The Quiet Road

While I was away struggling with the short days and the gloom, the rest of the world saw fit to continue doing it’s thing as though my participation were utterly irrelevant. I thought that was rather impolite of it, but figured I wouldn’t kick up a big fuss as everyone seemed to be having such a good time. And why let all that mulled wine go to waste, eh?

All the same, I think a quick recap of the news over the past few months is in order, with perhaps a brief comment from yours truly… the kind of comment that probably would have turned the tide of debate on the issue and brought about a swift and equitable resolution had I made it in a timely fashion. Now though, it’ll just seem like staggeringly obvious hindsight. But if staggeringly obvious hindsight isn’t what blogging is all about, then I for one don’t know what is!

Before I get onto that though, let me pass on a couple of links that have floated my way and which are particularly noteworthy. First up is the silly, wry and very funny short film, Pitch’n’Putt with Beckett and Joyce, which came via email from Gyrus. Favourite line: “No! Not a Milky Way! A Topic You Arse! (all fecund in its nuttiness)”. Go and watch it… you’ll understand.

Also via Gyrus (I think) is this; The World’s 12 Worst Ideas. I actually disagree with a couple of Fred Halliday’s points (for example, when people say “the world is speeding up”, I believe they are describing a very real phenomenon even if they have chosen a clumsy phrase to express it) but it’s nevertheless a very interesting and perceptive little piece.

Oh, and one other thing from Gyrus… this time his review of David W. Kidner’s Nature & Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity. I’m just about to start reading this, and it looks absolutely excellent.

Recent Oniony goodness (usually via email from Mahalia) included Meth Addicts Demand Government Address Nation’s Growing Spider Menace, Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution and the short but sweet White House Quietly Retracts Entire State Of The Union Address.

But what of world events and international shenanigans? What of them?

What indeed.

Looking for satellites

One thing that leapt out at me, though didn’t make as big a splash as perhaps it might have done, was the news that China has zapped an orbiting satellite with a ground-launched missile. I wonder if there was a West Wing moment in the the White House, where Dubya faced the Joint Chiefs and asked, “so what contingencies do we have to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion without the use of satellite surveillance, communication or navigation?” and one by one the assembled brass all shook their heads and looked down at the desk in front of them.

You have to admit, it was a masterstroke by the Chinese. In one fell swoop it completely alters the military situation around Taiwan. I’ll bet there’s some very busy folks at the pentagon right now. I noticed some muted complaints coming from Washington. But not only is that all a bit pots and kettles… who really wants to piss off China?

Comin’ over here, stealin’ our jobs…

My eye was also caught by this – far smaller – story: Ecuadorean footballer rebuilds village. It’s about Ulises de la Cruz, a professional footballer playing for premiership side, Reading FC. Mr. de la Cruz is using his great success (premiership football is a goldmine) to help drag his home village out of poverty. He’s sending back the money to build homes, schools and community centres and the village of Piquiucho is benefiting marvellously from their famous son.

And good for them too! I’m just amused by the media… the fact that de la Cruz’s celebrity and wealth means that he’s celebrated for his “philanthropy”, whereas if he were a labourer on a building site sending half his paypacket home to his family in Piquiucho then he’d just be some bloody immigrant syphoning money out of the British economy.

Climate Change

Of course Climate Change has recently hit the headlines like never before. The combination of the extremely emphatic IPCC report and Al Gore’s lightweight but popular An Inconvenient Truth has really stirred things up. And about time too. Of course, Climate Change – like Peak Oil – is what James Kunstler describes as “a long emergency”. It’ll be difficult to keep people engaged with this issue when the climate doesn’t make some sudden, obvious change in a couple of months. That said, this emergency won’t be stretched over a long enough time so as to be unnoticeable. Millions of people are being, and will be, seriously affected by it. I’ve got a long piece in the works regarding the environmental policies of Ireland’s main energy supplier, Bord Gáis, so I’ll not say too much on the subject now. Except to point you at this excellent piece on the BBC website: The semantics of climate change. And – more importantly if you live in the UK – please read Merrick‘s excellent piece, How Green Is Green Electricity? and act accordingly.

Merrick (from his other blog) is also providing the soundtrack to these times. Go listen to the orchestral version of The The‘s wonderful Armageddon Days Are Here (Again). What a track!

It’s weird. The “Hitler was a vegetarian” thing. I was involved in an online discussion of vegetarianism recently and someone posted the cryptic message… “Hitler was a vegetarian. (Enough said!)”

Now, the person posting was almost certainly just making a stale wry comment. But still they got me thinking. See, having been a fairly strict veggie for most of my life (I recently relaxed things a little for health reasons), it’s a line I’ve heard time after time. But I’ve never really understood it. Leaving aside the somewhat salient fact that he wasn’t, in fact, a vegetarian; what’s a person trying to say when they claim “Hitler was a vegetarian”?

Are they saying: “being a vegetarian doesn’t make you a good person”? Is that really it? Because I don’t actually know anyone who claims that it does. Most vegetarians simply feel that their conscience won’t permit them to be involved with the meat industry (for ethical or ecological reasons). The rest eschew meat for more direct “empathy” reasons. Only a total nutter, or a sanctimonious fourteen year old, would make the claim that their diet makes them a good person. Certainly nobody serious.

Vegetarians believe that involvement in something so questionable as the modern meat industry is a choice they simply don’t need to make. So long as an adequate alternative diet is readily available; as it is; then choosing not to eat meat is no different to choosing not to participate in blood sports. It doesn’t make you a good person to obey the dictate of your conscience. Merely a normal one.

That said, the odd hostility with which vegetarianism is often met makes me wonder if there isn’t a lot of defensiveness going on… like maybe there’s lots of people not listening to the dictate of their own conscience. Can you imagine hassling someone at the dinner table because they don’t like badger-baiting?

Apparently Hitler also wore socks. Oh, and I’m told he liked to listen to music. Next time you encounter someone listening to a cd, why not point out that “Hitler was a music listener”. Then add enigmatically, “enough said” as though you’re making some general point about listening to music. If the person listening to the music is also wearing socks (and is eating vegetables), it’s probably best to scream “FASCIST!” and beat them to death. Y’know… just in case they decide to annex the Rhineland and invade Poland.

It’s news round-up time again. There’s just so much absurdity out there, and even though I leave myself open to accusations of shooting fish in a barrel, I just can’t help but comment on some of it.

First up, the rumour mill is working overtime regarding the fate of Public Enemy No. 1. That’s Osama bin Laden, not Pope Benedict, though I guess it very much depends which side of the barbed wire you’re on. A French newspaper has published a leaked document claiming that typhoid has succeeded where the world’s only superpower has failed. All very H.G. Wells if you ask me.

The United States is naturally sceptical. They recently admitted that they’ve had “no concrete intelligence” regarding bin Laden for over two years. The idea that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of Old Europe should be the first to hear about his death must really irritate them. Perhaps if they’d spent more time actually hunting down the guy who attacked them five years ago, and less time involving the West in a major conflict in central Asia and plunging Iraq into civil war, they might not have to rely upon second-hand leaked French intelligence.

Just a thought.

Oh, and surely I can’t be the only person who listens to the British armed forces claiming “surprise” at the resistance they’re meeting in Afghanistan and says “Well… duhhhh”. I mean, come on guys! Remember the late 70s? That whole “Red Army getting it’s ass kicked” thing? I guess NATO thought it would be different this time because they’re the good guys and not nasty commies.

Speaking of Pope Ratzinger though… talk about stirring up a hornet’s nest. Who’d have thought that Islam could be so easily offended, eh? Well, apart from Salman Rushdie. Popeman has been likened to Hitler by some muslims. Perhaps being German and wearing a Nazi uniform during the 1940s has something to do with that, but I suspect it’s more about the speech he gave in which he favourably cited Manuel II Paleologus describing the influence of Mohammed as “evil”.

I noticed that some in the Muslim community are calling for Ratzinger to be removed from office…

Muslim scholars and religious leaders at a convention in Pakistan on Thursday demanded the removal of the pope, saying his apology for comments linking Islam to violence was not acceptable.

“The pope has committed blasphemy against our Great Prophet, he should be removed,” a resolution adopted by the gathering said.

“The apology and explanation given by the pope is rejected,” it said.

Taipei Times news article

These are scholars and religious leaders, right? And yet they don’t know that the Pope can’t be removed from office. He’s appointed by God you idiots! And that’s the real God we’re talking about… not the fake one all you Muslims believe in.

See, that’s really the problem I have with all this monotheistic intra-doctrinal nonsense. Every time a Catholic affirms a belief in Jesus Christ as God they are commiting blasphemy against Islam (i.e. saying Mohammed was wrong about lots of stuff). And every time a Muslim affirms a belief in Mohammed as God’s True Prophet (with Jesus just some minor bloke who paved the way) then they are committing blasphemy against Christianity.

Hell, just give them all guns and let them have-at one another. Oh that’s right… someone already has, haven’t they?

I have a lot of respect for Richard Dawkins, but at the same time I’m not a huge fan of the kind of aggressive atheism he preaches (his description of pantheism as “sexed-up atheism” is crass to say the least), but there’s no greater advertisement for Dawkins’ position than the crassness of Islam and Christianity and their childish slanging match.

Also, let’s get something straight… both Christianity and Islam are violent religions. Deal with it. Both say that “ye shall know them by their works” (or some such aphorism). And so long as there’s a bunch of believers praying by day and murdering by night then neither can claim to be peaceful doctrines.

Local news

Meanwhile here in Ireland, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has come under fire from the Mahon tribunal. This is an investigation set up by the current government into allegations of corruption in politics and it’s already claimed a number of high-profile scalps. Of course, now that the tribunal has started investigating alleged illegal payments taken by Bertie while finance minister in the early 90s, it’s suddenly not so welcome. Defence minister Willie O’Dea has attacked the tribunal for investigating Bertie.

To be fair, it doesn’t look like Bertie was genuinely corrupt (it seems he was loaned some money by friends during the breakdown of his marriage in 1993 when he was strapped for cash and had legal fees to pay) but if he really has nothing to hide then he should accept the right of the tribunal – which he set up – to examine those loans.

And finally…

In that business called “show”, the silliness just keeps on coming. Dame Helen Mirren is pissed off by the portrayal of women on the screen. Apparently “actresses are still féted for their looks over their intelligence” and that’s got the Dame seething. Am I the only one who thinks that’s weird? Why on earth should an actor or actress be given a job because of their intelligence? Given my obscenely high IQ, should I be seething because Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are landing plum roles that should rightfully be mine?

Well no. Because I can’t act for shit. And my naked torso is unlikely to sell too many tickets when compared with Brad Pitt’s sculpted abs. Actors and actresses should be chosen (and féted) based upon two things… their acting ability and how good they look on screen. Sorry, but there you have it. Intelligence has bugger all to do with it.

UPDATE: US report states bleeding obvious

It’s been a pretty tough few weeks from a personal point of view. I’ve had to reevaluate some things that I thought I’d already dealt with. Which is always unsettling. What else, one wonders, will leap from the past to mess with head and heart?

Still, at least I’ve got the record collection to deal with it. At times like these, one realises that some friends are definitely for life. So thankyou Nick Drake, Matt Johnson and Tim Buckley… you’re helping a lot. As is me old mate Frederich Nietzsche… “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent”… ain’t that the truth?*

Anyways, browsing through a well-known online book retailer I espied something that managed to marginally lift my spirits. Check it out. Yes, that’s right, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon… his first in almost a decade! Called “Against The Day” and running to more than a thousand pages, I’m confident that it’ll be the finest novel published in almost a decade. Not due out until December this year, I’ve nonetheless already begun to feel excited at the prospect.

Pynchon is one of those writers that you either get or you don’t. Those who don’t, find him nigh unreadable. For those that do, however, Pynchon is rarely outside their top three novelists. He stretches the imagination to places that didn’t exist before he put pen to paper. He’s funny and wise and somehow manages to illuminate truths about the world we live in despite peppering his work with mechanical ducks, singing dogs, ninja death nuns, godzilla-attacks on Tokyo and rat messiahs.

Or maybe because of that.

Peak Oil is coming to get ya

The United States is on the brink of a major economic slowdown. In fact, it could well be the beginning of the final crash, though it could also be the last dip before that happens. The property market is stagnating as Americans are starting to feel poorer. Cheap oil means cheap everything, and the days of cheap oil are drawing to a close. I saw an interview with Al Gore in which he predicted that Dubya Bush would reverse his stance on climate change and begin the process of scaling back America’s fossil fuel consumption.

I’m not sure he’ll have much of a choice.

China and Venezuela have signed a major oil import-export deal. The government of Chad has just kicked ChevronTexaco out of the country. Officially this is for non-payment of taxes, but it comes just a couple of weeks after a meeting between the government of Chad and a Chinese trade delegation (the first diplomatic contact between the two nations since Chad recognised Taiwan almost a decade ago). Coincidence?

Incidentally, I’m also reading a lot about commodity speculators pumping vast amounts of money into crude oil. If this is true, then there will be a short-lived price crash (possibly down as low as 25 dollars a barrel – my prediction) when the US economy goes south and demand drops dramatically. This would be a good time for poorer nations to buy in enough reserves to fuel a transition to renewables. Not that they will of course. Economists still have too much influence over political decision-making. People who somehow believe that owning a dollar is the same as owning a dollar’s worth of crude oil (that whole “tranformability of units of production” bollocks).

Swiss banking and investment group, UBS, has become the latest major institution to accept that crude oil production is about to peak. Their prediction is that it will occur within 20 years, however they claim it will be mitigated by a switch to “other energy sources, notably natural gas”. Hmmm… someone needs to a have a quiet word in their ear about gas production and how it’s likely to peak around the same time as oil.

In other news

I read that the Vatican may be about to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design. This can only be a bad thing for science education all over the world. The trouble with I.D. as opposed to plain old wacky Creationism is that it’s a religious belief masquerading as a scientific theory, so it may insidiously work its way onto the science curriculum in religious schools. You may as well teach spaghetti monsterism in schools. I mean, if you’re going to fill kids’ heads with absurd nonsense, then at least make it funny nonsense.

By now of course you’ll all have heard the news that Pluto is no longer a planet. Apparently it’s now categorised as a “dwarf planet”. Does this mean that little people aren’t people anymore? I’m not an astronomer, but I did study a little bit of linguistics, and it seems to me that anything called a dwarf planet is clearly a type of planet. Frankly I think the phrase “solar moon” would have been a lot better (as well as being the title of a novel I wrote some years ago and destroyed).

Meanwhile the Irish government have announced that Aer Lingus, the national airline, will be floated on the stock market by the end of September. As I’ve discussed previously, this is an idiotic decision made by greedy politicians who simply don’t understand the concept of public service. Capitalists, fools and self-interested scoundrels to a person. A pox upon them all.

There’s little doubt in my mind that the combination of climate change and peak oil will result in violence erupting in certain places as people turn on the politicians and business leaders who led them to disaster. I wonder will Ireland be one of those places? And I wonder whether Bertie Ahern and his minions are aware that they may well be first against the wall come the crash? And I’m not talking about a metaphorical wall either.

Anyways, hopefully I’ll get myself back on an even keel – emotionally speaking – before too long. Which means I’ll start taking an interest in what’s happening around the world again, and become a half-decent blogger once more. If not though, I’ll track down some music memes. OK?

I switched on the TV a couple of days ago and caught a few seconds of Tony Blair’s foreign policy speech… the one delivered in Los Angeles. I’d missed the first third of it, but planned to listen to the rest. Unfortunately the very first thing I heard him say was how militant Islam “resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism”. At that moment I weighed up the cost of a new television against my desire to watch Blair deliver a speech, and went for a walk instead.

You couldn’t make it up. Blair raising the spectre of Reds Under The Beds during a policy speech in America…? I know I say this all the time, but our political leaders are all turning into minor characters in a Thomas Pynchon novel. Or maybe it’s the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson fucking with our heads. Take thanatoid Ortho Bob from Pynchon’s Vineland for instance. I don’t know exactly why, but when I read this description I just can’t help but think of Dubya Bush…

Ortho Bob came lurching over, looking as awful as the night he must have spent, wanting to talk some more about his case. He had been damaged in Vietnam, in more than one way, from the list of which he always carefully – though it might only have been superstitiously – excluded death. There were items enough on his get-even agenda, relief for none of which was available through regular channels.

Ortho Bob isn’t Bush… well, not directly anyways… but that last line completely sums up how I feel whenever I see Dubya. He’s got the same look in his eyes that Ortho Bob has as he lurches across the Zero Inn to Takeshi’s table.

Political funding

To other things… I notice over at Justin’s place an issue has arisen which finds me, unusually, in complete disagreement with the boy. No, not that Hazel Blears must be stopped. As a general rule, who could argue with that? It’s just that – in one of those monkeys and typewriters moments – Blears is actually backing a sound principle in this case.

Blears view, as I see it, is that political parties should be funded through the public purse (aside: I’ve got my media player on shuffle and Taxman by The Beatles has just this minute come on). And while I do completely see Justin’s points when he decries such an idea, I nonetheless believe that public funding is the lesser of evils.

Now, before I explain why, could I just put in the standard disclaimer about how I actually don’t believe representative democracy is a good way to run things in the first place, and how if I were made God Emperor there’d be some pretty damn radical restructuring, and the phrase Anarcho-Syndicalist Utopia would enter the common lexicon. So yeah, this is very much an exercise in deckchair rearrangement as far as I’m concerned.

Here’s the thing… we clearly live in an era where parties with better funding do better in elections. I’ll not go into my standard rant about how badly our poor ol’ apebrain deals with mass media advertising, but I’m assuming it’s an uncontroversial point that high levels of funding relative to your opponents gives an advantage in a modern election. And this advantage could very well be a decisive one in close contests.

The trouble is; that’s profoundly undemocratic. Which is a bit crap if your aim is to run things democratically. It all but forces political parties to pander to the business community and the wealthy. There may be a lot more of the poor, but they tend not to set aside a large slice of the household budget for political donations. Maybe back in the days of mass unionisation… but harking back to a past golden age is the job of The Right, so let’s not kid ourselves, eh?

If we place a political party or an independent politician in the position of relying upon donations for their political survival, we cannot blame them for seeking out the biggest donations. And while we may despair that parties seem to represent those who finance them above those who vote for them, we are surely not surprised about it. How on earth could it turn out otherwise given what we all know about the average human capacity to resist temptation?

On the other hand, if you deny all funding to politicians except a ration from the public purse based upon the number of votes they receive… they’ll still end up representing the people who pay for their campaigns, but now those people are their voters.

Yes, this is a very very simple sketch… safeguards would have to be introduced to prevent the entrenchment of power (because that’s not already happening, right?) and the active exclusion of smaller parties. There’s also the ethical dilemma of having extremist parties being funded by the public, no matter how “democratic” the formula that calculates the level of funding.

Still, I see it as self-evidently more democratic than the current system which forces politicians to choose between representing those who vote for them and those who pay for them. Just so we’re clear though… down with democracy! It’s a godawful way to run a civilisation in decline.

Rob Newman’s History of Oil & Ting

Speaking of civilisations in decline, via Gyrus at Dreamflesh comes a link to Rob Newman’s vaudevillesque political screed “History of Oil”. It’s both funny and informative. I’d heard a radio broadcast of it before, but it’s greatly enhanced by the visuals. Watch it at Google Video.

Oh yeah, a couple of other links. Ken MacLeod has returned after a prolonged break with a hard-hitting piece on the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Well worth a read. Meanwhile over at David Byrne’s journal he talks about US Christian fundamentalism in terms usually used to discuss militant Islam. I’ll bet he gets some interesting hate mail.