Category: Oldfilibuster’s Rhyme & Reason

This is the story of an imprisoned ‘would be’ monarch and a beleaguered emperor who put too much trust in the art of cryptography. Both were victims of a false sense of security. The whole point of cryptography is to prevent information…

This programme is all about censorship, the proscriptive practices of non-democracies and dictatorships, and the struggle of artists to express themselves freely and honestly. It will be punctuated with excerpts from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony No. 7, and for good reason. He…

The sickly-sweet history of sugar has stuck fast to so many of the seamier and crueller chapters of history. Sadly, its journey of devastation continues to this very day with modern slavery, worker exploitation, environmental destruction, and damage to human health in…

Dueling was an insane practice that caused the senseless death of two young men who still had a life’s work ahead of them. At the time of their all too premature deaths, both Galois and Pushkin were young men who had already…

Voting is a powerful thing, the results of which exercise us endlessly, most recently here in Ireland with an election result that kept journalists busy, pundits scratching their heads and politicians eventually making historic and paradigm shifting deals, and all this in…

Today it’s all about taxes throughout history and the poor fools who beggared themselves in order to pay them. Taxation has a long history, and from biblical tales to popular culture, tax collectors have never ranked highly on the list of revered…

I suppose that most of us are familiar with the phrase Jumping the Gun. We have all probably jumped the gun on a few occasions in our lives. While jumping the gun may be a fairly benign oversight in the humdrum of…

Have you heard the one about the bad scientists who called the good scientists’ science bad science? No? Well, I would like to tell you about them. Like so many historical goings-on, this episode is just one more preposterous example of an…

A country operating at a feudal level in the late eighteenth century may, in the words of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, “be regarded as a misfortune.” A country operating at a feudal level in the early…

Oddly enough, it was at a similar time of year, autumn, when that English army led by King Henry V faced French soldiers on a battlefield in Agincourt in 1415, and Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley’s Anzac corps prepared to capture Passchendaele Ridge…

The funny thing about queenship throughout history is that it was normally seen as a perversion of the perceived order, an unjust inheritance as it were, by most men you’d care to ask, especially those in power. Primogeniture was the main vehicle…

Misogyny is one of the most constantly repeated mistakes in history, a mistake made by generations of men who abused their positions of power. Even to this day in countries across the globe, many conveniently employ the lame excuses of ‘culture’ and…