Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Dead sure about doomsday
Another prophet like so many of his fellows has proven inadequate to forecasting accurately ‘the end of days’. Instead of mass extinction last week, those of us who have not yet succumbed to natural wastage are readying ourselves for the next doomsday pronouncement, the very big one on December 21st 2012. Soothsayers, exactly like the rest of us, have been dropping like flies for centuries suffering desultory demises long after the much promised final moment. Over their lives their apocryphal ambiguities will have hit the occasional mark in the manner of shot from scatterguns. Because one or two pellets strike the target it foments their followers to dance and gibber, express themselves in tongues, while failing or not wishing to see that the vast bulk of lead shot is littering a still living landscape.
How do these would-be shamans magnetise their disciples? I suppose there are many among us who wish to be saved from the horrors of mortality and would rather believe in a bizarre salvation than the occupation of a mundane slab in the mortuary. Others, with exalted thoughts above their station, fall for the notion of being ‘chosen ones’, notwithstanding the fact that all supplicants of all religions have this as a germinating notion at the root of their belief. For others it might just represent a sublimation of suicidal tendencies. Better being part of a mass rapturous exit than a solitary one from a ledge or a bridge. Or is it for some that life is dull and this represents excitement in an otherwise nondescript existence and they are attracted by the buzz of projected mayhem like rubberneckers at a traffic accident up ahead?
Whatever, the fact is that anyone prone to prophesying, no matter how crass and transparently unbelievable he or she appears to the majority, will gather adherents. Most of us are gullible and impressionable given the right circumstances no matter how much we might uphold rationality as our banner, as can be witnessed by the number of atheists and lapsed believers who recant on their deathbeds. The spectre of death drives us into many a strange realm.
"I have seen the future and it is very much like the present, only longer." Khelog Albran (The Profit).
Labels: Doomsday. Failed prophecy.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
The Death Divining Device
There is some interesting news today and long overdue, particularly if you are a science fiction reader. For the measly sum of 400 pounds (a thousand cedi) you can undergo a simple test that gives you an indication of how much longer you are going to grumble and stumble your way across the planet! Apparently chromosomes have little dangly bits which erode over time. By checking the rate of wear a calculation will tell you how much life you have left in your carcass. Though, as yet, the dangly bits cannot be lengthened, it is believed that their rate of decrease can be slowed by not harbouring the usual suspects of booze and fags, fast food and couch potato inertia.
This could change society as we know it, Captain. Insurance companies could insist on the test before taking you on as a client, businesses may wish to see how long you can be reasonably seen to be employable, future wives and husbands might want to see if you are all flash and no stamina and you, yourself may wish to have conclusive proof that you should change your ways or get some living in before the great day.
Our western societies run on a strange premise and that is that you don’t know when you are going to die. This ignorance insulates you from having truly to explore your natures with that concentration that comes at the prospect of your hanging. Your relationships with near and dear as well as those you just about put up with would change dramatically as the dangly bits are seen to have all but disappeared. The youthful, irresistible force of a personal belief in immortality which lasts well into middle age for most of us, will weaken until you are faced with the bare facts of the end being nigh.
Will you be more caring and empathetic to others, eschewing war and territorialism or will you become greedier for pleasure and riches and develop little instinct to love your neighbour?
The choice is yours - for 400 pounds.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
The Black Hole of Islamabad
Continuing the theme of asking how it is possible to square the assassination of Osama Bin Laden with the US’s avowed intent of exporting democracy and the principles of a justice which is universal and does not discriminate between rich and poor, I see that the American administration is cementing its story that there was ‘no alternative’ to the killing. Obviously this is a nonsense. Releasing pictures of Obama and the war cabinet viewing what amounts to a ‘snuff movie’ merely underlines the event as a global advertising campaign for the assurance that American vengeance will prevail everywhere. In fact there were several senators who concurred openly with Obama on that score. Far from being the least bad scenario in terms of its consequences for peace and harmony between creeds and races in the world, its very calculated and atavistic nature will enrage and incite those for whom life amounts to a jihad against anyone who is different from them.
I watched a programme on black holes the other night and there is a growing number of scientists who believe that there is a black hole nestling in the centre of our planet, having its most demonstrable effect on the Bermuda trench and the Marianna trench, resulting in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle history and the same heap of weird occurrences on exactly the opposite side of the Earth. In fact the suggestion is that there are black holes everywhere, the biggest nearby being the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Apparently our little, local one still packs a punch and could be having effects upon tectonic plates, volcanoes, weather patterns, the ocean flows and all else. One of the outcomes of this likelihood is the theory that the constant creation of new life forms results from a physically changing earth. The supreme violence of black holes leads to the birth of new possibilities.
No doubt Obama, who seems a straight fellow in most ways despite a certain religiosity that does not sit well with me, hopes that by exporting his own black hole into the centre of Pakistan, something creative will emerge from the act. But what? Stretching my mind I cannot embrace any likely good. Instead, as with the Bermuda Triangle, all I see are more anomalous disasters, planes coming down, ships sinking, buildings, dams, railways lines, airports blown up. The problem for Obama is that what he has precipitated and witnessed is in complete contradiction to his rhetoric. He cannot now ever be a Ghandi or a Christ or a Buddha figure. He has, like Macbeth, stepped too deep in blood to ever redress his extreme act and find redemption.
Labels: Black holes. Obama. Bin Laden. Democracy. Assassination.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
To Kill A Mocking Bin Laden
I remember liking a film starring Paul Newman, called Hombre. The scene which stuck in my mind was when the baddie takes off his weapons and goes to face Newman (white man brought up by Indians and despised because of it) who, nevertheless, is protecting stage coach passengers who hold exactly those racist attitudes towards him. There is some verbal interplay where Newman refuses to bargain with the outlaw. The outlaw eventually says he’s returning to his men. Newman smiles and asks him why he thinks that is going to happen - and then shoots him. For me it was my first example of a number of films where the hero ditches a code of honour and does the improbable - if you like to believe in fairness, justice and the right to a trial. In fact, last night I was watching yet another episode of Homicide, Life on the Streets (by the team that went on to make The Wire, that beacon of confused and tangled morality, and currently, in season five, one of the detectives is under pressure because he killed a very unsavoury drug dealer and murderer when he could have taken him in. Like Dirty Harry films, he believes that the villain will not see justice in the liberal courts.
So it is with mild surprise that I have not heard or seen anything in the media which challenges the killing of Osama Bin Laden. He could be one of the worst villains around from the West’s point of view, whatever he and his followers believe to be justifiable in their acts but it raises the question of assassination being suddenly regarded as lawful (in David Cameron’s terms and acceptable). Is it? Obama gives the nod, watching streamed images of the attack and there is no jury, just a group of gawping politicians and soldiers. Isn’t most western law so framed as to try murderers through an impartial judicial system? The problem for the Americans and liberal consciences everywhere is that by disregarding it, it brings the whole political game into disrepute. Shooting an unarmed man in cold blood. It justifies everything the Israeli death squads do around the world, the Russians, the Pakistani Mumbai terrorists, Chechnyans, Middle Eastern dictators, African state militaries, secret services everywhere. If you can’t draw a line in the sand over such a high profile killing, then how can we uphold international law?
I am not sure we can use the excuse that to let him live until he is tried and hung like Saddam Hussein would have caused more terrorism. If you are going to export notions of democracy to the world, there have to be hard and fast rules. Haven’t there?
Saturday, May 07, 2011
Spy-ders and webs of intrigue
I watched yet another programme about the end of the world happening on December 21st 2012, according to the Mayan calendar, the patterns in the I Ching, Chinese astrology, Revelations in the Bible, a variety of soothsayers and some scientists who say that the earth, the sun and the black hole at the centre of our galaxy are in alignment for the first time for 25,000 years which could lead to the poles reversing and untold doom. I’d seen it all before and there is a part of every person prone to a hysterical flash of deep fear when presented with the presentiment of his own death, never mind all of humankind. That having passed, there was a piece of evidence that I had not seen before and which lingered when calmness returned.
Apparently, by using spiders - search programmes - that run around the web, information can be gathered of even the tiniest import, which gives something like an accurate projection of events and when they will occur. It began (naturally) as a means of forecasting the stock market (crashes in particular) and moved on to political, environmental and social events. What I thought was intriguing was that the programmers believe that their spiders create a zeitgeist-like understanding of macro events because they are linked in to the combined consciousness of everyone who uses the internet. Very close to Jung’s idea of a universal unconscious which he believed we tap into for our visions, dreams, innovations and creations. Anyway, the spiders also say that December 21st 2012 is human race ground zero. Of course they must be gathering all the other prognostications listed above in their travels around data topography which itself must be influencing millions of internet browsers but even so, it was a new perspective on doom.
No doubt these spiders or spybots are used extensively by all intelligence units throughout the world. Every nation wants an economic, social or political edge never mind a military one. But I have not read that the banks who brought us into economic ruin have been subject to our web creepy crawlies. Of course not. They are above rigorous investigation as are their auditors. They eat and drink at the same troughs are our political masters and leaders of multinational companies, move across international borders with impunity and gamble the day and night away. Wouldn’t it be good if a spider-handler did a wikileaks on them and we were given some illumination into the murky world of the hidden controllers of human destiny?
At least until December 21st 2012!
Labels: Spying on the internet. 2012.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
In the name of justice...
Well, it’s been a week of it! Two billion watching the Royal Wedding just as they had when Princess Diana was the then royal bimbo of choice. The War Cabinet in the White House watching Bin Laden being blasted off this mortal coil by a US assassination squad, Pope Paul passing Go towards beatification with Robert Mugabe there to watch the proceedings by special decree of the Italian Government. We are a global viewing community are we not? Cameras on mobile phones bring news to YouTube watchers of war, rape pillage and one on one humiliation, the content of which governments, special forces, girlfriends or classmates would like to suppress, CCTV everywhere and the media’s own trained sleuths with their nosey distance lenses capturing celebrities at it (it being whatever they want to think of as private). If you can’t see a recording of it, it doesn’t pass muster in modern society.
There was something of Ancient Rome about Emperor Obama’s watching the assassination. His thumb had pointed earthwards and so the dogs of war shimmied down their ropes to put an end to Bin Laden’s hateful stratagems of terror in a tiny arena outside Islamabad. There was something undeniably unseemly and surreal about Paul being elevated towards sainthood on the strength of a nun’s recovery from Parkinson’s. In front of a million flagwaving amnesiacs or deniers. This, the man who had presided over child abuse from his priests for more than two decades, his administration blocking investigations, covering up the horrors of it all, moving on bishops and priests to enact their life-shattering crimes over and over again. And all this with Mugabe, apparently a devout catholic, given special permission to pass through Rome to be there. Mugabe! Special friend of the Vatican! Given the history of Catholic atrocities, I suppose he must be regarded as a fellow traveller, bedfellow, bosom pal.
The Americans could have taken Bin Laden for trial. Benedict could have prevented his church from swimming even more in a filthy quagmire of hypocrisy. Mugabe could have been told that his Catholic soul would rot in hell and no amount of last rites would bring absolution. A litany of ifs and buts that bear no relation to the upper atmosphere of politics.
Labels: Bin Laden. Mugabe. Pope Benedict