Mr Adams - re your comment.
Although I would be the first to applaud your scholarship, I take issue with you on your assertion that every schoolboy knows about the battle of Jenkin’s Ear. I can only assume this was one of the careless generalisations to which you are prone.
Being a social scientist I do not content myself with anecdotal evidence, and I decided to test your dubious claim. I therefore stationed myself outside the gates of our local high school and put the question to a selection of pupils in the 11 to 16 range (in the interests of sexual equality – something of which you seem unaware - I included girls in the survey).
After correlation of the statistics thus obtained (in the final stages using Cooks coefficient to allow for obverse weighting), I arrived at the following result: Not one student – boy or girl – had heard of this battle.
(Whilst pursuing my enquiries, I was arrested by the police for ‘loitering with intent’. Naturally I was released when my purpose was made clear, and my academic credentials had been checked.)
Of course, I myself am well acquainted with the incident that occurred in 1731 and led to war some eight years later. The war, of course, had little to do with Captain Robert Jenkins, or his (allegedly) severed ear. As I am sure you know, the ‘ear’ incident was an excuse to whip up feeling by those with trading interests in the region. (A bit like ‘weapons of mass destruction’), Walpole eventually being forced to yield to said interests and go to war with Spain.
Do things ever change? Once again I refer you Naomi’s excellent book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’.
I am, however, disappointed that you, of all people, should have been taken in by the propaganda of ’99 year leases’ and such nonsense.
I invite you to check whether Guantanamo is not, in fact, ‘twinned’ with Galveston and, furthermore, whether on the outskirts of this city there is not a very large building with an inordinate security presence for a ‘canning plant’.
I leave you to draw your own conclusion.
And by the way: I have visited your old blog on two or three occasions and until quite recently, found a blank page. Then I tried again and got the ‘no longer known at this address’ thing.
Thank you for you tip re the ‘counter’ – I shall try this.
On the other hand... if I did not have a counter I could imagine this site being visited by THOUSANDS of people!
1 comment:
Oh, George, quite obviously I meant all schoolboys over sixty years of age. All they teach them these days is how to open a lager bottle with their teeth, and convert a bread knife into a handy little dagger (the latter in the metal-work class).
Still, being of the 'elder' generation, I'm happy to note you were well versed in the unfortunate mishap to Mister Jenkin's auditory instrument, as I fully expected.
Incidentally, I trust you are aware that Cook's distance is an n by 1 vector. Each element is the normalized change in the vector of coefficients due to the deletion of an observation. If you were utilizing the coefficient in other than regression diagnostics, I doubt it would have produced accurate results. Still, given that I wouldn't expect a modern day school-person (note the sexual equality statement) to know their arse from their elbow let alone Jenkin's ear'ole, the subject has lapsed into irrelevance.
PS Surely, one visit from such an eminent personage as myself is worth at least a thousand more....shall we say... mundane visitors?
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