Armageddon Factory

Maybe I’m too cynical at times. I read the newspapers, or watch the TV news, and my first instinct is to wonder how I am being manipulated.

Take that story about the dentist-turned-terrorist Sohail Qureshi who was jailed for four and a half years last week. Most of the newspapers were suggesting that his sentence was too mild, adding that he was likely to be free in a year.

But what actual threat was he?

He was caught boarding a flight with several thousand pounds in cash strapped about his body, with optical night-vision lenses and police batons in his bag, along with two sleeping bags, two rucksacks, some medical supplies and a removable hard drive containing US army combat manuals.

He pleaded guilty to possessing articles for terrorist purposes and to possessing a record of information likely to be useful to terrorists.

So it’s obvious, by his own admission, that he was bent upon some violent act. No doubt he deserved to go to prison.

He had also been in contact with Samina Malik, the so-called “lyrical terrorist”.

Several of the news programmes referred to him as “an al-Qaida operative”. Apparently he had been on a training camp once. One newspaper described him as “a hate-filled fanatic”, while another said that he planned “to fight against British and American troops in Afghanistan”.

It was at this point that I spluttered into my tea.

He’s a dentist. What’s he going to do: pull their teeth out? Even assuming he has actually had some training, how, exactly, is he going to fight British and American troops using police batons, sleeping bags and rucksacks?

I’m trying to imagine what sort of action he might have been planning. I have a picture of him charging down a hill spinning a sleeping bag over his head while wielding his trusty baton. He would have been able to do this at night, of course, being equipped with the night-vision lenses.

OK. He had money. Maybe he was going to buy weapons. He could probably get one or two Kalashnikovs for that money, plus maybe some grenades and a pistol. Perhaps there was even a brigade of Taliban troops waiting to meet him somewhere on the Afghan border.

You have to ask, however: what use would a dentist from Forest Gate be to the Taliban, those battle-hardened mountain-men, many of whom have known nothing but war all their lives? He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

But it’s the comparison of resources that clarifies the real truth behind this story.

The day after Sohail Qureshi was sentenced the Americans were in action on the outskirts of Baghdad, attacking so-called al-Qaida targets.

They dropped 40,000 lbs of explosives in a forty minute blitz using F16 fighters and B1 bombers.

A B1 bomber costs $283.1 million. The US Air Force has 100 of them. Each 500lb bomb costs $283.50, making the cost of one forty minute operation, in ordinance alone, nearly $23,000.

There are currently 1,055,734 American soldiers on active duty around the world. US arms spending amounts to 48% of the world total. US soldiers are the best equipped in the world, each one having large quantities of deadly, sophisticated weaponry at their disposal….. probably including night sights and sleeping bags.

The idea that a crazed dentist from Forest Gate, an addled poetess from Southall and a few other nutters can be considered a threat to world peace compared to the Armageddon factory that is the United States is, of course, a fantasy.

Please click on the following link for a mind-boggling article from Rolling Stone magazine on the economic reasons behind the war in Iraq. Has the American state finally gone completely crazy? Here is the evidence...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle/print

Three Short Pieces: 1. Save the Fish!

There's a line where righteous behaviour can spill over into self-righteousness. It's a very fine line. Everyone knows it: the point where a matter of principle can become a matter of absurdity. Take what happened to my friend John. He was on a weekend camping trip in mid-Wales with his five year old daughter. This was the first time John had seen Rhiannon for weeks. And he's crouching by a little silvery stream with a child's fishing net, chasing the trout around, the girl hanging onto his leg and chattering, both of them more intent upon their conversation than with catching a fish, when they're approached by a couple.

"What do you think you're doing?" the woman says. The man just stands in the background with his arms folded, looking displeased. She has long hair and a woolly jumper, and he has sandals and a beard. John looks at them bemused. "You're not allowed to catch fish in here, you know," she adds, indignantly.

John stands up. "Catch fish?" he says. "With this?" And he holds up the flimsy stick with its little plastic net.

"Well, you look Green," the woman says.

It took a second or two for that one to sink in. John thought she was referring to his fishing abilities. And then it struck him. She was referring to his politics. She considered herself a conservationist. She was trying to Save The Fish.

It's a common problem on the Righteous Left. People become so caught up in what they like to think is the Big Picture, that they stop noticing the details. The mind is so set in a righteous groove that it can longer distinguish a threat from a plaything. Of course the real threats to the future of the Planet - the international corporations, the military-industrial complex - are so unassailable and, at the same time, so ubiquitous, that it is beyond the scope of the average person to challenge them in any but the most peripheral of ways.

So what's a good Eco-activist to do? He has to do something. This is the point, maybe, where the sense of a personal mission can fall into pomposity - where righteous purpose becomes self-righteous posturing - and can end in the absurd spectacle of a couple of middle-class hippies defending these swift, muscular trout from a child's plastic toy.

Rhiannon said: "I think that Woman's mad!"

2. Angry Hair

People have different ways of dealing with anger. Some people get drunk. Others kick a football about. Some people meditate. Raji drives.

He had this beautiful sport's car. And one day he was so angry he just jumped into it and put his foot down. He didn't tell me what he was angry about. So he was hurtling down the road at 60mph. There was an S-bend at the end of the road. He skidded round the first turn and then banked into the second. There were a couple of workmen nearby, digging up the road. He could see their faces. They were looking at him as if he was some kind of idiot. This made him even more angry. He just slammed his foot on the accelerator and...

Well you can guess the rest. His beautiful new sport car, slick and shiny and humming with power, wrapped around a lamp post: a write-off.

Anger makes you do stupid things. He was lucky he wasn't hurt. But he knew the workmen were still watching him. He leapt out of the door, slammed the door shut and, without looking back, went on his way. He was going to the hairdresser's.

Anger compounds anger. If he was pretty pissed off in the first place, he was quadrupley pissed-off now. The hairdresser had to calm him down. "Have you rung the AA?" the hairdresser asked. So Raji did. And with his car hissing and steaming around a lamp post, and this wild anger tearing at his nerves, he had his hair done.

Afterwards he went back to the car. The AA were already there, ready to tow the thing away. He gave them instructions on where to take it and got on with the rest of his day. He was due to at the airport in 4 hours. He didn't have time to think about what had happened till he sat down on the plane.

"And did you learn any lessons from it Raji?" someone asked.

"I learned not to drive when you're angry," he said.

"Why’s that?”

“You end up with a bad haircut.”

3. The Price of Food

"What's the most expensive food you've ever eaten?" says Pete.

There are a number of them sitting at the bar, sipping on the various drinks ranged in front of them. The barman is polishing a glass nonchalantly. They all look at each other, mildly bemused.

"Dunno," one of them volunteers. "Lobster, maybe. That's expensive."

"I had Caviar once," another one says, "only it wasn't worth it. Tasted like salty axle grease to me."

"Me and the Missus went to an upmarket Indian Restaurant in London, and they put gold leaf on the food. I don't know if it was expensive or not, but it was certainly tasteless, in more ways than one."

Pete is, by his own admission, mad. He's pumped full of all those drugs they give to psychotic patients, which makes his eyes watery, and his walk stiff and awkward, like a puppet from a Gerry Anderson TV serial. He holds his arms clumsily at his sides, curling the fingers, as he wanders from pub to pub looking for company. He's also the victim of an unhappy divorce, and these days he's been looking even worse. His clothes seem more battered and stained, he always seems to have tears in his eyes, and sometimes he looks as if he's about to fall over. I asked him if he was all right.

"It's these new drugs," he told me, "they make me depressed."

"Don't you resent being made a specimen in a psychiatrist's drug-experiment?" I asked.

"I'd rather take the drugs than not," he said. "Not taking the drugs is much worse."

So anyway: back at the pub. Eventually they'd all run out of expensive foods to discuss. They'd been through all of the obvious examples, and anyway, it was beginning to seem like a pointless question. It wasn't as if he was asking them what meals they had enjoyed, which would have got a much better response. One of them turns to Pete.

"So what's the most expensive food you've ever eaten then Pete?"

It was what he'd been waiting for.

"Wedding Cake," he said, and walked out.

Gravity

Personally I don’t like the idea of fate. When we talk of fate it makes it sound as if everything is predestined, predetermined, laid out like a train on its tracks, taking us on a journey from here to there without us having a say in the matter.

That’s the meaning of the word “destiny”. It means destination: the place where we are going.

Read more here

A Happy New Year

A Happy New Year.

Or is it?

It depends on which calendar you are using. For instance, the 1st of January 2008 in the Gregorian calendar is actually the 23rd of Tevet 5768 in the Jewish calendar, and the new year is not due for another 273 days, on the 29th of Elul, which is the 29th of September.

According to the Southern Buddhists, New Year is the first three days of the full moon in April and the year is 2551.

According to Muslims, New Year is on the 10th of January, and the year is 1429.

According to the Chinese, the New Year is in February, and the year is the Year of the Rat.

According to the Julian calendar New Year is on the 14th of January. The Julian calendar was the calendar used in the West until 1582, when it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar. Some Eastern Orthodox churches still celebrate New Year on the 14th of January and some stubborn traditionalists still use the Julian calendar for all of their dates.

In fact it is possible to celebrate New Year in almost every month of the year. It depends on what part of the world you come from and which belief-system you ascribe to.

According to Robert Anton Wilson, the great anarchist humourist and writer, the year is now 6008, his personal count beginning with the birth of Hung Mung, a mythological ancient Chinese philosopher who supposedly answered all questions by shouting loudly, "I don't know! I don't know!"

Thus Robert Anton Wilson’s satirical version of a calendar system begins with an uncertainty.

Later he revised his views, saying that ALL calendar systems, including his own, were attempts to impose a single vision on a complex world, and he started using a variety of different systems at the same time. So a Robert Anton Wilson article might be dated in any one of about twenty different ways.

What most of these different calendar systems have in common is a starting date. That is, they are linear and progressive and whoever devised the system had to choose a day on which to start calculating the progression of days and months and years that lead us up to today‘s date.

Thus time is perceived as a straight line leading from somewhere to somewhere else. So it seems to go from the past to the future, from something that is fixed and known to something that is as yet unrealised, from young to old, from youth to maturity, from ignorance to wisdom.

And as it does so it degenerates: it goes from strength to weakness, from vigour to decrepitude, shifting from imagination into habit, from creativity into decay, in a process which can never be reversed.

But time might not be like this at all. It might not go in a line. It might go in circles.

One particular Celtic version of the New Year came in the form of a story. The young Oak King challenges the old Holly King for the love of the goddess, and kills him. This story is commemorated in a garbled form in the ancient carol, the Holly and the Ivy, and is repeated, in reverse order, in the summer, when the Holly King defeats the Oak King.

Thus the cycle of the year is seen as a story of death and rebirth, endlessly echoed through time.

Which, of course, is exactly what it is: death and decay giving way to growth and rebirth, and all of us spinning in a merry dance through the cycles of seasons.

And it is this notion of time which we celebrate in our modern version of the New Year. We celebrate the idea that the year can become new again. We celebrate the renewal and the rebirth of the year.

So a Happy New Year to you once more, whenever you think that might be.

Satan in the Supermarket

"Better to shop in Hell, than serve in Heav'n."

I’m not sure you will catch sight of Satan wandering the aisles of Tesco, however, pushing a shopping trolley, forked tail draped loosely over one arm, while he picks out bottles of Christmas sherry from the shelves, two for the price of one.

You will, however, find Mammon there.

Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy in his Dictionnaire Infernal (1818) describes Mammon as “Hell’s Ambassador to England.” And you might add that Christmas is his time of year.

Read more here.

Matalan Family

There’s nothing more irritating than to have some jolly pop-tune tinkling through your head when you’re feeling anything but jolly yourself.

That’s the trouble with Christmas: relentless jollity.

Right now the tune is “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” as featured in the Marks and Sparks advert on the telly, with Twiggy and a bunch of younger models gallivanting about in a pastiche of some 1950s Hollywood romantic comedy.

No it’s not. It’s the Most Annoying Time of the Year.

It’s particularly annoying when you have the same tune being played over and over again to remind you that you STILL haven’t got round to buying your presents yet.

I’ve been scouring the papers for bargains. Here’s one. Why not try a box of Opulence chocolates from Harrods? At £100 for 80 chocolates it would make an ideal present for that favourite aunt to enjoy after her lunch on Christmas day.

£100 for 80 chocolates works out at £1.25 a chocolate, so maybe it would be advisable to restrain the aunt from actually eating the chocolates. Maybe she could be encouraged to just take the occasional lick instead.

This also has the advantage that it can be turned into a parlour game for the rest of the family. Simply gather around and estimate the value of each lick.

This is cheap compared to a Tercenturian Hamper from Fortnum and Mason (pictured). A snip at £20,000. I suspect the only reason for buying this is to show off how rich you are.

Or how about a dinner suit from Matalan, costing £40?

This is a case of the sublime to the ridiculous, of course. For the price of one box of chocolates from Harrods you can get two dinner suits from Matalan, plus a spare trouser leg and zipper.

What a bargain. We were all round my Mum’s house when I read out the advert. I said, “come on: £40 for a dinner suit, it’s got to be crap,” and my sister said, “that’s how much it would cost to hire one, so you could buy a new one and just wear it one night.”

Meanwhile my other sister, mishearing, said, “some people wouldn’t mind laying out forty quid so that it matches the rest of the table.”

Pardon? So they make dinner suits in co-ordinating colours to match your table cloth and napkins now? How modern.

She thought we’d been talking about a £40 dinner service.

My whole family are great fans of Matalan whose original shop was situated in Tamworth in the Midlands, not more than forty miles from where we were brought up.

It’s where they are today, the whole lot of them, in the brand new Matalan store in the East Kent Retail Park near Broadstairs where they are doing all of their Christmas shopping for the next twenty years I suspect.

I do hope they buy me a dinner suit. I want a red one to go with my Father Christmas bow-tie and matching earmuffs.

I intend to look sophisticated at the dinner table this year.

Remembrance

I went down to the remembrance service at the war memorial with my dad.

I’d bought my poppy a few days before from a lady poppy-seller outside the supermarket. She said, "I know your face. You write that column in the newspaper. Sometimes it makes me so angry I want to shout."

"Good," I thought. "Then I am doing my job."

I don’t normally go to the remembrance service. This is not because I don’t honour the sacrifices made by our service men and women in times of war. I am not a pacifist. I believe there are times when we have to fight to defend our values. It’s just that, as Will Self said that morning on the Andrew Marr programme, I don’t want to be party to a state-sponsored cult.

There are wars and there are wars. Some wars are just and some wars are not. The Second World War was a just war, being a struggle against fascism. We were on the right side.

Other wars are not so clear cut. Whose values, exactly, are we fighting to defend? In the case of the war in Iraq, more than a million Iraqis have died, and several thousand coalition troops, to defend the right of big American oil companies to steal the resources of that desperate, wounded nation.

In the case of the war in Iraq, in other words, we are on the wrong side.

The reason I went to the remembrance service this time was because my dad asked me to. This seemed like a great honour to me, to be able to stand next to my dad as the flags were lowered and he remembered his comrades.

It was a dull grey day but the sun came out right on cue just as the Last Post was sounding.

After the service we went to the British Legion for a drink, where I introduced him to Councillor Julia Seath. They began talking, and within a few minutes discovered that they had something in common. They had both been in Singapore, Julia as the daughter of a British Army officer, and my dad as a young rating in the British Navy.

They were chatting away happily about their memories of Singapore, recalling certain places, certain streets and certain landmarks, when their conversation suddenly became intense. They realised that they must have sailed over on the same ship. They were both on the same ship at the same time.

It was 1949 and the ship was the SS Orduna.

Julia said she remembered the seed cake they ate and that they used a special kind of soap to lather with as they had to wash in sea water.

This meeting wouldn’t have been possible without me. I’ve known Julia since I first came to this town and got involved with local politics.

It felt like a privilege to have been a witness to such a conversation.

Some things seem much more than just coincidence and I was glad I had accepted my father’s invitation.

Free Horoscope Reading

I had my horoscope done over the internet the other week. The advert said: "Free Horoscope Readings". I filled in a form with all my details - my time and date and place of birth - and sent it off.

Some days later I got my reply. It came in the form of an e-mail which had a web link attached, with a security number. You logged on to the website, pasted in the security number, and got your "Free Personal Horoscope Reading."

"Dear Christopher," it said.

It was a very long text, mainly in blue, emblazoned with multiple capital letters, and with lots of words emphasised in bold contrasting colours.

"The other day," it continued, "when I was working on your Free Personal Horoscope Reading" – in bright red – "I had a SUDDEN BLINDING REVELATION about you."

"Oh dear," I thought, wondering what was coming next. Anyone who has to use capital letters and bright colours in such abundance is obviously on the make. It’s like they are shouting at you on the page, like someone suddenly leaping across a room and bellowing in your ear.

It said that there was going to be a very lucky turn of events in which I would become seriously, seriously rich and that all my dreams would come true. "This is an ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY," it said.

At some point the text said that it was IMPERITIVE that I continue reading to the end of the page.

Well you know me. I wasn’t believing a word of this. This wasn’t a horoscope reading, it was an advert. I was just waiting for the sting at the end. How much would I be expected to fork out for whatever service it was they were offering?

There were lots of free things on offer as part of the deal, like an ancient Egyptian Talisman, and a "Magnetised Photograph". This latter consisted of a photograph of the woman supposedly giving me all this personal attention, which she would specially "magnetise" for me so that when I rubbed it I would be in direct "psychic" contact with her.

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of being in direct psychic contact with anyone with a tendency to shout at you in clashing colours and capital letters. It was bad enough on the page. Imagine if it was in your head.

After this the text started to turn nasty.

It was going on and on about psychic-this and spiritual-that, promising me all sorts of wonderful things, when it suddenly said that I had a choice in all of this and that it was imperative that I made the right choice.

"I know you have been unhappy in your life," the text went on. "I know you have been lonely and frustrated. I know you have been hurt."

It then promised me that if I made the wrong choices my life would simply get worse.

I saw the psychology of that. Everyone has been unhappy at some time in their life. Everyone has been lonely and frustrated and hurt. My "personal letter" was clearly a mass produced effort with my name added by the mysteries of digital technology, but the psychology of it was to touch elements in my life that we all share.

Fear and loss and loneliness, hope for a better future, love – of course – and dreams of wealth and avarice, who hasn’t dreamed about these things or feared them?

The text was now adding a threat to its previous benign inanity. It was saying that my life could get worse. Indeed, it promised that it would unless I took a certain course of action.

This is where the sting came in.

She was even now working on my personal horoscope which would give me precise details on how to cash in on the great luck that was about to descend upon me, while telling me how to avoid all the pitfalls. She didn’t want to be so crass as to talk about money, she said, but in the light of the GREAT WEALTH that was even now gathering itself to pour down upon my head…. Etc. etc. etc.

You can guess the rest.

There was a Pay Pal link though which I could give my credit card details. After that I stopped bothering to read.

We’ve all see letters like this of course, and I couldn’t really complain, having elicited it in the first place by answering an advert on a website. But it struck me that it was tantamount to extortion by threats and there are certainly some vulnerable people out there who could be taken in and possibly damaged by this sort of thing.

Maybe I should sue for damages? That way I could get that fortune my horoscope promised me.

Parallel Worlds

Imagine. Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away (as they say in the movies) there’s another you. This "other" you shares everything that you have. She has your past, your history, your family, your name, your body, your sense of identity, your dress-sense, your possessions, your sense of humour. She is identical to you in every way. She likes what you like. She not only thinks she is you, in a very real sense she is you.

She is sitting in exactly the same place as you are now, reading this blog, just as you are. She is wearing the same clothes. What’s the weather like outside? Well in her world the weather is exactly the same. If it’s sunny in your world, it’s sunny in hers. If it’s raining in your world, then it is raining in hers.

But at this point, maybe, things begin to change. You carry on reading this blog, intrigued, whereas the other you interrupts her reading after the first sentence and decides to go for a walk instead. Outside she meets someone she hasn’t seen in ages, who asks her out for a drink. A romance ensues. Later they marry and have children. The two worlds are beginning to diverge.

Small changes lead to greater and greater effects. So in your world you marry a completely different person, and have different children and sometime in the future, one of your children is responsible for a great breakthrough in medicine which saves large numbers of people from a major epidemic.

A war for resources that might have happened did not happen. People live who might not have lived. Some of these people are responsible for huge changes in how we go about our daily lives. And on and on like this, until the two worlds are utterly different from each other.

It is the "parallel worlds" scenario beloved of science fiction writers. You imagine a world quite like our own, but weirdly different in significant ways. So, for instance, in one episode of Doctor Who the protagonists believe themselves to be in London, only when they look up there are Zeppelins in the sky and the world is being ruled by a malevolent dictatorship. They realise they are in a parallel universe.

You think this is all just the stuff of fantasy? You are wrong. It is legitimate scientific theory. It is not only likely to be true, in all probability it is true.

The theory goes something like this: if space is infinite and matter is distributed evenly throughout then every possible scenario must be taking place in one part of the universe or another. So there’s not just one "you", there’s an infinite number of you, all diverging from the pattern at varying points along the way.

It’s like that trick you do with mirrors, reflecting a mirror in a mirror, till you get an infinite regression of mirrors disappearing off into the distance. An infinite number of Earths, going around infinite suns in solar systems exactly like ours. Infinite versions of the internet, with an infinite number of blogs by CJ Stone, all varying in an infinite number of ways.

Well I know it sounds far-fetched, but, according to the physicist Max Tegmark, in his theory of Parallel Universes it is the simplest possible explanation for how the universe actually works. Unless we imagine that the universe stops at some point and turns into something else - a kind of cosmic terminus-building with a big sign saying "Please Mind The Gap When Disembarking From The Universe"- then the best assumption is that it goes on forever; and if it goes on forever, then every possible story-line you can imagine is happening in some part of the universe or another.

As for that other you: she might have gone out for a drink tonight, but she missed reading a very interesting article instead.

And who knows how this might change the world?

Halloween

It's that time of year again folks: the world-famous festival of fake blood and tackiness known as Halloween.

In my local pound shop, called George’s Mini-Market, you can buy vampire teeth, horror masks, wigs, face paint, skeleton costumes, glow-in-the-dark fingers and vampire's blood from anywhere between 10p to £2.

You can buy all the same things everywhere else too. The windows of all the shops are full up of the stuff.

Meanwhile in one of the posh craft shops in our town they have a proper witch's broomstick in the window, obviously hand made. They also have a witch's hat. My sister went in and asked how much the hat cost and they laughed. They got it from Woolworths, they said.

When I was on holiday in Romania last year I went to Bran castle in Transylvania, which is popularly known as "Dracula's Castle". They were selling all the same tat there too.

It's an international conspiracy. Why go to Transylvania when you can buy your Dracula gear from George’s Mini-Market?

Actually the only connection between Bran Castle and Dracula is the fact that the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula was filmed there.

The real historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, may have spent a night there once. "Dracula" was one of his titles. It means "Son of the Dragon".

Bram Stoker based his own Dracula's Castle upon one in Scotland which he also visited only once.

So Bram Stoker and Vlad the Impaler have one thing in common. They both only ever went to Dracula's Castle once.

A few years back Christians used to get very upset about Halloween. They would send scary letters to the newspapers accusing anyone taking part of "occult practices".

Fortunately this kind of superstitious scare-mongering seems to have died out in more recent times. Or maybe it’s that Christians don't want to be accused of being spoilsports any more, when secretly they still disapprove.

The first time I was ever published was in my local paper in a letter sent in reply to one of these letters, which I signed "Puck". It filled up almost half a page and the editor added a disclaimer to it. "The views expressed in this letter are not necessarily those of this newspaper." I was going through a pagan phase at the time.

In pagan circles Halloween is called Samhain, and is the Celtic New Year. It is a very ancient festival indeed, and involves a meal in which an extra place is laid out for the visiting dead.

It had mainly died out in England due to its replacement by Bonfire Night, but was revived recently as an American import after the popularity of Steven Spielberg's ET, which used Halloween night as a convenient plot-device.

These days the ET costume has become a part of the Halloween tradition. If ET was around now he wouldn't have to wear a sheet over his head. He could come as himself.

Sainsburys, meanwhile, is refusing to sell flour or eggs to under 16 year olds. Apparently this is to do with the practice of egging people's houses as part of Trick or Treat.

A friend of mine has the following notice on his door:

No Trick Or Treat

X-Ray Lasers

Mounted

On Roof.

It seems to work. Or so he claims.

Whitstable Harbour

From The Whitstable Times 27/09/2007:

I’m from Birmingham originally. Not a DFL, a DFB. Down From Birmingham.

When I was a youngster we used to go out to a piece of woodland just outside the city called Chelmsley Wood. Later the area was developed and a large council estate put there (1).

At one point it was the largest council estate in Britain.

It looks like Lucerne Drive (2) but is almost as big as Canterbury, if you can imagine that. Lucerne Drive with Elephantitus.

It was designed and built in the 60s.

It has a town centre with shops and car parks, and a number of pubs. The pubs, of course, have no soul, being all the same, without history or atmosphere, and just being kind of plonked down anywhere as an afterthought.

As the years went by the pubs became increasingly decrepit and nasty. You wouldn’t want to go into a Chelmsley Wood pub without an armed guard. I think that Baghdad is probably safer than a Chelmsley Wood pub on a Saturday night.

The reason I am telling you all of this is that I’m looking at a drawing of a Chelmsley Wood pub right now on the internet. It’s called The Oyster Catcher and is Shepherd Neame’s proposed development plan for Whitstable Harbour (above).

OK, I’m probably exaggerating here. I’m sure that The Oyster Catcher will be sensitively designed and built to take into account the ambience of its surroundings. That is, like every new building in Whitstable these last few years, it will be slapped all over with Kent weatherboarding.

But the question still remains: who on earth thinks that Whitstable is in need of another pub? Whitstable has some of the best pubs in the world. Pubs with real character and real atmosphere, not crude mock-ups plastered with weatherboarding to give them that “authentic” Kent look.

I didn’t manage to get to see the development proposals for Whitstable Harbour when they were on display in the Horsebridge. Fortunately they are still available on the Canterbury City Council website.

So I’m looking at the various options now. Shepherd Neame’s attempt to recapture the spirit of a 60s council estate in the shape of a pub is actually the least objectionable of the proposals.

One of them looks like a spaceship, and another one looks like a circus (3).

I like these architectural drawings. They are exercises in creative fantasy. The design that looks like a spaceship also looks like it about to take off into the wild tumultuous skies.

However I’m puzzled as to why the council thinks the harbour needs developing. I don’t know about you, but I actually like the buildings that are already there.

Crude but functional, you might say, and entirely appropriate for the environment, this being a working harbour. Perhaps a larger version of the very successful market would be more in keeping?

That’s what attracted me to Whitstable in the first place. It is a real living town, not a theme-park parody of itself like Canterbury.

Let’s keep it that way!


1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelmsley_Wood
2) http://www.lucernedrive.co.uk/
3) http://www.canterbury.gov.uk/buildpage.php?id=3416

Scary Times

My aunt sent me a set of photos over the internet. They purported to show a little girl being punished for stealing in Iran. The photographs showed the little girl with her arm being forcibly held out while a car was running over it in order to break it.

The pictures were accompanied by some virulent anti-Iranian text.

I say “purported to show” and you already know what my attitude to these photographs is likely to be.

They may have been faked. They could have been mocked-up in Photoshop, or the result of a staged enactment.

Even assuming they were showing something real, there is nothing in the photographs to indicate where they may have been taken. It could have been Iran. It could have been Turkey. It could have been any one of a dozen different countries in the region.

For those of you sceptical of my scepticism, I would just like to remind you of the lies that got us into Iraq, and that German soldiers in the First World War were accused of bayoneting babies.

I think we all know by now that we are being set-up for a new war, this time against Iran.

If you think the war in Iraq was a disaster, just you wait. A war against Iran would be apocalyptic to say the least.

Unlike Iraq - which was a country already on its knees from years of sanctions, continual bombings and the bloody after-effects of the previous devastating war – Iran is a fully-functioning advanced radical state with a motivated and armed population. It would not be such a push-over.

Iran has always been the real enemy, having dumped the American-backed Shah in their Islamic revolution, and having backed some of the key anti-American/ anti-Israeli forces in the region, like Hamas and Hezbollah, for a number of years.

It is also almost certainly backing some of the Sh’ia based militias in Iraq, something that will no doubt provide the justification for any future attack. But - it has to be said - complaints about “interference” from an occupying power about a regional neighbour is patently absurd. It would be like Nazi Germany complaining about “interference” by Britain in the affairs of Vichy France during the Second World War.

The Americans have already built a small army base on the Iranian border, supposedly to stop incursions into Iraqi territory. This is a joke. You only have to look at the map to know this.

There are 200 American troops in that base. The idea that they can have any effect on cross-border incursions in a desert region along such an extensive border is laughable.

More likely they have been put there as an act of provocation.

There are also British troops on the southern border, so expect to see a re-enactment of the capture of British sailors earlier this year.

British troops are being used as bait in a nasty propaganda war, which will, almost certainly, turn into a real war in the end.

Scary times ahead.

Round and Round

One of my favourite books is The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by PD Ouspensky. The central character is a failure who finds himself at a dead end in his life. Broke, bereft, emotionally and academically ruined, rejected by the woman he loves and contemplating suicide, he wishes he could live his life over again, but with hindsight this time, knowing everything that he knows now.

Then he meets a magician who offers him that chance. But first the magician gives him a warning. “Remember this moment,” he says.

After this the hero is catapulted back in time, to the exact moment when he believes he had made his first great mistake, and in his confusion, finding himself a fully developed older man in a child’s body, proceeds to make exactly the same mistake again.

Thereafter the book is a catalogue of continuing errors, in which the character does everything he did in his first life while slowly forgetting that he had ever made this return journey. In order to fit in, he reverts to his younger self, becoming, once more, a child in a child’s body. But he is plagued by a sense of repetition, of deja-vu, as if he has been here before.

There’s a terrible inevitability about the story, like the wheels of fate moving inexorably on, and a sense of echoes-in-time. There is also something unsettlingly familiar about tone of the story - a kind of resonance - as if you yourself know some of this already: as if you, the reader, also exists in a time-loop, as if you’ve been going round and round in time throughout all eternity. It’s just that you keep forgetting, that’s all.

Which is - maybe - not so far from the truth.

I had a weird little revelation the other day. I was thinking about reincarnation. I suddenly thought, “what if time is not sequential”: by which I meant that maybe time is like that loop in the PD Ouspensky story, or like the ever-repeating cycle of events in Groundhog Day. Not a straight line but a circle, going round and round and round.

I which case, I thought, when we die we don’t necessarily go on to the “next” life as such, but we can go back to any of our lives at any time in history. Each life is the same life, but with a different historical backdrop. This was my revelation. We have to keep on coming back and back until we get it right.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Maybe each time we come back we set ourselves a new riddle. That is how we develop. It’s not that there is some outside force judging us. We judge ourselves. One part of us is eternal - consisting of the whole of our experience throughout time - while the other part, the familiar little bit that we consider ourselves to be, that lives out our small dramas on this planet, is on an endless journey to find our selves.

There’s a great line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “Eternity is in Love with the Productions of Time.”

It’s a bit like a soap opera. If you already knew the outcome of the story then it wouldn’t be worth watching.

So it’s like the eternal “you” sets itself a puzzle - a plot-device, an interesting conundrum - which the mortal “you” then has to find the solution to, and that you have to keep on coming back and back till you’ve sorted it out. Then it’s on to the next sequence.

In the Ouspensky story the hero finds himself right back where he started, in exactly the same mess. Only this time he remembers that he has been here before. It is at this moment that he is able to move on. It is at this moment that he is finally free.


Anthony Peake links:
website
blog

Time Reversal and Reincarnation

One of the things I most love are scientific papers which appear to prove the existence of supernatural powers.

One I read recently was called "Time-reversed human experience: Experimental evidence and implications" by Dean Radin of the Boundary Institute, Los Altos, California. It’s about precognition.

There are a number of experiments in there which make fascinating reading. My favourite is an experiment into so-called “presentiment”, that is precognition of a future feeling.

The experiment went like this. A computer generates random images. Some of these images are of a violent, sexual or emotionally charged nature. The participants in the experiment are wired up in such a way that the experimenters can tell when the person is affected by the pictures. Violent or sexually charged pictures cause a severe reaction in the measure of the so-called “autonomic nervous system”.

The non-charged pictures include pastoral scenes and pictures of household objects and cause no reaction.

The participants press a button, and after a six second delay the picture flashes up on the screen and remains there for another three seconds.

So this is the thing. During that six second delay, if the picture that is going to be flashed up is one that will cause a reaction, a higher than average percentage of the participants show a reaction in anticipation, before the picture comes on their screen.

In other words, this shows that people often know what’s coming before it comes. We quite naturally, as a matter of course it seems, can see into the future.

I love that. I love it when hard empirical evidence shows us that the universe is far more mysterious and strange than the one suggested by the theologians of materialist science who currently preside over the scientific establishment.


I read about the work of another scientist recently who has been looking into evidence of reincarnation. The scientist was Ian Stevenson, M.D. Professor of Research Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, who died in February this year.

Unfortunately, unlike the precognition experiment above, reincarnation cannot be tested in the laboratory. Dr. Stevenson was more of a detective than a normal scientist.

He would hear of a case where a young child - typically between the ages of two and seven - claimed to have had a previous life. After that he would interview the child, and then attempt to verify the child’s story.

Sometimes some of the children told remarkable tales about people and events which they couldn’t have got by any other means than by reincarnation.

His most famous book is Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, published in 1966.

In a typical case, a boy in Beirut claimed that he had been a mechanic in his previous life who had died in a car accident. Witnesses say the boy provided the name of the driver, the location of the crash, the names of the mechanic's sisters and parents, cousins and friends, all of which turned out to match the life of a man who had died some years before.

Of course, none of this constitutes proof, and Dr Stevenson was too cautious to claim that his investigations were any more than “suggestive” of reincarnation.

On the other hand, almost nothing in science is based upon absolute proof. For instance, there is no “proof” that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. There is, however, overwhelming statistical evidence that it does.

As to what conclusions you might draw from his work, Dr. Stevenson has his own views on the subject.

"I think a rational person, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence."

But there are a couple of questions which follow on from this: if it is true that we are indeed reincarnated beings why do we generally forget about it; and why it is that Dr. Stevenson’s cases were all young children? Aren’t older people capable of remembering their past lives?

I’m not sure what the answer to this might be.

Perhaps we are more psychically in tune when we are younger, and that’s why some children but not many adults can remember their previous lives.

As to why we forget: I think that’s obvious.

Forgetfulness might be a survival technique. After all, who wants to remember their own death?

The Mandate of Heaven

My favourite book is the Book of Changes, the I-Ching.

Perhaps you have heard of it. It is one of the oldest books ever written. It is also unlike any other book on the planet.


http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Mandate-of-Heaven-myth-and-politics-in-the-I-Ching


Further links:
Yi Jing, Book of Sun and Moon
Calling Crane In The Shade
The Great Vessel
I-Ching on the net

Blessed By Luck

It was my birthday. I was at the Shobab restaurant in Whitstable with my family: my Mum, my Dad, my two sisters and my brother-in-law, plus my niece Beatrix, who was two and a half years old at the time, and is one of the brightest little creatures on this planet.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Blessed-by-Luck

Words

I’ve been having this debate with a friend of mine about the meaning of the word “facetious”.

To me it means jocularity at an inappropriate moment: trying to be funny when the conversation calls for something else. A facetious person is someone who thinks that they are funny, when they are not.

My friend says no: it simply means jocularity or humour. A facetious person, according to him, is a joking person, someone who is always making bantering remarks.

Actually, both definitions are true. In its original meaning, in French, facetiousness is simply wittiness or jocularity: a form of bantering humour. The fact that it has also come to mean something more negative is a consequence of the complexity of our language, a combination of Old German and Old French with a bit of Viking thrown in.

Once you have several words with the same meaning, each variation will tend to acquire more and more nuanced interpretations. Hence “facetious”. Originally just humour. Now humour at an inappropriate moment.

The point about language is that meaning is fluid, not fixed. Meaning is something that shifts over time. As I said to my friend, what does “fabulous” mean? What does “fantastic” mean? Both are words which have changed their meaning.

Or what about “gay”? This is a word which has changed it’s meaning not just once, but twice now.

It is also a measure of how people are constantly subverting “official” language.

To anyone born before the fifties, of course, it will have a range of associations around the ideas of brightness and happiness. Garlands of flowers are gay. People are gay when they dance and have fun. The blossom in early spring is gay.

In my younger days it became purloined by the rising Gay Liberation movement to mean homosexual, its current “official” definition. It is now the first definition in the dictionary. It was a radical move. By forcing the rest of us to redefine our terms it also asked us to think again about our own personal prejudices and, perhaps, to adjust them a little.

Most people these days, I imagine, are happy that the old stereotypes about homosexuality are gone and that people are free to choose their own path, as long as it doesn’t impinge upon others.

What people get up to in the bedroom is their own private business.

However, the irony is that the word has moved on again, with hardly anyone noticing. These days, amongst the young, “gay” tends to mean something like “fey” or “naff”: something slightly over-the-top and ridiculous, superficial or pretentious.

Elton John is gay in all senses of the word.

So “gay” has acquired an additional meaning as an implied insult, despite the language mafia’s attempt to control our use of words.

As for “facetious”: the reason my friend and I started this conversation is that I accused him of being facetious. I have since adjusted my description, calling his humour “tangentially facetious” instead.

He takes that as a compliment. At least I never called him gay.

The Camera Never Lies

“The camera never lies,” they say. Well it does, and it does so with increasing frequency on your TV news these days.

There were a number of occasions when this became particularly clear to me. One was an image of a reporter on the front-line in Afghanistan during the invasion in 2002. He was ducked behind a line of troops in a trench. But there was something wrong with the set-up; the “troops” were Afghan – supposedly members of the Northern Alliance - but their uniforms were brand new.

Since when have you seen Afghan fighters wearing uniforms even, let along brand new ones?

It was so obviously a fake. It was clear from the looks on their faces and the general air of dishevelment and lack of discipline that these weren’t troops at all, but just a bunch of guys off the street dressed up to look like troops, straight from the prop department of the Pentagon.

I wish I had that bit of film to show to you. It was hilarious. There was the reporter with his serious face reeling out all this portentous nonsense, with his flak jacket and his helmet, clutching his microphone, making out that the Taliban were just over the other side, while behind him a bunch of scruffy Afghan peasants were lying in a ditch pretending to be troops, picking their noses and having a laugh.

Another was a shot of the “rebel” army in Haiti in 2004. They were overthrowing President Aristide, the democratically elected leader at the time.

But while the news reports were all making out that this was an internal matter – rebels vs government - it was so obvious from the look of them that this was no ordinary rebel army.

They were too well dressed and too well fed. They were toned and muscled, with tight tee-shirts showing off their abs, with back-to-front baseball caps, clutching the latest in US-made high tech weaponry.

They were so obviously Western-trained mercenaries in the pay of the US government, a point made clear when Aristide was later escorted from the country at gunpoint by the CIA.

This at a time when we were supposed to be promoting world-democracy.

The most famous example however is the one where they pulled down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.

It looked like a large crowd of ordinary Iraqis celebrating the end of the dictatorship. If you remember they made a great to-do about explaining the insult of people banging the statue’s face with a shoe. But any perspective would have told a different story.

The “crowd” consisted of 150 selected individuals, while the square itself was nearly empty. The shot was a set-up, as later independent photographs (above) made clear. Notice the presence of American tanks guarding the square and ask youself why this shot or one from a similar perspective was never shown on your National TV News.

So you have to beware. Nothing is quite what it seems. Most of the real news is being hidden from us, while, in it’s place, we have fakery and deception, smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand.

You have to watch the news very carefully these days; not to find out the truth: to find out the lies.