in Gotham will now be fetid, stinking, sweaty torment until sometime in late September. Today the temperature was up around 90, the air was viscous and clinging, and the sun beat down pitilessly from a blinding white sky.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Today I noticed no fewer than five different people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts here in my ultra-blue neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. I will be generous enough to assume that they do so out of youthful ignorance, and not out of an informed wish to lionize the ruthless and bloodthirsty Communist revolutionary, butcher of political dissidents, gays, and Christians at Castro’s CabaÁ±a prison — who personally executed, with apparent relish, even the children of his political opponents, and who strove to cultivate in his followers “hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”
Forgive me for discussing personal business in this sober forum, but today’s post is one of congratulations to our son Nicholas, who was graduated today from the Berkeley-Carroll school here in Brooklyn. Next stop: Brandeis University.
Here’s a shot of B-C’s towering new alumnus with his sister ChloÁ«, who will be heading into her senior year at the University of Michigan.
Nick, I’m mighty proud to be your father.
My dear, departed mom used to quote a wise old saying from her native Scotland:
“When in doubt, say nowt.”
Good advice, friends.
The rate at which we learn is such a limitation. People are generally at least moderately intelligent, and if we were all able to comprehend the various things that everyone else is working on, I’m sure that so many helpful suggestions would be offered that the rate of progress in almost all fields of endeavor would increase exponentially. But it is simply impossible to get people “up to speed” as it were, with any reasonable investment of time or effort.
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Today finds your humble correspondent in Seattle, Washington, where I have been summoned, quite unexpectedly, for a bit of business about which, unfortunately, I mustn’t disclose any details at the moment. The trip came up on very short notice, and the urgency of making hasty travel arrangements yesterday evening meant that waka waka waka lay fallow for the day. I apologize for the service outage.
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The other day I had a familiar tune repeating itself in my head (an irritating phenomenon sometimes called an earworm), and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. Convinced that the Internet had to be able to help me somehow (my answer for everything these days), I got online and started poking around. I quickly turned up a website called SongTapper, where the idea is that most tunes are distinguishable by their rhythm alone. All you have to do is find your way to their song search page and tap out the rhythm of the song on your space bar. I was skeptical, but lo and behold, out popped the correct answer: Mozart’s Turkish March.
Try it yourself.
In considering the question of how “mere” matter can exhibit intentionality, I argued in a previous post that living things have purposefulness and “aboutness” by virtue of their being designed, just as our artifacts have. The designer, however, in the case of living things, is not a purposeful Mind, but the blind processes of evolution and natural selection. If we are willing to acknowledge that our complex intentional apparatus might, as we look backward through our ancestral history, take simpler and simpler forms, all the way back to the earliest replicators, we go a long way toward establishing the “gradualist bridge” that many dualist philosophers insist cannot be built.
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From Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Ten:
At every action, no matter by whom performed, make it a practice to ask yourself , ‘What is his object in doing this?’
But begin with yourself; put this question to yourself first of all.
Today’s PhysOrg newsletter (which I highly recommend subscribing to, by the way – it’s free, pithy, and a great way to keep up with the latest in science and technology) contained some interesting news: it appears that some of the physical laws of the universe are changing over time.
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Dr. William Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher, will of course be familiar to readers of these pages (in fact many of you will have come here in the first place as a result of our occasional cross-linking). Bill is a professional philosopher – the real McCoy, as opposed to the loquacious amateurs who drive taxis and cut hair here in Gotham – and his site is a fascinating forum for discussion of philosophical topics. He attracts interested laypeople like me as well as his academic colleagues, and the discussions are always at a high level both of erudition and civility. I have learned a great deal by reading and participating, and have been persuaded to rethink many of my own opinions as a result.
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My friend Jess Kaplan has just brought to my attention an ominous datum: on this numerologically significant date, 6-6-06, the cost of the average fixed-rate mortgage just happens to be a rather unsettling 6.66%.
Those who prefer a dualist account of mind sometimes raise the objection that if our mental acts are simply the result of material chains of events in our brains, then there is no room for creativity, for our apparent ability to think original thoughts. But what does “creativity” mean?
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In a gratifying development, it appears that scientists have finally weighed in on that dimwitted question concerning the chicken and the egg. As w.w.w. readers will recall, of course, from this post, the matter had in fact already been settled.
Well, I’ve been slacking off again. Rather than sitting home hammering at life’s persistent questions, I spent the evening at the Yee’s Hung Ga 32nd Anniversary and First Annual Awards Banquet, at a restaurant on Elizabeth Street in the heart of New York’s Chinatown. Along with the distribution of engraved plaques to sundry honorees, the four-hour bacchanal featured kung fu demonstrations, laudatory and exhortatory orations, lion dances, a celebratory proclamation issued by no less than Hizzoner the Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg himself, and ten courses of Cantonese food. A splendid time was had by all.
There are places here and there that are noted by painters and photographers for the special quality of their light. Southern France is one; van Gogh made some of his most beautiful paintings in and around Arles. St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida!) is another, and so, as it happens, is the far end of Cape Cod.
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Here’s an amusing item over at MandellOnline: a one-man review of the history of pop-music dance styles over the past 50 years. It’s well worth a peek.
Those who’ve read any Charles Fort (I’ll be writing about him shortly) will know that over the centuries there has been, from all corners of the globe, no shortage of reports of odd things falling from the sky – frogs, fish, stones, sheets of ice, mysterious slime, etc. One of the more common accounts is of showers of blood.
These stories are often either dismissed as fabrications, or explained away in various unhelpful ways. One such “scientific explanation” of the shower-of-blood phenomenon, for example, was “a fine mist of blood cells produced by a meteor striking a high-flying flock of bats”. Usually, of course, they are simply swept under the rug and forgotten.
Now comes a noteworthy development from India, where one Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, has collected some samples from a red rain that fell in Kerala, and upon examining them has found what appear to be some very strange microbes. They are small – about 10 microns in diameter – and reproduce even under harsh conditions, even though they appear not to contain any DNA. Louis has suggested that they may be of extraterrestrial origin, and may be evidence of panspermia (the notion that life on Earth was seeded by otherworldy molecules). An investigation is underway.
Read more here.
I don’t spend a lot of time in the recording studio these days; one of the reasons that I took up software development after twenty-odd years of making records for a living was that the long and irregular hours were beginning to get to me. It was not a big deal, really, to do multiple consecutive sixteen-hour sessions when I was in my twenties; I’d just collapse for a day after the project ended, and I’d be fine. But as I got older it got harder to bounce back, and I’d spend days in a fog after such marathons. Now I’m 50 (50!), and I have to say that after putting in 32 hours in two days on Tuesday and Wednesday over at Right Track I feel about as focused and articulate as Ozzy Osborne on a fistful of ‘ludes. So instead of the usual piercing analysis and trenchant commentary on the passing scene, I’ll just have to leave you today with something else to worry about: Giant Hogweed. It’s big, it’s phototoxic, it looks like a cow parsley on steroids, and it’s coming your way. Learn more here, and here.
Once again, waka waka waka has been experiencing service outages. The reason this time was a six-hour drive home to New York on Monday evening, and a 14-hour day in the recording studio today (just got home at one a.m).
I spent the day at Right Track Recording on West 48th Street – one of my favorite places to make records – to do basic tracks for an album by a very talented young woman from Australia, a bassist by the name of Tal Wilkenfeld. Joining us in Studio A were tenor player Seamus Blake, pianist Geoff Keezer, and the astonishing drummer Keith Carlock. Tomorrow we will be joined by an old friend, guitarist Wayne Krantz.
So I hope you understand; I’m just too worn out to write a post today. Back soon.
It’s been pleasantly cool, for the most part, this spring, but June is just around the corner, and temperatures well into the eighties are predicted for the coming week back home in New York. Most people seem to be perfectly happy about this – the TV and radio meteorologists always act as if it’s glad tidings for all when the summer weather moves in – but I, for one, dread its arrival every spring, and always murmur silent thanks on those cool grey late-spring days that many people seem to take as a personal affront.
It’s just the way I’m built, I suppose – I’m a stocky fellow, weighing about 100 kilograms, and have a robust internal furnace. I’m also of Scottish blood, and since Scotland lies rather far north, and consists almost entirely of cold-water coastline and craggy mountains, it keeps pretty cool up there. I rarely feel cold even on the frostiest winter days, but when the temperature creeps above 80, I start having difficulty managing my heat economy, and when it gets into the 90’s with high humidity, as it does with depressing regularity in New York City, I begin to suffer in earnest. When it gets really bad – those hellish days in the upper 90’s when the sky is a glaring white sheet, the tops of the (remaining) skyscrapers are lost in the haze, the asphalt is melting, and the air at street level is a sickening, superheated misama – I begin to wish I’d never been born. I’d gladly trade six weeks in the single digits, with a howling boreal gale straight off Baffin Bay, for a single one of those awful summer days.
All right – ok – I’ll try to get hold of myself here. I’m sorry to burden you with all of this, but each year Memorial Day is when the Fear begins to take hold of me. Things aren’t too bad yet, and I’m grateful for that, but I know very well what’s coming.
It is extraordinarily quiet here in Wellfleet tonight. It’s been cool and grey all day, and just at dusk a thick fog crept in. The air is heavy and still, and a gentle rain is falling. It is the first day of the new Moon, and the sky is utterly back.
We live on a small hilltop on a little dirt road in the woods, about half a mile from the harbor, and although it is Friday night on a major holiday weekend, nary a soul is stirring anywhere within earshot. Even the coyotes, who often gather at night for no apparent reason other than to see how much noise they can make, are keeping mum.
When you are used to living in New York City, which is always ablaze with lights and throbbing and humming with purposeful clamor, such darkness and silence has quite an effect. Tonight seems almost actively black and quiet, and stepping outside one feels oneself in the presence of a great enveloping blotter, drawing out all that hustle and bustle so that something else, perhaps, may enter.
As sometimes happens, it’s late, and I may have to shirk my bloggardly duties for today. After a late night Wednesday, an early morning today, hours in the office reviewing mind-numbingly opaque Internet-protocol documents, and then a long drive from New York City to Wellfleet, MA, I am simply too zonked to opine about anything.
Well, almost. As I write I am listening to a 1965 recording, by the incomparable Arthur Rubinstein, of Chopin’s Nocturnes, in particular Opus 9, No. 3, in B major.
The ‘A’ section of this piece is a simple melodic figure, in waltz time, played with infinite tenderness by the great master. The structure repeats several times, and each time the second half of the figure is reinterpreted with increasingly intricate variation. It is sublimely, heartbreakingly beautiful.
Listening to this music, sometimes I feel that even if this were all the human race ever accomplished, it would be enough.
I susbcribe to a daily newsletter that sends along little quotations and aphorisms from various religious traditions – each day I get a Hindu one, a Muslim one, and a Buddhist one (the Christian and Jewish ones leaned too much on Old Testament begetting and begatting; they were boring, frankly). This was the Muslim offering from yesterday:
When we allow God’s power to pervade all our actions, and submit to his decrees, we shed all anxiety about the effects of our actions on others; we cease even to consider the effects of our actions. When we cease to consider the effects of our actions, we are adopting the attributes of God himself.
-Qushayri, “Risalah”
From “366 Readings From Islam,” translated by Robert Van der Weyer. Copyright 2000. All rights reserved.
Before you get in line to see Al Gore’s new movie, be sure to take this fun quiz.
Just sent my way by Eugene Jen: a remarkable 3-D view of an underground city constructed by a colony of Florida harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex badius. Take a look here.
In today’s Wall Street Journal newsletter was a link to a recent commencement speech by John McCain, in which he tries to frame the context of political debate, and reminds us that more unites us than divides us. It’s well worth reading, and you can find it here.
