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2003-10-31 17:17

Oh my God, they dubbed Pippi!

The bastards:

I �ver 30 �r har norska barn f�rst�tt exakt vad Pippi menar n�r hon sagt:
- Sn�lla lilla krumelur, jag vill aldrig bliva stur.
Nu �r den svenska eran �ver. Nu dubbas hon till norska.

[For over 30 years, Norwegian childrens have understood exactly what Pippi meant when she said:
"Nice little person or entity, I never want to be stur [growed-up?]."
Now is the Swedish era over. Now she is being dubbed into Norwegish.]

Jan Einarsson, professor i nordiska spr�k ("professeur des langues scandinaves"), among others, is displeasured:

- De flesta norska barn, i alla fall den stora majoritet som talar bokm�l, f�rst�r den svenska som talas i filmerna. Att dubba till norska tror jag �r r�tt on�digt.
- De svenska barnfilmerna har hj�lpt till att �ka f�rst�elsen f�r svenskan i b�de Norge och Danmark.

["Most Norwegish childrens, in any case the large majority who speak bokm�l, understand the Swedish which is spoken in the film. To dub it into Norwegish think I is quite unnecessary. "The Swedish childrenfilms have helped to increase the understanding of Swedish in both Norway and Denmark."]

Outrageous behaviour. They'll be wanting independence next, mark my words...

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2003-10-31 10:17 (UTC)

Sm�rg�spost

1.

The glideosaurs of le tr�s ancienne r�gime. They could fly, like the birds.

Dr Unwin said: "There is this idea that pterosaurs were failures because they are extinct, but that is temporal chauvinism."

2.

Kronprinsess Vickan goes to the hockey in New York and speaks to intrepid reporteurs:

"Vi landade i l�rdags. Det har varit j�ttesk�nt", s�ger hon.

["We got here on Saturday. It's been lovely," she said.]

Investigative journalisme, thy name is "Aftonbladet", for sure!

3.

The Chinese year of the French year of Chineseness - now with Confucionism!

D�s qu'on parle de confucianisme, on colle souvent l'�tiquette d'un enseignement fait de morale sociale avec tout ce que cela comporte de fastidieux et contraignant. C'est r�ducteur, voire compl�tement faux en ce qui concerne l'enseignement originel de Confucius qui transpara�t dans les Entretiens.

[When one talks of Confucianism, one often sticks to the label of a teaching of social morality with all that that implies of tedium and constraint. That's reductive and completely false as far as the original teaching of Confucius in the Interviews goes.

The nice thing about Lib�rationbladet is that it appears in newsagents ("newsstands") here the day after it comes out in France, so I can decide to buy it based on a leisurely persusal. Confucius, he say, "Niiiice!"

4.

The Onion stitches up the Pope. Mr Pope and his hilarious death-cult will be taking an break from this bladet as of now, on account of they've had more than enough space lately.

Tak to yami for the link.

5.

I walked to Swedish class in the rain yesterday, having forgotten that it was half-term and therefore not happening. Then I walked home, in the rain. Bedraggled isn't the half of it.

6.

Languagehat runs with the Nahuatl theme launched over at Naomi's, which has saved me the bother of doing the job properly myself, hoorah!

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2003-10-30 10:45 (UTC)

Prinsessgossiproundup

1. A little cosy flat in / What is known as Old Manhattan

The ancient Swedish custom of offsneaking:

Victoria och Daniel firar nu k�rlekssemester i USA.
Hos kronprinsessans gamla v�rdfamilj har de f�tt lugn och ro. H�r ska de r�dda sitt f�rh�llande.

[Victoria and Daniel are enjoying a romantic holiday in the USA.

At the kronprinsess's old landlord's family's place they're taking it nice and easy. Here they're patching up their relationship.

2. When in St Leninsburg...

Frankly, it doesn't much matter what you wear, the Russian sense of "style" will make you look good by contrast:

I g�r ble hun og kronprins Haakon vist rundt i det vakre Jekaterina-palasset i Pusjkin, i utkanten av St. Petersburg.

Yesterday Mette-Marit and her husbant went round the beautiful [sic] Jekaterina palace i Pushkin, on the outskirts of St. Leninsburg.

3. What would Knudella wear?

Somehow, I doubt she'll be attending State Occasions dressed as He-Man anytime soon, but what do I know?

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2003-10-30 09:34 (UTC)

Marxmanship

It's Komrade Karl, in interview and it's utterly marvellous:

The fashion-following apologists of the propertied classes, now and again, try to find an adequate rival for me. They just can't bear the thought of lacking a recognised genius. So they resurrect Hayek one summer and, by the next spring, they are all wearing Popper (now that's someone with only one idea in his head and, boy, did he flog it to death and irrefutably so!). The very lazy ones go for Isaiah Berlin-so easy to comprehend, so stupendously unoriginal, so devastatingly tautological. Of my contemporaries only Darwin made the big time. And I understood it at once. Friedrich convinced me to dedicate Das Kapital to him, but Darwin, coward to the last, turned me down. On reflection, he was probably right. Had he accepted, natural selection would have been regarded as yet another Marxist conspiracy.

Trenchant! It's long, too, and there's more than a hint of underlying seriosity:

I've got to ask you this: the Soviet Union, the gulag, communist terror.

KM I thought you would. I must admit that I am as vain as the next person and all this personality cult and Marx-worship did get to me. It did tickle me to see my face on banknotes of the old DDR and a Marxplatz in every Prussian city. Of course, thanks to Engels's marketing skills and the efforts of Bernstein and of that tedious man, Kautsky, I became the grand guru of the socialist movement soon after my demise. Consequently Russian westernisers had to take me as seriously as electricity. So I was not surprised when Lenin decided to turn me into the Bible. Lenin was a clever politician with good instincts. But he was also a fundamentalist determined to find in my works the justification for whatever it was he wanted to do. He made "Marxism" up as he went along. This detestable habit, typical of religions since time immemorial, spread everywhere. I began to have the feeling that even my shopping lists were being drafted into the service of this or that faction of the movement. Take the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." This was a formula I had devised to suggest, following its ancient Roman usage, an exceptional government in a time of crisis. I must have used this expression no more than ten times in my life. I can't tell you my surprise when this resurfaced as a central idea of Marxism, used to justify one-party rule. What can I say? And I was rather surprised when the first so-called socialist revolution occurred in such a deeply backward country run by Slavs-of all people. What the Bolsheviks were doing was accomplishing the bourgeois revolution that the Russian bourgeoisie was too small and stupid to carry out. The communists used the state to create a modern industrial system. If one must call this the "dictatorship of the proletariat," well, so be it.

Go on, treat yourself.

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2003-10-29 13:34 (UTC)

An unhistorian's compleynt

What with the rigorous demands of the Enlightenment ("Upplysningen") seminar, I have spent rather more time lately than had previously been my custom perusing of the "history" shelvings of Bristol's bookshops ("bookstores"). My conclusion, which is mine but which for this once, at least, I am firmly persuaded would be yours also if you had had the evidence inflicted upon you, is that history is a challenging subject to file, and that the challenge is not being met with anything resembling success.

The classification that seems to have found most favour ("favor") is one that divides things into countries or regions first, and then subdivides into chronological order. And then the things that don't fit (often including "Yoorp" which, even when it constitutes a category in its own right, doesn't have anything like the clout of "Random Military Engagements Involving Our Boys" when it comes to shelf space) are all mixed up together, preferably by author. So Enlightenment ("Upplysningen") enlightenment is variously scattered across the UK (especially the books on the Scottish Enlightenment, all decked out with glowing blurbs from the Scotsman), France, possibly Germany (at least in principle - in practice the German history sections usually appear to be auditioning for the role of "Blighters - See also Random Military Engagements Involving Our Boys") and Whatever.

Everyone knows that it was impossible to find anything out Before the Google Era (BGE), but Amazon really does deserve its status as flagship of the Internet Shopping Armada. The past is all very well, Varied Reader, but I am often very glad I don't have to live there.

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2003-10-29 11:44 (UTC)

Now in glorious 3D!

I've spent pretty much my entire research career on problems in two dimensional or axisymmetric problems, but no more! As of now I am working on a problem with a full three - count 'em! - dimensions.

It's going to be a pain to visualise, for sure, but this is why they pay me all this money. Plus, if the colour pictures science comes out well we might get another shot at Nature, which I am childish enough to be excited about.

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2003-10-29 09:45 (UTC)

Of Danish /a/ and other wovels

Then shalt thou count to three.
No more, no less.
*Three* shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the counting shall be three.
*Four* shalt thou not count, and neither count thou two, excepting that thou then goest on to three.

[Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Holy Hand Grenade" scene]

OK, I've consulted both Koefoed and Bedsdorff, and they both give:

  • A front mostly-open a ("slightly more open than English 'man'"), mostly long. Eg., gade, vase, sad.
  • A front fully-open a ("the sound of 'a' as in 'man' as heard throughout most of the north of England"). Short only. Eg., kaffe, mand, lang.
  • A back a ("like English 'rather', 'bar' or 'marble'"). Both long and short, but only before or after 'r'. Eg., rase, drak, varm.

So we can group these all under the phoneme /a/, as David recommends, and we also presumably have a phonemic distinction between long and short wovels.

All of which reminds me that a long time ago I set out to give an account of Swedish pronunciation and then didn't. I'll get back to that, but I think I'll have to do it in TeX and make postscript and pdf versions for distribution, because ASCII IPA is Very Annoying, especially since one of the things I want to do is to compare the different transcriptions used in different sources. ("Hi, my name is Count von Bladet and I am a geek of phonetic notation.")

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2003-10-28 15:41 (UTC)

Nous sommes tous Am�ricains

'Member?

But some are more Am�ricains than others. For the rest of us, exiled and voteless in the Recalcitrant Republic of Yoorp, the Grauniad has created a blog through which to watch the American election. Read now; weep later, or ignore it now and weep later: the choice is yours, for a limited time only.

And to round off this rather ill-tempered day of bloggage, how about Christopher Hitchens - for it is he! -'s fair and balanced response to Mother Theresa's beatification:

As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)

The Pope has ruled it's a miracle, Hitchens and the medic acquainted with the case say otherwise. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, sadly, could not be reached for comment at the time of going to press.

Tomorrow, for sure, we will eschew religious controversies completely, and political ones as far as possible.

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2003-10-28 15:12 (UTC)

Hon �ker t�g!

But do check out the maternity-wear:

Mette-Marit kom til Russland med fly, men velger toget n�r hun og kronprinsen fortsetter ferden mot Moskva.

[Mette-Marit came to Russia on an aeroplane ("airplane"), but chooses the train when she and her travelling companion go on to Moskograd.]

The caption describes it as "en russiskinspirert overdel i svart med store rosa blomster" ("a Russian-inspired overpart in black with big pink flowers") but words really can't do it justice.

[Tak, tack or takk, selon le cas, to Anna Louise for the linkage]

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2003-10-28 14:12 (UTC+1)

Of course

It's also going to be dark when I leave work every day until March.

And I can't find the CD of arrangements of Italian renaissance composer Costanzo Festa that the Vlobs recommended anywhere, and the guestbladet's playing up, and I can't find the gnuplot option to set the axes to use the same scale.

But I'm in a worse mood than can be accounted for even by taking all of those things together. I think, on balance, I shall blame Silvio Berlusconi for this. Here's Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian to warm us up:

You may find it hard to believe how truly awful Berlusconi is. So try this: imagine if Tony Blair, personally, owned ITV and Channels 4 and 5, had a heavy hand on the BBC's output, also owned every Blockbuster in the UK, Manchester United FC, and most of the country's newspapers, had been under prolonged legal investigation for just about every financial crime they have a name for, hired as his gardener a former mafioso subsequently given two life sentences for murder and heroin trafficking, stuffed his cabinet with what are amusingly called "post-fascists", and was an unblushing vulgarian who distributed 12 million free copies of his hagiographical life story - a book beginning with a detailed horoscope of the man and containing 114 photographs of its subject. While we're at it, we may as well alter Blair's appearance by knocking several inches off his stature, removing most of his hair and giving him piggy little eyes that radiate smugness and contempt.

Few European politicians could inspire cover story denunciations by both the laissez-faire Economist and the stubbornly gauchiste Nouvel Observateur, but Berlusconi has managed it. I hadn't heard the one about the autobiography, though.

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2003-10-28 11:54

In praise of now

It's now now, again, at last -
The sacrificial hour of sleep is reborn anew
And has been returned to us.

And now, again, at last,
When the sun reaches its zenith in the heavens
It is noon, as it properly should be.

It is now, again, at last -
Summer's frantic rush fades into memories
And our clocks no longer need to tell a time an hour ahead of now -
At long-awaited last it's once more now.

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2003-10-27 16:40 (UTC)

In which the Church owes me a millennium's worth of progress, plus interest

We should always be prepared so as never to err to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchic Church defines it thus.

[Ignatius Of Loyola (1491-1556), Spanish churchman, founder of The Society of Jesus, liar, "saint".]

The canonical example of the Church's enthusiasm for scientific enquiry into the nature of the universe is of course its treatment of Mr Galileo:

In 1633 Galileo was formally interrogated for 18 days and on April 30 Galileo confesses that he may have made the Copernican case in the Dialogue too strong and offers to refute it in his next book. Unmoved, the Pope decides that Galileo should be imprisoned indefinitely. Soon after, with a formal threat of torture, Galileo is examined by the Inquisition and sentenced to prison and religious penances, the sentence is signed by 6 of the 10 inquisitors. In a formal ceremony at a the church of Santa Maria Sofia Minerva, Galileo abjures his errors. He is then put in house arrest in Sienna. After these tribulations he begins writing his Discourse on Two New Sciences.

Galileo remained under house arrest, despite many medical problems and a deteriorating state of health, until his death in 1642. The Church finally accepted that Galileo might be right in 1983.

The endearingly batty 1914 Catholic Encyclopedia has some characteristically pugnacious shitweaseling as how this wasn't a disgrace at all, actually. But by 1978 even the Vatican had had second thoughts about the case:

One of the first steps of John Paul's papacy, which began in 1978, was to begin procedures leading to the rehabilitation in 1992 of Galileo, the Italian astronomer persecuted by the Church for teaching that the Earth revolved around the sun.

The Inquisition condemned Galileo in 1633 because his teachings clashed with the Bible, which read: "God fixed the earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever." Galileo was rehabilitated after 359 years.

But why not pretend - just for kicks - that the Galileo thing was just a misunderstanding. In any case, surely the Church has no argument with science anymore? This is a thing which it is funny that you should mention, because it would appear otherwise:

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which HIV can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.

[...] The president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, told the programme: "The Aids [sic] virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon [sic] can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the condom.

"These margins of uncertainty... should represent an obligation on the part of the health ministries and all these campaigns to act in the same way as they do with regard to cigarettes, which they state to be a danger."

It would be at least internally consistent if he were claiming that the smaller viruses get through the "net" that traps the larger spermatozoa, so let's assume that he's normally capable of at least that level of lucidity. (Are we not generosity itself?)

However, the claim is still a transparent, although doubtless impeccably pious, lie. It is an obvious and trivial falsehood: water molecules are much smaller still than HIV virus, and yet condoms are nonetheless waterproof. This certainly isn't simply a misunderstanding, it is a deliberate falsehood : nobody could possibly believe themselves competent to make such a claim and not also know that it is false.

The BBC also carried the story:

The Archbishop of Nairobi Raphael Ndingi Nzeki told Panaroma that condoms were helping to spread the virus.

"Aids...has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms," he said.

In Kenya, one in five people are HIV positive.

Neither the Guardian nor the BBC even mentioned these claims in their science sections, presumably for the simple reason there's no science involved: the Church's representatives are simply engaged in a propaganda mission to spread lies.

As for the idea that Christianity should get a name check in the Yoorpian constitution, for which Poland is agitating:

"We want a reference to Christian tradition in the treaty," [Poland's] foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, has insisted.

But it is not only the government. "Polish bishops demand and plead that the authors of the EU constitution directly mention the Christian heritage of our continent," said a letter to Berlusconi. "It is the Christian faith that has shaped European culture and is inseparably linked with its history."

Bah!

A rival theory, which is mine, holds that the Christianising of the Roman Empire brought about its collapse in the west, and that the Church's emphasis on the future eternal whereabouts of persons' souls lead it to consider any attempt to ameliorate their present circumstances irrelevant if not actually counter-productive, thus both causing and perpetuating the 1000-odd years of backwardness known as the Dark Ages.

Even the culture that was maintained and produced during that dismal period owed less to the influence of the Church than Mr Cimoszewicz appears to believe:

Throughout medieval Europe Arabic had a far more powerful impact on the transformation and shaping of culture than most narratives of our history reveal. This was true not only in Spain, where Arabic was the lingua franca of educated people of all three religions for many centuries, but far beyond. The new and often revolutionary cultures of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe were often provoked or shaped by an Arabic culture that traveled throughout Europe in many guises, in translations of a hundred varieties, in attitudes about culture, or in songs that were sung and heard and then played again in a different language. It would even be fair to say that European culture from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries is a culture of translation whose monuments are not only new texts in a new language but, no less, the memory of the older language and civilization...

If the tolerance required for the maintenance of a mixed Islamic, Jewish and Christian culture later largely evaporated to the territorial advantage of Catholicism in Yoorp, with the result that there are now persons who can proclaim - presumably with straight faces - that the continent's cultural debt to Christianity deserves constitutional acknowledgement, then so much the worse for Yoorp.

The Middle Ages were a long time ago, for sure. But you might at least hope that Poland - the site, don't let's forget, of Auschwitz - might have the decency to remember that Christianity's contemporary hegemony in Europe (relative to other religions, at least) has been made to look rather more substantial than it might have done in ways that have often failed to reflect credit on it or its practitioners:

Pope Pius XII never publicly condemned the Nazis' persecution of Jews, even when they were being rounded up and deported from Rome. His silence is partly blamed for the failure of Germany's Catholics to resist Hitler. Anti-Jewish Catholic doctrines such as the claim that the Jews murdered Christ were said to have ideologically underpinned nazism. Vatican officials allegedly helped Nazis escape Europe after the war.

Outside of Poland, of course, few populations in Yoorp are still poor, wretched or ignorant enough to fit Church's preferred demographic profile for recruitment, and the centre of gravity of the religion has moved to South America and Africa, where the fruit is lower-hanging and there are still persons to be found who know no better than to believe blatant and shameless lies about condoms and what-have-you.

My Yoorp, of course, is the secular Yoorp of the philosophes of the Enlightenment (Upplysningen) and the Church's privileged place in it has primarily been as a source of intolerance and backwardness, but to an extent which has - I freely admit - had a considerable impact on our civilisation. So how about a compromise, Poland and whoever else is agitating for this constitutional pre-amendment: you can have a section on the special role Christianity has played in Yoorpian history, so long as I get to write it. Deal?

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2003-10-27 13:18 (UTC)

Norwegian Nannying

At six quid a pack, I'm amazed anyone can afford to smoke, but just in case:

Norway is to be one of the first countries in the world to bring in a national ban on smoking in restaurants, bars and cafes.

The aim of the Norwegian ban is not only to protect staff that work in these establishments from the harmful effects of passive smoking, but also to "de-normalise" smoking as a social pastime.

When I was in Norway I was strapped for cash on account of the price of beer, and the duty-free fags ("cigarettes") didn't last long, so I had to switch to rollies, as were all I could afford. This inadvertent camouflage of course lead to the many Norwegian wimmins who coveted my manly body thinking I was of native stock, and gave me hours of practice saying, "Jeg sn�kker ikke norsk," which is best said in impeccably accented Norwegish after all.

Meanwhile, Mette-Marit couldn't make a recent posh dinner on account of as how she had a terrible hacking cough the flu.

[Prinsess linkage via Anna Louise, dreary rambling bladeteer's own]

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2003-10-27 09:50 (UTC)

[Book Review] Norman Hampson The Enlightenment

The thing about Pelican books, which this originally was, is that there's a good chance they'll be denser and drier than is these days considered appropriate for a general audience, and this is no exception. Which is of course fine by me, but the squeamish may wish to note that when Mr Hampson chooses to quote French verse, he quotes it in the original French alexandrines and does not provide translations. He also doesn't translate Latin tags - it turns out "Homo homini lupus" is from Hobbes, and not just the title of one episodes of the celebrated Italian horror comic book featuring Mr Dylan Dog. It means "Man, the wolf of men," so far as my delapidated Latin can make out.

If you can stand all that, which I can, you get a not-quite-dizzyingly brisk tour around the intellectual life of 18th century Yoorp, and if you're me you get many prejudices confirmed vis-a-vis the superiority of the Enlightenment (Upplysningen) to what succeeded it. F'rinstance:

However ambivalent their attitude to Rome [i.e., the classical Roman empire], the men of the Enlightenment were virtually unanimous in decrying the Middle Ages. The entire period from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west to the sixteenth century tended to be dismissed as one of poverty, oppression, ignorance and obscurantism, "centuries of monkish dullness, when the whole world seems to have been asleep," as Fielding put it. (p.149)

While we're on the subject, we may note that J.M. Roberts's Penguin History of Yoorp has "Christian Empire" and "Decline and fall in the west" as consecutive chapter subheadings. Coincidence? I think not.

There's a shift of emphasis from the "early" philosophes to the later developments, including Rousseau, but Hampson recruits these pre-romantics to the Enlightenment cause by noting that they were interested in the reform of society only via individual soul-searching.

[Rousseau and his followers] shared with the optimists of the early part of the century a basic faith in the existence of a beneficial Providence, by whose agency all might yet be made harmonious. Where they differed was in their insistence that reform must begin in individual hearts before it could transform society.

Then, of course, things go horribly pear-shaped in the run up to, execution of and aftermath of the French revolution, as the vile Romantics take over. While the values of the Enlightenment were urban and sophisticated cosmopolitanism (hoorah!) mixed with a healthy dose of scientific curiosity and optimism, the Romantics offered a new conception of "sublimity", patriotism and a celebration of "natural" simplicity - it's no coincidence that their preferred phase of history was the fresh simplicity of the Middle Ages.

Can you guess which side I'm on, Varied Reader, can you? Here's the repulsive Ficht, who has inexplicably chosen to celebrate the start of the long slide to unspeakable barbarism:

"The German alone, because he is a living race, has a true native land." More ominously, "We appear to be the elect of the universal divine plan."

Sigh.

Anyway, it's a dense and somewhat dry book, and Hampson states at the outset that his goal is to offer an overview and an individual synthesis for the reader to challenge and modify as desired, and it worked for me. There will be a great deal more Enlightenment-flavoured reading, for sure, and you lucky persons will be hearing about it, also for sure.

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