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    Dishwash Theory and other deviations
    Dishwash Theory and other deviations
    Dishwash Theory and other deviations
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Dishwash Theory and other deviations

    By Rob Godfrey

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    About this ebook

    By far the longest essay in this collection is 'Dishwash Theory - an explanation of the mind', which is a somewhat unique take on the nature of consciousness.

    This collection runs to approx. 34,000 words and also contains a number of diagrams and photographs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRob Godfrey
    Release dateOct 24, 2012
    ISBN9781301630790
    Dishwash Theory and other deviations
    Author

    Rob Godfrey

    Rob Godfrey was born in London on March 21st 1964. After travelling the world and having various adventures he is now pausing in a quiet part of south west France.

    Read more from Rob Godfrey

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      Book preview

      Dishwash Theory and other deviations - Rob Godfrey

      Dishwash Theory and other deviations

      Collected essays 2002 - 2012

      Rob Godfrey

      Contents

      Hurrah for Bill and Kate!

      The Klondike Gold Rush

      The lunatics are taking over the asylum

      Le Bon Dieu – Who was Jacques Brel?

      The death of Stalin’s daughter and Alexander Litvinenko

      Human nature – here’s my theory…

      The Tintin Books

      Iraq, and the man who threw his shoes at President Bush

      Shopping and Syphilis and Seasonal Greetings

      Is war inevitable?

      Sorcery and Second Comings

      The Robber Barons of Saudi Arabia

      The life and times of Robert Herrick

      The nightmare begins

      Non-Biological Intelligence

      Benazir Bhutto, Bin Laden and big bombs

      A Paschal chick on a daffodil cake

      A Brief History of Mongolia

      Rocking at the end of the world

      Dishwash Theory - an explanation of the mind

      ____________________________________

      Dishwash Theory and other deviations

      By Rob Godfrey

      Copyright 2012 Rob Godfrey

      Smashwords Edition

      _____________________________

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ______________________________________

      Introduction

      These twenty essays have been written over the last decade. They cover a mix of subjects across the arts, politics, science and history, everything from a theory of the mind to vice and disease in the Victorian age to the assassination of a Russian spy, with Tintin thrown in for good measure. The eclectic nature of these essays means that they are not easy to categorise, hence they appear in no particular order.

      This collection runs to approx. 34,000 words and also contains a number of diagrams and photographs.

      Rob Godfrey

      Charente, France 2012

      ______________________________________

      Hurrah for Bill and Kate! (April 2011)

      A spiffing wedding at the Abbey today… but seriously, whatever your views about the British royal family, this was still two young people getting married and I’m sure we all wish them well.

      The last time I was in Westminster Abbey I attended a memorial service for the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. I didn’t get an invite to this morning’s event. I now live in middle-of-nowhere France, and just down the road from me there are the remains of a chateau. It was razed to the ground by peasants during the French Revolution. I’m not sure what became of the inhabitants of the chateau; one presumes they got the Gillette treatment; but as well as a lot of headless aristos the French Revolution also produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which even today is still the cornerstone of the constitution and can be found pinned on the wall of every Marie (town hall) in France.

      Likewise with the Americans and their Declaration of Independence in 1776, which is still the cornerstone of the American constitution. Incidentally, the Statue of Liberty was a gift to the United States from the people of France. The statue is of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tablet upon which is inscribed the date ’1776′.

      The British, on the otherhand, prefer to have street parties. There is no written constitution in the United Kingdom; no single document that guarantees the rights of citizens. The UK has what’s known as an ‘uncodified’ constitution; ie, there are a number of documents and precedents that establish citizen’s rights, yet these rights have never been written into a single document bound by law. Some of the principle documents that make up the British constitution are: Magna Carta of 1215 (which outlined the rights of freemen and serfs), the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 (which enshrines the principle that nobody may be arbitrarily detained without having their case heard in a court of law), and the Act of Settlement of 1701 (which outlines royal succession). These archaic documents, along with many others, are what governs the inhabitants of the British Isles in the 21st century; along with precedent (ie, some things are not written down, but instead are done because that’s the way they’ve always been done). You have to be both a legal and constitutional expert in order to find all this stuff and understand it. It’s hardly a constitution, and is easily abused by those who have power.

      If you watched the royal wedding today on tv what you saw was basically illegal in a modern democratic state, in the sense that the plebs cheering in the crowd don’t have any proper rights in law, and the royals parading in front of them don’t have any proper mandate.

      It could only happen in Britain.

      _________________________________________

      The Klondike Gold Rush (November 2002)

      The northbound ferry arrived right on schedule after its three day journey up from Bellingham. Most of the passengers got off at Haines, the shortest route to interior Alaska. Those who remained on the ferry were bound for Skagway, the shortest route to the Yukon. Dawn began to break as the ferry slipped her moorings and headed up the Lynn Canal. The Canal is about half a mile wide. It has steep sloping walls of black rock. At the top of the walls are forests leading up the slopes of the surrounding mountains. The waters of the Canal were crystal clear. The silence magical. One hour's sailing time from Haines, at the head of the Lynn Canal lay Skagway, nestling at the foot of a steep glaciated valley. A few miles further up the inlet lay the smaller settlement of Dyea, which is now a ghost town. Skagway is derived from a Tlingit Indian name, Skagua, which means the place where the north wind blows.

      The ferry began manoeuvering into dock. Wisps of mist rose from the Canal waters. To the left of the ferry terminal there is a black sand beach. The chill morning air resonated with history: a hundred years previously, stampeders would have dragged their belongings up that black sand beach and found themselves in a place that was often described as hell on earth. Back in the 1897, Skagway grew from one cabin to a town of twenty thousand in the space of three months. It boasted over seventy bars and hundreds of prostitutes, and was controlled by organized criminals. This sleepy little settlement at the head of the Lynn Canal become a part of the greatest gold rush of all time.

      It began on August 17th 1896, in the Canadian Yukon Territory, when two Indians and a white man stopped to rest beside a tiny stream called Rabbit Creek, which flowed into the Yukon River. There on the creek bottom they saw glistening flecks of gold, caught between rocks like cheese in a sandwich. The men's names were Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, members of the Tagish tribe, and George Carmack, a California man who had moved to the Yukon and joined the Tagish band.

      The trio had panned creeks before. This day was like many before it, but it would be like none that followed. It would become known forevermore as Discovery Day. According to legend, Carmack was led to the gold when he dreamed of king salmon with gleaming gold nugget eyes swimming in blue-green water. They struck it rich that day and quickly re-named the creek Bonanza. They would become immortalized as the co-discoverers of gold which, by today's standards, would be worth over a billion dollars.

      Word of The Bonanza Discovery spread fast among northern prospectors, but the arctic winter was on its way, limiting travel to and from the Yukon; so it wasn't until the following year that news of the Bonanza discovery reached the rest of the world: At 3 o'clock this morning the steamship Portland, from St. Michaels for Seattle, passed up Puget Sound with more than a ton of solid gold on board and 68 passengers. When this magic sentence appeared in the July 17, 1897, issue of The Seattle Post-lntelligencer, it triggered one of the last - and one of the greatest - gold rushes in history. Before noon that day every berth aboard the Portland had been sold for the return trip north, and telegraph wires carried details of the 68 returning miners who wrestled suitcases, gunny sacks, pokes, and boxes of gold down the gang plank at the Seattle wharf. When it was actually weighed, the gold amounted to more than two tons, but by then it didn't really matter; the stampede to the Klondike in northwestern Canada was underway, and the effects on Seattle and other towns in the west would prove nothing short of astonishing.

      The news came at an opportune time, because North America was locked in an economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893. The Panic of 1893 was sparked at first by the collapse of an important railroad company, and an industrial corporation that had been paying dividends illegally. However, the underlying weakness was caused by the persistent reckless spending of the Democrats, who had been intentionally inflating the money supply by overvaluing silver relative to gold. This fiscal irresponsibility on the part of government established a vulnerable hidden risk that the public was not aware of until it was too late.

      The Panic of 1893 resulted in destroying some 172 State banks, 177 private banks, 47 savings banks, 13 loan and trust companies and 16 mortgage companies. It also

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