Prince of Propaganda

You will have seen the photographs. Prince Harry in a baseball cap. Prince Harry on a motorbike. Prince Harry kicking a football made of rolled up toilet paper. Prince Harry having a laugh with his mates. Prince Harry firing a machine gun into the empty desert.

Prince Harry fighting the good fight for justice and democracy in Afghanistan.

On a single day there were 56 pages of coverage in eight national newspapers, with booming headlines like "Harry the Brave" and "Harry the Secret Hero." The Sun included a glamorous poster of the prince out on patrol.

Meanwhile it’s been Afghanistan week on the TV news: a number of short films looking at army conditions in Helmand Province in the South of the country, where most of the British troops are stationed.

Well I‘m a cynic about these matters. Though Prince Harry’s presence in Afghanistan was a closely-guarded secret for a while, it was always a set-up for future propaganda purposes. How many of you actually believed those images? Do you really think that the British army would put him in a position where anyone would get a chance of firing live bullets at him?

As for the TV reports, I watched with increasing irritation as the week went by. How are we supposed to understand such a complex set of issues on the back of a few grainy bits of one-sided footage? The reporter was addressing us in a portentous tone while perched on top of a flat-roofed building in the middle of Kabul, a relatively safe city. These were his exact words, or something very close: “British troops, fighting and dying in Afghanistan to keep terrorism off our streets.”

Hang on now. These are Afghan tribesmen, not international terrorists. They are fierce, wily, savage mountain people fighting with home-made guns, essentially nationalistic peasants. They probably have no idea of where Britain is, and still less care. Their passions are inflamed at the sight of foreign troops on their soil. If there weren’t British troops in Helmand no one would be firing at them.

I must have been one of the last people of my generation to make it to Afghanistan. It's been off-limits for the last thrity years or more. Anybody younger than me - unless he was a reporter or in the army - couldn't possibly have seen it. At least I have some idea who these people are.

This was back in the 70s, when the famous hippie-trail to India passed through that mountainous, desert land of warring tribes, before the Russian invasion, but during the time of the communist government. Even then it was like the wild west. The Afghans are good at copying things and I was told that there were gun factories dotted about in secret locations. But then you’d see them riding into town on horseback, with a rifle slung across their shoulders, and it was a flint-lock not a machine gun.

It was the Americans who gave them Stinger missiles to fire at the Russian helicopter gun-ships. It was the Americans who trained them in modern warfare and who brought Osama bin Laden in to whip up their Islamic fervour.

Everybody knows by now that the war in Iraq was conducted for the venality and greed of the oil magnates in charge of the White House, so they are repackaging the Afghan war as somehow more “just.”

But Osama bin Laden left many years ago – left to escape while the US engaged in its plunder of Iraq.

Don’t you think its time we left the Afghan people to their own devices?

Van the Man Meets The Bard of Ely

The following is a picture of my good friend Steve Andrews, also commonly known as The Bard of Ely, due to the fact that he writes poetry and that for many years lived in Ely, in Cardiff. The story that follows, about the time that Steve met Van Morrison, is a word-for-word transcript of a tape I made with Steve, which was later used as the basis of a Guardian column, and later again in my book The Last of the Hippies, in which Steve plays a major part. Apologies for the lack of new content on this site. I've been busy with a number of projects. Meanwhile, enjoy the sound of Steve's distinctly comic voice....

“And we’ll walk and talk in gardens wet with rain,

And I’ll never ever grow so old again.”

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks.

First of all I spoke to Van at Robin’s. I was working for Robin Williamson. This would have been about 1993. I was working at Robin’s as his secretary. And I had to answer the phone and everything, and I answered the phone one day and it was actually, it was Van the Man, and I’m saying, "who’s speaking please," and he’s saying, "Van Morrison." And I’m in total shock, awe, whatever, I’m like, "wow, this is Van Morrison," you know. And that was the first time I spoke to him, and that was a very unsuccessful conversation. I’m sort of gibbering, "oh, um, I’ve always been, well er, a great fan of yours." And he’s saying, "yeah, yeah?" And I’m saying, "yeah, yeah, really, what shall I…?" And he’s saying, " just tell Robin that I’m in the area and if I’m around I’ll give him a call again." I said, "oh yeah, right, right, I’ll do that." And - I remember what he said - he said, "all the best." And that was it. And I thought, "oh wow, wow, Van Morrison has said ‘all the best’ to me, this is brilliant, I’ve spoken to him." And that was the first time that I had any sort of connection with Van.

But then, I’d taken my son to his pottery class. And it was closed that day. And it was in the afternoon by now. Robin Williamson was doing the midsummer solstice concert at the Celtic folk museum in St Fagan’s, which I obviously knew about. I had an invite to be there. Because the pottery thing wasn’t happening, I said to my son, "well let’s go along and see Robin." So we went to the folk museum and it was an appalling day - it was one of these midsummer absolute piss-down days, it was absolute torrential rain going on - and we got there quite late anyway, and when we got there Robin’s gig was just about finished. And because of the terrible weather, they had to move the open air thing into one of the marquee tents. And Robin finished his set, and I could see a couple of people, one of whom was Van Morrison. And Robin went over and he was talking to them, and I thought, "wow, that’s Van Morrison again." And then I heard in the conversation, it came up that the other guy who was with Van was from Ely. And I thought, "wow, wow, Van Morrison is actually with someone who’s from Ely. This is my cue to go over and say something." And I went over and I said - the first thing I said was just utterly ridiculous - I said, "so you’re Van Morrison then?" And he said, "er yeah?" And I said, "oh yeah, I spoke to you once before, from Robin’s." And he said, "yeah." I said, "And I’ve always been a great fan of yours, I love your music." And he said, "yeah." And by this point I’m thinking, I’m not making much success here, I’m not having much success in having sparkling conversation with my hero here, all he ever says is "yeah."

At which point my son came over to me, and he’d just been outside the tent, and he came in the tent, like, we were at the edge of the tent, and Robin is stood one side, and Van’s stood here, and there’s this other guy from Ely stood there, and Isaac just comes in under the edge of the tent, and he says, "Dad?" And I says, "yes Isaac." And he says, "you see this rope?" pointing to the guide rope coming off the marquee tent. And I said, "yeah?" And I’m starting to sound a bit like Van Morrison, I’m saying, "yeah?" And he said, "well, can you put your head by it?" And I said, "yeah." And he said, "well go on then." So I’m moving my face down by the rope, very naively, in my usual way, and not expecting anything, and not being on my guard at all, I’m just putting my face down by this rope. At which point he grabbed the rope and twanged it, and all the water that had collected on the tent roof flew all over my face and down my neck and all over my clothes, and I just didn’t know what to do or say or anything, I’m just completely and utterly freaked out with utter embarrassment, cos this is right in front of Van Morrison. And I just muttered something, "er, oh, er, Isaac, um, we’ve got to, er, we’ve got to go and, um, come on," and sort of grabbed his hand and went. And I didn’t look back. I just sort of went out into the rain outside and headed for the exit as fast as possible. And that was it.

Bard of Ely at MySpace

Brave New World

The following words are from the 1946 introduction to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I only offer them as particularly appropriate at this moment in history.

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

And again:

"Great is the truth, but greater still, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

Today there is a holocaust. The holocaust is upon us again. A people are being killed. A people are being targeted. A people are being subjugated. A restless army roams amongst a population, killing at random. Children are sliced down in their own homes. Their cries are echoing up to heaven, but no one hears. We are all silent. No one listens. No one hears. All is silence except the echoes of gunfire.

You ask, "Why do they hate us? Why do they target us? Why do they murder us at our business in our own towns?"

You ask this, but you do not ask, "Why do we hate them? Why do we target them? Why do we murder them at their business in their own towns?"

The child's cry echoes down an empty street. Why can we not hear it?

The Mother's cry falls on deaf ears, a dead baby in her arms.

Why can we not hear the pain?

You listen to the arguments. Listen, listen, listen, really listen. The argument is for a racially pure Israel, for racial purity, for a racial state. And within that state a separated ghetto with a racially distinct people inside, hidden behind fences, and subject to arbitrary attack.

Zionism was the original Nazism.

The Zionists worked with the Nazis.

They are one and the same.

Last week we heard that torture flights had passed through British territory. This sort of information has become so routine now that hardly anyone notices.

This week it was reported that Prince Harry had been in Afghanistan. Then we get pictures of him with his "mates" kicking a football made of rolled up toilet paper, rolled out for us, as it were, on demand, another item of ass-wipe news to wipe out the reality of what's happening around us. Routine propaganda.

Routine torture. Routine murder. Routine lies.

A routine war.

http://news.uk.msn.com/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=7677967

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19447.htm

Codswallop

I was listening to L. Ron Hubbard on tape with a friend of mine. L. Ron Hubbard (in case you don't know) was the Science Fiction writer turned spiritual guru who founded the Church of Scientology. My friend is an ex-member of the Church. He was guffawing all the way through. "I used to take this so seriously," he said.

The basic theory of the Church is that we are all re-incarnations of extra-terrestrial beings called Thetans. Members of the Church pay vast amounts of money to rise through the ranks. They start at OT-1, and progress upwards. "OT" stands for Operating Thetan.

On the tape Ron (as he's affectionately known) is sitting by the Ocean talking intimately to his followers. You can hear the lapping waves and the mournful cries of seagulls in the background. The tape was made sometime in the early '60s. He has a very warm, soothing voice, and he's chuckling to himself in a self-satisfied, nonchalant manner.

He was telling us about a near-death brush with some vast Truth. He referred to the Truth as The Wall of Fire. So awe-inspiring, so terrible, is this Truth that the mere mention of it would make you sick. Many people in history who have approached this Truth have died. Ron is the first man ever to have come through the ordeal. He did it so that others would be able to follow him. This Truth is only accessible to OT-3 levels. To reach OT-3 costs many thousands of pounds.

Then my friend told me what this "Truth" actually consists of. It concerns the origins of sexual perversion on this planet. Apparently it came from a Thetan dictator called Xemu several billion years ago. He ran a confederation of 75 planets, and brought certain of his subjects to Earth, where he tied them to a mountain and dropped nuclear bombs on them. He was experimenting on them, by implanting them with sexual perversion.

My friend said: "So Ron was right. It would make you sick. It would make you sick to have paid all that money just to hear such a load of old codswallop."

Freedom

I was at a meeting the other day. The adjudicator asked us if we’d like to take a break. Only he didn’t use the word “break”, he used the word “breather” instead.

We said no, we’d rather just get on and finish the meeting.

It suddenly occurred to me what he meant. He was talking about a fag-break. The word “breather” was a euphemism.

This seemed quite funny to me, substituting the idea of breathing with that of smoking: as if taking a breath of nice clean fresh air was in anyway similar to sucking on a cancer stick and dragging those deadly fumes into your lungs.

It also struck me as a measure of the changes taking place in this country that no one wanted to take him up on his offer. In that room of maybe ten people, the only smoker was the adjudicator himself.

This time last year he wouldn’t have used a euphemism. He would have imposed the cigarette break and several people would have joined him.

Ten years ago it could easily have been the other way around: ten smokers to the one non-smoker. Almost everyone would have wanted that “breather”.

Twenty years ago and we’d all have been smoking in the room itself, and the non-smokers would just have had to put up with it. The air would have been thick with cigarette smoke and the floor dusty with ash.

Some changes are definitely for the better.

I watched an old TV drama the other night. What was shocking was the sight of people lighting up on the screen. You don’t see that any more. It seemed dirty somehow, rude, like seeing someone picking their nose in public.

Personally I like the new smoke-free pubs. I always laugh when the smokers go out. They look so guilty and furtive, shrugging their shoulders apologetically as they shuffle out for their fix.

There’s two smokers I see almost every day. I see them leaning either side of the door of their house, each with a fag in their hand, blowing the smoke out onto the street. Then they stub out their cigarettes and go back into the house. These days even the smokers don’t want to have to put up with the smell of their own smoke.

It’s been three years since I gave up. I never did a better thing. A few weeks ago I met my old friends John and Carol down the Labour Club. John gave up some years ago, but, he admitted, sometimes he still longs for a cigarette.

That never happens to me. It’s a matter of interpretation. I still get the odd twinge, but rather than interpret it to mean “I want a cigarette”, I think, “thank God I don’t have to do that anymore.”

The key lies in the term “giving up”.

When you give something up, it implies that it was enjoyable at one time. But smoking was never enjoyable, it was always only an addiction. The only pleasure you ever got was in the temporary relief from the cravings.

I spent about two months fighting my addiction. My moment of freedom came with one particular cigarette. I realised even as I was smoking it that I was already craving the next one. Each cigarette creates the addiction that requires the next cigarette to relieve it. In that moment I knew that all the cigarettes in all the world would never satisfy me, that all I had ahead of me if I didn't quit was a lifetime of craving. I knew that with every fibre of my being. The spell was finally broken.

I used the Allen Carr method.

You take one final cigarette, you smoke it, and you say goodbye to it. You smoke it knowing that it will be your last.

After that it becomes funny.

I was in a shopping queue about fifteen hours later in the midst of the withdrawal laughing at the absurdity of it. I wanted to say to the check-out girl, "hey, I'm withdrawing from nicotine and it doesn't hurt a bit."

Nicotine addiction is almost entirely psychological.

There's like a little tickle in your belly, but once you remove the psychological craving - the illusion that cigarettes are a pleasure - it's a cinch. You're high on an excess of oxygen. You haven't had this much oxygen in years. The whole world is suffused with colour. The air wafts with scents. Your senses are coming alive, and everything is hilarious.

I was in another shop buying lottery tickets and the Daily Mail for my Dad. I hate the Daily Mail, and I've never done the lottery.

A youngster came in, a girl, maybe 15 or 16, and bought a packet of ten cigarettes. I said, "you'll be addicted for the rest of your life you know."

I thought it was so funny. I could see the look on her face, a combination of surprise and disdain - surprise I'd said anything, disdainful of my aged opinion - and it was like reading my own mind at that age.

That was when my own addiction had been born. It had nestled in my cells and in my belly, a little tiny furtive thing niggling in my guts, hidden from view. It had pretended to be my friend, when it was really my greatest enemy. It had lingered inside me like a virus, sucking out my will. It had been a pose at the time, a way of appearing grown up, but it soon became a need.

After that the addiciton is associative. If you have a cigarette with a coffee, every time you have a coffee you are reminded of cigarettes. If you have a cigarette with a beer, the beer becomes a trigger. Everything becomes a trigger. Use the phone. Smoke. Have a meal. Smoke. Sit down. Smoke. Stand up. Smoke. Breathe. Smoke. A lifetime of breathlessness and obligation.

So no, I haven’t “given up” smoking.

I have been released from a terrible curse.

The Qi That Rides The Wind

I’m what you might call deeply insensitive (as opposed to people who believe in spirits, who are usually referred to as “sensitives”). I couldn’t tell a spirit from a washing line. What I mean is that there was just something odd about the décor of the house.

It was purple for a start, various shades of purple, from light purple on the walls, to dark purple on the skirting board, with flimsy maroon scarves scattered all over the place, shrouding out light fittings and cast about seemingly casually over the backs of all the chairs. Also the room was full of crystals, table fountains and wind-chimes dangling in inconvenient places at the entrance to most of the rooms....

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Qi-That-Rides-The-Wind

The Boondoggle Economy

I’ve just discovered a new word. It’s “boondoggle”.

Well it’s not a new word actually. The spell check on my word processor recognises it. But it’s new to me.

It comes from America. A boondoggle was a piece of braided leather which boy scouts used to hang their whistles on. It may have had a nautical purpose at one time. It’s basically a useless but decorative item.

Later on it appeared in a headline in the New York Times, on 4 April 1935. “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play ... Boon Doggles Made”.

It was referring to one aspect of the New Deal programme during the depression when unemployed people were put to work doing useless jobs.

As a word it became famous overnight and came to represent government funded work with no intrinsic purpose used as a way of gaining political patronage.

I first came across the word in an article from Rolling Stone magazine called The Great Iraq Swindle.

In the article the writer is referring to the privatisation of services in the US armed forces. The American army no longer washes its own smalls. It gets a private company in to do that. The private company is on a cost-plus contract. This means that whatever it spends it earns, plus three percent.

It’s the way the American army has been run since the Balkans, which means that Blair must have been aware of it.

Stop and think about it for a second. Cost-plus. You get three percent on whatever you spend. It’s a recipe for spending as much money as you possibly can. Everything you spend earns you an extra three percent.

This is what they call “free enterprise”.

So American soldiers’ underwear is being washed on a cost-plus basis. So too are all their social needs being met. Cost-plus means that every soldier who uses the privatised R’n’R facilities gets charged to the American government, which encourages the people who estimate the numbers to exaggerate. The people who estimate the numbers are also the people who take home the profit.

Cost-plus is also the method being used to rebuild Iraq: that traumatised, wounded, war-torn, and shattered country. Cost-plus to build privatised hospitals. Cost-plus to build roads, police training academies, schools, to run airports, to build sewerage plants, to generate electricity, the lot.

It’s the reason why nothing in Iraq works very well, why they still have power cuts even to this day. They blame it on terrorists, but it’s mainly just substandard workmanship.

Profits go straight back home to America, to American private investors, leaving the poor Iraqis with nothing but wreckage to contend with. Even their services aren’t their own.

Everything that the Americans knock down in that grand on-going Turkey-shoot we call “The War on Terror” is being rebuilt at the American taxpayers expense by private companies on a cost-plus basis, making this the biggest public spending bonanza in World history.

This is called "Military Keynsianism". Keynsianism is the theory - first suggested by the British Economist John Maynard Keynes - that a capitalist economy needs a constant supply of public money to "prime the pump", as it were, to keep the economy rolling. In the post-war years in Europe public spending was - to a large extent - spent upon the public, on hospitals and schools. This was called "the welfare state". Military Keynsianism is another form of the welfare state: the welfare state for the rich, a way of funnelling public money into private hands via the Military-Industrial Complex.

So next time you hear about operations against al-Qaeda targets on the outskirts of Baghdad, remember who will do the rebuilding.

Remember, too, who made the bombs and who built the planes; who supplies the equipment; who made the uniforms and who rakes in the cash.

War: the biggest boondoggle of all time.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_5LcdqpgTho

Pistis Sophia

The following is a column I submitted to an astrology magazine. Regular readers of this blog will recognise it as based on something I wrote in these pages about two years ago. Unfortunately the editors didn't feel it was suitable and it was rejected. This is only the second time a story of mine has been turned down by this particular publication. Interestingly enough, the first time it was a story about Christianity too: about Pro-Life Christians.

Here's a copy of the e-mail exchange between me and the editor just after it was rejected:

Chris: "What's the reasoning for this, just out of interest? No-go on Christianity?"

Editor: "Yeah bang on, we have to give religion a wide berth."

Which is odd, don't you think? Why would an astrology magazine feel that it has to give a wide berth to religious questions?

But as I pointed out to a Christian friend of mine these texts have been suppressed for nearly 2,000 years now, so it's not surprising that they should continue to be. I expect they would get a lot of noisy hate mail if they published. Christians just seem to find the idea of a feminine aspect to the divinity too difficult to contemplate it seems....



On my birthday I typed the words “The Hypostasis of the Archons” into my mobile phone and sent it as a text to my ex-wife, the mother of my son.

The funny thing is, of course, that using predictive text, my mobile phone did not recognise the words at all. Well it recognised some of the words, but not others. The others I had to spell out. Hypostasis. Archons. Letter by letter. Therefore my mobile phone now contains the title of an early Christian Gnostic text in its memory.

The Hypostasis of the Archons. It means, “The Reality of the Rulers”. It is one of the Gnostic gospels found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. They are a collection of early Christian writings which had been buried in the desert to hide them from destruction by the Orthodox elites at the time. They date from between the first century to the fourth century AD and show what a very different force Christianity was in these early years.

When I found the text on the Internet is was like a thrill of instant electric recognition passing through my whole body.

I’d never read anything quite like this before, and yet is was oddly familiar. Christianity, and yet not-quite Christianity. Something else.

The reason I typed the title into my mobile phone to send to my ex was that she had asked me about Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code.

I’d said that Dan Brown was sort of onto a half-truth in his book. Not that Jesus ever married Mary Magdalene, but that the feminine has been systematically exorcised from Christianity over the centuries and that certain forgotten forms of the religion were much more sympathetic to the notion of a female side to the deity.

This is clear in The Hypostasis of the Archons, where the feminine part of the deity is given a name: Pistis Sophia.

“Sophia” means “Wisdom”, “Pistis” means “Faith”.

Her name therefore means “the Wisdom of Faith”, or, perhaps, “the Faith of the Wise”.

This is how she is described in the book:

“As incorruptibility looked down into the region of the waters, her image appeared in the waters; and the authorities of the darkness became enamoured of her. But they could not lay hold of that image, which had appeared to them in the waters, because of their weakness - since beings that merely possess a soul cannot lay hold of those that possess a spirit - for they were from below, while it was from above. This is the reason why ‘incorruptibility looked down into the region (etc.)’: so that, by the father's will, she might bring the entirety into union with the light.”

It was the image of the goddess reflected in the waters that caused a resonance in me. The goddess as “incorruptibility”. The idea of the “authorities of the darkness” becoming enamoured of her, but being unable to lay hold of her. They fail to lay hold of her firstly because they are looking in the wrong place. (What they are looking at is merely a reflection.) But secondly, because she is the image of incorruptibility and cannot, therefore be “laid hold of”. She is beyond objectification. She is beyond property. She is beyond measure.

As I read the words it conjured up an image in my mind.

This image sent a message to me about the true nature of our world, as a reflection of another world. Sometimes, even, I can sense that other world - not so far away - as a world of immense, intense almost unbearable beauty; as a world of true kindness; as a world of friends, not strangers; as a world where exploitation and violence have ceased to exist; as a world which glows with its own inner light, where the works of art and nature are forever intertwined in an elaborately playful dance of sheer delight. The naturalising of the human. The humanising of nature.

The rebirth of the goddess.

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Hypostasis-of-the-Archons

Justice

This is Sohail Qureshi, the dentist who was jailed for four and a half years last week on terrorism charges.

The picture is the one used in the Sun newspaper in its coverage of the trial on January the 9th.

In other pictures he appears without a beard, or with a small goatee.

Have you noticed how unreal that beard looks? It looks like it has been scribbled on the photograph with a felt tip pen. Look at it more closely and it appears to be the product of some cack-handed manipulations in Photoshop. The question is why? Why bother to put up a fake photograph when there are real photographs available? We can only wonder. Maybe the real photographs weren't intimidating enough.

Qureshi was arrested at Heathrow airport in 2006 as he was getting ready to board a flight to Pakistan.

He had several thousand pounds in cash taped about his person. In his baggage were night-vision lenses, sleeping bags and rucksacks, plus a removable hard-drive containing copies of US combat manuals.

According to security sources – as reported in the Sun - he was intending to go on to Afghanistan where he was planning to take part in actions against British and American troops.

You see this is what I find absurd. How seriously are we supposed to take this? The threat from jokers like Quereshi is about as real as that beard of his, and as effective as that Kalashnikov would be against an F16 fighter or a B1 bomber.

This is not to say that he didn’t intend harm, or that he shouldn’t be punished.

Who knows what was going on in his mind or what he intended? It's just that, on a relative scale this man is decidedly small-fry. A nothing. A nobody. A jumped-up idiot with delusions of grandeur.

The threat of terrorism is now a world-wide phenomenon. But the majority of victims of terrorism are not people in the relatively safe West; they are Muslims in the conflagration of fear and terror that is the Middle East.

Over a million people have died violently in Iraq as a direct consequence of the actions of the British and American governments. When violence happens in an occupied territory it is always the occupiers who are to blame.

It is no less a terrorist act to be killed by an American warplane armed with Mk 82 general purpose bombs in a raid against al-Qaeda positions in a civilian area on the outskirts of Baghdad, as it is to be killed by terrorist bombs in London or Madrid; the difference being the sheer frequency of the attacks.

Two attempts in the last five years in London.

One a week in Baghdad.

The trouble is, when I say something like that I can already feel people’s hackles rising.

Nothing justifies attacks on civilians.

Nothing.

And that goes as much in Iraq – where attacks on civilians are an everyday occurrence – as it does in London.

There is no such thing as “collateral damage”.

There are people dying, that’s all. And mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters grieving. And families and friends driven literally insane with grief.

And one grief does not compensate for another, it only adds to the store of grief.

This is a grieving, sad, hopeless, desperate world right now and I don’t know what the answer might be.

Grief on grief. Never ending grief.

But what I suspect - what I very strongly suspect - is that the routine response of enraged Muslims like Qureshi to these horrors is expected, and that the customary noise of newspapers like the Sun - their manufactured outrage - is merely a ploy, a front, a slight of hand in a game of masks and appearances covering far more devious plans.

The vultures are feeding on the blood of war.

It’s rich pickings amongst the carnage.

In the midst of a collapsing economy war is the one sure-fire way to increasing profits.

And just as I celebrate the capture and punishment of one would-be terrorist like Sohail Qureshi, so I would be even more pleased to see the real war criminals brought to justice; to see the likes of Bush and Blair hauled before a jury and tried in a properly constituted court of law.

You see, I believe in Justice.

Which is more than you can say for them.

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

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?