RedStateEclectic

Ideas of Freedom (2/3) - Reprise (9)

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The Tension in Classical Liberalism - A Rigid System with Dynamic Elements

In the previous post The Idea(s) of Freedom (1/3) - Uniform Meaning versus Dispersed Meanings, I emphasised what I consider a fatal internal contradiction in the classical liberal system of liberty: the ambition to offer a set of principles that establish exhaustively the meaning, the one and only valid conception of liberty. This gives rise to a contradiction, since liberty is defined in terms of building blocks (rights, property, justice) which are subject to deliberative contestation, different degrees of political support and thus constant historical change. The general concept ("the system") of liberty is not congruous with the dynamism of the elements from which it is built.

It is telling that the great scholars of natural rights, Grotius (1583 - 1645) and Pufendorf (1632 - 1694), especially the latter, were considered the most respected writers on natural law at the time, earning John Locke's (1632 - 1707) admiration, while

[n]either [...] could be called liberal individualists; on the contrary, both reached conclusions that were more favourable to absolutism [i.e. the unconditional sovereignty of the ruler, G.T.] But as (Locke indicated) Grotius and Pufendorf presented a theory of natural rights and obligations that could be used to solve the fundamental problems of political philosophy. They provided a conceptual structure, a way of thinking about political problems, that promised to bring system and coherence to a difficult discipline. 

Smith G.H. (2015), The System of Liberty, Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, p.145

The Loss of Social Realism

Smith presents Locke's concept of freedom as an advancement compared to the mechanistic idea of freedom offered by Hobbes.

For Hobbes, freedom is the ability to do as one wills without external impediments of any kind. For Locke, in contrast, freedom is the ability to do as one wills with one's own without the coercive intervention of other people. (Ibid. p. 138)

Under Hobbes' conception, we arrive at paradoxical outcomes; for instance, a robbery may be both a violation and an exercise of freedom, i.e. a violation of the freedom of the person robbed, and an exercise of the robber's freedom.

However, there are two provisos not taken into account by Smith:

(1) To define freedom as the ability to remove ANY external impediment is certainly less than satisfactory. However, by rejecting such a wide definition of freedom, we have not yet settled the issue of whether it may still be advisable to remove impediments on specific occasions that necessitate the partial violation of freedom-defining rights. Which brings us back to the dynamic, case-driven character of rights, property, and justice. And it brings us to another objection to Smith's argument:

(2) While Locke's view of freedom is expounded by Smith to be a "social concept," defining freedom as a pattern of admissible/inadmissible human interaction, on closer inspection, it does not deserve such characterisation.

For, in Locke's view, writes Smith,

a condition of perfect freedom can said to exist when property rights, both in one's person and in external goods, are fully recognized and protected. Thus to the extent that a legal system approximates this goal, it can be said to preserve and enhance liberty. (Ibid. p. 138)

The unfortunate theme of "system" recurs in the notion of "a condition of perfect freedom," against which we are supposed to measure the degree of desirable approximation to liberty attained by the legal order. But it is not "a condition of perfect freedom" that drives the real life process of developing and defending freedom. It is not an intellectual construct that "can be said to preserve and enhance liberty," but social interrelationships that comprise far more weighty and efficacious factors than a doctrine claiming perfection.

In this sense, Locke's classical liberalism presents us with a static notion of liberty that does not do justice to the dynamic conditions of freedom in the real world, where the political character of freedom-defining social relations is pervasive.

For more see: Red Cedar and Apple Trees - The Political Character of the Economic Process.

The original post.

Ideas of Freedom (1/3) - Reprise (8)

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I am reading The System of Liberty, Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism by G.H. Smith.

The author writes in a pleasantly lucid way that demonstrates his superb command of the subject-matter. Smith elicits erudition free from arrogance or bookishness.

At least to me,

themes in the history of something

sounds suggestive of rather lower-ranking, miscellaneous issues, in stark contrast to the promise of the title:

the system of liberty.

The textual tension between title and subtitle captures a degenerate feature of classical liberalism. Owing to liberalism's magisterial ambition to reign in our minds and hearts as an all-encompassing world-view - a system of liberty - this family of more or less cognate doctrines has soon after its political ascendancy and rather abruptly lost touch with the march of time which, by now, it is part of only as a somewhat exotic accessory tinkling and twinkling on the fringes.

A Uniform Concept of Freedom

In fact, I contend, the most fundamental reason for the eclipse of liberalism - and ultimate ascension in different form, on that more in an another post - lies precisely in

its stubborn, ultimately rationalist ambition to be a system, a conclusively connected, coherent, and complete whole.

But why should that be so?

First note, freedom has a strong capacity to attract wide-spread concurrence and admiration. As she embraces a large number of phenomena that distinguish our very recent modern civilisation, freedom is a term that is naturally situated on a high level of abstraction, hiding constituent elements that can only be made appraisable in terms of truth and moral preference by disaggregation. On the highest level of abstraction, it is natural for people to flock around the term, and it is quite possible to give a valid definition of freedom capable of subsuming partisans with very different understandings of the concept.

Personally, I like Hayek's general definition, according to which freedom is, in my words,

the absence of arbitrary interference by others in a person's protected private domain (or even more tersely: "Unabhängigkeit von Willkür," as he writes in German: independence from arbitrariness).

Many will be happy to accept this definition of freedom, including people that may not be regarded by certain votaries of classical liberalism as even being capable of genuine appreciation of freedom. Indeed, matters get more tricky and divisive if we probe just a level deeper and ask questions like these:

What counts as arbitrary interference? How do we wish to define a person's protected private domain? How is that domain to be protected? By whom? What competences does the protector possess?

Dispersed Meanings - Contextually Defined Freedom

It turns out that even a clear definition of liberty always makes reference to dynamic concepts. These constitutive concepts of liberty are dynamic in a duplex sense.

Firstly, they are open to interpretation and invite dissent and pluralism, whose orderly pursuit is a main aim of freedom.

Secondly, they are being practically contested for, in the process of which they change or assume differential validity (my concept may only be allowed to be proposed in the general discourse, while somebody else's is accepted as operationally valid, serving as the foundation of laws issued by a legislative body).

In a free society, which the classical liberal definition of freedom is obviously trying to cover,

the auxiliary terms by which freedom is being contextually defined – justice, rights, property etc. – are naturally variable.

In large measure, freedom’s purpose (more neutrally: functional achievement) is to

empower people to negotiate the meaning of these auxiliary terms, and hence the working connotations of freedom, the meaning and operative content that people are giving to freedom.

According to classical liberalism, freedom is supposed to have only one, unambiguous meaning. By contrast, whatever the expectations of the classical liberal, in practice freedom persists and is only possible as a texture of different meanings and practices. Even if these convictions and deeds are contradictory and mutually exclusive to some extent, it is in their pursuit that humans are weaving the real texture of freedom.

It is a violation of the logic of freedom to conceive of her as a uniform and closed SYSTEM. Liberty is open-ended, she is a process with plenty of indeterminate future ramifications.

The greater the insistence on liberty as a system, the more liberalism becomes an exercise in intellectual vanity rather than a single-minded pursuit of the theme of freedom.

The rationalistic pretence of the classical liberal tempts her to ultimately give in to the lure of corruption. Most notably, her view of politics is corrupted by a hidden rationalist agenda in which there is no place for the hard-to-control ferment of competing political concepts, interpretations, and uses of the idea and potential of freedom. She disavows politics and democracy.

Ironically, classical liberalism has lost its import in the same measure as it has given clear precedence to doctrinal closure over a concern for the real state of liberty. Under these conditions, whatever one may think of contemporary liberals (i.e. Democrats, or say German social democratic liberals, or modern British liberals), the transition of the political name of freedom (liberalism) to other factions than the classical liberal one was an accident urgently waiting to happen.

Continued at The Idea(s) of Freedom (2/3) - John Locke and The Tension in Classical Liberalism.

The Invention of the Modern Public - Reprise (7)

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Accompanying Freedom and Ancient Greece - Reprise (6), take a look at the below redux post:

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The 5th century BC is generally looked upon as the heyday of the Athenian polis. The peak is preceded by centuries of strife, rapprochement and fusion among distinct tribes that will eventually make up the polis and remain visible as members of the political order of Athens.

Ancient Greece is a melting pot of very different cultural traditions, religious commitments and outlooks of the world. In addition, the seafaring and trading elements are constantly exposed to the challenges and insights of dealing with alien people and their peculiar cultures. Finally, the gods of the Greek are considered more knowledgeable than ordinary mortals, but it is thought within the purview of the assiduous to work out and come close to acquiring the knowledge of the gods. This creates a strong incentive to research and strive in other ways for genuinely new insights.

Thirst for Knowledge and the Impulse for Freedom

Taking all this together, Athens incubates a culture, probably the first culture, in which critical thinking is a prominent feature in the lives of its citizens. To many among the ancient Greek, it is a virtue and a passion to try to discover whether things are actually different from what they hitherto had been held to be. Custom, tradition, cultural and religious dogma are not hermetically shielded from critical examination, and different points of view that seep in thanks to contact with other Greek tribes and strangers contribute to the Greek mission of re-examining the world.

The emerging attitude of critical thought represents a fundamental paradigm shift that will be decisive in the breakthrough of a new concept of the community. When everyone is thought capable of piercing with his mind the world's superficial phenomena to get closer to their essence and real structure, you create a totally new notion of who people really are and what station they deserve within the community. You create a public consisting of human beings equally endowed with powerful capabilities to conquer the world with their brains. This is the birth of the democratic public.

At this point, the inquisitive, ever researching Greek mind, takes a seminal cue from former attainments in the study of the physical world. The Greek natural philosopher is deeply convinced that there is to be found measure, proportion, and harmony in the depth structure of nature. The helter skelter around us may be actually reduced to basic elements (atoms), a substratum from which variety is derived in a way that is orderly and open to explanation. This atomistic theory is carried over to a new realm of intellectual curiosity.

[T]he Greeks of the fifth century had become familiar - through their contacts with foreign peoples and through rapid changes of legislation in their own states - with the variety and the flux of human custom.

What more natural, then, than that they should find in custom and convention the analogue of fleeting appearances and should seek again for a "nature" or a permanent principle by which the appearances could be reduced to regularity? The substance of the physical philosophers reappeared as a "law of nature," eternal amid the endless qualifications and modifications of human circumstance. If only such a permanent law could be found, human life might be brought to a degree of reasonableness.

Thus it happened that Greek political and ethical philosophy continued along the ancient line already struck out by the philosophy of nature-the search for permanence amid change and for unity amid the manifold.

(A History of Political Theory, G.H. Sabine, 1961, p.28)

The Inquisitive Demos

Under the umbrella of this paradigm, a people is gathered to examine their natural and human universe, to come up with hypotheses and challenge one another, and debate as intellectual equals their understanding of matters.

The search for harmony, measure, proportion is not only the guiding presumption of the curious Greek mind, but also the highest value for the member of the polis. As I wrote in Ancient Greece and Freedom:

[T]he participation of the individual [in the public sphere] is paramount, but not for his own sake in the modern sense of personal freedom, rather in order to create a harmonious social whole. Property and family are secondary concerns. Freedom is serving the community, freedom is assuming a role, fitting into the community so as to preserve its capacity for harmony.

Intellectual factions emerge which prefigure in astounding ways contemporary disputes (including those among libertarians), but what matters most for the present purpose is that two indispensable elements to be found in modern liberty are making their appearance:

• the right to question the world before your eyes, and

• the endowment of an entire population with this right.

This is the creation of an egalitarian demos, whose every member is invited to apply his critical faculty to trace the laws

which, if understood, would tell why men behave as they do and why they think some ways of doing are honorable and good, others base and evil."

(Sabine, p.29)

Of further interest: A Modern Story - Politics and the State in Ancient Greece.

See also Demos and Freedom - Robust and Non-Robust Conditions of Liberty, Summing Up the Universe - Sir Karl Popper's Three Worlds, The Libertarian Triangle of Oblivion.

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Freedom and Ancient Greece

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Freedom and Ancient Greece - Reprise (6)

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The significance of the below redux post on Freedom and Ancient Greece derives from the insight it granted me into the democratic character of freedom, which in turn implies another consequence rather unpalatable to the run-of-the-mill libertarian: instead of being an unfortunate side effect of freedom, politics is absolutely central to freedom:

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Political theory begins with the ancient Greeks. And with it turns up the hiatus between political ideals and political reality. Entirely neglected by libertarians, there is a spontaneous order of politics and the state. It is this spontaneous order that produces theoretical efforts and the attempts at political attainment in reality that often deviate substantially from one another. Freedom grows in complicated ways.

Freedom in Ancient Greece

The political picture of ancient Greece is confusing.

The city states are formations of astounding compromise. They are the result of associations between formerly separate tribes, clans, kinship groups. In ancient Greece, the element of deliberative democracy appears to stem from the need to arrive at negotiated arrangements among tribes with varying creeds and values.

For the free member, i.e. the citizen of the city state, the most supreme attainment, duty, and privilege is to participate in the common handling of public affairs - (originally to make sure that one's clan or tribe is strongly represented). Bear in mind, this understanding of freedom does not stress the individual's rights, but the need and bliss of finding a station in the community, being part of the community and contributing to it in a way that makes for a strong, like-minded, even harmonious union of the members.

From the point of view of the individual, this creates an awkward tension between empowerment and submission - the participation of the individual is paramount, but not for his own sake in the modern sense of personal freedom, rather in order to create a well-cemented social whole capable of extraordinary martial prowess. Property and family are secondary concerns. Freedom is serving the community, freedom is assuming a role, fitting into the community, so as to preserve its capacity for military strength and concordance.

Mind you, a faint echo of this resonates in the basic idea of liberal consequentialism, where personal freedom is considered instrumental in achieving "the good society." According to consequentialism, we approve of certain liberal precepts because ultimately they ensure the most beneficial consequences for all, i.e. the best we can achieve in terms of an approximately ideal social whole.

Political Reality in Ancient Greece

Be this as it may, the political reality in ancient Greece is very different from the ideal of social harmony.

The desire to implement a democratic system with meaningful grass-roots participation creates democratic processes capable of mind-boggling interference and arbitrariness. Time and again, the tyrannical character of Athenian democracy is so unbearable as to upgrade in the eyes of many even the option of a tyrant in person.

The ancient Greek understands the dangers of the tyranny, and he understands the protective role of democracy, but he has difficulties in fine-tuning the democratic institutions -- perhaps owing to the legacy of unifying large numbers of tribes, all of whom are to be given a voice in the public choir.

"The spirit of the amateur, both for good and ill, is written large upon Athenian political practice." (Sabine, p.15)

The miraculous capabilities that the modern libertarian ascribes to the individual left to his own devices without a political framework are confidently expected by the ancient Greek of the individual once he is part of the political debate, adding his bit to the crowd's "happy versatility."

In Athens, politics and the state are insufficiently integrated in the general division of labour, a drawback painfully felt in the area of law. In the absence of a legal profession and its attendant independent institutions, the law is as fluid and fickle as the fads and strands of a discussion carried out by a changing group of discussants.

It is at this point that I would feel inclined to argue that ancient Greece did not know freedom, certainly not in our contemporary sense. Greece lacked at least one of the robust conditions of freedom - the rule of law.

The Epistemic Revolution of Ancient Greece - Birth of a Critical Demos

At any rate, with everyone given a voice, the genie is out of the bottle. For the most significant ancient Greek contribution to the growth of thoughts and institutions relating to freedom is the indelible

belief in discussion as the best means to frame public measures and to carry them into effect - this faith that a wise measure or a good institution could bear the examination of many minds - that made the Athenian the creator of political philosophy.

The Athenian

never believed that the customary code was binding merely because it was ancient. He preferred to see in custom the presumption of an underlying principle that would bear rational criticism and be the clearer and more intelligible for it.

[Of the greatest import for Europe's future history is the passionate] Greek faith that government rests in the last resort upon conviction and not on force, and that its institutions exist to convince and not to coerce. Government is no mystery reserved for the Zeus-born noble. The citizen`s freedom depends upon the fact that he has a rational capacity to convince and to be convinced in free and untrammelled intercourse with his fellows.

(A History of Political Theory, G.H. Sabine, 1961, pp 17-18)

Thus, in ancient Greece, an indispensable element of freedom as method is born, only to be preserved in the tradition of the critical method which prevails precariously through darker ages and finally reappears and converges in the relentless doubt characteristic of modern science.

What lends to political reality in ancient Greece an unbalanced quality is that one element of freedom - the ability to challenge everything - is insufficiently channelled by another one - the stability of law and the restraint of governmental interference and arbitrariness.

However, we record a moment in the evolution of freedom when a political experiment gives rise to a new concept of the public, one that will take a long time to mature - a public that consists of all citizens empowered to apply their critical faculties to the task of defining the subject matters of public affairs and how to handle them.

This is one decisive condition in the emancipation of the individual, which is precluded if you bar some of us from political participation. Gradually, when further conditions of liberty come to fruition, the emancipated individual lifts man's natural talents to a new level, where everyone is allowed to become a resource provider for himself and for others to the fullest possible extent.

For more on this last aspect see my Summing Up the Universe - Sir Karl Popper's Three Worlds.

See also Why Law? (1/2), Why Law? (2/2), The Meaning of Politics Is Freedom (Hannah Arendt).

Reprise 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

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Randy Barnett on 'Our Republican Constitution'

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Relaxing to think on a Sunday afternoon.

Reason TV sat down with Georgetown Law's Randy Barnett to talk about his new book "Our Republican Constitution" and a number of other issues.

  

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Libertarian Presidential Debate - Johnson, McAfee, Petersen

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Watch the first part:

 

My score card accords the winner of each segment 3 points, the runner up 2 points, the third-place-finisher 1 point - with cumulative points behind candidates' names:

I do not necessarily agree with the candidates' views, so my judgement is a mixture of assessing reasonableness (even in a person of different opinions), coherence, communicative effectiveness, and, where applicable, concurrence.

 

Introduction                            : McAfee (3), Petersen (2), Johnson (1)

Terror., Military, Foreign Policy  : Petersen (5), McAfee (5), Johnson (2)

When to go to war?                  : Johnson (5), Petersen (7), McAfee (6)

Dealing with Welfare State         : Johnson (8), Petersen (9), McAfee (7)

Terrorism, ISIS                         : Johnson (11), Petersen (11), McAfee (8)

Foreign aid                              : Johnson (14), Petersen (13), McAfee (9)

Personal Questions                    : Johnson (17), Petersen (15), McAfee (10)

Appeal to Democrats                 : Johnson (20), Petersen (17), McAfee (11)

Abortion                                 :  McAfee (14), Johnson (22), Petersen (18)       

Death Penalty                          :  McAfee (17), Petersen (20), Johnson (23)

Gay Marriage                           :  McAfee (20), Petersen (22), Johnson (24)

Gender Pay Gap                       :  Petersen (25), Johnson (26), McAfee (21)             

Vote For Other Pres. Candidate  :  Petersen (28), McAfee (23), Johnson (27)

 

If my counting is right, the winner by a small margin is Petersen, one point ahead of Johnson.

Nonetheless, if I had to decide who I would vote for, ultimately, Gary Johnson would have my support. McAfee strikes me as a bit of a black horse. He leaves me with the impression that some of his views are not too well thought through. Petersen is personable, a good communicator, with an aura of deep conviction, but his palpable faith comes with the downside of rather a mechanical approach to the issues. Johnson is the one who convinces me that his principles do not cut him off from reality and people with other beliefs.

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How I Became a Tory ...

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Matthew Parris tells the story about devouring the book that made him become a Tory at the age of ten.

Older readers may remember this series. Younger readers should know that Pookie was a small winged rabbit with blue trousers, rescued in distress by a loving, poor but honest girl called Belinda, who lived alone in the wood, made Pookie a padded bed in a sort of shoebox, and helped him grow wings. The pair became the greatest friends.

One late autumn day, Winter — drawn as a scary giant with icicle fingers — arrives. There’s a great storm. Trees blow down. Burrows flood. All the animals in the wood (Pookie’s friends) are devastated; homes destroyed, food stores ruined, wings and paws wounded. Pookie and Belinda take in the casualties, warm them by the fire and feed and tend to them. But Pookie (with whom I identified) strides out into the storm in a rage and, shaking his little paw at Winter, tells him to stop being so cruel, go back to the North Pole and never return.

And to Pookie’s shock, Winter withdraws. Pookie is briefly feted. Autumn is followed by spring. Then all nature is thrown into confusion. Flowers have no time to prepare to flower again; dead leaves and branches have not been cleared, nor animals refreshed by hibernation. Now all the woodland folk protest, and Pookie becomes a figure of hate.

So, in the biggest adventure of his life, Pookie flies all the way to the North Pole, nearly perishing in the attempt. He confronts Winter a second time (this full-page picture was so frightening I kept it under my pillow to sneak glances in the night). Pookie confesses he had been wrong, apologises, and begs Winter to return. The little rabbit now realises that the seasons have a purpose, that lazy or foolish animals with ill-sited burrows or nests have to be shown their folly, and every creature given an incentive to work hard, prepare and store.

Admiring Pookie’s courage, Winter relents, agrees to return, and wafts the exhausted bunny home on a storm cloud.

The source.

Being a confirmed enemy of winter as we all know it and a believer in directing human ingenuity toward a tightening of winter to the length of one month and a radical reduction of the shortened winter event to immaculate winter wonderland conditions, I would tend to extend the lesson to be learned from the above story to approximate more of a conservative-progressive compromise: let us respect personal responsibility as a pivotal means for changing the world in unheard-of ways. Let us not just brave what is, but achieve what is not yet. And let us not be too shy to do it collectively.

Realpolitik

Image credit - including another interesting article on Realpolitik.

The story behind the name-dropping:

The concept emerged when liberal nationalism in Germany failed during the revolutions of 1848. The domestic political challenge, writes Bew, was how to build a stable and liberal nation state in a fragile, rapidly changing environment without either violent revolution or harsh repression.  Germany’s internal fragmentation, along with its vulnerability to external pressure from its lack of geographically defensive natural frontiers, set the context. Realpolitik proposed that statecraft must first identify the contending social, economic, and intellectual forces to achieve some kind of equilibrium so they would not hinder the nation state’s development. Only then could the project of liberating Germany to form a united realm succeed.

Ludwig von Rochau (1810-1873) coined the term “realpolitik” in 1853. His two-volume Foundations of Realpolitik offered a liberal response to the challenge of power politics that had swept aside constitutionalism in Germany just a few years before. Accepting power as the fundamental determinant of politics, Rochau separated natural or legal right from sovereignty, which he treated as the consequence of power. Political arrangements had to reflect the social forces within a state as harmonious balance among them minimized internal conflict while drawing more effectively upon their intrinsic strength. Ideas mattered, but less for their intrinsic virtue (or viciousness) than for the wider support they attracted.

Cynics might rate an idea’s usefulness above its truth. Rochau focused instead on the power an idea exercised. Whether right or wrong in themselves, ideas had influence that any political assessment must consider if it was to match reality. Modernity, Rochau believed, made public opinion the key factor in national politics. Statesmen had to engage rather than attempt to suppress it.

Realpolitik aimed to strip away illusions, whether grounded in sentiment, ideals, or ambition. Understanding reality made serving higher ideals possible. Critics later charged Rochau with succumbing to obstacles that blocked change, but he sought to work around barriers rather than push through them. German unity, from a realpolitik standpoint, opened the possibility of a liberal agenda of self-government, expanded political participation, and freedom of expression.  Nationalism offered a unifying ideal to overcome differences stemming from religious sectarianism, region, or social class. Since neither Germany’s old order nor the conservative internationalism epitomized by Klemens von Metternich could share power with rising groups or adapt to change, Rochau believed both were doomed to fail.

Make sure the entire article.

It strikes me that Realpolitik in the sense defined by Rochau seems an indispensable aspect of modern liberty. The latter replaces the tutelage by kin, lord, or priest with vastly expanded personal latitude and responsibility. People represent themselves more than a community of rigid, anti-individualistic cohesion. Compare what I have written about modular man in Violence, Sustenance, and Faith - Civil Society and Social Cohesion (Ernest Gellner) - (4/4). In seeking accommodation with his fellows, the individual is led by different motives and strategies than the tribesman subservient to a culture that treats him as a faithful reflection, an enactor of its rites and rules. Liberty gives rights to people with varying notions of justice and other fundamental convictions. If the they are to coexist peacefully, new forms of compromise and toleration need to be instituted. Realpolitik has a role to play in that.

 

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Poisson d'avril

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What a great experience: this morning, I was privileged to witness the flying visit of the Nebraska Supreme Court to US Air Force base Ramstein, Germany, expertly organised by Senator Laura Ebke. The Court was holding oral arguments at the newly inaugurated Kearnsey Poisson d'Avril Law School over here in Landstuhl, Germany, an institution founded to encourage the harmonisation of US and European law with a long-term view to a gradual replacement of US law by the musical scores of German composers.

A "poisson d'avril" (april's fish) is a joke made on April 1st. In France, children try to stick a fish picture on their friends' back. When the joke is discovered, they shout "poisson d'avril !"

The source.

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Happy Easter 2016 ...

Image credit. NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly celebrated his first holiday back on Earth after his #YearInSpace by sharing a photo of a bunny rabbit plush toy in space, taken inside the ISS. In the background you can see the blue marble we all call home.

...from space.

In the meantime, down here we are enjoying the cheapest Easter "since Lehman".

 

 

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Happy Easter to Everyone.