Iris surveillance

These crept up on us in our front garden. We went to the Lake District for a week and when we arrived what should we find but these show-offs.

Quote of the Day

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

• Isaac Asimov

  The problem seems to have got worse over the years since he made the observation!

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joan Armatrading | Love And Affection

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Rash Conclusion

By Paolo Valdemarin. Not such a Long Read, but to the point, and perceptive.

Everyone worries about AI replacing doctors. After 24 hours in the hands of the NHS, I think they’re looking in the wrong direction.

GP, A&E, then other parts of the hospital. Every shift, a new doctor. Every new doctor, the same questions. The same story, retold from the top. Every single one of them then took a picture of my rash with their phone.

The first GP I saw actually had an AI assistant. It recorded our conversation and drafted a letter, which he printed on that grey recyclable paper the NHS uses for everything and which absolutely no one in the chain that followed ever read…

The NHS is like many other large organisations, unable to join the administrative dots. Sometimes, it’s maddening to have to watch it especially since no rocket science required to fix it. I guess the problem is that nobody ‘owns’ the co-ordination problem.

My commonplace booklet

I really liked this New Yorker cover (captioned “War-a-Lago”), which was clearly referencing General George Patton’s practice of standing upright in a Jeep during WW2 while reviewing troops. After the Normandy invasion he was given command of the US Third Army which went deep into Nazi Germany.

During the Allied occupation of Germany, Patton was named military governor of Bavaria, but was relieved for making aggressive statements towards the Soviet Union and questioning denazification. He also held antisemitic views and made derogatory statements about Jewish people.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Why the voice note craze is yet to truly explode in Britain

From BBC News…

On an August day in 2013, WhatsApp, the messaging app now owned by Meta, made an announcement. With relatively little fanfare, they revealed the voice note, the messaging feature that lets you send a clip of your own voice to friends and family.

”We know there’s no substitute for hearing the sound of a friend or family member’s voice,” the company enthused in a press release.

Thirteen years on, receiving a 10-minute clip from a friend, telling you about a complex family feud or workplace drama, is an experience that is loved by some and loathed by others.

In places like India, Mexico, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, voice notes are almost matching the popularity of written texts as the preferred form of electronic communication.

But curiously, the truth is that compared to many places, Britain never seems to have quite caught the voice note bug.

I don’t think I’ve ever sent one. But my sisters love the medium and use it quite a bit.

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Refractive Jellyfish

One of the most enigmatic photographs I’ve ever taken. It looks as though someone’s monocle has fallen on the sand. But it’s just a jellyfish. Taken on a beach in March 2012.

Quote of the Day

”Familiarity breeds contempt, but without a little familiarity it’s impossible to breed anything.”

• Noël Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi | Nulla in mundo pax sincera | RV r630 | Marie Lys, soprano

Link

Music for a May morning.

Long Read of the Day

 How Charles III Quietly Filleted Donald Trump in His Own House

You will remember from Friday’s edition that I liked the King’s speech to both houses of Congress. As it happens, I didn’t know the half of it. This elegant piece by Dean Blundell masterfully fills in the picture.

There is an old British art form that Americans, despite our many gifts, have never quite mastered. It is the art of saying terrible things about a man while he smiles and nods, convinced you are paying him a compliment. King Charles III flew across the Atlantic on April 28, 2026, walked into the United States Capitol, and gave a master class channelling his inner Mark Carney.

By the time he sat down to dinner at the White House that evening, he had — without raising his voice, without breaking decorum, without uttering Donald Trump’s name a single time in anger — done something no Democrat, no journalist, and no foreign leader has managed in a decade. He made the President of the United States look small in his own ballroom.

And he did it with jokes.

It’s a lovely essay. Here are some gems from it:

A President who insists he is not a king, in a country whose entire founding mythology is built on the violent rejection of monarchy, was about to throw open the doors of the White House for an actual hereditary king — the head of the same throne the colonies revolted against in 1776 — and the White House communications team was, at that very moment, posting a photograph of the two men captioned “TWO KINGS.”

Or this:

Charles took the rostrum at 3:09 p.m. He spoke for roughly 25 minutes. He received multiple standing ovations, including from Democrats who have spent the past year searching for someone, anyone, capable of saying out loud what they have been thinking.

Or this:

The single most electric moment of the speech came when Charles invoked the post-9/11 alliance — when NATO triggered Article Five for the first time in its history to defend the United States — and then pivoted, with the unhurried grace of a surgeon, into the present.

Today, he told the chamber, that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people, in order to secure a truly just and lasting peace.

Members of Congress rose to their feet. Both parties. Together. In a Congress that cannot agree on a lunch order, Republicans and Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder to applaud a foreign monarch publicly contradicting the foreign policy of the man who had hosted him for breakfast.

The biggest surprises of all, though, come later in the piece, when Blundell turns to the speech Charles delivered at the White House dinner that evening.

Charles then pivoted to Trump’s most cherished domestic vanity project: the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a $400 million ballroom Trump has been building, financed in significant part by private donors and corporate interests, against the howling objections of historians and preservationists.

He could not help noticing, the king observed dryly, the “readjustments” to the East Wing.

He was, he said, sorry to report that the British had made their own attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814.

This was the moment of the night. In 1814, during the War of 1812, British soldiers marched into Washington and burned the White House to the ground. Charles — heir to that throne, head of that state — stood in the rebuilt building, looked at the demolition crew’s work outside, and gently equated Donald Trump’s signature architectural legacy with an act of foreign arson.

The line was so good it hurt. The room — Fox hosts, cabinet secretaries, billionaires — laughed because there was nothing else to do…

This is writing of a very high order. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

In his current FT column, Tim Harford asks if his intuition that politics is more emotionally fraught than it used to be is accurate. He points to a recent working paper by a group of Harvard Researchers which appears to confirm that hunch. I dug it out and started to read, but by the time I got to page 52 (of 138) I’d lost the will to live, and so will just give you Hartford’s summary.

1. Of all the emotions expressed in tweets on X (née Twitter) by far the most common is anger. Other emotions (positive and negative) don’t get a look-in.
2. Anger is on the rise. It started to rise in 2106 and by 2020 40%-50% of tweets were angry.
3. The angriest tweeters are: people at the political extremes of both the right and the left; people who follow a lot of politicians and ‘influencers’; and people over the age of 65.

The funny thing about these findings is how obvious they are. Nobody who’s been paying attention to what happens on ‘X’ will be surprised by them. It may indeed by the case that people are getting angrier in general, but anyone who thinks that the obsessive users of social media are representative of society as a whole is making a serious mistake. So what this research seems to confirm is simply that social media algorithms reward anger — something we’ve known almost from the year dot. Bah!

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Conkers

Hitherto, it had never occurred to me that Chestnut trees might be interesting at this time of year. Until yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”This damp little shambles of a democracy on the edge of the Western world”.

• Nuala Ó’Faolain on her (and my) native land, which is currently a bit of shambles.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Giunse alfin il momento…Deh vieni non tardar |Marriage of Figaro | Regula Mühlemann

Link

Long Read of the Day

The King, the Queen, and the Ballroom Blitz

Tina Brown on song about King Charles’s visit to the Augean stable that is the current White House.

God, it was nice for British embassy guests to see King Charles and Queen Camilla in person yesterday afternoon! As the royal pair emerged with elderly, familiar grace onto the portico steps of the residence and stood side by side, rooted in history, the volatile Washington circus finally came to a stop. Two teary national anthems were played. There was the sweet smell of freshly mown grass, small sandwiches were passed, and the better-dressed-than-usual DC crowd waited respectfully in assembled “pods” for Their Majesties to unfreeze their pose and descend to emit magical civility.

Given that the last time many in this crowd had seen each other was underneath a table in the Washington Hilton ballroom as a would-be presidential assassin at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner stormed a checkpoint and was wrestled to the ground, the embassy garden party was mint tea for the nerves. Everyone was comparing their Saturday night vignettes of Secret Service heroes vaulting over scattering silverware or the sight of a disorientated RFK Jr. being armpit-lifted out of danger with his actress wife scurrying behind. Right before the king and queen deplaned at Joint Base Andrews, Trump’s creamy-faced flak Karoline Leavitt turned her valedictory, pre-maternity leave speech from the podium into a gargantuan gaslight session of the traumatized press, blaming Saturday night’s violence on hate-filled discourse purveyed by Democrats and the media. Wait, wasn’t it her boss, Donald J. Trump, who godfathered the Jan. 6 mayhem, excoriated the murdered Rob and Michele Reiner last December for having “Trump derangement syndrome,” and commemorated the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller in March with the Truth Social post “Good”? Trump himself in his post-dinner press conference took his propensity to attract assassins as proof he is a president of consequence, like Lincoln (but not, apparently, like Gerald Ford, who nearly took a bullet from Manson mini-maniac Squeaky Fromme).

On the embassy lawn in the spring sunshine, the king glided through the parting crowd as if he were on casters. He first greeted a bipartisan cluster of ingratiating pols that included gangly Scott Bessent, stocky Mike Johnson, Steve Miller with his shiny cue ball head, and Nancy Pelosi, her four-inch heels defiantly sinking in the grass.

Do read on. There are interesting stings in the tail.

Books, etc.

This is a remarkably ambitious book by an Oxford scholar I’ve been following since her first book came out in 2020 (when she gave a presentation about it to our — then new — research centre).

Here’s how she describes it in the Prelude:

This is a technology book, because artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi and executives the new prophets. It’s a business book, and personal development one, because it explores prophecy as an industry, with a focus on how to avoid falling for false prophets in a “data-driven” world. It explores the history of prediction – from ancient oracles to the development of measurements and probability – to argue that prophecies are more often than not power plays in disguise. It’s a political treatise on how prediction serves social control.

Like I said, ambitious.

My commonplace booklet

Thank God for Private Eye!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 King Charles’s speech to Congress

Quite classy, IMHO, especially in current circumstances. Worth watching. Link

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