Blog time

It's been a busy weekend and a busy day. I'm afraid I didn't get time to write a post on any of the ideas I've had churning around in my head today.

Never mind, normal service will resume tomorrow.

The Subtle Takeover

I'm a subscriber to a "Daily Dilbert" and have been for a long time. Today's strip (July 17, 2012) is a gem. The pointy haired 'Boss' is addressed by his 'secretary' along the lines of, 'he only does what she tells him to do, and the economic devaluation of property puts her relative earnings on a par with his.' He asks, "And your point is?"

Her response is telling. "It's as if you work for me now."

For some years I watched the slow replacement of technocrats in management positions by people waving "management" diplomas and degrees. None of these former filing clerks and secretaries actually had a clue what the people they "managed" did, or how they did it, but, hey! we were constantly told they didn't need to know, they were there to "make our jobs easier" and "facilitate our being able to 'focus' on our work." The strange thing was that our workloads increased as this happened, and not in our specialist fields. If anything, our 'focus' on our specialisms suffered, because now we were constantly filling in forms, or writing reports or 'business cases' for our "managers" in order to allow them to "measure" what we were achieving. Or not.

I know I am not alone in finding that where, in the past, I'd gone to my technocrat boss, made a case for buying some equipment or doing something in a different manner, now I spent several days writing a request just to discuss it. In the past, if I made my case effectively, the boss looked up the budget and, if we had the necessary funds, agreed an allocation, and approved it. Now, I had to draw up a specification, then a business case and finally a report for consideration by a board. Usually after many 'amendments, clarifications and further explanations, might get approval to do it. Or, as often as not, got told I couldn't have the money this year, and would I take this up again next year.

Several times I discovered that money I could have used from the budget had been 'earmarked' for some more 'clerical' support. That invariably made my blood boil, especially as it was money originally budgeted for more teaching or technical support. Again, I'm not alone in discovering this, and it isn't confined to the UK either, it is right through the Western democracies.

There was another change as the "management" became more "manager" and less "technocrat." This occured at the secretarial level. Suddenly they became "Personal Assistants" and very clearly a barrier to any nasty hands on techy types who might want to approach the "manager." Where, before, the management had always wanted to talk to the techies, in fact found it useful and productive to do so, now management didn't want to talk to us because, in all likelihood, we would tell them things they didn't want to hear, or, worse, talk about things they had no knowledge of or which would expose their ignorance.

I have said this before, and I have never been popular for saying it, even when I taught management and leadership. Management is NOT a profession. It is a function of a profession, any profession.

It is a skill which must be learned, but the "manager" of a cleaning operation cannot transfer to "manage" a chemical factory and vice versa. That is where the sort of 'accident' that was the Chernobyl failure begins and lays. Not everyone who is a "techy" has the skills to be a top manager or even a middle manager, but to place someone who is without any knowledge of the functions and operations to be managed in a position of authority over those who do is not just stupid, it is utterly self-defeating.

Today's comic strip sums up exactly what has happened in commerce and industry across the west in the last 30 - 40 years, managers are now accountants, secretaries and filing clerks attempting to manage and direct professionals in all the technical fields - and they haven't a clue what they are doing. Worse, in order to "manage" they fall back on bureaucratic practices, bullying and barriers. It will destroy far more of our economies than it will save and, in the end, it will require their ejection from the offices they have usurped.

Hopefully that will happen before it has reached the point of collapse.

Hot and Stormy ...

Trying to garden in the present weather is a little tiring. That doesn't stop the grass growing or the weeds getting out of hand, so we've been busy, but now its time for a break. Somewhere there's another storm brewing. We've had several in the last few days. Being high up means some spectacular lightning of course, and it is a trifle cooler than down in the valleys.

The Monk, in a fetching wide brimmed hat, gardening jeans, shirt and sunscreen, has been extracting Bindweed by the bagful. If you could market the stuff and eat it, he and Mausi could probably make a fortune. Our garden is, thankfully, relatively free of it, but we are surrounded by forests and fields, and they are full of it. Plus, it migrates ... Mausi, with much greater knowledge (as you'd expect) of flowering plants, gardens and their care, has dealt with the tending and nurturing. Now the grass is cut, the bindweed hacked into submission and the roots dug out, the edges trimmed and the garden looks cared for and pretty again.

But now its time to contemplate getting the BBQ going and grilling some of Herr Wusts finest sausages ... Preferably before the next thunderstorm arrives.

Blunt Instrument ...

A friend, a Barrister of some repute, once told a class I was leading, that the "Law is an extremely blunt instrument" and should be used with caution. He was referring at the time to a then recent case, in which the judgement reached by the court, was likely to have a major impact in future on all cases falling under the legislation concerned. This is one of the major problems, in my view, with English Law, it doesn't necessarily mean exactly what it appears to mean - until a court has ruled that it does. Or that it means something subtly different. And that is where the problems start, because now the law impacts upon things those who drafted it, never considered or didn't intend.

In recent years we have seen a number of such rulings, usually made in the application of some recent piece of legislation. Frequently we have seen laws enacted by Parliament - certainly in the last 20 or so years - which are so poorly drafted and so badly thought through that the ultimate interpretation, and therefore the matters it affects, intended to address some 'issue' the denizens of that House deemed necessary, became a weapon against activities and people it was not originally intended to impact upon. Much of the Health and Safety Regulation introduced by the shovel load in the last 15 years has certainly had that impact on the Police, the Fire and Rescue Services, Ambulance Services and even the Voluntary sector. A great deal of the "anti-racist" legislation has had the effect of actually enshrining racism in some ways, with Whitehall "targets" for "ethnic and gender mix" in the workforce of public bodies, or the now frequent use of "race-hate" laws to ban groups or organisations from using public venues because some activist heard a member of the group use an idiom or phrase the activist considered "racist."

I see the problem has reared its head in the US as well, which uses a similar legal process in the interpretation of the law. A recent message from The Postulant provided me with a link to a Journalists Blog which took me to a very interesting article on a court case being brought against Congress for the passage of a law which, among many other things, would permit the deployment of the US Military within the borders of the USA itself for "counter insurgency operations, and the suppression of unrest." The reason this journalist and his fellow litigants are suing over it is that it would also permit the government to stifle the reporting of any action they wished to keep under wraps. Once again, I foresee that the application of this Act would be fraught with ramifications for everyone in the US, but in particular with their much vaunted freedom of expression, action and the right to bear arms.

The more I learned about the law, the legal process and the manner in which laws are created and framed, the more convinced I became that we needed less specific laws and fewer laws of compulsion on the Statute Book. Yes, we do need laws, every society needs to have clearly defined and understood boundaries of behaviour, what we do not need is a plethora of often overlapping, sometimes contradictory and seldom clearly understood legislation. My former profession, the Fire and Rescue Service, is affected by some 900 different pieces of law, a lot of it duplication, and some of it actually flat out contradictory. The Police have a similar problem.

Sadly, since the legal profession has a vested interest in making all law as opaque as possible, I doubt we'll see it reformed short of a major overthrow of the present syste, - and even that is only likely to make it even worse ...

Madam is unwell ...

Madam Paddy Cat is unwell. It is very likely age related, so there is not a lot anyone can do except make her reasonably comfortable and pander to her little foibles - like insisting on breakfast at 04.15 in the mornings ...

Still, at her age, she's doing remarkably well, a surprise really since she didn't start out that well and probably used up 8 of her supposed 9 lives by the time we moved to the flat I bought in Tewkesbury.

We had a visit to the vet today, not our favourite occupation, and now we are feeling very unhappy and want some personal love and attention.

Bureaucrats; you gotta love them ...

Mausi and the I are slowly getting all the papers required by the German authorities sorted out. The hold up is, as ever, Pretoria, but, after almost two years of waiting, even the Standesamt is prepared to make allowances. Finally, yesterday, he acknowledged that we'd run out of option for getting a response from Pretoria acknowledging my divorce in 1995 has been duly noted and recorded. The official has finally accepted the copy of the Marriage Certificate from my old ID Book as a valid document and the print-off from the SA Dept of Internal Affairs Population Register that shows me as "Divorced."

We were told it's irregular, but all our other papers are valid, so they will have to accept what we are able to supply from the South African end as it's obvious we aren't going to get a response.

All I can say is, it's taken 9 months to get this agreement. Nine months of phoning Embassies, Pretoria, more Embassies and Consulates and more calls to Pretoria. Thankfully, having shown all the forms, all the letters and emails, our Standesamt has agreed its a hopeless pursuit. Finally the Magistrate will look at issuing an approval for our marriage.

All I can say, after this experience of the system in South Africa, is I really cannot understand how anyone actually gets anything done there. It must be murder to get anything at all out of any government department and, as for dealing with two ... No, forget it.

Welcome Josephus ...

The Gray Monk and Mausi are joined at the Scriptorium by Josephus, a former colleague and friend of the Monk. Look out for posts from him in the future, the Monk can assure readers they will be extremely informative and interesting.

The Monk is away ...

The Monk is in the UK for the next couple of days, so posting may be a little on the "light" side unless he can get connected ...

He's teaching on a course, in case anyone is interested and returns home on Friday evening.

So, now you know ...

Resolutions ...

Are not something I generally subscribe to, but I was very amused by a comic strip called "The Grizzwells" in which the lead character, Gunther Grizzwell (A Grizzly bear if you don't know the strip) makes a resolution that he's going to take up unicycling. When asked why he replies, "because he has no intention of keeping it ..."

I guess that's one way of looking at these "New Year Resolutions" - make one you know you won't keep. Then you won't feel guilty about not keeping it.

Another friend presented a list of ten things he wanted to achieve this year, with a list of ten things he didn't do last year. No. 6 on the second list caught my eye and my sympathy. "Ripping into some idiot who doesn't know the first thing about the subject he's talking about," is certainly one I can chalk up as a resolution to keep this year. I really do have to learn to walk away from those who make statements about climate, religion/faith and historical events with little more than the Daily Mail or the Guardian slanted abridged, edited and twisted version of any of them as a basis for their "knowledge" of the subject. People like that don't want to know the truth, they operate entirely with closed minds on the premise that "facts confuse me; my mind is made up and I don't want to know the facts."

OK, there's my resolution. I'm going to have to work hard on it ...

Last Post?

Happy New Year to my readers.

May 2012 bring everything we all hope for.

Interesting History ...

Today is the 48th anniversary of the shooting of President John F Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic President of the US of A whose election, as I recall, was greeted with almost as much hype as that of the present incumbent. It is often said that his assassination is one of the world events that remain firmly in a person's mind and I can certainly say, in this case, it is true. I was at school. It was a maths class and it was interrupted with the announcement.

A teacher came in, told our class master, who told us, then returned to the lesson. That was it. As we weren't in the US it was shocking to hear that a head of state had been deliberately killed, but it apparently didn't affect us - so we just went on with our school  work.

I remember it was on the news that night on the radio (South Africa didn't get television until the mid 1970s) and it was a week or more before any of us saw it on the Movietone News in the cinema. By then, of course, a great deal more had happened, including the killing of the accused gunman. I was astonished recently to learn that, at the time of this assassination, killing a US President wasn't a "Federal Crime" and the whole affair was, technically, the jurisdiction of the Dallas Police Department and no one else.

One can only wonder whether anything would have been different if JFK had not died. Would Vietnam have escalated the way it did? Perhaps not, since L B Johnson appears to have made that his "Cuba crisis" stand. On the other hand, there are a whole slew of very good social programmes that the US owes to LBJ and not to Kennedy. JFK made the promises, LBJ delivered them.

History certainly has a number of interesting "what ifs" attached ...

Music and feasts ...

Yesterday we had a great treat. Carleton Etherington playing at the Marktkirche in Wiesbaden. Carleton is the organist and Master of the Choristers at Tewkesbury Abbey and was invited to provide this Saturday's lunchtime recital in the Marktkirche, Wiesbaden. He produced a fantastic concert of three pieces by "modern" English composers for our listening pleasure and certainly wowed the large audience that packed the church.

Afterward Mausi and I had the pleasure of showing him and Katie round a part of the Rheingau and then taking them to dinner at the family run hotel and restuarant in Frauenstein. The Hotel Sinz is one part of a family operation which includes a vineyard and winery. The food was superb, the wines excellent and the company perfect.

Today the clocks went back, but Madam Paddy Cat does not acknowledge this purely human foible - her "I want my breakfast yowl" was still on the Summer Time schedule. Oh well, we had to get going early anyway as our church was host to the local Anglican congregation today and we needed to get there in time to help prepare for it. In the end it was a lovely service and great fun.

Autumn...

The weather here is certainly not very mild at present. After the heat in Tehran, a bit of a shock, but it is Autumn and wind, cold and potentially rain should not be a surprise!

Oh well, time to get the woolies out methinks...

Absence makes the heart ...

Hopefully, grow fonder. The Monk is away in Iran for a conference for the rest of the week. Provided no one goes on strike, no volcanoes blow their tubes inconveniently and Lufthansa maintains its schedules, he will be home again on Friday with lots to tell.

As we say in German then - Bis Freitag!

Weekend

It's been a busy weekend. Yesterday we had a street party. The residents of our street came together, tents were pitched in front of one of the houses, "Schwenk-grills" were set up, children's games set up in the street and beer, grilled sausage and loads of salad supplied. Proceeds will go to support a school for blind children in Wiesbaden. It was great fun, and now the Monk finds himself with three "students" for English Conversation classes ...

Quid pro quo ... He gets to practice his German on them.

Today has been a rather autumnal day, though the Old Catholic community had their "Parish Meeting" after the Eucharist. Both were quite well attended and we also learned that our Pfarer has been elected to replace the retirning "Dekan" for this area. This is the equivalent of an Archdeacon in Anglican terms, so he will have a lot of extra responsibility to deal with.

And now the weekend is winding down and Monday looms for Mausi and a deadline for his presentations and papers for a conference for the Monk. Tempus obviously has a serious case of the fugits ...

A little trip away ...

Mausi and the Monk are off to Hanover (or Hannover as the German's spell it) for a farewell party for Mausi's sister who is taking up a position at a school in Brussels. This will be the Monk's second visit to Hannover, but the last hardly counts as he was there for only one day and a night - for a major exhibition.

He's looking forward to seeing more of it, but not particularly to the four hour drive! Normal posting will, hopefully, resume next week, possibly with some pictures of Hanover!

Every now and then one stumbles across a statement so profound it is almost impossible not to see how obvious it is, and yet, how often it is ignored.

I recently came across an article on the Physicist Richard Feynman. It prompted me to take a slightly longer look at his life and work, interesting because, even as a physicist, he maintained a strong adherence to his Christian Faith. Born 1918 he died in 1988 and is still quoted on a wide range of science matters. One of his greatest assets though was his ability to summarise difficult issues and put them into plain words. Another was his ability to nail down "home truths" that seem to have got lost somewhere in recent years as secularists, atheists and general "religion is the root of all evil" pundits comment and sometimes rant about a faith they know little or nothing about.

One of my favourite quotes from Dr Feynman is simple -

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

but it has a close second in

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

However, the profound statement which drew my interest was this -

In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

Now it seems to me that he has struck a blow right to the very heart of the current attacks on faith by certain members of the "scientific community" and others in politics and even literature. They may well be "experts" vin their own narrow fields, but many of them patently do not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the religious beliefs they so freely attack - and it shows every time they open their mouths before those who do. I may not be a physicist, biologist or great "best selling" author but I do know a little about my faith, enough in fact to know that those who attack it know less than nothing at all about it. And that is very sad indeed.

Patently, Dr Feynman did know his faith and had no difficulty reconciling either his science or his faith. Reading some of the papers he delivered I am left with the conclusion that the world needs a lot more scientists like him ...

You really do have to love his simple statement - Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts ...


You can find more of his quotes at WikiQuotes.

Short days ...

Seem to be the order of my life at present. Far too much to do or which I want to do and not nearly enough time to do any of it!

Ce la vie, I shall have to make a good post for the blog tomorrow. There are a number of important things to be looked at at the moment and I shall probably comment on some of them. But the grass keeps growing, the house needs cleaning, the cat needs attention, books have to be written, edited and nursed round the publishers ...

You get the picture.

Catching up

Today was spent on a medical check this morning and trying to catch up on a number of things at home.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better organised!

Cat's health ...

Twenty-one is a really 'great' age if you are a cat, at least according to our vet. Madam Paddy Cat may not entirely agree as her back legs are giving trouble and the injections for that are now causing a stomach problem. That said, there's plenty of life in the old girl yet, she certainly makes use of her full vocabulary of "bad" words when the vet tries anything Madam feels is not permitted and tonight's visit to the Bad Schwalbach practice was a real education in how to put humans in their place.

Oh well, the old lady is now sat on the patio bench next to me, our resident black bird is having hysterics because "there's a cat in HIS garden" and I'm enjoying the cool twilight and a great "dunkel" bier.

Tomorrow, perhaps, when I'm back on the desktop I can post some pictures of the now completed and planted out "Krauter Schnecker" which, I have to say, took a lot of work to complete, but is looking great. And now Madam Paddy wants a bit more attention....