Mein dongle ist kaput. Today the exotic little creature refused to crank up at the Cardigan Internet Café. We did intelligent things for a while before reluctantly concluding that the systems were working fine and it was the USB dongle wot was broke. ‘Tis said that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. There is a corollary. If it is broke don’t try to fix it. You can’t. Nothing to be done except send it to a landfill site. Only nostalgia stopped me ditching it there and then. I would try it on my Apple Mac Mini when I got home. But to no avail. Events, dear boy! Events! The loss of my memory stick...my Alzheimer Moment...was definitely not on-message for today.
Since getting my own internet connection at home...howbeit a rather poor dial-up one... I tend not to use the Cardigan Library’s free internet. Instead when I hit town I park the car up the hill where it’s free, walk into town and stop off at the Internet Café on the floor beneath the library. They are my local printer. Weblogs and anything else for hard-copying get converted to Adobe pdf format and copied over onto the dongle. Today there were 20 pages of Innovation Dynamics documents ready to go. Oy vey! After the weekend. I almost paid £14.99 for a 128Mb replacement but my stock of rewritable CDs can do the data transfer job just as well.
In the Anderson Room at Cambridge University Library...catalogued as Mss/6871/p59 reverse...there is a letter dated 5th April 1887 to the Bishop of London from Lord Acton. Bishop Mandell Creighton was taken to task for two critical failures in his History of the Papacy. He had been too indulgent towards the more secular activities of the Renaissance Popes by failing to recognise the contaminating effect of power politics upon the papal office and he had neglected to make any judgements...a serious crime in Lord Acton’s eyes.
Here is what Lord Acton had to say: ‘...I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against holders of power as power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
And he goes on to remark that ‘...great men are always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when they superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of liberalism meet and keep high festival...’
Pretty strong stuff that includes the oft-quoted dictum on the corruption by power. But just as important are the notion of historic responsibility as distinct from legal responsibility and the suggestion that this might apply to the exercise of influence as well as authority. Quite a lot of wisdom in so few words.
The travelling scholar formerly known as William Shepherd has announced a new identity: William of Salisbury. On my return to England with the hurricane of ‘87 I wandered the land looking for a home and settled on Salisbury. I then spent two years in Canterbury before moving to Rye. Should I try for Salisbury again? In 1950 its Labour Party candidate went by the name of John Papworth. He lost, was offered a safe seat next time around but refused. Why? ‘How can I represent them. I don’t know anyone there.’ How quaint.
Anton Pinschof: ‘Let me tell you of an amazing mathematical observation that any fool can make...and I distinguish fools from idiots. The foregone conclusion to all the meetings since the beginning of time that ever worried about the effects of the use and abuse of power in all its forms is that if any form of power accumulates somewhere, anywhere, then somebody must surely turn up to wield it. If that person is not an idiot to start with he will become one sooner or later. If not he will be thrown out and replaced by a more likely idiot.’
Thrown in as an aside: ‘Idiots in Greek were those forbidden to vote. They were outside the polity. Those who wield our power today are by definition outside the polity because they work against it and are not so much elected as selected by the mathematical probability that if that person got there nobody else got there first.’
Last night I watched Mr & Mrs Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Afterwards it was too early for bed so I began browsing absent-mindedly while checking my weblinks. Eventually I clicked myself through to Walter Schwarz’s article about organic city produce in Havana and from there to the Resurgenc archives.
En route I chanced across the company I had wished into being twenty-eight weblogs ago. The Phone Coop does one month broadband contracts. They hit you with a £30 connection fee and insist that you stay at least a month. But after that it’s £18.99 per month with 30-day notice for cancellation. Had I known this at the end of November for nine pounds a week I would have installed Phone Coop Broadband. Strange that the Phone Coop doesn’t show up in switches and searches. Echoes of Google in China?