The Moonshine Memoranda

COPACABANA - THE MEMORANDUM

2009-04-12T17:05:00.007+01:00

Jonathan said: How was the fishing?

Always fishing for information, Jonathan. And I, for once, have none to
impart. Except, perhaps, for what my experience taught me. What I had expected
to find was a real summer sale of sexual solicitation. Couples copulating on the
beaches, and making love in casual encounters. Women who were discarding all
modesty or freely exposing their intimate parts. Animal intimacy and an erotic
fever. But forgive me casting doubt on this, for what I discovered was a diverse
and inviting expanse of beaches and a healthy and happy conjoining of the sexes.
A heterogeneous but cohesive people who, under a statue fortuitously named
Christo Redentor, seem to have no sense of moral displeasure at their own
inherent disposition. A point not recognized in Europe, but surely compelling in
the moral behaviour of a culture which so wholesomely contrasts the image of
lascivious exhibitionism that has for so long attended the European female. Nor
does it fail to grasp that the body is not meant to be a pornographic gift, but
a natural affirmative statement. Sex is a perfectly proper pursuit in the
circumstances, and I read no sinister connotations into it.

No subversion, no insinuation, no measures of voyeuristic coercion that
any foreign intruder might introduce will shatter this South American
equanimity. To me, the most striking thing about them is an extraordinary happy
quality in their animate eyes and their Latin temperament, their vitality and
good humour. The whole interweaving pattern of racial counterpoint and ethnic
distinction which is mirrored charmingly in the manner of their vernacular and
its symphonic construction, communicating, as it does, with a phonetic,
gesticulative impact. Some people might say that a gift for mimicry is the sign
of an undeveloped language. In this case it is an example of the extraordinary
rapport the indigenes can establish with the minds and emotions of strangers.
Even South America’s dispossessed, the campesinos and the urban poor in their
barrios or favellas, seem a breed supremely more vibrant than the blue-eyed
Caucasian elite which, in spite of outward appearances, is already carrying the
senescent virus of a declining race.

Let’s face it, the beleaguered fortress of Europe has fulfilled its
Faustian compact with what is now a truly demonic civilization. Its modus
vivendi having acquired a deftly nightmarish tinge, compounded by collective
paranoia if not the wholesale departure of the will to live. Which is a problem
with a far less definable solution than poverty and destitution. A sort of muted
psychosis, one might say, within this ghastly twilight zone that has gathered
closely around us. A cultural Gö tterdämmerung, no less, where all the rules
and exhortations of moral history and enlightenment are abruptly beginning to be
held up to a different light. Nor is it difficult to reconstruct the reaction of
those tormented minds and bodies which are solemnly informed that the pursuit of
pornography is compatible with full mental health. For that, to me, is the
supreme example of a rampant schizophrenia which allows some to trample on every
erotic secret and gynaecological mystery, while others are being forced into
stranger and stranger orientations, often bereft of the apposite sex, and then have to find something else to fuck, and that generally means themselves.

I am, heaven knows, no mere bystander in the business of fornication - but it seems to me that all this must be part of the ever more desperate self-deception underlying our mental development, which is increasingly fuelled
by the terrifying urge for wealth, as in the field of economics, and virtual pleasure, as in the field of electronics. The moral side of it does not bother me, but I have no doubt that this curious borderline reality has its effects on the collective mind. For whether you finally crack and are taken to A&E suffering from repetitive-cyber-attention-psychosis, or perish from a cocktail of heroin, cocaine and skunk, is pretty much the same thing once you've become
dependent, or even addicted, to the almost hourly fix of being injected with
yet another online-dopamine rush.

Soma for the feeble-minded!

The actual world is simply too real for us and we don't want to be part
of natural life. We want to create a magic world in the likeness of our own
image, a blueprint no less, to become actual when linked and twittered, blogged
and face-booked en masse. In this way we can enjoy a fantasy as if it were a
reality. Not to mention those whose minds have come to dwell exclusively on
electronic images while looking for the one thing they can never find, which is
reality. Nor is it generally realised that we now have four species of man: the
celebrities, the pornographers, the politicians, and the mutants. For even if
you are not as yet an active pervert, an electronic mutant or hounded into mental
paranoia, there are plenty of people around you who are. All those unsavoury
habits of diseased little minds, incapable of appreciating the balance of the
world's forces and concentrating instead on the parochial conflicts of religious
wars, Keynesian politics and how to improve the technology for killing other
human beings. Flotsome amid this greater enterprise, their proliferating miseries of interest to no one but themselves. For the inspired sense of the art of the impossible which so characterized the ascent of this once great Western civilization has long since become submerged in the
limitless links for the never-ending distractions which are all virtual, without roots, intangible and circumstantial shortcuts to arousal on a journey that is made unwillingly, without appetite or positive hope of a welcoming and redemptive climax...

And there you are, folks: So I went to South-America and - discovered Europe. God help us all!

Dreamy

DEATHWISH...

2009-03-27T19:53:00.005Z

Jonathon Porrit: "Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure. Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one
way to reduce that impact."

That isn't a solution, it's a post-mortem!

Porrit is right, of course, about one thing: while
the land available for agriculture competes with housing and industry, to say nothing of the environmental impact of a rapidly rising population, a forecast by the European commission predicts that Britain's population will increase from 60.9m today to 77m within 50 years, making it Europe's most populous country. The same statistics indicate, too, that France’s population went up by 300,000 in 2006 to 63.3m, the highest birth rate in three decades. And the Spanish government, apparently, plans £ 2,000 awards for mothers on the birth of each child. Thus the only possible course as to future demographic intentions is
instantly perverted and in direct contravention of all ecological
reasoning.

Such numbers, too, show the extent to which policies to promote
childbirth, including cash payments and subsidised immigration, have salvaged
what was once assumed to be the elusive fragment of a declining European race.
The population of developed nations was generally expected to remain unchanged
and would, indeed, have declined but for immigration. To wit, Russia's
population is actually shrinking by about 1m a year. However, ministers freely
acknowledge that imposing any kind of immigration quota is taboo in economic
circles, and any attempt to revise established views on pro-creation provokes
fierce resistance. That such lack of insight should exist at so critical a time
seems difficult to imagine, and I must admit even I am surprised at the sheer
vehemence of the opposition one encounters when challenging the pro-creative
view.

In WW2, the tide turned at Stalingrad.

Though neither Hitler, Stalin or Mao had a serious strategy for
improving the fortunes of the human species, they certainly kept the numbers
down. Inevitably, too, while the aspiration is identical, their likes will
return. Nor do I need to elaborate what will happen in a such a scenario, other
perhaps then to stress that ever increasing populations are bound to increase
the risk of conflicts over food and control of the world's resources, including
an increasingly precious commodity – Lebensraum. In addition, more of
us than ever are experiencing a version of the psycho-pathology made collective
by overcrowding. All these psychotic humans, where do they come from? Or more
importantly, how do you spot one?

'I am a child of this age,' said Nietzsche, 'a decadent. But only I
know that!'

And, yes, any notion that carbon technologies are truly concerned about
the fate of humanity, or the planet, or the future, is risible. Forgive the
expletive, but that’s bollocks. It’s tragedy replayed as eco-farce. Just another
illusion for the undoing of mankind. A giant Ponzi scheme, awarding subsidies to
selected emitters or paying new polluters with old polluters' money. No wonder
they don’t seem to be able to stop. So you cut down old trees in order to make
room for planting new ones! Or build Third World factories so western countries
can pay to clean them up. Separating the facts from the myths and the propaganda
is not easy in view of capitalism's ingenuity in milking the carbon markets,
admittedly, but suddenly the world is full of mad scientists who want to combat
pollution rather than apply Ockham's razor and cut populations. Logically, of
course, in the hothouse of daydreams charlatans are inevitable. But for all its
vast reputation, PR and self-importance, you feel that even the Great Green
Movement neither understands the complexity nor acknowledges the inherent
reciprocity of the world's demographic economy any better than anyone else.

Clearly nothing has changed in the relation between economic and
population growth. They are synonymous. One is the flipside of the other. By
contradistinction, a relevant paper from Professor Kevin Anderson, director of
the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research duly noted that: "Unless economic
growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonisation, it is
difficult to foresee anything other than a planned economic recession
being compatible with stabilising the climate."

Elementary, my dear Professor, elementary!

Meanwhile the world's population is continuing to grow by about one
million humans every single week, and will do so for the foreseeable
future. And that, to me, is the true legacy of our present enlightenment.

Dreamy

MEN or SUPERMEN?

2009-03-24T13:40:00.006Z

"Opposition to wind farms should become as socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seatbelt." Ed Miliband, Climate Change Secretary.
'The death of a species,' wrote Charles Darwin, whose view on natural
selection I have no wish to misrepresent, 'is a consequence of non-adaptation of
circumstances.' And whatever else may have been said since, as a statement of
fact, actual or potential, it seems remarkably in accordance with the need for
the species to fall in with the nuclear forces of evolution. And nobody
ever made this more clear than the admirable H.G.Wells when, in The Fate of Homo
Sapiens, he issued a 'last' resounding warning to mankind: 'Adapt or perish,
that is and always has been the implacable law of life for all its children.
Either the human imagination and the will to live rises to the plain necessity
of our case, and a renascent homo sapiens struggles on to new, a harder and
happier world dominion, or he blunders down the slopes of failure through a
series of unhappy phases, in the wake of all the monster reptiles and beasts
that have flourished and lorded it on the earth before him, to his ultimate
extinction. Either life is just beginning for him, or it is drawing rapidly to
its close.'

These words, at any rate, proclaim the weakness of the ecological
movement. For if it hopes to salvage the Earth, it has no measures for saving
humanity. Indeed, the first thing to be noted is that 'wind and water power were
the main energy sources of post-medieval industry' (Hoyle, Energy or
Extinction), that they represent the least efficient form of energy production,
a form of power in its declension, no less. Perhaps the clearest indication,
therefore, of this declension is to be found in the fact that our "Friends of the Earth" are
actually willing to exchange the prospect of nuclear fusion for the subsistence
of a wind-and-water economy; that, I repeat, they have actually succeeded in
placing fidelity to the Earth before the ability of a highly technological
civilization to master its own central and salving destiny, its conquering
vision and cosmic ambition.

Public opinion, on the whole, has followed the retrogressive judgment
here, but I am not so sure it is right. For if the world's verdict endorsed that
judgment, it would represent a highly improvident depreciation of the skill and
ingenuity offered to it by a technological civilization. One thing, in any case,
is certain, we would be left in no doubt where its spirit resides. For the
pessimism conveyed in the demoralization of an age whose judgements no longer
embrace transcending or even confident standards, is not merely ecological. It
is evidence of deep changes in the orientation of the collective psyche. It is
fundamental to a world lost, in more recent times, in impossible ideas of a new
intellectual darkness. In an illusory nostalgia for a remote and rustic past. A
mellow eventide of butterfly and thistledown as the great concluding age of
peace, or what is held to be the last and most perfect phase of human existence.
Without regret and without ambition. Even though it can accomplish nothing
except the petrifaction of all that which lies at the basis of a healthy and
progressive civilization. And the triviality of much or it, rather than the
propensity for windmills and hydro-electric power, explains why the Great
Green Manifesto which seems to have become a kind of highly charge panacea for
the correction of all social ills, reads remarkably like a repeal of the
principal contents of Magna Carta or the Glorious, the Bill of Rights.

We should, with perhaps equal plausibility, also remember that the
meaning of Life - even in its most ill-conceived moments - is by no means
confined to the extreme monotony of our quotidian existence on Earth, nor
exclusive to the problems of an organic, environmental, or social kind which
have held the stage for so long. That would be utterly to misconceive its
nature. It is manifest with the same decisiveness in the concept of nuclear
energy as one of the most dynamic catalysts of a highly indeterminate stage in
human development and, we may add, of hope. Less dynamic perhaps but none the
less relevant since the whole of human civilization was based on its universal
and redemptive power. Indeed, it may be taken for granted that if we fail to
take the necessary steps to preserve either of these Promethean gifts and keep
alive for all time the two most powerful forces known to man, we might just as
well give up the quest for the stars and enter a period of universal
retrogression. For what it comes to, in the final analysis, is the exclusion of
any reasonable thought about preserving the balance between ecological
prescriptions for a brave new world and the total legislation of human life.

As for the rest, one soon wearies of such prattle. Indeed, the
banalities vary. But whether ecological, pacifist, irenic or activist, and
however irreconcilable in their ideological different ways, we are provided with
no central purpose upon which to extend our future hopes. The initial impetus
spent, clearly and unmistakably they all rest on a compulsory sacrifice of what
is perhaps the most dynamic heritage of human evolution: its transcendent
genius, the true bestower of all our noblest values.

Dreamy

GONE FISHING...

2009-03-01T14:47:00.003Z

You’ve been a lousy audience, and I am going fishing. Thank God for that...

Dreamy

PS.: until further notice!

JESSICA...

2009-02-27T12:50:00.007Z

At nine minutes before eleven P.M., I rang the bell at no ** Windermere Lodge, Hornsey Lane, Highgate. At five minutes past eleven, Jessica stepped into
view, her hips swinging in time with her breasts. She was a real looker. A beguiling 5ft 10in confection of honey-blonde hair, limpid blue eyes, baby-doll
face, snake hips, and the contemptuous posture of a woman who found herself consistently in demand. Extreme desirability had a lot to do with it. She could
get anyone she damn well pleased. Okay, we’re looking at a rock’n raver - an open vintage Ocelot jacket, a tiny black mini-skirt, the smallest of black lace see-through bustiers, 18in upper thigh circumference (above the thigh you’re on
your own), silk-stockings and, of course, four-and-a-half-inch fuck-me stilettos.

‘I was going to wear something revealing,’ she confided to me. ‘Those little see-through hot pants from Agent Provocateur, but how can I without
looking like a load of soft porn. I mean, I don’t want to seem like a pushover.’
'Little late in the day,' I thought.
Zinc lips, bright eyes, faux-tanned skin. I always thought looking the
height of seasonal glamour tended to be part of the retail deal. I couldn’t
picture her doing anything for sex if she had to wear plain clothes and no
lipstick, but was beginning to wonder what superbly outrageous homage to
tinsel-glamour I myself had paid. Thank heavens for beautiful women. ‘You don’t
have to be a pushover,’ I said. ‘You can be sexy and still have class.’

‘It’s impossible for me to be cool, stylish and fashionable, and not
look like every man’s favourite fantasy. Sometimes I feel like the biggest C in
town,’ she said, ‘rather like a West-End production, with everybody wanting a
part in it.’ She sighed, ‘so, you know, you get laid a lot.’ She recognized, she
explained, the role of the penis, but professed to be unsure whether male and
female libidos were not altogether mismatched. Whether or not was open to
question, she said expansively, milking the pregnant pause, ‘but for every man
you jerk off, there’s two dozen priming their barrels. Unless, of course, they
already have their dicks up each other’s ass.’
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ I said. I must confess, though, I was inclined to think that she’d
been putting it a little strongly.
‘Sometimes I wish they would put their
penises away and do something useful. I’m sick and tired of ending up with a
dick in my mouth every time I leave the house.’ She took out her compact and
looked into the mirror. ‘All men are potential rapists, you know.’

‘No kidding?’ I said, groping for an answer. ‘That’s a serious
allegation.’

‘But it’s the women who make them so. Let’s face it,’ she elaborated with a throatiness in her voice that made my lips tingle. ‘A woman’s vagina is an amalgam of chemistry and biology, of taste and flavour that deter and attract
simultaneously. Its various aromas, scents and biological reverberations are very cunning and entirely irresistible.’

I felt myself reddening. The phrase reeked of cunnilingus. ‘It motivates men more than anything else in the world,’ I said, somewhat flustered. ‘It appeals to suckers like mangos to flies.’ She threw me a disdainful
look. ‘Just think about it.’

‘Thinking about little else,’ I said, starting the engine.

(Jessica was no mere prostitute down on her luck. She was a child of
progress. This was a woman who might go down into dirt, but whoring for her was
an informed career choice. The toughest part of the blessed thing was that while
Jessica was getting tied up, spanked or sodomized indoors, I would be waiting
outside, sitting in my cab...)

TUTU...

2009-02-25T12:40:00.004Z

Tutu was so named after his call sign N22.
He demolished every calculation.
First be failing to find Tower Bridge and then by taking the only action
consistent with professional integrity and returning his customer to the base. Nobody likes to take the wrong turn, and nobody, least of all a London cabby, likes to feel inadequate. But a map on the steering wheel, the rain, the
traffic, and driving on the left side of the road, his hunch was borne out
almost from the start: it was a lot all at once. Besides, there wasn’t anyplace
else to go. One-way streets can be so demoralizing!
One hour later, and almost twenty miles on, it was quite a surprise his lady passenger said, to come across roebucks in Shoreditch.
Tutu was keeping shtumm.
The gravity of the assignment was beginning to weigh on him. His plan had been to
take her as far as Liverpool Street Station, and then turn her loose on the
city. But while he had been studying maps and observing traffic deployments, he
had not been paying much attention to the scenery, albeit that its bucolic
splendour could not but merit one’s interest. I’d call not knowing where I was
going immensely inept. Driving left or right, who cares? It’s totally out of
order.
But guess what?
Tutu was intrigued by the gratuitous mystery of finding himself in uncharted pastoral terrain. Optically, logistically, geographically, this was a different environment; almost as though he was
looking at another world, albeit that the lady felt no enthusiasm for such
bucolic frolics. So far as she was concerned, this raised the ludicrous but
authentic prospect of having arrived in Hertfordshire.
I’m positive, in fact!
Which prompted Tutu to retail a long story about having mistakenly
taken the wrong turn, which he said - with the hang-dog look of a man who is
struggling to recall what it is like to be in error - he totally failed to
understand.
‘What’s wrong with you people?’ the lady replied. ‘A trained
gorilla could find his way to Tower Bridge, why can’t you?’
Tutu couldn’t handle rejection. And with this evaluation confronting him, he lost all
confidence in his ability to save the day. So in order to regain some measure of
self-esteem, he did something he was rather good at. He agreed, but only with a
significant mark-up on the original fare, to take his customer back to the
base.
‘Prices vary according to venues,’ he explained.
Reports are somewhat haphazard after this. But one thing is clear, the lady, taking
exception to this infringement of private hire etiquette, walloped him over the
head with her umbrella. Even Tutu was surprised by this. And according to
Wyfield the controller, few things are as effective in modifying a driver’s
route as a well-placed umbrella.

(from The Overman Conspiracy - dedicated to those still at sea...)

Dreamy

THE CONTROLLER...

2009-02-23T17:16:00.005Z

Crushed: “Ouch. I suppose one thinks of Taxi driver, immediately.”

Paul W. was the night-controller, possibly the most thankless and gruelling job in the entire driving business. A compulsive gambler, he was one of the toughest guys you’d ever hope to meet. He was also trying hard to reduce his life-span by smoking Capstan full strength at the rate of forty a night - a brand which I thought no longer even existed. Nor was it surprising in the circumstances. The types he had to deal with confounded every expectation. It was difficult to imagine a more polyphonous lot. Paul always rose to a crisis.

Genius is an ambivalent term, but it somehow approximated his ability to do justice to everyone. Here the happy accident of being an ex-market trader stood
him in good stead. He was a veritable switchboard, capable of instant calculations and astonishing feats of memory. He was also a brilliant talker with a gift for repartee and an extraordinary semantic ability. He would
communicate in every jargon, tongue or vernacular ever devised by man. Like so
many gregarians of his type, he thrived on pressure. There was an acute cerebral
intensity in his intellectual make-up. He was one of the most alert and
perceptive men I had ever met. As a controller he was remarkable. Not just
because of his microchip memory, but because he had infinite patience with his
drivers, such as Tutu, a quiet mathematical student from Delhi with brooding
looks and tragic eyes.

There was but one stipulation: Don’t screw up!

‘There are only two things you have to remember,’ Paul W. invariably
admonished his new recruits. ‘Never fall asleep behind the wheel, and always pay
your rent on time.’

No other references required.

‘You are now a fully licensed cab-driver. God help us all!’

(Paul Wyfield now runs a fruit & veg stall in Covent
Garden)

Dreamy

KYLIE...

2009-02-21T13:09:00.004Z

Hush, sleep the everlasting sleep
Dream the everlasting dream
Take a kiss from my dark lips
And forever hold your peace, hush...

If I gave you my eyes
Would you give me your teeth
Or bite while you could not see?
Would you take my thoughts,
Spin them into your soul
Or blow them into a whisper?

You can’t deny your destiny,
Sleep my child, sleep,
Fall into my arms forever,
Follow me, hush, hush...

(Kylie - child prostitute)

It sounded almost as if she was reciting from the far end of an
interminable underpass. She was pleading, I knew, almost like I should do
something. But what could I say to this melancholy refugee from the
free-floating horrors of her own obsessed imagination. These were the classic
symptoms of drug-induced hallucination. And I had neither the skill nor the
inclination for abandoning myself to the fantasies of a susceptible and
over-imaginative child.

She was right, of course, on one score.

One day she simply wouldn't wake up, lacking the vitality that
energizes life. One day she would come face to face with reality. It was just a
matter of time. Life is consciousness, and like consciousness extinguishable. I
felt alert to a situation that seemed nevertheless unreal. Some psychic
dichotomies were irreconcilable. Here she was, neither woman nor child, neither
wicked nor innocent, perennially dodging the soporific affections of some
psychotic entity, spinning her soul into a web. Almost as if she no longer
belonged to herself, waking up was a struggle. A reluctant return from the magic
kingdom.

The ravings of a fourteen-year old? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean
that she didn’t have a point. At least fallen angels have some hope of
redemption. She had nowhere to turn but to drugs and dreams for her salvation.
Already, she was in freefall. I could almost see her hurtling to her death.

As she walked towards the mansion in the crisp morning air, she struck
me as the loneliest figure I had ever seen. I heard the crunch of her footsteps
on the gravel. A waif-like, insubstantial figure, apparently quite alone.

(From a true recollection, based on Kylie, a child prostitute -
fourteen years old. The poem is her own - the events are authentic).

Dreamy

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL - and may the Force be with you...

2009-02-16T16:53:00.010Z

...so I left this link on Alastair's newly inaugurated blog, and promptly
ran into one Alina Palimaru, authorized moderator and young amant de coeur:

To Selena Dreamy:
First of all, your hyperlink does not work, so you may want to go back to
school for some computer workshops!
Eventually, I did find your blog page with your views about Alastair Campbell...much to my dismay! I know there are people who disagree with his political views, and other personal aspects of his life. We are all entitled to our opinions. Unfortunately, we are not entitled to our own facts!
Let me just copy a passage from your meaningless diatribe, to demonstrate
what a sick, depraved and pathetic little brain you have! Selena Dreamy:
"Alastair’s past history was an unbroken chain of disaster, his blunders ranging
from minor tactical gaffes to major strategic errors, to say nothing of his
psychotic breakdown, clinical depression anduncontrollable outbursts."
For your information, Alastair is a brilliant political communicator and
strategist, and his fanclub includes, among little people like myself, Bill
Clinton, Gen. Wesley Clark and many other prominent international figures. He
also happens to be the "architect" of one of the most spectacular political
comebacks in England's history. He may have made a few mistakes along the way,
who hasn't? He actually did assume responsibilty for some of them.
But your passage seems to imply that Alastair himself is entirely responsible for his
breakdown and depression. You should be ashamed of yourself! You are welcome to
visit this blog and submit constructive criticism. I always enjoy a healthy
policy debate. But if you intend to return with more unsubstantiated junk, just
to brag about how much venom you harbor, then I will only say that you and your
blog are a fraud!

Alina

And here, with due respect, is my rejoinder:

To Selena Dreamy:

"First of all, your hyperlink does not work, so you may want to go
back to school for some computer workshops!"

You're absolutely right. I am, without reservation, a hopeless plodder.
I also know that therapy - not schooling - is my only shot at technological
survival.

"Eventually, I did find your blog page with your views about
Alastair Campbell...much to my dismay! I know there are people who disagree with
his political views, and other personal aspects of his life. We are all entitled
to our opinions. Unfortunately, we are not entitled to our own
facts!"

I believe we are all agreed that it is better to be familiar with the
facts before proclaiming oneself informed. For the level of ignorance that was
being displayed in the catastrophe of Blair's foreign policy during Alastair
Campbell's years as director of communications and strategy, was extraordinary
by any measure. And indeed, to say that the wrong countries were invaded for the
wrong reasons, secularists confused with fundamentalists, and a clueless
intelligence community retailed progressively destabilizing information, would
merely be to report on facts. Not to mention an administration which was blinded
by political arrogance and ideological obstinacy and, apparently, unaware that it
was collaborating in the greatest geo-political disaster story of the past four
decades. As, in the event, a more specific charge would be that, under the
doctrine of collective responsibility, the entire UK government of the day may
have been guilty of war crimes.

"Let me just copy a passage from your meaningless diatribe, to
demonstrate what a sick, depraved and pathetic little brain you have!"

Bless your little heart, Alina, you must have misunderstood my demon - this
particular gift I own of plucking the strings you respond to in exactly the musical style I prefer. It just so happens that I’m quite happy and forbearing about descriptions of this kind. It’s one of my many failings as a blogger and my concurrent deterioration as a human being that I have no desire to pretend to something I am not. I've never been an ethical persona. Call it deplorable. Call it picking up traits from your mentor Alastair Campbell - mine being the Virgin Mary - it is all the same to me. Though who turns out to be the Devil and who is the Saint, rather depends on whose side you're on.

"For your information, Alastair is a brilliant political communicator
and strategist, and his fanclub includes, among little people like myself, Bill
Clinton, Gen. Wesley Clark and many other prominent international figures. He
also happens to be the "architect" of one of the most spectacular political
comebacks in England's history."

Ooops - I have my doubts about the divine properties of Bill Clinton,
to tell you the truth. Admittedly, I was originally an unsuccessful teenage
violinist in New York. But when, as associate Director of Research, I worked at
the Library of Congress, with a coveted pass to the White House Rose Garden, it
soon became clear to me that deception formed the basis of his entire presidency
- such as the granting of pardons, squelching an investigation, awarding a
contract, deferring a regulation or looking forward to yet another "appropriate
enquiry", to say nothing of his groundbreaking "I did not have sex with that
woman!" So don't bore me with this American rogue. As for "the most spectacular
political comeback" - it seems to me that you are a starry-eyed devotee
retailing information to fit pre-existing norms, whereas I represent the
wholesome scrutiny of the people. And Alastair can certainly be under no
illusion as to the nation's feelings with regard to himself.

“But your passage seems to imply that Alastair himself is entirely
responsible for his breakdown and depression. You should be ashamed of
yourself!”

But I am. I am deeply troubled by it - unlike Alastair and numerous
obsessed persons under the misapprehension that they have some sort of claim on
public sympathy. In fact I still wonder about his downward spiral into
alcoholism, and whether or not to acknowledge it as a complex affective
pathology. I went cold turkey on every depression I have ever had, self-induced
or otherwise. Perhaps Campbell saw things differently from his psychiatrists,
but, despite his colossal sense of victimhood, the man should never have been in
politics. It may not be my business, but at the end of the day, it's my ass.

"You are welcome to visit this blog and submit constructive criticism.
I always enjoy a healthy policy debate. But if you intend to return with more
unsubstantiated junk, just to brag about how much venom you harbor, then I will
only say that you and your blog are a fraud!"

I have few virtues, sweet Alina, one of them being that I am the only
blogger to have declared herself a "fraud." It's in my profile. At the same
time, of course, you're missing a fundamental distinction: A pseudonymous
persona is not the same as a fraudulent identity. Indeed, a maverick deception I
can suffer, but a political toady I have no time for.

Finally, may I say that you are adorably homely, formulaic, endearingly
predictable and plainly out of your depth. As for Alastair, I'm afraid I find a
strong disposition in myself not to think so well of him as you seem certain I
ought to. Indeed, I might even claim that his blog is a confused amalgam of
careless, futile, and, at times, blatantly disingenuous allegations, replete
with more political inaccuracies and psychological misconceptions than any other
blog I have come across in two years of reviewing them (with the exception, of
course, of my own!), but I will not! In fact, I beg you all to give a moment of your time to Alastair's blog, and to peruse it for yourself. You will not
find it hard to come up with your own conclusions.

And may the Force be with you...

Dreamy

THE VERY STRANGE CASE OF ONE GEERT WILDERS, FILM-MAKER AND DUTCH MP...

2009-02-13T18:02:00.002Z

So, Geert Wilders, elected representative of the Dutch Parliament, was sent
packing yesterday, after trying to enter Britain for a screening of his
controversial Film Fitna in the House of Lords. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary
refused leave of entry in deference, presumably, to the mores of 7th century
Arabia.

It is hard to separate wishes from conclusions, but, on the evidence
available, Mr Wilders has good reasons to believe that peaceful intent is not on
the jihadic agenda. His film Fitna deals in facts: The stock images are the
stuff of nightmares. Globally, religious violence takes place on a scale not
dreamt of even by the author of the Koran. The war in Afghanistan, like that in
Iraq, has become a magnet for Islamists determined to fight the infidel. This on
top of a powerful denunciation of the western social order and the declared
conviction that Islam must rule the world. It is as if Saddam had never left.
Which, apparently, is why they're already auditioning for what being an Islamic
paradise means, and they're doing it with a raucous, excited abandon that is a
pleasure to behold. The result? Political oppression, thousands killed - and
collective suicide rage. The civilian toll is the highest anywhere since Rwanda
or the second world war...

This is seriously explosive stuff.

Britain's policy of trying to use repressive diplomacy to curb the
right to free speech at home has been in stark contrast to an idiotic, downhill
war that is still being waged abroad. To say nothing of the bellicose rhetoric
coming from the Muslim community clamouring to introduce sharia law into
England's green and pleasant land. Behold! The brave new world of the sanitized
truth is at hand - is the government considering plans to deny that 9/11 ever
took place?

That sounds like an absurdity, but yesterday, on Newsnight, an
apoplectic Keith Vaz, MP and head of the influential Home Affairs Select
Committee, provided a taste of things to come. He hadn't seen the film, but he
was aware of Wilders' reputation, and that was enough to call his credibility
into question. In other words, if you wanted freedom of speech, you'd have to go
to abroad. To respond, smile with as much patience as you can muster. Now
western civilisation can safely be condemned to burn in hell for a cartoon
poking fun at Islam. Remember how the Western media stooped to kiss the mullahs'
ass? With Britain leading this legendary feat of self-abasement!

Being irreverent can sometimes be de rigueur in the West, but in Muslim
communities it is still beyond the pale. And even though the highly
controversial Dutch MP's documentary could not be further from the grotesque
antics of Michael Moore - to introduce a counterpoint - the sad fact of the
matter is, that a performance of Geert Wilders' film could quite possibly have
turned into a riot, a pitched battle, or even a national disaster.

Yes, I always anticipated appeasement. But I also think I have a right
to feel at home, and I do not.

Islam is the very antithesis of an open, pluralistic, inquisitive,
modern, hospitable society. Nor, in considering the relation of one culture to
another, can one avoid value judgments, relative though they are. Standards are
formed in comparison, and if sometimes we speak of one culture assimilating the
values of another, strictly speaking this should mean that new ethical values
and associations are able to emerge. That, it seems to me, is the sum and
substance of cultural integration. Yet, no sooner is this said than elements of
what seems to be, and often is, an outright refusal to take the final step in
the process of social amalgamation, are being alienated into the objects of a
fundamentalist doctrine which instead professes isolationism and a total
rejection of Western indigenous values.

The first fruit of this has been a story of alienation of identities.
The rise, particularly in countries like England and France, of the most
intransigent of ethnic minorities as organized centres of disaffection; as the
most assertive of political pressure-groups, extraordinarily overwrought and
constantly at odds with Western European cultural, constitutional and
educational practices, necessarily vitiating much of its oldness and
conventionalism and constituting a threat not only to its traditions, customs
and manners, but, paradoxically, to its very spirit of freedom and toleration
and, hence, to the essential Englishness of the British Nation herself.

Dreamy

WAS IST DAS....?

2009-02-10T18:39:00.006Z

Can't work out the language. I guess it's either Finnish, or perhaps Hungarian. Any clues?

"Modern fiziğin Bu eğilim, elbette, tüm malzeme çözmek için elektromanyetik dalgalar bir evren. Eğer kulak zarı, eşdeğer bir titreşmesinde ses sıvı olarak kulak içinde oluşturulur. Bu, ilgili beyin söyler sahası, hacmi ve süresi veya elektromanyetik "sesin frekansı". Aynı şekilde, bir alıcı ile bir koku molekülünün Docks, sinyal geçecek için beyin's takas olan koklama ampul, kokuyor. Esasen, de elektromanyetik radyasyon tüm aralığı - gama ışınlarından, x-ışınları, ultra mor, görünür ışık, kızıl-ötesi, mikrodalgalar, radiowaves vb - ötesinde algılanabilir vizyon için retina's eşiği, görünen renkler ise, üzerinde her yönde spektrum sadece elektromanyetik frekansları farklı. Ne zaman ışık retina üzerine düştüğünde, kimyasal değişiklikler belirli teşvik oluşabilir ile insan beyin kendisi için içerik yorumlar elektrik faaliyetleri onun duyusal
deneyimi. Bu tonlar, sesleri, tonları, renkleri, blushes veya boyalar, ancak
beyinde duygulanımlar!"
xxx

OBAMA - AND THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

2009-02-07T14:45:00.001Z

The White Man’s Burden?

That was the slogan, and how weird was that? To say nothing of the
imperial, hubristic, thankless sordidness of it. Meanwhile, the white man’s
humiliations mounted. The loss of the American Presidency was a more or less a
foregone conclusion - given McCain’s fractious relationship with his own party.
McCain the renegade was barely tolerated.

So, it all adds up to one of those stellar moments when the political
planets were in exactly the right alignment for a really bright supernova. It
was the vision of Obama that appealed, as much as the man. He sniffed the air
and scented victory. It was a summons rather than an election. Equivocation,
finally, was over for the Afro-American, as the country's fate was bound over,
inexorably, to the "Black" Man who suddenly felt that he had a promising future,
not just an intolerable past. But above all, this was a battle of the New Age
against the old, to suit an era in which the white man’s hegemony has arguably
run its course. This was the political solar plexus. Circumstances, rather than
ideology, had propelled the freshman senator into becoming the first black
president of the United States - and thus, the repository of their hopes.
Deliverance is at hand, the civil-rights movement has reached its apogee and the
continent’s great profiteers and speculators are seen to stagger as the world's
tectonic plates shift beneath them.

The countdown to the future has begun.

The temptation to play with the idea of Armageddon and the presently
perceived economic threat from the newly gravitating Third World races might be
sacrilegious. But even if you feel that global warming is for wimps, you have to
accept the scientific evidence that the planet reacts to all types of stress,
whether ecological, demographic, energetic or nutritional. And even without
invoking the much maligned sense of entitlement of the Caucasian races as a
remarkable feat of historical unscrupulousness - and their past history, after
all, is part of the indictment against them - it is nevertheless the case that
they were the true upholders of the surpassing human values, of progress and
respect for the “Higher Man” and his institutions of science and technology, the
product of enlightenment and its intellectual tradition, the purveyors of a
finely-tuned hereditary sense of inquiry and method, to say nothing of the
pursuit of knowledge that has the potential to uncover fundamental properties of
our future universe.

Obama offers an alternative which turns the decline of the white man's
mandate into an instrument of future hope. If not the coup de grace, it
may certainly be the turning point in the fortunes of the industrial nations.
Some compared it to Nelson Mandela’s ascent in South Africa where, meanwhile,
for the unconquerable Master Race, there is no prospect but evacuation. Nor
should this be construed in any pejorative sense, but nothing I know about those
up-and-coming races suggests that scientific altruism or the quest for knowledge
could ever have been a motivating factor in their quest for the social
recognition of a variety of essential human requirements, or indeed, for a
humane and equitable freedom.

God knows, how weary we are of squalor, poverty and deprivation, but
any notion that such up-and-coming masses are in any sense concerned about the
welfare of the world, or the planet, or the future, is laughable. A deadly
conflict between two competing giants is already delineated. As Asia’s power
grows, that of the West diminishes. Frankly, I have to say I'm torn on this one
and not sure where lies the future direction of man’s ascendancy. The scientific
evolution and the Conquest of Space is neither an affair for sedentary Caucasian
nations nor for the newly developing Third World races. The unwashed multitudes
of the world are inevitably too concerned with survival to give much thought to
“higher” aims.

Nor is this all: the question now arises whether 'the first of the
human race' will prove to be the last, the Nemeses and destroyers of the world,
or whether they will actually begin to take their own future more seriously in
hand? The 'white man' of today must bear his burden. It may be necessary for him
to surrender the very way of life that the precursors of our own day found so
congenial, the very planet, perhaps, from which he commenced his assault on the
Planets which the rest of mankind may be too improvident, indifferent, hostile
or hungry to participate in.

Even so, and this is not perhaps the place to expound Darwinian
evolution, but its operative formula that evolution not infrequently proceeds
through the elimination of 'specialized types' and the survival of the simpler
and more adaptable forms of life, is really a good summary of the irreconcilable
antagonism of the principles upon which it is based. Much would depend, of
course, on the nature of the decline. On whether for instance it is caused, in
the language of the evolutionists, by 'a new vigorous society overrunning a
senile one,' or through 'the total collapse of the more advanced technological
societies, and a reversal of human life to the primitive subsistence level.' No
doubt the two are related. But with the latter in mind, it is not perhaps
unreasonable to say that a condition of their pre-eminence is that 'the first of
the human race' - and technically at least this may have been applicable -
establish new claims to immortality or else, whatever their other claims, make
room for supercession.

Dreamy

POD - Publish And Be Damned!

2009-02-03T12:48:00.004Z

ANONYMOUS: I have since received and read your book in its entirety, Miss
(?) Selena Dreamy...And frankly...You may well deplore the standard
unresponsiveness to your literary query. But what would surprise me most about
your querying, is that the agents you approached didn't blast your ears with
their views on the necessity for censorship. or did they? Because, this is the
kind of book, in my opinion, which no mainstream publisher could possibly
consider. etc. etc.

Absolutely! Publishers are justifiably aware of the need to ensure that
opinions are given on the basis of verifiable fact, albeit that in a European
court of law, my own chain of evidence would almost certainly be unacceptable as
a basis for litigation or, indeed, dismissed as double hearsay.

But the real problem with main-stream publishing is, that editors no
longer even accept submissions. And while a reputable literary agent may, on the
average, receive a hundred manuscripts per week, or some 52,000 per annum, he or
she will, at the same time, rarely accept in excess of three or four new authors
a year. Am I exaggerating? Quite the contrary. 46,000 full manuscripts submitted
to Richard & Judy's 2004 writing competition do bear me out.

Faced with The Overman Conspiracy literary agents were polite but
unforthcoming. And while personally, I think that anyone who has been rejected
on the basis of a single sample page has serious cause for complaint, I also
decided that after one-hundred-and-fifty tries and a dozen near misses, it was
time to throw in the towel.

The solution is POD. It's that or certain literary death!

The Overman Conspiracy entered the ISBN chain at a time of my own
choosing and is available at AMAZON and all the major outlets, including
brick-and-mortar stores. What's more, I am convinced that each of us is a
participant in creating the future. As a frequent listener to Simon Mayo's book
programme, I had occasion, once, to eavesdrop into his conversation with
Christopher Foyles, the chairman of Foyles bookshop. What struck me was his
considered opinion that Print-On-Demand technology is cutting edge - the last
logical link in the production chain.

It is a vision that fires my imagination.

The total number of books published in 1996 was, in A.A.Gill's
disapproving words: "!1,170,620. Given an average print run of, say, 5,000, that
makes about 5,85 billion books a year. Each cost about £ 1.30 to make. How much
cash is that? How many trees is that?"

A.A. Gill raises an environmental issue - his words focus on the real
problem. POD, in fact, rests on very solid, environmental grounds. There is no
initial print-run. On receiving an order, a single copy is produced with the
author getting up to 89% of the royalties. In fact, it is hard not to agree with
Martin Roe, who believes that in the past "profitability has been factored
around millions of sales by hundreds of authors; and that in future it may be
based around hundreds of sales by millions of authors."

To speak of ‘bad choice’ in connection with POD is hypocritical. Even
to suggest that there is a choice may be disingenuous. For many, in today’s
debilitating literary climate, it is nothing less than Plan B. At present
unpublished writers have no commercial body to represent them. And the
probability of that happening can easily be calculated according to state
lottery mechanics. The reverse of this process is, in principle, not impossible,
but its likelihood is exceedingly low. One positive result merely gives
probabilities concerning a million negative ones.

Walter Aske
might well have preferred to be a "legitimately published” author. He may also
be a charismatic iconoclasts, with a profligate disregard for literary
conventions, flawed, hurt, haemorrhaging from a thousand crucifixions, but
outrageous individualism is not the answer. Personal introduction is a different
matter: Behold the Man - he is no mere follower of fashion! His first filly, The
Better Maker, ran unplaced. We await his second. And remember, Mr Aske, people
who can sell - they are not really selling a manuscript - they are always
selling themselves.

Meanwhile, I myself, remain grateful to Kira
Cochrane for introducing me to POD technology: The Sunday Times, August 14,
2005. Publish and be damned self-reliant. It was none too soon.

Dreamy

THE STING or The Story Of How Gordon McCabe Shot Himself In The Foot

2009-01-29T18:01:00.007Z

This Is The Story Of How Gordon McCabe Shot Himself In The Foot In Front Of An Audience That Included A Dutchman, An Elberry, A Kindly Cynic, And One Selena Dreamy Who Reported The Matter To The Relevant Authorities.

Having long had serious doubts about my own identity, Gordon's feat might have been be a simple trick, embellished by second sight and wishful thinking, perhaps, but somehow I always knew that someone like Dr McCabe would come along and sort it out. I am, indeed, a close observer of this Doctor of
Philosophy - who I'm acquainted with professionally and fond of personally - and even though Gordon's actual findings were preliminary and had not been subject to peer review he went ahead and published them.

"I formed the suspicion long ago that Selena was male. In fact, my suspicion was quite specific: I guessed that Selena was Dr David Oderberg, from the Philosophy
Department at the University of Reading."
(Gordon McCabe)

This was undoubtedly an incriminating statement! And as such, accordingly, I needed to declare an interest. I'm not acquainted with Dr Oderberg, and for all I know he may well be Miss Selena Dreamy, or a kind of quantum-Doppelgänger. But that would be to place the theory before the
evidence, and as theories are themselves based upon evidence, they must always
be open to amendment in the light of new or conflicting information. And since,
precisely on the information available - I myself inclined to a different view,
I sent Prof. Oderberg an email:

"I'm not certain, Sir. But I think I stumbled across something at the
Comment Section of http://elberry.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/the-overman-conspiracy/ that you were not supposed to see. Come and share this bit of gossip:"

The die was cast, and for Dr Gordon McCabe nothing would ever be
the same again. Indeed, if this has ruined your day, Gordon, don't be
disconcerted. I want to apologize for the wicked Prof Sonderberg. The punishment
inflicted upon you has been severe, if not inhuman. At the same time, of course,
the comparison constitutes an unbearable insult to my own person, needless to
say. Indeed, as a philosopher, he has, it seems to me, an altogether
unsophisticated relationship with anger. And perhaps, at least in retrospect,
that is his chief transgression:

"Hello, thank you for this email and for drawing this bit of stupidity
to my attention.
Gordon, how dare you post such a ridiculous piece of
speculation. I have no connection whatsoever with any of this.
I demand an immediate retraction on this blog, with apologies.
Next time you are inclined to speculate about who people are, you might consider asking them first so as to corroborate your fanciful hypothesis."
Prof. David Oderberg
University of
Reading

Then came the problematic part: and, here, predictably enough, is
Gordon on his way to do penance:

"David has asked me to retract my hypothesis, and I’m more than happy
to, and apologise for identifying him with Selena Dreamy." (Gordon McCabe)

By means of that extreme simplification, two mock-philosophers
managed to sidestep all the elegant solutions associated with that noble
discipline. Truth to tell, for someone used to the exercise of reason and the
concept of philosophy as a search for intellectual salvation, it is all very
strange and alarming. Indeed, there is a lesson here. Philosophy - and surely
that is a point upon which all sides can agree - is an ancient art, the
essential foundation of all other inquiries, the generator of higher thought,
and based on the idea that human existence may be alleviated through rationality
and mutual understanding.

I know that's all relative, but frankly, contemporary philosophers are
a fearful jest upon a fearful age, if I might be allowed this freedom to express
myself. And just so you won't look a dupe, Gordon, when next divining an
identity, I'd like to clear up a common misconception: A pseudonymous identity
is not the same as a false identity. It is the work of the devil. A transgression peculiar to the Internet age, replete with everything that makes the cyber sphere, and the vast opportunities it creates for ethical and professional deception, such a virtual torment.

In a word, a loony bin!

But what I meant to be saying before I was so enticed by one of my multiple personas - troublesome little trolls - is, that as an American subject, I respectfully decline to answer any
further questions concerning my gender or identity by virtue of my
constitutional privilege under the Fifth Amendment!

Dreamy (Miss!)

PS.: for all other enquiries, please refer to my gynaecologist!

WEMBLEY PARK POLICE STATION...

2009-01-26T19:49:00.008Z

...and this is the facsimile of a letter Max McDowell sent to Wembley Park Police Station:

...it reads as follows:

Dear Officer,

Here is a token of my appreciation: The Overman Conspiracy. (See p 84-88)
Without the experience of one of your detention cells, and the excellent treatment I received at the hands of your WPCs, this book would have been deprived of its finest chapter!

Chapter Five chronicles the events that led up to, and took place,
during my brief detention of Nov. 9, 2002. As stated on p 88, "the food was
excellent, and the force good humoured and very attentive, especially the WPCs."

I would be gratified if this complimentary copy could be incorporated
into the Wembley Police Station Library, if such there is. Failing that, please
accept it as a personal gift to the highest ranking WPC at your station. Or
anyone else - should the latter be inconvenient - who loves a damn good read.

Best personal regards,

Sign.

Ah well, boys will be boys - (Max doesn't have much finesse) - so I guess I'll need to be sweet to him...

Dreamy

APPLETON SPECIAL!

2009-01-23T11:53:00.006Z

"...meant to say but keep forgetting, you should post some samples from
your book on your blog - the equivalent of letting a potential buyer flick
through a book in Waterstone's.
Best wishes etc.... "
Elberry

The above is from an e-mail I received a little while
ago. And below is, not an excerpt from the book in question, but the version of
an extract which I myself posted, in the fall of 2004, to Gillon Aitken
Associates, Literary Agents, London S.W.10.

“As for the story I cannot really see the point in dwelling on it.“ I
wrote. “It has a beginning and an ending, a denouement where you would expect
it, some truly offensive language and some psychotically violent and
child-chillingly hideous villains. I know what you're thinking - I'm under no
illusions here - but it seems to me that in spite of an appearance of
considerable complexity, any story is only as good as the telling. The proof of
the pudding, in other words, lies in the reading.” And lets be frank about this,
I’m never even going to attempt a *great* fictional masterpiece. My passion is
philosophy and the pursuit of reason. But I am not, as might have happened once,
above writing a damn good social satire or, in the event, even entertain a few
people.

Unsurprisingly, Kate S. was ‘not in love with it.’“I didn’t find myself
responding positively so I’m obviously not the right agent for you,” she wrote
with impeccable common sense. Bless her.

If the eminently sullen nature of my query produced a response which no
consideration of literary irreverence could mitigate, the fifth chapter would
definitely have put paid to any possibility of that. Not because it’s the
slightest chapter. But because the temperate Ms Shaw could not possibly have
approved of it. Frankly, I myself was astonished one morning in the summer of
2003, in the midst of my deepest slumber, to learn that I had been placed under
arrest. And, for those of you who might suggest that my life has been an ongoing
triumph of impeccable conduct, I am afraid to say, the allegation was one of a
serious sexual nature.
And here’s how the whole thing started.
My friend Benny told me about this party and how it was going to have all
the cutest chicks in town. The instant I arrived, he said “Try the Appleton
Special“.
I had barely opened my mouth.
Then his pals and their girlfriends piled in. Six hours later I found
myself at a police station in Wembley Park - a West London district of whose
existence I had previously been altogether ignorant.
I was stripped naked. A desk sergeant asked me a quantity of highly
inappropriate questions. A custody officer advised me on my rights. I was then
supplied with a prison issue boiler-suit - entirely made of paper - and
"charged" with affray, sexual harassment and attempted rape!
Imagine that!
Then the cell! A bunk, a sink, a john.
No amenities, except for a paperback left lying on the bunk. ‘The Satanic
Verses‘. I’m not even a fan of Salman Rushdie‘s. The only thing I like about him
is his incredibly lovely fourth wife. That said, I may not have the prominence
of Salman R., but the reason I don’t have his wife is not my lack of virility.
That thought cheered me up a lot. Whatever was going to happen next, I
blissfully drifted off to sleep.
My slumber was interrupted when an audible gasp arose from a startled woman
PC who tugged at my sleeve and pointed in the direction of my groin. I snapped awake. For reasons completely unrelated to my libido, an awkward matter had presented itself. It looked three-dimensional. It felt three-dimensional. It was unmistakable:
A giant erection!
As I lay napping on my bunk, a highly volatile and critical development had been unfolding in my boiler-suit. It seemed like the prelude to an explosion. Given the nature of the paper vestment, nothing substantial restrained the projection. The WPC then said that I could be guilty of an offence of indecent exposure with intent to insult a female under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. The maximum penalty, she added was three months imprisonment.
She was looking at the ceiling, not at me.
Nor could I possibly have conceived that the English criminal justice
system and a natural urinary inclination could be combined to form such a devastating indictment. I scarcely knew what to say. I also explained that my physical appearance was the result of too much Appleton Special, a giant hangover, and pressure on the bladder.
What else was there to say? That I was pleased to see her?
I didn’t tell her about Salman’s wife, though. No need to get cute with the
law.
Nor did I mention that the Appleton Special was 100% proof. That it can
cause double vision, pink hallucinations and visitations from airborne
elephants, is what I have also good reason to believe.
As I was led into the interrogation room the constable simply waved me
inside. He did his best to ignore the fact that there was an unauthorized
hard-on on the make. Flushed with adrenalin, it was still straining to gain
altitude. The paper suit seemed remarkably compliant. There was nothing
ambiguous about it. The cops kept their distance. Once inside, though, there was
a universal gasp, and it wasn’t one of approbation. It was evident the
detective-sergeant in charge of the interrogation alternated between
astonishment and reprimand.
“Good Lord,” he said, stating the obvious.
“Force majeure!” I replied, by way of explanation.
“Straighten up, man!” he said - not without awe.
Hardly the best move to make under the circumstances!
“Sit down!” he barked.I was happy enough to do that.
“Are you drunk?”I admitted I was.
“Do you have a drinking problem?”“No, Sir,” I said. “I have a problem
staying sober!”
He didn’t crack a smile. Privately, of course, I agree, my appearance told
heavily against me, even though the only credible piece of evidence produced by
the Crown was a substantial erection. How substantial depends on which account
you believe. Mine or the police’s.
And that’s about the size of it.

Meanwhile, I want to set your minds at ease as much as I can. I want you to
know that I was granted bail in accordance with the Bail Act, 1976, under the
provisions of Section 34/37 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, and granted
unconditional release. Would it bother you if I also claimed that I am less
disturbed by the evidence I presented to the Crown, than by seeing that the
question of my gender should have become the subject of so much hesitation on
this board? Conflating fact and fiction, I would remind you, is the essence of a
writers' license, and so far as you are concerned, gentlemen bloggers, perverts and doggers,
rest assured that I always considered, and shall continue
to consider, myself delectably, scrumptiously, deliciously...

Miss (!!) Selena Dreamy

A Review of THE BETTER MAKER

2009-01-21T11:38:00.007Z

THE BETTER MAKER by Walter Aske.
Lulu 278 pp £ 7.29

"I mean that I came home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous and even more cruel and inhuman - because I have been among human beings" Seneca

Walter Aske has a way with words. "Darkly attractive with words" - to paraphrase Sini Kaattari, one of his main characters. Nor is he part of a literary movement or creative writing club, but a man of great introspection and originality. For his main theme, unprofessed, is undoubtedly himself. Maintaining a symbiotic colloquy with love and despair, The Better Maker is an excellent example of how the use of language sets one apart; how its rendition, not the story is paramount.

Using a well-established literary device that allows one timescale to
be relevant to another, Patrick Sadler's Italian fast-forwards give his life a
posthumous meaning as well as guiding the eye of the reader to the ultimate
denouement of his literary composition. On the face of it, Patrick seems
destined to be a pariah. Morose, insular, lugubrious, he has in effect turned
himself into an outcast. Again and again, his adult behaviour has roots in his
childhood: ...his introspection, his suspicion of his own insignificance, his
self-obsession, his ambiguous relations with Sini Kaattari and - of which she is
seen as the epitome - with Polly‘s nose. One remains profoundly struck by the
miserable aspect he presents. Rigid with intimidation, he has a defeated look
about him. A symptom, no doubt, of the overarching need to be loved. Perhaps the
story is apocryphal. But it has the sound of psychological truth. And on this
point as on others it does not lack credibility

Above all there is a sense of restless uncertainty:

"He studied her for some hint of his failure, why she had withdrawn
from him in the Leech Hall, and avoided him since. And why now she had taken him
into her kitchen, and offered him tea, or coffee, or hot chocolate even. Then
his gaze dropped and he stared at the table, fighting to withstand the love that
would compel him to speak, to speak and so err in her strange kingdom. If his
love had scared her so, then he must act outside of love; but that misleading
angel had him, as surely as ever. Within a minute his easy, sleepy warmth had
contracted to silence. He was barely aware of her or himself; he had sealed
himself into a numbness from which he could act without love. The music met the
silences strangely.”

While he endures a major psychological crisis - that of falling in love
- people around Patrick Sadler are both charmed and alarmed by his tranquil
defiance of convention. Like the Roman Seneca, Patrick is dismayed with himself,
but even more dismayed with his fellow men, and he functions on the assumption
that they are not to be trusted. At the same time, one is struck by his strange
passivity in the face of his “Torment.” Reacting with the same stoicism he has
displayed as a child, the victim refuses to protest the treatment the world is
dishing out to him. Tortured by inner demons and a sense of his own
worthlessness, he's less of an arrogant or Rimbaudlean rakehell than he is an
abandoned and impassive outcast. His entire attitude is complete denial.

Some of its content makes repetitive reading. There are too many recurring,
campus canteens that badly need to have their mash potatoes fed to the pigs. And
a number of his dialogues are diminished by a plethora of insider innuendo. A
sort of campus repartee. I wonder, too, whether the university content isn't
responsible for some the style, which, at times, is remorselessly collegiate. In
fact, the atmosphere is, if not pretentious, somewhat affected, even if the
finest passages are composed in an archaic, oblique and enigmatic style with a
terseness that - for all its infusion of "fearful secrecy" - has few equals. Or
at least, few that I know of. And yet, paranoia can be catching. Becoming ever
more detached and mysterious - in the words of Sini: "You are not exactly human”
- their "forbidden" relationship seems more suited to the sadistic moral
universe of 13th century Florence than the Runnkirk of 1999.

"He dreamt of her death. he dreamt of his. Knives in the night. He woke
in his flat and rolled to his unsteady feet, listening and waiting, then unable
to sleep, worried for Sini across the town. They both waited their end, her
shaming, and what hell would follow after. Their love did not feel blessed and
wonderful; it was urgent. They both talked of how long they could love like
this, before a world they both saw as cruel and stupid found them out. They
shared an intimation of doom that went beyond scandal or separation"

Fear feeds on itself and prophecies of doom become self-fulfilling:
“Sini died on Christmas day.”

One of Walter Aske's amazing qualities is the potently
self-deprecating irony and wit that he applies to potentially heart-rending
situations. His ability to handle emotional restraint is extraordinary. There is
a memorable scene in the nocturnal college library where Patrick feels haunted
by a ghost - which then turns out to be Sini incarnate, who promptly takes him
home. What follows is a tragicomedy. He declares his love for her as he lies
prostrate under a pile of vestments from a coat-rack which has collapsed and
buried him. One wonders what Henry Miller would have made of it - the great
master of the hilarious and grotesque. And Strindberg's taste for bad omens
would have been no less well served - to take the other extreme. Indeed, some
may argue that if you are used as a butt for fate or buried under a pile of
coats, some of love's dignity is lost. But even though Patrick is hardly
expansive in his emotions, for the time being he appears a contented man.

He dreaded the fading of his love for Sini - and so did I. In truth, I
felt a terrible hole in my stomach. And, I suppose, if I'm honest, I also felt
affronted when "she took his now eager cock in his mouth". It jars (- which is,
of course, precisely the point that the author is making). Polly Church, on the
other hand, never lives up to her promise. I retained a feeling of distinct
unfamiliarity. "The one deeper, bonded in his blood and bone; the other an
unsettled revenant, a catalyst." The result, inevitably, is an untidy compromise
until I lost them again in a long bluster about Schubert, Mozart, St Augustine,
Apocalypse, Christ and the pretensions of literary theorists. Followed with
another exegesis by Polly Church on Abelard and Heloise in - if I have got this
right - Dante's Inferno, plus a giddy succession of non sequiturs blazing away
with all the dizzying complexities I had previously devoured about Patrick’s
disintegrating life. It was 3 am - the hour of the wolf - and I had enough of
death, Satan, the Viking and a man called Gaston who devotes himself unashamedly
to succeeding as a bohemian temp. I told myself we'd reached the central fire.

Now, I am no great creative writing fan. And some books have a longer
life than their authors. Most of them don't. But I have a hunch that what makes
The Better Maker unique has more to do with the dark poetic spirit of its
author, the vogue for personal deprecation and its spark of nihilistic chemistry
than with any capacity for explicit, blatant mainstream perceptions. The author
started as he meant to go on and he writes well, in an "untutored" fashion.
Clearly, in scale, scope and significance this is an Erstlingswerk, and I had an
extraordinary sense of its singularity. In fact, Walter Aske is an accomplished
communicator, but he also needs to be a skilled editor in order to render the
intricate convolutions of the story accessible to the more general reader - for
that "less is more” continues to be an excellent recommendation, here as
elsewhere. Commercial success, admittedly, is only a remote possibility. But
then, success and genius are not synonymous - far from it! In fact, he would
never make it as a writer-in-residence employed by Camden or Islington Arts
Council. And we should all be thankful for that!

Oh, and lest I forget, if you have never heard of Walter Aske , you may be surprised to learn that he is none other, of course, than Elberry of The Lumber Room.

Dreamy

KEYNESIAN INSANITY...

2009-01-18T18:30:00.001Z

Kayfabe: "Our Government tells us it's expecting to borrow £60bn this year
and a further £100bn next. Many other countries in Europe will be doing much the
same. In the US, as we know, Congress famously approved an extra $700bn of
borrowing to fund the bail-outs. Obama says he's going to spend a similar amount
on New Deal style projects - in addition to the regular Federal deficit of a
$trillion or so. So I dunno... how much new Global borrowing does all this add
up to? Couple of $trillion? Five trillion.. more?"

Yep, much more! $ 53, 000 000 000 000 trillion, to be exact!

According to the financial expert David Walter ("An American Time
Bomb"), America's total liabilities, including public debts, actually amount to
$ 11 trillion, added to which there are currently unfunded obligations in social
security benefits of $ 7 trillion. Unfunded medicare promises, apparently, add
up to some $ 34 trillion, to which for good measure he attaches another $ 1
trillion for miscellaneous requirements. All of which adds up to a grand total
of $ 53 trillion in terms of negative equity - or $ 175. 000 000 per person - in
order to deliver on the obligations and promises of the US government.

I, personally, cannot vouch for these figures. But anyway you slice it,
wowza! There is nothing in human experience to compare with it. What we are
dealing with here is not an event of negative equity, but a process of financial
meltdown at a rate ten times higher than the growth of population.

Meanwhile, in America, apart from the huge tax-cutting and public-spending
package sketched out by Barack Obama last week, its central bank, The Federal
Reserve, has already stepped up its quantitative easing, as if we could conjure
away financial immolation and find economic immortality through printing
banknotes. But perhaps our most spectacular failure is with the fundamental
problem of balancing the structure of the global economy with the demands of the
global ecology. While the future will be disintegrating in yet another ferocious
spiral of boom and bust, all efforts would have to be concentrated on urban
demographic growth in order to increase the world's fiscal population. Precisely
because growth and productivity are linked to the volume of consumer population,
the only answer to long-term economic decline, is more humans and plenty of
them. Nor - in the full understanding that this, too, is an adjournment rather
than a annulment of an inevitable confrontation - does it offset the burgeoning
new carbon emissions created by the requisite high birth rate and the steady
flow of migrants to the West.

Here is a human explosion waiting to happen!

And carbon capture technology, to tell the truth, will not be keeping
pace with the urban population increase. It is a classic case of untested
assertions. Carbon trading, too, is by definition a strictly temporary
expedient. I have no fundamental objection to such Keynesian ideas as
deficit-financing - I don't understand it, so I don't object to it - but if
Messrs Brown & Co are confident that we should continue to consume more than
we produce, it is obvious to me, that Keynesian insanity is a natural result of
the belief in charlatanism. Indian jugglers may perform such feats of
escapology. But then, of course, they are tied up inside a sack and thrown into
a river. Which rather suggests to me that Anglo-American conmen should be
treated likewise.

There is no way to spin it, folks. The dirty fact of the matter is,
that we can’t escape; we can’t hide; and we can’t possibly have the cake and eat it.

Dreamy

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE...

2009-01-06T18:53:00.003Z

LIVING OUTSIDE TIME: "When I think about the character of China I struggle.
This surely is not only because I do not know the language. I sense that it is a
different world, not just a different part of the world. Despite the obvious,
profound differences between Islam and the West; despite, moreover, the
increased personal freedoms here in China - with respect to personal matters
such as alcohol and relationships – I do feel that China is more exotic and
strange to me than was Kuwait."

Cultural differences are like alien worlds. Indeed, culture moulds our thoughts so much that we cannot even conceptualise ideas for which we do not have precedents. And the value and
rightness of Western knowledge are not empirical absolutes. Which often makes me
wonder how presumtuous it is, indeed - as if they were divinely ordained - to
measure everything by the moral standards of the West...

The Judean-Christian morality may well be regarded as the chief
instrument regulating legislative questions subsequent to the Roman Empire. But
I, myself, am more than puzzled. What Christianity achieved by a bold stroke of
dogmatism, the world now accepts as an inherent good, which plainly it is not.
It is nothing but the identification of the supreme power with the supremely
self-serving choice. And by that identification the Anglo-American dominated
West bestows upon itself a legitimate and divinely sanctioned international
authority. And don’t tell me, folks, that world supremacy was not acquired by
effective and brazen occupation.

Nor does it prevent me from recognizing that oriental cultures have
completely different conceptions of either freedom or personal constraint.
Muslim culture wilting under the heel of the American imperialist, means more to
its adherents than all the social opportunities of a way of life directed at
nothing but the pursuit of happiness. And just how honestly anyone can claim
that the world promised by America is the best of all possible worlds, is rather
a matter of perspective. As for that freedom we worship so much, we have
considered chiefly its rewards. Impressive though it is, it may well be the
secularised version of the descent into Hell. So far as Islamists are concerned,
every constraint and taboo which builds a civilized society has been swept away.
Sexual license is at a premium, the dissolution of the family progressive,
homosexual union administratively sanctioned, paedophilia rife, crime out of
control, violence glorified, drugs the great sustainer of the multitudes.
Whereas Islam - with its gigantic affirmation of Allah - has all the attributes
associated with the propagation of the human heritage and the continuity of the
species.

Or has it? Or is that which dominates the entire bloody sequence of
current events but a dichotomous fanaticism, impounded in its own mad,
delusional "freedom" one the one hand, and a deeply entrenched fundamentalism on
the other?

It is never a matter of iniquity. It is always a matter of cultural or
religious perspective. But it is compelling, nevertheless, to observe how the behaviour of one
side always reinforces that of the other.

There is no way I am going to forego the freedom my Western heritage
bestows. But while you and I believe it possible for Western Hellenistic
Enlightenment, ultimately, to democratise the entire globe, I personally, find
it an imposition to think that a fourteen-hundred year old theocratic culture
like that of Iraq or Afghanistan can be emancipated during the course of a
single war. The reform of Islam is a contradiction of terms. The democratisation
of Islam signals the death of its own oriental identity. Nothing less. Indeed,
let the record show that this war has been responsible for turning the austere
religious tenets of an obscure Saudi tribe - the Wahhabis - into a worldwide
Islamic fundamentalist revival!

Dreamy

A (PSYCHO)-ANALYITICAL ABC OF MY FAVOURITE BLOGGERS AND DOGGERS - and a Happy New Year to ye all….

2009-01-01T18:15:00.014Z

ALL SHOOK UP: Though a brilliant logician and an enviable blogger whose writing is clear and lucid, ASU clearly cannot see the forest for the rubber trees. I suspect it relates to his fundamental inability to embrace the fact that he does not exist. The human mind is perversely immune to such logic, and ASU cannot be sure he is ruthless enough to believe in a philosophy informed by mind-bending quantum equations and distorted by relativistic insights. For some, quantum physics is still a religion, and the knowledge and mastery of science the centre of its mysteries. Astrologers such as Mystic Meg, of course, will tell you that they've known this all along, but the experience has done nothing to change ASU’s mind. Indeed, he has difficulties restraining his annoyance at the complacent arrogance of Selena’s tone, and I am fully conscious that such censure is well and truly judged. Trust me to mock someone whose only crime has been to be a agreeable and generous conversationalist. Shame on you, Miss Dreamy.

APPLEYARD: A regular domestic Messiah, see BRYAN

BLOGGERS: Everyone, it seems, is at it, except the paedophiles and the
Brownies. Rabble-rousers, liberals, bigots, zealots, pornographers, the
pro-lifers, homophobics, psychopaths, and even the Sioux. A constant flow of
hard drive addicts who rant to get their latest fix. In terms of subject matter,
it's open season. Frankly, if someone's going to have an vacuous, pointless
hobby, I'd rather it was sex. I only read bloggers who adore fornication and are
enthusiastic about the death penalty. In any case, I have never been at ease
with this world of digits, where you can't tell whether anyone is who they say
they are, and that obviously excludes myself. But you know what scares me most
of all? Bloggers are like the bubonic pest, the black death, the plague of
locusts - you can never kill them off!

BOB: The Dutch like to lecture other countries about the evils of too
much legislation, and Bob is a man who can detect flaws down to the atomic level
of intellectual resolution. But whereas I believe that reality is an illusion
that can only exist in the mind, his point indubitably is, that the world turns
on mutually exclusive delusions, and that it is never as simple as black and
white.

BRYAN: Never trust a man who uses self-deprecation, it is impossible to
provoke him. Afflicted with an inner restlessness that is compounded by a
chronic inability to sleep, Bryan’s psychological profile fits the contours of a
high-functioning intellectual suffering from emotional deprivation. There is
little doubt that Bryan desires to be loved. Or that this tenderness towards
himself may cost others dearly. Though I did all I could to be provocative, he
stubbornly refuses to be engaged. Understandably! At stake is his whole design for living, the
dream of a liberal intellectual who has built his career entirely on academic
ephemerals. Bryan has lived on the edge of great ideas, and his shoptalk abounds
in tantalizingly loose ends. But does his clean, unchallenged reputation stand
up to scrutiny? Or has the Messiah lost his call? The buzzards are circling.
Beware the Ides of March.

DICK MADELEY: A pseudonymous identity is not the same as a phoney
identity. Is your identity defined by law, or by what you believe you are, in
your own mind? Handsome, shrewd and disarmingly affable, Dick’s first discovery
of himself was of a man as far as possible removed from Richard in origins and
fortune. But behind every great man, it is said, there is a great valet. And as
such he has become confidante and counsellor of numerous television
personalities and society ladies, including his charming spouse Judy, to whom he
preaches an admirable if outdated nineteenth-century morality. See RICHARD
MADELEY APPRECIATION SOCIETY

DREAMY: As a blogger I am not worth much but I have the advantage that
others are worse. As a leggy blonde in hotpants and stilettos I really am a
cliché, a woman driven by oestrogen, rather than expertise - but inevitably I
have a lot more admirers then (see) SELENA

CRUSHED BY INSOC: Crushed needs no attempts at cheerleading from
myself, idolised as he is by his numerous readers. Everyone agrees that he is
clever and charming but in truth, as yet, I don’t really know him. Evidently, he
is an operator who beguiles his audience. And an affable participant in the
genteel, informal debates on uncontroversial subjects, such as sex and cocaine. May he blog happily ever after…

ELBERRY: Elberry is the laureate of
the loner. Witches and sorcerers are still proscribed, but Elberry is spreading.
Born of bitterness and cynicism he has the whiff of the serial killer about him
( – which, I sense, is l’eau du morgue). In certain ways he’s representative of
what's wrong with all of us. Because we owe our identity largely to psychotic
forces and have no wish to appear a failure to ourselves, we feel bound to pour
scorn on the rest of world. These experiences are indeed consistent; they are
nothing but the ever-present grievance of the humbled man. Elberry’s problem is
not original in this respect. But rather than plunge into a deep depression or
suffer invisible blows to his psyche, he reacts with the same obduracy: (alternatively: see ÜBERMENSCH). Also see THE LUMBER ROOM

HAVERS of HAVERING ON: The last of his kind, writer and musicologist
Richard Havers can be found, fortuitously but appropriately, in the heartland of
northern politics where the principal source of all moral wealth is England
still. And the unreserved aversion which he shares with almost everyone for the
Scottish author of our economic discontent is more than matched by his total
contempt for the devious turncoat Mandelson. It takes a remarkable investment to
dislike as keenly as he does, though, in truth, I’ve often thought of shooting
Mandelson myself.

HELEN's FIRST LANGUAGE: Why are there so few women at the highest level of science…?

JONATHAN: A man whose comments reveal a high level of irritability, and
whose leitmotif is a never-ending: "I don't understand…” He believes that the
heart's creative wisdom has a more important message than the logic of the mind
and needs his Saviour like a father. His anxiety is like that of a child fearing
abandonment. I shook him to the core, because he suddenly saw the fundamental
dilemma besetting his personal destiny when reproduced on a higher,
anthropomorphic plane. No doubt his crucial hesitation is whether our idea of
God can be purely spiritual or must be in part at least, be an anthropic one.
Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Jonathan’s investment. In
fact, I don't know any seeker after the truth of whom I am disposed to think
more highly.

THE LUMBER ROOM: Glum bulletins proliferate, but
spurred on perhaps by simultaneous perusal of the tractates of those very
elusive thinkers Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, Elberry’s public transformation
from college pariah to exiled intellectual is now almost complete. The LUMBER
ROOM’s true purpose - despite some rather odd personal statements - makes one
feel that he is sustained and animated by the whole notion of literature, and it
is that which seems to have prevented him from turning himself into nothing but
a self-lacerating outcast. The Lumber Room is a remarkable mixture of insider's
knowledge, philosophical speculation and literary assimilation. Highly recommended.

McCABE: Gordon acts the part of the theoretical
physicist brilliantly, but philosophy, you feel, has never really been his first
love. Prompted by nonhuman emotions and perceptions, the logical, unemotional
part of his blog is performed excellently. But always remember that he will
employ scrupulously formal syntax, and that there is no conspicuous
demonstration of wit. Mathematical reasoning is the only way to grasp the
fundamentals that lie behind what Gordon observes. Where others have a vision,
Gordon has a balance sheet. But thank you, nevertheless, Dr McCabe. I always
profit from your blog. As a specialist in data processing, you have, at all
events, provided us with the certified statistician’s view of philosophy.

RICHARD MADELEY APPRECIATION SOCIETY. Many bloggers are tremendous
for a few instalments and then become dull, embarrassing self-parodists for the
rest of their time. Nor do I wish to suggest anything of the kind. On the
contrary. I know Richard Madeley is an intellectually most alert and very
complicated individual, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my
part if I were, in any way, to second-guess his motives. The Richard Madeley
Appreciation Society is one of the great classics in blogging history. But the
tragedy of Dick’s talent is the missed opportunities it represents. If you want
to drive a man to become a radical destroyer of his proper genius, just give him
half a dozen blogs…

MUTLEYTHEDOG: Lovable, cuddly, in the most promiscuous sense. A canine
who said nothing that could not be found on the walls of a public convenience
and whom I’ve previously nominated as my choice for comedian of the year. Fact
is, I seriously intend to retrain as a counsellor for people who have been
exposed to Mutley’s website, or been contaminated by his wit. Which, roughly,
amounts to 15% of the UK population.

NIGE: The little Little Englander. Sublimely believes in the divine origins of Shakespeare. A gracious blogger. Tasteful. Exemplary. Nige writes carefully, elaborate when necessary, but in that proper English tradition which includes humour and élan and just a trifle recklessness whenever so appropriate.

THE OVERMAN: The Who? A signed copy of my best-selling autobiography
plus gratuitous sex (where applicable) for the first correct answer!

PERCY: No one can ever say you lack candour, Sir Percy - a
conclusion entirely uncompromised by his rough, untrimmed beard. Veteran biker
and a man of strong will, fixed opinions and mercurial temperament, he seems
ideal for the type of woman who says “let there be war.” Still ponders the
amount of sperm he dispensed since first he worshipped at Selena’s fountain.
He’s disappointed when people agree with him, so he dissents just for the hell
of it. What happens next is anyone's guess -
see PERVERTS

PERVERTS: see Percy

SELENA: Polemic backed up by a considerable body of research, and genius is an
amplifier often used when promoting herself. In fact, she has a tendency not to
engage in conversations, but to descend into them, often from an elusive height.
She is dogmatic, overbearing, deceptively articulate, with a sort of despotic
predominance and a tendency to overrule everyone. Irritating at best, obnoxious
at her worst - your continued patience is appreciated. See ÜBERMENSCH

SUSAN B: one of Bryan’s favourite groupies, Susan is an uplifting
discovery. Refreshingly of her own mind. Independent, highly literate, though
given to daydreams and flights of adulation. Like her a lot.

THE SPINE: This weblog is well grounded, brilliant, perceptive,
sublimely satirical!

TRADITIO ET VIRTUS: So much about blogs is down to atmosphere and
conception. This has a stillness, suggesting an almost serene engagement. The
fascination of a poet's soul for the power of the infinite. Reach for the stars
but eschew the gutter - behold, we can make thoughts come
true…

ÜBERMENSCH: “The noble type of man feels himself to
be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges ’what
harms me is harmful in itself.’ He knows himself to be that which in general
first accords honour to things, he creates values.“ (Nietzsche, Zarathustra).

DREAMY

INDIA KNIGHT AND THE DOWN'S SYNDROME or Argumentation by Abuse

2008-12-11T13:58:00.003Z

“Parents of a Down’s child must make painful choices” says Minette
Marrin

“You forgot about love when it comes to Downs Syndrome” says India
Knight

“What Marrin seems unable to grasp is that these things –
time, stress, expense, anxiety, tears – are sacrifices that parents are happy to
make because they love their children. There is no mention of love in the 1,050
words of her column, nor of hope or faith or compassion or even kindness.”

Conversely, there is plenty of compassion but little wisdom in India
Knights account. Sniffing out insults where non exist and hot on revenge, India
ostentatiously avoids all reference to the gist of Minette’s argument.
Obviously, so far as she is concerned, Minette Marrin’s impartial analysis broke
all the codes of social deference. Deference to deficiency, that is. And such
things rankle. As it turns out, it really is far more fruitful to analyse India
Knight as a cultural phenomenon than as an over-astute
respondent.

“The (rather telling) point c) – who would have sex
with these people? – is bizarre. Do we need to concern ourselves with the
question of whether the sexual needs of our unborn child are likely to be met in
adulthood?”

Yes we do! Absolutely! Self-serving love and doting affection are good
for the soul - but what about the afflicted? Quite obviously, India has no
comprehension of her own responsibility as a parent. With medical advances and
social care, the chance for self-expression are incomparably higher than at any
time before, admittedly, but so are the odds against social happiness. Nor does
it make the syndrome enviable. I am impressed by the deep emotion and the cry of
anguish, but no one is condemned to die, nor is anyone talking about euthanasia
or eugenics - we only reserve to ourselves the choice of the right decision.

“Besides, what are we to do with other sexual undesirables –
should we cull the fat? The ugly? What about the old, with their spindly bones,
eating up National Health Service resources and, if Alzheimer’s strikes,
mentally retarded to boot? They just sit, all doddery – not many takers on the
rumpo front. What’s the point of them?”

Harsh words indeed - and this is where the lady is loosing the plot. I
suppose we can forgive the columnist for that most human of sins, argument by
abuse, but it seems unnecessarily harsh on the old and the ugly. What’s more,
the hints could hardly have been plainer. Isn’t a society judged by the way it
treats the old. I have no children of my own, but I did have a mother with
cancer, and a father incapacitated by a stroke, who both died cared for, by
myself, at home. And perhaps it would be best if we looked after them at home,
rather than dispatch them, “all doddery” to the social services in order to make
room for those condemned to live the greater part of their shortened, damaged
lives in considerable mental and physical incapacity.

“I would never deny any woman the right to make an informed choice about her pregnancy. I didn’t know about my daughter’s condition when I was pregnant; it is possible that, had I known, I would have had an abortion. Fear, prejudice and articles that reinforce both would have helped me along. Needless to say, I’m glad I
didn’t have a termination. But that’s not the point.”

But that, precisely, is the point, my dear India. Your kind of
reasoning shows all the signs of misrepresentation by hindsight. Whereas Minette
talks about informed perspectives and the painful complexity of pre-emptive
antenatal choices, you talk about the love of a mother, which is unqualified,
wholly acknowledged and should never be denied. Now, here’s a clueless mother. A
woman who knows everything but herself. It doesn't get any more irrational than
that.

“Abortion is a personal, subjective choice. I question the
wisdom of a columnist passing off her ugly, out-moded opinions as sound advice.”

It stands out rather conspicuously in retrospect, and I don't think I
had noticed it myself until Miss Knight drew my attention to it, but - quite
unlike the abusive India - Minette Marrin acquitted herself rationally, coolly
and concisely. As for being outmoded in her opinions, well, this may indeed be a
factor in the public perception of her reasoned perspective, informed as our
society is by a much more insidious type of cruelty.

“The father of a teenage boy with Down’s told me last
week that he fears Marrin’s view is one that may be shared by the majority of
people…He is wrong, I think…That world has gone, and with it the ugliness Marrin
gave vent to last week. My experience, and that of my correspondents, is real.
We know that life can be tough but that people are fundamentally good and
compassionate….Nobody is embarrassed. Most urban children know at least one
child with a disability…And that is human and tender and complicated and
beautiful.”

So there you have it. Compassionate stereotypes abound. The rise of the
PC welfare society has largely coincided with the spread of a social altruism
that finds the debilitation of their society cause for enthusiastic celebration.
An attitude that fêtes its own mediocrity and initiates the irreversible process
of its own demise. The premonitions are well laid out here. Indeed, there is no
better way to feel like an outcast than to be brilliant or strive for
excellence. As an idealist, you're on your own. While the planet is reeling
under the weight of 7 billion human beings, soon to be twice that number, India
wishes to increase the burden. Leaving aside her giant disregard for the
realities of global demographics, Miss Knight’s ferocious protestation of her
own maternal property rights is but contempt for everyone else's. There is no
notion that the rights of humanity outweigh the rights of the individual. Nor
does anyone question the fact that the duty of humanity is first and foremost
that we should care for the meek and aid the afflicted, and consequently no
provision should exclude their care; but how all this adds to the evolutionary
fitness of the human species is rather less apparent. And I, for one, am
extremely disturbed by the current hysteria of the times, of which this kind of
attitude seems to be a manifestation. This is sheer parody, a case of
high-functioning incapacity, the demented, idiotic perspective of the lobby
extremist who turns people with physical or learning disabilities into icons and
expect the rest of society to cede our freedom of choice to fear and phoney
sensitivities.

Dreamy

JACQUI SMITH AND PROSTITUTION…

2008-12-03T16:35:00.005Z

Some forms of idiocy are circumstantial, perhaps, but considerable
nevertheless. That the current Labour administration requests the
criminalisation of punters whenever prostitutes are controlled for another man’s
gain, is a stark demonstration of the fact that Jacqui Smith, like Harriet
Harman, is either at the extreme limits of self-deception or totally detached
from reality.

Even more suggestive was the excellent Minette Marrin. Her headline ran
prominently - and with just a hint of irony - in the Comment section of The
Sunday Times: “Slithery Jacqui Smith wants a back-door ban on prostitution.“

Oooops…

“What she wants is to deal with the “demand side” of prostitution: if
only men didn’t demand sexual services, there wouldn’t need to be any nasty
supply” - which, of course, is rather like putting the cart before the horse
…erm stallion. To wit, if there were no scantily dressed females, enticing
x-rated flics, dirty movies, provocative ads, lascivious lap-dancers, teenagers
prancing in discos, thongs, G-strings and six-inch fuck-me-stilettos, there
would be much less demand. For that the first will be followed by the second I
can, with knowledge of the matter, affirm. Sex is a cultural no less than an
economic phenomenon, and on the evidence available, I favour a less fictitious
reading: that men are as hopelessly trapped as are women, to say nothing of
grinding, lonesome, unforgiving urgency of it.

Whether we like it or not, from the point of view of that trend, our
sex-crazed culture tempts people to do an “evil” action and then prevents them
from doing it. Men, by their cultural conditioning, have a hard-on, if that’s not
too apposite a phrase, for ready lascivious curves and for prostitutes that
accommodate, and the recourse to trafficked women, the spread of venereal
disease, the advent of sexual delinquency in terms of rapes and drug dealers,
traffickers, ponces and heroin addicts are the direct result of legislating
against the most fundamental needs of human nature.

The public happily allows itself to be deceived, but men will kill for
sex! Indeed, when all possible allowances have been made for today’s sexual
offender, with no more moral sense than a beast of prey, the problem is actually
insoluble. On the other hand, it may also be all we deserve. 'There is no evil
between men and women,' it has been said, 'that is not a common evil'. No one,
in short, is blameless, but as someone observed of D.H. Lawrence, he 'was no
doubt right in describing as vampires his women characters; the men, soon to
join them as “undead,” have by some defect of the moral will, made them so.'
Bound together by one predominant quality - the power of the opposite sex - he
is as much her victim as she is his.

As far back as 1358 the Grand Council of Venice declared that
prostitution was 'absolutely indispensable to the world', and the Venetian way
was to control and to provide regulations rather than to censor the ban.
Cultural trappings of the Venetians aside, there was an admirable raft of
reasons why this should be beneficial. And why all of that revenue should today
be lost for a raft of opposite reasons I simply don’t understand.

I feel sorry for Jacqui, and a little guilty. An out-of-shape middle-aged woman with a somewhat glazed expression she couldn’t possibly comprehend what I’ve achieved with my tits’n’ass. I've left the business now. And it may only have been the fourth or fifth time when last I
made a professional visit to the Houses of Parliament, whereas Jacqui does so on
a daily basis. But what has her vagina ever done for the Home Secretary, except
made her feel inadequate: “I wouldn’t walk down a street alone at night.” Poor
Jacqui! Nor does she have to assume the absurd and humiliating pose of bending
over to exercise her sphincter. Inadequacy provides no revelations and no
insights. Indeed, the defence against a fear of inadequacy can sometimes be
daydreams and detachment from reality. But, whether you like it or not, dear Jacqui,
prostitution is an organic necessity, and I believe I’ve ennobled that
necessity.

Dreamy

THE ÜBERMENSCH CONSPIRACY

2008-11-29T18:36:00.010Z

Yup, I went through some rather agonizing moments in the bath this morning and I’ve come up with the conclusion that the only solution is to own up.
Silence is a wonderful weapon, but then, no one really knows how to handle it - especially me… and under present legislation I could actually be held for 28
days on nothing but dry bread and water…

Yuk…!

Here, then, is THE ÜBERMENSCH CONSPIRACY, and you win no prizes for guessing that this is what finally led Special Branch to conclude that they were wasting the government’s time and resources on an inquiry that was going nowhere. In fact, I make bold to prophesy that this will be the future stance of MI5 after they have perused its contents, i.e. a dead-pan parody of international
conspiracy and of certain strains of political hypocrisy. Max McDowell’s angle is not altogether the conventional one, admittedly, but, I for one, remain profoundly struck by the forensic evidence presented. And clearly, the involvement of such individuals as foreign secretaries, ministers of the interior and heads of states is so pervasive in any case, that they tend to fall outside or go beyond the scope of the merely judicial process.

Nevertheless, McDowell has scored an impressive world exclusive. An
expatriate based in London, he’s a tough, self-regulating character with an
astute and ever-present sense of life's absurdity. It is of course painful for me
to know how much I have contributed to his present dilemma, and the passage of
two weeks has done nothing to assuage his outrage. But what we have here is a
personal eyewitness account, documenting seemingly cheap satirical fiction which in
reality is down and dirty fact. Indeed, the fact is, that police only withdrew a
file on his findings to the Crown Prosecution Service last month after an
undercover investigation by Der Spiegel judged it to be a John Grisham emulation. You will
realize what can be done with this sort of story by a writer with the gift of
ambience and the requisite touch of satirical sadism. Which is of course why it
is still the subject of a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin amid growing demands
by Christian Democrats to identify those responsible for 9/11.

But then, of course, Germans are not meant to have a sense of humour -
they are expected to be dour and rigid. For that, surely, is how the world at
large loves to hate them best.

So far as my own participation is concerned, I confirm that I had no
involvement in, or responsibility for, the alleged coup. In fact, McDowell never
directly reveals the true identity of his “sensual, sultry, seductive,
enigmatic, loving, stimulating and yet, compassionate“ Selena, but one can
hardly call him tight-lipped either. Which is a very sore point with me
(Bastard!). Being called upon to perform some two dozen times, I much regret
that my true nature will finally be revealed. What I'm trying to convey is that
my entire history is something I have nothing to do with. But then again, I’ve
long since wondered if I shouldn’t be someone else. I do feel your interest has
been waning boys, and so I might as well own up. Much to the unashamed relief of
Sir Percy, no doubt, who has the peculiar distinction of being the only person
ever to have been banned from this blog and who - by his own admission - comes
here for the sole purpose of jerking off…

Now, how cool is that?

Dreamy

WHAT GOES ROUND COMES ROUND...

2008-11-26T15:20:00.002Z

Well, I might have guessed!

Instead of Deutsches Kolleg having brought a lawsuit claiming libel,
I've now become the subject of a bizarre investigation. You may remember the
Übermensch Conspiracy. It is all a very mysterious business, but in accordance
(presumably) with protocol, investigators were polite but persistent. All three
of them. I also have reason to believe that my PC didn't crash, but was shot
down. Access to all my personal files is being denied. Microsoft wps docs have
been completely sealed. But, just for the record, I'm not under caution,
although- for reasons unelaborated - been advised to exercise discretion (?!).

Well, what I've disclosed may seem like indiscretion, but when so many
more compromising papers against Messrs Blair & Co have been published
without any animadversion, it would be very injudicious to lambast me with this.
Besides, my intention has never been to make an allegation, but to retail the
truth, and that is what I persist in doing. So far as I am concerned, I've acted
within the limits of a personal responsibility from which I do not intend to
deviate or extricate myself. While all eyes have been focused on Afghanistan and
the Taliban, the world may have been looking in the wrong direction. What this
also reveals, of course, is a new line of investigation - looking at a potential
cover up rather than a crime!

That apart, I am not about to jeopardize a great scoop by spilling it
on the Internet. My Deep Throat may well have been generalizing about a far more
diverse and complex issue than he himself ever guessed. For which reason I shall
not elaborate on his identity, though it can of course be easily supplied if
required. To be sure, he is not a British national. And I confess that to this
day I have come to no firm conclusion about how smart or dumb Max M. really was.
The Security Services may have their own views on that, but, in the absence of
direct evidence in the form of legal or forensic verification it would certainly
have been wiser for me no to have got involved at all...

What happens next is the subject of dispute and a continuing investigation, but,
frankly, what’s the point of suing someone whose only assets are a laptop and a
G-string?

Dreamy

ROD LIDDLE - HUMOURLESS IMBECILE...

2008-11-12T13:15:00.003Z

“Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian president, greeted Barack Obama’s victory by commending him on his “suntan” and was astonished to find people taking offence. God save us from humourless imbeciles, he said.”

Ever a stickler for diplomatic niceties, the excellent Rod Liddle, too,
was offended - an outrage more notable for its desperate self-deception than for
any measure of affront.

I’m afraid, the incorruptible Sunday Times columnist missed the point
when he claimed the “suntan” crack was quite as bad as someone referring to
Silvio as a “pasta-eating, sexually incontinent megalomaniac gangster.” The
implication is quite clear. If the latter is equivalent to the former, then,
Rod’s view of the black man can’t be very elevated. And there is the rub.
Prejudice is harder to shake off than common sense. By all means, don’t mention
the war when you run into a Kraut, but if the colour of someone’s skin not only
requires discretion but is actually taboo, then we have a problem. It's a
mistake that misunderstands the intrinsic value of cultural and racial
differences.

Rod is trapped in circumstances. From his perspective he has acted
chivalrously. Though one suspects that he does not recognize his own profoundly
patronising attitude. All his discernment and good will are plainly no
protection against the condescending bonhomie of his own inherent bigotry. A
community activist who runs a help centre advising itinerant migrants on how to
secure their full entitlement to benefits is one thing, but to extend
affirmative action to a towering heroic figure, president-elect and soon to be
commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest superpower, iconic and swathed in an
aura of mythic achievement - well, that’s quite another.

Wake up, Rod. There are too many old grudges. You cannot repeal
two-thousand years of history by affirmative action alone. If the implication is
that black people are exempt from the laws of human progress because they are
somehow more disadvantaged than the rest of us, then, sadly, I remain
unconvinced. But if you’re saying they are a people with an indigenous
inferiority complex, something that anticipates the victim and perennial
resignation, then frankly, I couldn't be more unsympathetic. If given the chance
I would stay in bed all day eating chocolate. But it so happens, we’ve all got
to get up and get on with it.

You're a lucky dude, Rod, don't be a dumb one.

Dreamy

THE DREAMERS OF THE DREAM...

2008-11-03T19:54:00.007Z

The tendency of modern physics is, of course, to resolve the whole material
universe into electromagnetic waves. When the eardrum vibrates, an equivalent
sound is generated in the fluid within the ear. This tells the brain about the
pitch, volume and duration or frequency of the electromagnetic “sound”.
Likewise, when an odour molecule docks with a receptor, the signal travels to
the olfactory bulb, which is the brain’s clearing house for smells. Essentially,
too, the entire range of electromagnetic radiation - from gamma rays, x-rays,
ultra-violet, visible light, infra-red, microwaves, radiowaves etc.- is beyond
the retina’s threshold for perceptible vision, while colours, across the visible
spectrum in both directions are merely different electromagnetic frequencies.
When light falls on the retina, chemical changes occur that stimulate certain
electric activities by which the human brain interprets to itself the content of
its sensory experience. Not hues, tones, shades, tints, blushes or dyes, but
sensations in the brain!

So are we dreaming a dream?

Well, if the cosmology of relativity is correct, then the only standard
by which reality can now be judged is an essentially prescriptive or even
solipsistic one. The perspective is decidedly anthropocentric. Einstein’s
greatest merit, of course, was his emphasis on relativity as a metabolic
principle. Before him the universe had been conceived of as inherently
mechanical. Now it became a dynamic, intelligent organism, in every essential
alive.

With Newton classical physics was at its greatest - and at its most
naive!

Einstein, by implication, was probing the universe as a function of its
relation to the human mind. Man fundamentally causes things to exist. He gives
them the essential attributes they possess. Upon this simple principle he
evolved a number of set equations which declared that the universe adapts to us
rather than being irrespective of ourselves. As I have written elsewhere, his
universe impresses not by its statement of fact but rather by a strong
susceptibility to the inherent characteristics of its own empirical psychology.
We are, as nearly as we can tell, inextricably entangled in what we see -
affected by no other causes than ourselves.

Of course, in order to understand the initial conditions of the
universe, we have to turn to quantum mechanics. The effect produced by the Big
Bang, the actual micro-second of creation 13,7 billion years ago, was primarily
one of the passage of time - i.e. of the relation of thought to extension. Very
few people trouble to remember that there can be no such thing as extension
without duration. Time and space are one. Both conceptions of the universe are
complete in themselves, apparently, but we cannot conceive of one without
recourse to the other. Space involves distance! Measurement involves time. Or,
indeed, energy - and definition (or mass, which we perceive as weight). Mass and
energy are, in fact, two aspects of the same phenomenon: E = mc2.

At what we call zero-time - mind became matter!

Neither by the grace of God nor by intelligent design, but by a sort of
irreducible necessity, the universe is produced like a rabbit out of a hat! Like
it or not, our cosmic inheritance, its very title deeds, lie in the thought, a
template which has to be accepted as a virtual concept rather than an
established material system. And not least because circumstances make of
irreducible necessity a conceptual law of creation - with Gravity being the
medium between thought and action.

The universe is a logical concept. It follows its own train of
thoughts.

If God’s aim was to produce something which relied upon irreducible
necessity rather than specific form he couldn’t have done better than with the
Big Bang. And He certainly gave prove of it. The creation of the original cause
is more properly to be regarded as an act of conception, rather than an event in
the ordinary meaning of the term. Something that can be metaphysical or
material, depending on nothing that the human mind can grasp. For it is through
our very own eyes that the Universe is, for the first time, able to conceive of
itself. Indeed, if there is one idea that one takes away from contemplating the
universe, it is that of pure intelligence. Or that of the cosmos, far from being
fixed by Newtonian edict, unfolding like some enormous brain.

But could God be unaware of his own divinity? By substituting Man for
God - or Thought for Being - it no longer seems quite so preposterous to imagine
that it is in this enormous, retrospective subjectivity that the unrivalled
conceptual power of the human mind, weak though it may be in other respects, is
ultimately vested.

Dreamy

THE UNBELIEVERS - (A Treatise Concerning The Limitations Of Human Understanding)

2008-11-01T18:53:00.009Z

All Shook Up: I have trouble in applying pure open-ended logic, in an infinite range of possibilities, to theoretical events and phenomena that must (in my view) be seen as actual, observable events. I can never get my head round, for example, the (to me) ludicrous idea that a bunch of monkeys sitting at typewriters for infinity would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare.

Well, ASU, if abstract reasoning could be reduced to mere algebraic calculations, and mathematics allowed to operate by itself and without limitations, then, I’m afraid, you’ve just put your foot in it - and here I mean absolutely no offence. It seems almost unnecessary to add that your monkeys would not only re-produce the works of Shakespeare, Joyce and Goethe but of every single weblog that was ever consigned to the cybersphere. It’s basic physics, Jack, and to deny that is to abdicate any intelligent understanding of what constitutes either reality or reason.

BOB: An alien might see/ perceive the motorcycle in a different way, or
he might not even see it at all, but the fact that I can see it and other people
and animals are enough evidence for me that there is an a priori motorcycle that
will still be there when I am gone. These things are also known as common sense
and I am aware that it is a philosophers job to challenge such 'obvious' truths,
but up till now I could never be convinced. To me it is not more then a thought
experiment.

There is no point, then, me insisting that our planet, in spite of what
Bob thinks, isn't a blue and fragile jewel, but electromagnetic energy, and
consequently lacks the defining character of both, substance and colour. Or that
- within the limits set by the relevant principle - a given number of observers
might assign a different number of measurements to events and forces at the same
point in space and time. Which becomes even more plausible when you absorb the
simple fact that far from being a thought experiment, common sense already
exploits the effects predicted by the two basic theories - of relativity and
quantum mechanics - in its latest technologies. Nor would one speak
disingenuously about a subject which has genuinely engaged the responsible
attention of one’s intellect. But what baffles me is a way of thinking which is
characterized by a paradoxical combination of steady acquiescence on the small
scale and repeal of purpose on the large scale - which is very unnerving.

Almost invariably, the human mind has a tendency not to dispute the
facts, but to backtrack on the conclusion. And that is not a tenable procedure.
There are no compromises or deviations. We need to be quite clear about what
happens here. Once you accept propositions which are intrinsically self-evident
and which eminently consist of ideas that are clearly and distinctly conceived,
you don't need a PhD to come up with the results. And my point is not that these
results are something new, which indeed they are not, but that quantum physics
and idealist philosophy have come full circle and adopted common ground. Only
now, in a world explained by quantum mechanics and informed by relativistic
understanding can Berkeley’s idealism be properly appreciated. Here, the
distance between virtual experience and real encounters has narrowed to nothing.
Indeed, a quantum blueprint of our universal geometry has rendered conceivable
what has previously been beyond imagining: that to be is to be perceived.

ASU: Prove it!

Of course, I can go over the same ground ad infinitum and insist that
yours, indeed, is the fundamental objection of classical mechanics, whereas in
quantum mechanics, indeterminacy is an inescapable property of the world. But I
would much rather suggest that you prove the opposite. Without recourse to the
five senses, that would be a problem with a far less definable solution. Indeed,
try thinking of the world without “humans“, i.e. without structure or coherence,
and you have a serious dilemma. Like trying to think of an ass without thinking
of its ears, you inevitably have to have a mental picture of what you’re
supposed to do without. And so the argument is circular. Because, trust me, you
can’t. You’re forever chasing your own tail. Proof itself introduces an unavoidable element of visualization into reality, and my mistake was to assume that the likelihood of its abstraction ever existed.

For subatomic physicists, apparent logical impossibilities are the norm. And yet, how can they be illustrated? The human mind is never more mediaeval than in its perception of
what is at the forefront of scientific ideas. It hardly seems credible yet it demonstrates the difficulty of establishing the truth about an epistemological conclusion of this magnitude in the absence of visually representative information. Humans have a deep psychological need for inherent concepts, and cling to their priorities. So the preferred avenues of intellectual escape are
miracles, mathematics or outright denial. In fact there are still theologians
who will argue that the miracles of Jesus were supported by reliable testimony,
even though I find no argument for the existence of the divinity and virtue of
Christ in the fact that he was walking on water. All it really meant for him was
that from the moment you learn to do that, you are no longer under the necessity
of getting your feet wet. The miracles were true because the concept was true,
and that was not a matter of accurate testimony, but of the contemporary
evidence of human understanding. So, even today it will still take major
conceptual steps - particularly in the absence of easily accessible mathematics
- to replace perception with logic and move the psychological paradigm from the
relativity of science to the indeterminacy of the entire
universe...

But all this is rather old hat, folks - cheer up, the latest frontier is genetics!

Dreamy

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL - THE RETURN OF THE JEDI

2008-10-29T19:50:00.006Z

Interestingly, when I came across Lesley White’s News Review Interview with Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alistair Campbell, now novelist author and unemployed plotter, it brought the whole labour shenanigans back to me. What a collection of mugs. I’d all but forgotten about Robin Cook’s famous airport divorce. Or Ron Davies’ infamous moment of madness on Clapham Common. Or a red-faced Prescott staggering into the House of Commons after a short sharp shag with his personal secretary. Which did the former deputy prime minister’s international reputation no harm at all; Clinton knew just how he felt. But what
about his superbly inadequate grasp of his own language?And now, we learn that that psycho Campbell is back again, and never was there more ambiguity in a piece of editorial information that he will be “involved only when he feels like it, he won’t even have a title or an office”. No doubt he'll have a salary.

That caustic comic is no mug!

Of course, if you happen to be Alastair Campbell, remembered as an
arrogant, cantankerous, psychologically warped know-all, who was somehow
involved with the death of Dr David Kelly, you’ll be well wary of all this. As a
matter of fact, if you are Alastair Campbell you shouldn’t be perusing this
blog. You ought to be preparing your answers for the next instalment of
Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. When previously the question came up
which country, in 1973, entertained a space-station called “Skylab”, France -
Russia - UK - USA? - Alastair famously opted for France. Or was that just the
whisky talking? Well, for your information, Alastair, the moon is a balloon and
apparently uninhabited.

Brown’s stance has a certain obstinacy, you have to admit, but also a
certain desperation. Caught in a net of apparently insoluble conflicts, he’s
disinterring skeletons. Alastair’s past history was an unbroken chain of
disaster, his blunders ranging from minor tactical gaffes to major strategic
errors, to say nothing of his psychotic breakdown, clinical depression and
uncontrollable outbursts. Fear and Loathing in No 10. One can sense the
unmistakable lunacy of that asylum. At the very least, there’s the demonically
heightened atmosphere of political conspiracy. Indeed, the Mandelson appointment
suggests an almost suicidal wish to atone for personal culpability. Mandy the
mascot. Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate. Mandelson the mother of
all huffs, the king of strops, torn between feelings of inferiority and
delusions of superiority, a rascal possessed of astonishing chutzpah, swept to
the top of one of the most notable piles of sewage in recent political
history...

Meanwhile, in America, Blair went on to his greatest triumph, the
Congressional Gold Medal award. WODs may be done and dusted, but no judgement on
his person or his role in history can avoid references to a rare facility for
lying and the vapidity of his ideas for the preposterous Millennium Dome. As for
his role of envoy to the Middle East, Rami Khouri, a leading Arab journalist,
wrote: it was “like appointing Nero fire chief in Rome.” A perfect incendiary,
indeed. It's self-perpetuating. There is a hot wind blowing through the souks of
Arabia.

Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. No doubt it is. But the
first thing to realize is that with the globalisation of its historical sense,
Western statesmanship has lost much of its idealism, vision and purpose. Power,
corrupts and depraves men like no alcohol or opium does. And the general
promiscuous cupidity to which the Labour Government has stooped over the past
ten years or so, has debased this nation as nothing else could. Needless to say,
political life has its own rules. And cupidity always sets the cultural tone at
the lowest possible level. But these years will remain branded, nevertheless, in
the history of the moral, political and social degeneration, rather than
decline, of this, once the noblest of island nations.

And that, folks, just about covers my view ...

Dreamy

JOHN PRESCOTT - MAN OF THE MOB

2008-10-27T18:44:00.002Z

“The fact is he's happy to keep drawing the salary, and do bugger all for
it. He's a another who highlights all that is wrong in our system, where self
aggrandisement and self seeking individuals seem content to tell the rest of us
what to do, but don't seam too keen on doing it themselves.”
Richard Havers

"In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties,
to perform the drudgery of life. Such a class you must have or you would not
have that other class which leads to progress, civilization and refinement...It
constitutes the very mudsills of society and of political government..."
James H. Hammond, American Senator, 1885.

“Is it possible to extend a higher civilization to the lower classes
without debasing its standards and diluting its quality to the vanishing point?
Is not every civilization bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the
masses?” Michael Rostovtzeff, Russian historian.

In the peculiar cross-cultural amalgamation that is post-modern Britain, it was perhaps
asking a lot of a man to be as comfortable deliberating on a point of procedure
in the Houses of Parliament, as he would have been leading factory workers to
strike in the capacity of a shop-steward. But the real paradox lies in the fact
that when the deputy prime minister invited his staff out onto the lawns of his
official Buckinghamshire country retreat to play a game of crocket, he missed an
essential point. The first thing he failed to understand was the ethos of the
game itself. Which is specifically designed to be as remote as possible from the
lower end of the social spectrum, so that at the higher end, the patrician
country squires of whom Prescott so obviously disapproved, should be able, at
their leisure, to discuss the fate of nations and become confidants even of
kings themselves.

Thus the English nation lost her soul. A people long haunted by a sense
of being ensnared, flung their reckless proletarian defiance at the tyrant
class. Or, to put it differently, they freed and revitalised precisely those
atavistic instincts whose moderation and restraint had been the work of a
thousand years of domestication. And so the necessary ideology was supplied. For
this was to bury the old England, together with its civilization as it existed
to date. That is to say, once prosperity took over, the cultural tradition of a
working man’s pride showed extremely little resistance to corruption by the
values at whose service it had been placed. Populist sentiment would not keep
pace with more ‘titular’ ambitions. Pride of social status was not the value the
working man choose to preserve. Class distinction was increasingly substituted
by admiration for wealth alone. And this sordid moral bankruptcy of the
proletarian leadership is a fundamental characteristic of the social revolution
of the twentieth century. Nor is it any good pretending that the concept of
social hierarchy, as a rise in status and standard, does not now tend to
manifest itself in the more affluent social position of a class of money-makers
or what is perhaps best defined as an aristocracy of wealth.

Join the rich to avoid being screwed!

So there is the paradox: ‘Mob above, mob below!’ Then comes the
practical argument, for the basic issue remains as it has been defined all
along: “Where I found a living creature, there I found the will to power; and
even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.”

Nietzsche

THE MANDELSON INTERVIEW...

2008-10-26T14:32:00.006Z

Much has been made of Sophie Raworth's interview with Peter Mandelson last
Sunday. Below, the original version, courtesy of Iain Dale’s:

PETER MANDELSON: Well thank you very much. You've said I've done nothing wrong.
Therefore what do I have to answer for?
SOPHIE RAWORTH: A lack of judgement. Appearing, socialising with somebody who could benefit from you and your
position as European Trade Commissioner.
PETER MANDELSON: Sophie, Sophie, you cannot do business as a European Trade Commissioner in Russia, India, China,
South Africa, Brazil, all the big emerging economies of the world without having
contact with the big business and economic figures in those countries as well as
the political figures. I make a very clear distinction indeed. I do not allow
any conflict of interest to arise between the contacts I have with these
individuals and how I do my day job. I've now come back to British politics, I'm
now a British minister, I'm governed by the ministerial code. I've signed up to
the ministerial code and I will abide by the ministerial code...

And here is Selena Dreamy’s version of the same
interview:

Peter Mandelson: I'm tired of listening to your bullshit, honey. You've said I've done nothing wrong. Therefore what do I have to answer for? I lay in my bunk until the sun came up. Is it something I've done in my sleep?

Selena Dreamy: A lack of judgement. Appearing, in pyjamas with somebody
who could benefit from you and your position as European Trade Commissioner.

Peter Mandelson: Dreamy, Dreamy (a raucous laugh) you cannot do
business as a European Trade Commissioner in Russia, India, China, South Africa,
Brazil, Scalini’s, San Lorenzo’s, Nobu’s, the Dorchester Grill, and other such
exquisite bijoux, without having erm...contact with the big business and
economic figures in those places as well as the political figures.

Selena Dreamy: In pyjamas?

Peter Mandelson: Sure , if you don’t want to be left out in the cold.

Selena Dreamy: Black tie?

Peter Mandelson: No black tie, just gorilla handshakes and proper
identification. That guy Deripaska makes Don Corleone look like a fruit!

Selena Dreamy: Black socks?

Peter Mandelson: I make a
very clear distinction indeed between pink pyjamas and black socks. I do not
allow any conflict of interest to arise between the erm...contacts I have with
these individuals and how I do my day job. Formerly a young communist, and
recently ennobled, I've now come back to British politics. I'm now a British
minister. Fuck the ministerial code and the camel it rode in on, I have a price
and am not averse to a little luxury.

Selena Dreamy: But you’ve never accepted a favour?

Peter Mandelson: The one thing I never accepted was "no"!

Selena Dreamy: You do know your credibility is on the line?

Peter Mandelson: Absolutely. If life were fair, I'd be singing Castrato
at the Scala. As it stands, the fucking is done. If there's gonna be
any fuckin', it's gonna be me doin' it. It’s starched collars for every one now
who enters my office. I've signed up to the ministerial code and I will abide by
the ministerial code...Now go get the fuck out!

Well, that's show business, folks. Better get some shut eye...

Dreamy

A COSMIC ANALOGY: THE ECLIPSE (A Post In Which Miss Dreamy Explains How The Present Determines The Past)

2008-10-25T18:47:00.008+01:00

All Shook Up: “I'd say that things like gravity, radio waves, magnetic forces.. were in existence long before humankind developed the means to measure
and utilise them and that, based on that fact, many other phenomena yet to be
discovered similarly exist.”

Note, however, that with different values of the physical polarities and different initial conditions, nearly every potential universe could be ‘paralleled’ elsewhere. Which makes it attractive to suppose that all combinations or configurations are equally probable. The view
that there is a unique universe of only one possible type would have to be discarded. One cannot prove it, but even without stretching the facts beyond a reasonable application, it seems more likely that the question of the uniqueness
is closely related to the act of knowing.

We can see this easily if we imagine a standard cosmic phenomenon: the
Eclipse. Rather than listing the various ecliptic possibilities, such as
annual, partial, total, solar, lunar etc., let me say that the interception of a
luminous body by the interposition of another body between itself and the eye of
the observer, is what constitutes an eclipse. However, it would seem more
compatible with this meaning to say that a total eclipse, such as that of the
Sun for instance, is seen along a narrow band called the band of totality.
Outside this band the screening of the Sun by the Moon when seen from the Earth is only partial. But either way, it has to be seen to be perceived.

Now, all these effects can be calculated in detail. Computations, in
other words, can be directed backwards to determine previous eclipses.
Conversely, prediction can be made with a view to future eclipses. This may seem obvious, even self-evident. The point, however, is that although the notion of a trajectory implies clear knowledge of its progression, the eclipse only comes into existence at the moment that we observe it. The act of observation, in other words, has not only created the eclipse - but its complete and entire past.

It may seem ludicrous to claim that the eclipse actually antedates the
causal conditions it appears to institute. But my own view, from this
perspective, is that unless so perceived, no one will ever attempt to suggest
that an eclipse has taken place, say, in some far corner of the universe or with
reference to any one of an infinite variety of potential trajectories in some
wayward, yet unalterable, path to a predetermined assignation. Note, moreover,
that unless lodged firmly in the sense data of intelligent observation, there is
nothing irreversible about such an eclipse. It hinges on one’s ability to
determine its past as one would the backward movement of a clock. And this
becomes obvious when we consider that the Eclipse is a representation of our
knowledge, so that if our knowledge changes unexpectedly, the past must also
change unexpectedly. Without it, it may mean, simply, an imaginary event which
is ideally but not literally true, residing only in the consciousness of some
mind whose supremacy is undoubted but not easily defined.

To some, God still preconditions the mind of the observer. Yet, nature
can rarely bring herself to ignore loose ends. The search for an absolute norm
outside reality is doomed to frustration. Being must be interpreted in terms of
knowing. To the physicist, reality depends on his ability to produce for every
idea a formula or an equation. He can only specify an event through its
measurable properties. And mathematical analysis clearly shows that to account
for its fine balance the density of the universe must have had a particular, or
critical, value, and no other, at a very early time. The most explicit set of
equations, on the other hand, can never bestow life and meaning, but only an
emulation of facts, precisely like the Big Bang, which can have no history,
unless the history is a derivative of the event. And not just a single history,
but an infinite cluster of possible histories of every possible path or record
in space-time, and each one equally real whenever so observed.

Thus, the empiricist’s analysis prevails: there is no past, there is no
future, we initiate both.

Dreamy

SELENA’S NEW PROFILE (or A Post In Which Miss Dreamy Is Reinventing Herself)

2008-10-23T18:34:00.005+01:00

You may never have doubted for a moment that Selena Dreamy is for real. But since, according to a number of incredulous observers, Miss D. does not actually exist, it may be as well to revise my profile. So I’ve settled on this because too many distorted versions of my life have been appearing. In truth, I myself, may on occasion have been rather liberal in my management of the facts, and not because as a female I am subject to moods, but precisely because the intolerance and bigotry of contemporary society left me no choice but to strive for mastery in the art of dissimulation. And if I have laid some false trails, concealing my emotions behind a stance of non-restraint and total nymphomania, please be assured that I have measured all the responsibilities that accompany them.

And yet, at the core of this pseudo-fabrication is a person. The most substantive and provocative fusion of Selena Dreamy's private and public selves, the embodiment of complementarity - alert, responsive and absolutely reciprocal. One day she is naive, innocent, trusting, a girl of ten, the next I am the Delphic Pythia, a thousand years old, knowing everything. No doubt this is all
part of the psychological process by which my earlier life has ceased to exist
and I am committed in every sense to the future of the species. A profligate, wildly cerebral woman with exquisite taste in everything except the right man. Before I was ten, I understood that human consciousness is not only a medium of exchange between different bodies in space, but a property of space-time itself. Two years later, I had reinvented the solution to a crucial
problem in quantum theory. Indeed, on the journey we are about to undertake,
such secrets as have been revealed to me in all I have written to date, are
merely the tip of an iceberg. I am the virus of a chain waiting to become
contagious. In short, I am the chosen one. But only, of course, if you, the
plebs, do so desire.

And now, if you will excuse me, a Dresden Opera matinee recording of
Wagner’s Siegfried is shortly to commence on Radio 3, and I intend to
listen to Brünnhilde whilst reclining in the bath...

Dreamy

HAPPY DAYS are here again...

2008-10-21T16:38:00.003+01:00

Now that's a nice way to end a nasty contest...

THE 9/11 MEMORANDUM

2008-10-19T18:09:00.003+01:00

Bryan Appleyard, in today’s Sunday Times, reports on the terrorism of the
Red Army Faction - led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof - in Germany in the
seventies.

So, correct me if I am wrong, but the four terror attacks on the United
States on September 11, too, were planned in the mosques and al-Qaeda safe
houses of Hamburg. The German Federal Prosecutor investigating the attacks’
planning tells us that at least seven men linked to Bin Laden came together as
students during the early nineties and began plotting the suicide operations in
a back street flat near Hamburg university, including Mohamed Atta, the
ringleader and Marwan al-Shehi, one of the suicide pilots.

Had Germany been encouraging and guiding al-Qaeda's hands?

This may be stretching the truth, but certainly it can be argued that
the military style underground operations of the early seventies bear an uncanny
resemblance to those of 2001.

My deep throat?

Max M******* and I pursued several leads together when I was contributing
director of research at the Washington Library of Congress. For the time being,
I intend to maintain his incognito, but, for all I know, you may not find it
difficult to identify a former assistant head of the White House's Corporate
Fraud Task Force, from whom I learnt that there was a CIA file on 9/11 with
details of how the special relationship between the United States and the
Federal Republic of Germany required that the subject of September 11 be treated
as a “diplomatic incident” rather than one of forensic interest.

What is the this “incident” all about?

Well, according to the information that was passed to me at the time,
it was - in part and without prejudice - about an independent think-tank called
Deutsches Kolleg. I remember a Senate sub-committee commissioning a report from
us - that was some twenty years ago - on the activities of the far-left
Baader-Meinhof gang, the fanatical terrorist group whose hijackings, kidnappings
and executions of West German establishment figures in the Seventies made it
public enemy number one. This extreme left-wing organization wanted nothing less
at the time than the overthrow of the German State, which it regarded as a
puppet regime of the United States. I know better than to make libellous claims
on a public website, but it doesn’t take much to figure out that the nationalist
right-wing Deutsches Kolleg seems to have adopted the same marketing strategy.
Not only did (does?) it appear to be planning the overthrow of the US with its
financial, media and military power but is, even at this moment , adumbrating
the coming of the Fourth Reich.

And before you dismiss this as an epic intelligence fake, take a look
at the shape, texture and dimension of the German political landscape. The story
of how the left-wing lawyer Schily became a hard-line law-and-order interior
minister is fascinating enough; but the former German foreign minister Joschka
Fischer had come an even longer way since his days as a militant activist in
Frankfurt in the late 1960s and early 1070s. The Green Party, which he turned
into a disciplined political force, did their best yet in the 2002 general
election. At the age of fifty-five he topped the list of Germany’s most popular
politicians. There is clear evidence, moreover, of his friendship with
Hans-Joachim Klein, a terrorist who was involved in the 1975 attack on an Opec
summit in Vienna in which three people died. As a federalist and German foreign
minister, Fischer was strongly arguing that Europe could pull its weight only if
united under a single government. He is, of course, no longer in a position to
turn his controversial visions into political reality. But he was the
front-runner to be Europe’s first foreign minister (and it was the French who
backed him for that post). And that meant a blue-print for a European
super-state which would ultimately lead to the complete alienation of Europe
from America.

What did the Franco-Germanic alliance have to do with Deutsches Kolleg,
you’ll probably want to know.

Well, that’s a moot point. Deutsches Kolleg is the nationalist think-tank
run by a very shady character known as Horst Mahler. And there is absolutely no
evidence that his priorities, in the meantime, have become any the less bizarre.
He qualified as a lawyer as far back as 1963, but was actually for a time one of
Germany’s most wanted men. Fact is that he was convicted of conspiracy to commit
aggravated robbery in connection with the establishment of a criminal
organization and participation in the same. The criminal organization was not,
however, a far-right party, but the Baader-Meinhof gang, the fanatical left-wing
terrorist group which was later known as the RAF or Red Army Faction.

Horst Mahler had initially acted as legal counsel for Baader, but then
decided to join the gang, ostensibly for the greater good, but really, as it
turned out, to bankroll their terrorist lifestyle by holding up financial
institutions. That might seem no more than an extreme solution to what appears,
after all, to have been a purely financial problem. But then, you could say the
same about Billy the Kid. The difference is that after Mahler’s release from
prison in 1980, he was able, with the help of another young left-wing lawyer to
resume his legal career. And that lawyer was one Gerhard Schröder, subsequently
to be elected into the office of Germany’s Social Democrat chancellor.

But even without casting a word in anger, certainly, what can be said
without fear of libel is, that Gerhard Schröder appointed Joschka Fischer, a
former member of a militant group called "Revolutionary Struggle" as Foreign
Minister, and Otto Schily as Interior Minister. Otto Schily, I’ll have you know,
was Mahler’s defence counsel at the time of his trial. They were not only close
friends, but political allies. And let no one imagine that I have invented that
concurrence!

Do I have my head trapped in a historical time warp?

On the face of it that may seem a solid point. But from 9/11 onwards
America’s war on terror has essentially followed the ideological initiatives of
Osama Bin Laden. President Bush’s war strategy has not only aggravated that
initiative, but potentially turned it into the most powerful recruitment drive
for terrorism ever. And American “withdrawal” from Europe, on those grounds,
would be likely to prompt a massive redistribution of power in the region. Think
of 9/11 not as a “divide and conquer” approach so much as a “redistribution”
stratagem, giving the German-Franco alliance far more oxygen and almost
certainly provoking the new “Axis-powers“, to wit France and Germany, to
intervene politically if not financially in defence of Europe’s outnumbered
right-wing minorities (- if that were to be the aim!). For another, it would
also mean Germany’s re-emergence as a Teutonic superpower in the region, with a
strong counterweight to America’s presence on the other side of the Atlantic.

Nor will I pretend that my own information is altogether infallible - or
that the 9/11 conspirators have been acting with the tacit acknowledgment or
perhaps even with the actual connivance of the Socialist/Green administration -
but only that it has never been formally denied by the US Government. The key to
the claim that EU expansion is a secret German plot to retake the ‘lost’ lands
of Pomerania and Silesia is, in fact, contained in a statement to that effect by
Chancellor Schröder which is almost certainly apocryphal. Admittedly. But so far
as Mahler and his closest allies are concerned, the aim of Deutsches Kolleg is
quite literally to plan the Fourth Reich. They’ve even drafted a set of
Nuremberg-style laws, apparently, for its imminent foundation, including
paragraphs on the "Jewish Question".

Mahler’s metamorphosis from Marxist extremist to unhinged born-again
Nazi ideologue may have been a paradox, but in the case of Fischer, no amount of
Marxist dialectics can argue away the fact that he beat the crap out of the
police in 1973 at a violent anti-establishment demonstration in Frankfurt. So,
if Horst Mahler was heir presumptive, the Führer designate - and I do not
believe this is the case, I nevertheless do wonder about the effect it was all
having on the CIA - since, indubitably, the common enemy was the United States.
All this may shock many an excellent man, but Mahler, in an essay called
Independence Day Live which he wrote on September 12, 2001, went as far as
celebrating the 9/11 attack on America as the beginning of the end for the
"Judeo-American imperium".

I’m told — and you should be aware of this — that that 1950s jerk McCarthy and I sound
similarly paranoid. Let me assure you that we are similar in only one respect -
once we have the bone between our teeth we will not let go. Nor can I reveal,
for I do not know, what the German foreign minister and US Secretary of State
really said to one another, but a member of Clinton’s former administration also
told me that, counter to the publicly stated position, evidence was being
marshalled by US government prosecutors in New York at that very time, whereby
the above conspiracy would undoubtedly become part of a grand jury investigation
into a plot which I know happens to fit this theory.

Alternatively, feel free to call directory enquiries for Manassas, Virginia
and obtain the number for Academy Group, a forensic science consulting outfit.
The CIA was not the principal investigative agency involved in this. Nor has it ever been referred to in any public record. It has simply never been initiated, and never could be. But it has come to be known as The Übermensch Conspiracy.

Dreamy

TIME IS THE PROCESS OF THINKING...

2008-10-17T20:12:00.006+01:00

(A Post In Which Miss Dreamy Discovers That Thinking Of Limitless Space Is Like Trying To Think Of A Box Without Thinking of Its Sides)

‘In the original unity of the first thing lies the secondary cause of all things, and the germ of their inevitable annihilation.’ Thus Edgar Allan Poe.
And to presume otherwise is instantly to abandon any prospect of the rational understanding of what is meant by cosmic evolution. What happens next is a
matter of considerable disagreement. It is difficult to imagine that a lone “irrelative” atom, a single quantum of energy in its purest and most
concentrated form, should have sprang fully formed from the stupendous brow of God. A difficulty which is illuminating in itself as it demonstrates the extent
to which, in the Big Bang, matter and mind were fused into one. “If the universe is a universe of thought,” wrote the great James Jeans, “then its creation must have been an act of thought.”

Thought becomes deed, deed becomes word, building to a tremendous climax. In the rapidly expanding fireball, the process of thought-making continues as an inflation and recapitulation of the violent beginning on so large a scale that, however complex in its details, every significant force and
field becomes distinct and magnified. It is the violence, therefore, of creation
not of annihilation. Nor need we solve innumerable differential equations. The
best advice that cosmologists have today, suggests that the fundamental
diversification of the entire process is a necessary corollary of its ever
increasing dimensions. Particulars proliferate as a necessary requirement of
this continuity, allowing for chromatic deviations and dynamic oscillations
until, ultimately, the Universe blazes forth in a grand apotheosis, generating a
powerful antithesis between the four known fundamental forces.

This language is not, one may suppose, the orthodox interpretation
of astrophysicists on this topic. But we have seen already, in a previous post,
how antiparticles began as an intellectual abstraction, and ad hoc composition
of mandatory events, drastically compressed and recapitulated, with all the
terminology of quantitative semantics. In short, we discover very little. Truth
to tell, it is from this point on that the exact events become clouded by
judgment and conjecture. For what actually happens is that, as mass can be
created from energy, matter can be created from knowledge. Albeit that every new
‘discovery’ emphasizes the extent of our inherent ignorance of the fact that we
are the causes of ourselves, chief of the fundamental forces known to man.

Extemporization fundamentally requires displaying necessary
consequences, and necessary consequences in this connection constitute phenomena
which are implicit in the representation and analysis of the event. Here, then,
for the first time arose the astonishing concept of chronology. At
10-43 second, gravitational radiation emerges from the thermal equilibrium.
10-34 second, marks the beginning of the inflationary phase. 10-30 second,
particles precipitate out of the vacuum. 10-11 second, the electromagnetic and
weak nuclear forces make an initial division. 10-5 second, protons and neutrons
become articulate.

Time numbers points in space at which each event has been determined.
One chronological event is the logical consequence of another. Hence, there is a succession here which makes it necessary to suppose that time or extension can be measured, seemingly, in complete independence from the rest of the structure. A conclusion which, as it happens, is contrary to the truth. But Relativity was clear where Nature is obscure: “Nature is such that it is impossible to determine absolute motion by any experiment whatever.” And I find it difficult to distinguish between absolute motion and absolute time. Space that lacks motion is timeless. Motion that lacks space is mindless.

Here, then, time and space, originally one conception, hold forth to a
life of their own. And thus, in analysing their division we are studying
cosmology in its most anthropomorphic phase. Matter has resolved into a function
of knowledge. Purely physical action enjoys only a transitory existence.
Everything is flux. Meaning in any intrinsic sense is dispensed with altogether.
If it was the primary function of Space to provide a fixed frame of reference,
we have already considered its non-existence. Space defines matter. It
intervenes and determines. That's all. The concept of time, too, is wholly
irrelevant in a perfectly eventless medium. Being is blind to any chronological
distinction. Time is the process of thinking.

Dreamy

MANDELSON - THE EMERDATION OF THE GIANT ALBION

2008-10-15T19:44:00.009+01:00

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the Holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

Your Lordship!

Scarcely have the immortal graces of your Countenance Divine begun to shine forth upon our clouded hills, than the Holy Lamb of God has offered itself for the ultimate sacrifice. For very probably the single greatest error committed by Gordon Brown between the boom of 2007 and the bust of 2008, was his decision to solicit Mandelson’s return to the Cabinet. This would gain him the
title "Baron", one step short of Beatification, which recognises the aspirant’s
accession to Heaven and his power to intercede on behalf of individuals who
sacrifice in his name. Which, indeed, is how it came to pass that whilst the
Baron of Ploy and Moneypool was duly swearing allegiance to Her Majesty at
Monday's induction ceremony in the House of Lords, his transfer from a top post
in Brussels had already been sweetened by a sordid financial expedient.

In the words of Richard Havers: the "transitionary payment" of £78,000 a year for the next three years to ensure his income in his new job is the same as his £182,500 salary as
the EU trade commissioner.”

An oppressive, uneasy feeling begins increasingly to possess one...

Indeed, as Lord Mandelson takes office with a remarkable lack of public
trust, Gordon Brown’s new approach to politics appears to emulate the
pyrotechnical spin of the Blair years he detested so well: unabashed populism at
the sacrifice of substance. Ostensively devoted to the notion of socialism and
the reduction of poverty, Tony Blair, of course, could always intercede with the
Powers of Darkness because his socialist experience had been in some ways
self-serving, treating the Prince to sumptuous dinners and providing him with
male companionship and a legion of celebrity guests including Bono, Bob Geldorf,
Mick Hucknail, David Bowie and Sir Elton, courtesy of Chequers.

Perhaps in the archetypal language, Blair was equally the trickster,
the charmer and scoundrel of all ages, the wizard of ancient mythology. Not to
mention Cherie the harpist, who was plucking away most melodiously. For
meanwhile - along with his improved recollection of events - Blair has found
time to collect the Medal of Freedom (from Southern Methodist University Dallas)
and duly received the Congressional Gold Medal awarded by the US for his support
in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq
in 2003.

It was a time of general rejoicing!

Alas, while Brown’s sacrifice has been to a clutch of squabbling labour
MPs whose singular area of agreement was deep collective dislike of him, there’s
scarcely a section of public opinion that does not loathe Peter Mandelson. And
if he did have some capable moments here and there, we may rest assured, no
doubt, that he will not cease from mental fight or put down his sword, until he
has tarnished and despoiled their memory among the dark Satanic mills of shady
greed and cleverness ...

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my
handTill we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land...

You bet....!

Dreamy

A Propos Literary Festivals...

2008-10-13T18:57:00.005+01:00

At the risk of offending all literature lovers, festival and domestic ones, I can honestly say that a broken-down engine and a couple of punctured tires would have elicited as much approbation on my part as did the sound of the Cheltenham Literature Festival on my automobile’s BBC Radio Four. It was a supreme example of total bullshit.

Reviewers, at their best are vacuous debaters, at their worst gormless wafflers. Stupidity is the norm. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. In fact, I find it harder to cope with their tone than their thoughts, or what one might describe as the pretension to profundity inherent in the literary festival philosophy. Zest for depth can replace sanity, affectation turn into obsession. The urban grace they call sophistication is merely a form of senescence. In truth, to hear some of these alleged authors utter their samples of mingled sophistry and
trash, never fails to leave an indelible impression on my mind. And if I do not
quote directly from that twaddle here, it is because I threw it up.

My own book was never reviewed, but that is hardly surprising. Few
reviewers have heard of it and, in any case, I was never invited. In fact, I
shall endeavour to write a book that will help concerned researchers become
seriously acquainted with the problem of literary nausea. Its effect
precipitates the slow but progressive chemical changes usually found in those
suffering with severe depression. The gloominess, in my own case, was extreme
and the nausea indescribable. Eventually, of course, mental atrophy catches up
with everyone of us, and declines is irreversible.

Plainly, all this has to stop!

If you lose interest in books, you know something is seriously amiss.
And I need to get the hell out of here, or better still, launch my own heretical
movement and establish a new school of literary criticism. In fact, I can see a
new genre emerging: chronicles of flight from literary communities. Shut up!
Drop dead! Get lost! I don't want literary guidance. I just want to read my
books, quietly, and in peaceful solitude.

Hence, it is with little affection and no gratitude that I acknowledge
The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival for its assistance in the preparation
and execution of this post. You will do me but justice in believing me to be,
with the utmost sincerity and disrespect, &c., &c.

Dreamy

THE SPARTACUS SYNDROME...

2008-10-10T17:51:00.006+01:00

So finally the Empire strikes back: Convicted in Las Vegas by an all-white jury on twelve counts of robbery, O.J.Simpson now faces 15 years in a jail.

That epic acquittal of double murder in 1995 was as high a high as O.J. could ever have hoped for. It was vintage Simpson - aka the “Juice” - and it worked. The televised procedures had rapidly become a stage upon which an
extraordinary cast of mostly black jurors were addressing Shakespearean themes. In truth, what you were watching was Othello spending thirty days idly tearing up the laws of judicial integrity. O. J. Simpson was poised, composed and self-possessed. A man whose tremendous asset was that of a matinee idol, rakish and perilous with the physique and bearing of an athlete - but in terms of culpability, he might as well have been Jack the Ripper.

Nobody’s suggesting that anyone deliberately perverted the course of justice. But when you add it all up, it was obvious from the start, that the O. J. Simpson trial was an almost exact replication of the Marxist theory of history: a case of “Rise up and cast your judgement!”. It involved the ostensible redemption of the figure of a black man - a potential victim, if not a martyr - who was antithetical to the White Establishment as Spartacus was to
ancient Rome.

The issue was never guilt or innocence, but a conflict between a
dangerous black emotionalism and a reasoned respect for law and the American
constitution. It was haunting; you couldn’t help being intrigued by it. This was
political correctness in its most surreptitious and furtive sense. Played out
against the background of habeas corpus and trial by jury, it was also an
ominous instance of what the American philosopher Henry Adams once conceived of
as history’s tendency to develop along the lines of least resistance!

Do these details matter? Well, they do - and in several
ways!

Of course, the mutually belligerent charges of the American
Presidential election are not, indeed, the kind of narrowly crafted indictments
likely to bring a conviction in a court of law. Nor am I a sociologist. But one
of the most intriguing aspects of this presidential race is its demographic
factor. Astonishingly, while half the population growth in the United States is
Hispanic, and only about 10% white, rather less than 50% of the US population is
actually still Caucasian. The figures speak for themselves. Nor would anyone
question the fact that the various light-skinned races seem to be, globally, in
terminal decline. Indeed, one senses that the global balance of power is
beginning to tilt, that the Caucasian Empires are all but spent, and that this
is not about Obama Barack’s bid for presidential power, but about the sensation
of a new experience, the emergence of a global phenomenon: The Spartacus
Syndrome.

Dreamy

MAXIMUM ENTROPY...

2008-10-08T18:37:00.005+01:00

JONATHAN: “If science is to encompass what is now called metaphysical it will be because the metaphysical ...will stop being hidden and become publically, communicably and verifiably vealed...and therefore physical. I see no reason why this may not happen, but suspect this will require a transfiguration of that consciousness that lies behind and determines the potentiality of the senses.”

Which takes us forward to the totality of things. The state at which the universe is conceived to be devoid of structure, where the degree of randomness is infinite, and where everything that involves expenditure of energy, however slight, has come to a halt. This is the
point at which no further information may be added. And I would certainly accept a considerable amount of intellectual nothing in return for this rather
comprehensive, this rather infinitive, metaphysical condition that I believe we
are striving towards for the next ten-billion years.

This is not an essay in ontology, but the most irritating form of the
tenet that absolute knowledge is essential to metaphysical perfection is that
which asserts that total ignorance must be a form of imperfection. One thing is
certainly beyond conjecture, knowledge, like entropy, does always increase. And
we are talking here about the second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental
feature of which is the total energy distribution in a closed system. Entropy is
a measure of the disorganization of the universe which, due to irreversible
energy transfers, must always increase. To illustrate this, suppose that the
universe is winding down, to use a peculiarly expressive colloquialism, the
eventual outcome being a heat death. Or, as the physicist would put it, a state
in which organization is absent and temperature distribution uniform. There is
no possibility of repeal, the entropy of a closed system can never decrease.

Entropy, of course, is also a property of information theory: average
information transfer per symbol, as defined by a formally related distribution
ratio. As symbol and symptom of a twentyfirst-century phenomenon, it takes on a
more familiar and ominous form in the fragmentation of knowledge. And viewed
from this quantified perspective, not only matter and energy, but knowledge
itself would be fragmentary, bitty and disconnected. Hence, total intellectual
entropy would be a measure of the amount of information that was infinitely
subdivided, examined from every possible angle, and dissolved or refined out of
existence. For all things must end. How can one add further information to all
that one can possibly know. Perfection itself cannot add anything to itself. The
mind of man in its last phase is at the hour of perfect noon. Of course, death
plays a part. If the size of the universe is a measure of human consciousness,
total intellectual entropy equates the death of the universe with a return to
the unconscious. The era of homo sapiens is at an end.

Only when these developments have been accomplished, can we hope to
resolve those doubts about the design and purpose of the universe which the
various natural sciences do not purport to settle. But if we think of the
‘running-down’ or the ‘heat-death’ of the universe as a measure of ultimate
disorder greater than the uniformity of distribution in the conventional concept
of vacuum, the idea of complementary intellectual development may not seem too
great a leap of the imagination. Taken literally, it is of course an
insufficient endowment upon which to ground an empirical evolutionary theory.
Indeed, our knowledge of this development, observational and theoretical, is so
foreshortened that it is not as yet possible, on the other hand, to interpret
past observations in terms of long-term future hypotheses nor, on the other, to
dismiss the assumption altogether according to which, after billions of years,
there will no longer by any relativistic distinction between one individual and
another.

There may be those who find such a proposition nonsensical. Nothing
objectionable about that. Full comprehension of it, paradoxically, can exist
only when the evolution of the intellect has reached a stage of perfection that
is humanly unimaginable. Of course only time will tell, but there is no known
reason why the condition of maximum intellectual entropy, however complex it may
seem, should be materially and cosmologically but not mentally and ideally
applicable.

Dreamy

A MAKER AND READER OF RIDDLES...

2008-10-06T19:42:00.004+01:00

Bob: “And as for the metaphysical purpose, I am not sure what you mean by that (maybe you can explain in another post). But the way I see it, 'spirituality' and religion are not exactly declining. In fact, because fewer and fewer people understand modern technology and science, I feel that more and more people are escaping into these things.”

...and yet, all the world, East and West, is in need of renewal: politically, socially, economically, in the case of the East; spiritually, above all spiritually, in that of the West. Future progress in theoretical physics, as a distinct branch of philosophy, might well adumbrate the sheer extent of its investigative spirit. The business of the physicist, after all, is to divine the Creator’s intention and to interpret that intention, not merely as a means of giving coherent expression to his physical experience, but as a stimulus to his own
scientific imagination. He is a maker and reader of riddles.

The point has often been made that many people reject scientific values
‘because they regard materialism as a sterile and bleak philosophy’. Not
everyone may agree with me, then, that the physicist’s labour has an accessible
metaphysical meaning. But it is curious to note nevertheless that the sudden
introduction of a Faustian aspect into the science of physics has impressed
itself upon modern man with a far stronger purpose than the type of spiritual
life that finds expression in forms of religion essentially concerned with
ritual and the careless intonation of prayers.

It has been claimed accurately enough, that we can no more invent a new
religion than we can build a tree. And in a sense, of course, it is fortunate
that religious proselytisers are unfamiliar figures in the word of the physical
sciences. Scientists, it has been said, are distinct from ordinary people by
what they do not believe in. Instead there is a deliberate matter-of-factness,
the disciplined, concise ingenuity which constitutes what is called ‘the
scientific mind’. But with a hint or two of genius and basing his beliefs not
upon faith, but reason and physical fact, the modern physicist nevertheless
carries a strong and potent suggestion of what our future spiritual and
intellectual development is going to be like:

He believes in physical uncertainty, but not in immortality. In a
universal science that includes all and promises hope for the solution of all,
but not in God’s own communication. In the thermodynamic arrow of time and the
Immutability of the Law - in the words of the Gospel: E = mc2 - but also in a
new supersensibility and its elementary duality of wave and particle theory as
two different aspects of the same complementarity. He is pious, touched perhaps
even with a deeper motive, but extremely rational and intellectually
circumspect. He is thoroughly introspective and almost prophetic in spirit, but
he leaves nothing to chance.
In him the real and the ideal exist side by side!

Dreamy

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DR FAUSTUS...

2008-10-04T19:28:00.012+01:00

"His lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!
Come, Mandy, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Mandelson."

FAUSTUS LEARNS NECROMANCY
It may well be that you and I never genuinely believed him capable of sorcery and necromancy, but Brown certainly once held the conviction, widely prevalent among this nation, that if Peter Mandelson was the Prince of Darkness, Cherie was an outright witch. To say nothing of Tony Blair - famous for his capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who prayed in his name. Except, perhaps, that to join this exclusive association you must swear its one and foremost oath: I sponsor you, you sponsor me, we promote one another. And the faint, fugitive flavour of sulphur and brimstone is the subtle component that binds this covenant. The incongruity is spectacular. Nor is it for the first time, that the Tempter’s mesmeric powers presaged disaster:

“I love you, but I can destroy you!”

THE PACT WITH LUCIFER
There is something macabre about that Mandelson personality with a soul which looks as if it must be septically sterilised. But whereas Mandelson already made a name for himself as an interpreter of the I Ching or Book of Changes, and as a diligent, sinister accumulator of power, Gordon Brown has legally placed
himself into the hands of The Demon, at once salvaging his political existence
from total obliteration, and at the same time identifying his own failures and
requirements with the cause of political damnation.

DAMNATION OR SALVATION
Mephistopheles clearly, is a man for tight corners. Almost compulsively his
mouth opens like a predatory barracuda‘s, his lips hardened with aridity, his
body poised rapaciously. Here’s the pilot-fish to Gordon’s shark! And certainly,
there was a call for desperate measures. Alas, poor Gordon. This is his last
great offensive. In his frantic groping for political deliverance he has raised
personal surrender to a measure of attainment and surrounded himself with a
Cabinet as if it were the centre of a dark conspiracy. For circumstances, rather
than conciliation, would have propelled the Prime Minister into breaking a taboo
for which the Man Brown is bound to pay a terrible price - even as he enters the
heavenly realm...

"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?"

BURN AFTER READING!

MY PAEAN TO THE STARS...

2008-10-02T20:21:00.004+01:00

The stars are our timekeepers.

Their claim on our attention is profound and enduring. As far back as
we venture to go in the history of the great civilizations of the ancient world,
vanished already when Rome was built, they have always played a central role in
human affairs. Timeless and archetypal, it is the hidden purpose of the stars to
be gazed and wondered at as witnesses of our existence, indeed to be catalogued
and computed as living and oracular symbols in which men recognize their doubts and their dreams, their destinies, and perhaps even themselves.

Of course, like most attempts to describe the heavens, these are romantic stereotypes. But
if one is to ascribe a particular design to the stars for reasons other than
purely scientific, it is to provide a rationale for the human imagination and
thus to enhance the sphere of association and to waken and give guidance to
man’s capacity to evolve. This detail has importance since nothing yet discovered during the long history of human civilization rivals the charismatic conception of the stars as
a principle at once of energy and organization, as a living mythological symbol
of metaphysical redemption, an object of wonder, veneration, awe and
speculation, and even as a guide to the human psyche itself.

It might have been thought perhaps that modern men would seek to
disaffiliate from their archaic commitment to the eternal and the mythic, or in
some measure sacrifice psychological susceptibility to certain demands of logic
and exactitude. But for all our rationality, the impulse of the imagination
cannot be purged or refuted by facts. In our hearts and minds the fundamentally
active rather than the specifiably refractive, life rather than logic, has
proved itself a force of undiminished power.

Nor is it a question of physical measurement. Stellar evolution unfolds
against an authentic spiritual background, the ultimate incomprehensible
perspective from which everything has to be viewed - pure and unconscious space.
Because the universe we seek to fathom, in its spiritual essence as in every
aspect of its physical appearance as an impersonal force, uses the principle of
first causes as a means of conceptualising itself, it would also seem capable,
on these terms, of grasping itself as a purpose.

Intelligence involves self-knowledge. In fact, even without introducing
the concept of intelligibility, if there can be anything like a first cause, it
might just as well by the representation of the Universe as the object of its
own contemplation. An object, particularly with regard to the genesis of man,
which generates and extends itself by an ongoing process of self-realization.
Nor is it an abstract theory to suggest that what is in fact a crisis of modern
civilization is not so much indicated by the fact that the world’s ecological
life-support systems are under serious threat, but by circumstances which, at a
time of acute spiritual transition, appear to be the direct consequence of an
increasing vacuity of metaphysical purpose.

Dreamy

JANUSZCZAK - THE MURAL MEMORANDUM

2008-09-29T13:50:00.008+01:00

Mark Rothko’s suite of late murals, originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in 1958, are now the subject of the New Tate’s retrospective examination of his late work. Rothko, in the event, withdrew from the original commission and donated the paintings to the Tate where they arrived on the day he ended his life - February 25, 1970.

Obviously, a glorious failure!

And below are AA Gill, the Sunday Times food critic and Waldemar Januszczak, its art critic. The former giving an uncannily accurate impersonation of the artistic reviewer, the latter prostrate at Rothko’s feet with a moon-calf look in his eyes in what is a very credible simulation of pubescent infatuation. One is in italics, the other in Trebuchet font. But it is for you to decide who is who, i.e. who talks about artistic canvases and who talks about palatable gourmandise:

“Doomy weightiness has been replaced by a rich set of soaring sensations.”

“It’s all done without overt decoration or fuss, without adjectives or
exclamation marks.”

“a glorious ocean of linked variations”

“an inspired and complementary match”

“We have here a gorgeous restaurant decoration that appears, on this
evidence, to be completely uninterested in the big truths of the cosmos.”

“It is a masterclass in the metaphysics of how, what and why...”

“You will keep returning to this dramatic rethink for further doses of
revelation...”

“..like paint dripped into a glass of water, opaque filigree swathes and
fretted blots whitening out the miraculous landscapes...”

“...remarkable for their skilled manipulation of
glares and reflections and not their tonal bleakness.”

“The combinations of flavours and textures and methods are challenging, but
never overpowering, and often astonishing...”

“The thick fog of spirituality is blown away ... allowing it to breathe
more easily”

“There is none of the faux ponce or haute civility, not the merest whiff of
provincial grandeur that always comes with ...”

...comes with what? Dadaism, Etruscan cutlery, fresh trout grilled over
charcoal, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, or chicken korma from Calcutta? The
euphemisms, as it happens, are valid for either.

“It’s difficult to talk about the emotion of food; it’s plainly an element of eating that goes beyond
epicurean pleasure,” says AA Gill - which rationalization, in the event, is the
same for both. There are few facts but much room for synonyms. Oblivious that he is becoming a parody of himself, Januszczak’s brain seems a sort of gastronomic
belly or diaphragm which quivers in response to every culinary input from its
artistic surroundings and - pardon my hubris - regurgitates this type of
blatant, expedient humdrum horse-shit that even a prepubescent adolescent
wouldn‘t be taken in by: “those famously morose burgundy twilights in which
Stonehenge shapes loom up fuzzily in a claret-coloured gloom.”

Which brings me to Mark Rothko: "There is more power in telling little than in telling all!"

Of one thing we can be certain though, whether we divide art critics psychologically or ethically,
aesthetically or commercially, into vehicles of ambition or repositories of
benevolence, into male or female, black or white, vertically, horizontally or
diagonally, and solemnly conclude that creative ingenuity is in fact compatible
with full mental health, they still show the same dichotomy: the everlasting
struggle between the immovable object and the irresistible force, which is as
old as art itself and as inevitable as the rivalry between the sanguine, the
melancholy, the choleric and the phlegmatic, however trivially motivated and
carried on for whatever purpose. Their integrity, thus, is not in question. The
comedy lies in the fact that when all is said and done, though art can only have
the life of its beholder and may not be worth a warm bucket of spit, they’ve
actually come to believe in it...

Dreamy

ANDREW SULLIVAN - WITCHFINDER GENERAL...

2008-09-26T12:49:00.006+01:00

So I came across this piece yesterday, in which the saga of Sarah Palin becomes the theatre of the absurd. Apparently Sullivan sent two emails to the McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb, in order to enquire if Trig, Palin’s son, is her biological offspring!

It was a perfectly proper query to make in the circumstances, he claims, and one is to read no sinister connotations into it. A thought which might have been spared the perfidy of utterance! Not surprisingly, then, that quest was ignored. Not only that, but both his emails, equally unsurprisingly, found their way into the Washington Post. And here is injured righteousness:

“I asked a question in private. But it has now been made public by Goldfarb and Kurtz...”

Well, if you asked the question “in private,” the answer lies on the
tip of my tongue: Bollocks! No one promotes this private aspect of the
electioneering campaign more publicly than yours truly:

"I'm very sorry to say, it's come to this: can you confirm on the
record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? . . . Since this is a
crazy idea, it should be easy for you or someone to let me know, the most
popular one-man political blog site in the world, what the truth is."

Some people might say that a gift for impudence is the sign of a
malicious personality. In his case it is an example of the spectacular, if
self-defeating, callousness he can display for the feelings and emotions of
others. For worse is to come:

“They won't. They cannot take the time to confirm on the record that
Trig is Sarah's biological son, but they will try to smear the person asking.
What does that tell you?”

Well, what it tells me, Sir - and I may not be alone in this - is that the journalist is never so disingenuous as when he is being “ingenuous”. Though your reasoning is pervers, the facts are not in dispute. The slinger of mud feels maligned when it ends up on his face.

The sheer nerve of it!

I have never claimed, of course, that I first met Andrew Sullivan in
October 1999, when he called upon me in Washington, unannounced, at the Library
of Congress where I worked as the director of research. Or that it was an
eye-opener for me (and would have been for most of the Washington hacks with
whom he then associated). In fact, I have gone to enormous lengths never to say
that. All I will say is that you cannot malign a political party on the basis of
prejudice alone. His record speaks for itself - duly taking cognisance of the
fact that Sarah Palin appears to have no gay friends.:

“Finding these individuals has been difficult.“

Obviously, a man's judgement can change according to whether his spouse
is a man or a woman. A point not recognized in law, but surely compelling in the
emotional loyalties of this particular individual. For Andrew, as we all know,
is married to a male. So tell me, Andrew, if none of my friends are French, does
that make me a Francophobe?

Sarah Palin, he then points out, has been asking God to protect her
from witchcraft - a skill he practises with prolific zeal. Well, Andrew, under
the circumstances, like the good people of Salem in the year of
sixteen-hundred-ninety-two, that is precisely what I would do...

Dreamy

STRICTLY PRIVATE: THE SEVEN LIVES OF HELEN H.

2008-09-25T12:36:00.010+01:00

ONE
Behold the woman who understands exactly the poetic quality her life requires and who can reproduce the same emotion both physically and aesthetically in her garden arrangements. This may seem far-fetched, or perhaps just besides the point, but in either case, and within either of its boundaries, the pressing and immediate are lost...

THE SECOND LIFE
Although I cannot here replicate a precise
reconstruction of the private ventures that make him the true upholder of traditional American values, such as a healthy disrespect for authority, liking Bourbon, cool white jazz and possibly a little dope at weekends, I can see that your husband, nevertheless, has been conquered - only up to a point. Nor is Mrs H easily outdone. Indeed, it is hard to imagine two people with greater
contrasting personalities. To know him one must know - really know - rivers,
mountains, and wuthering heights. To know Helen one must know the eternally
feminine...She will always be Vixen with all her alluring and mystifying
characteristics - a mystification of too much and never quite enough...

THE THIRD LIFE
But even if a sensuous woman in need of worship is not the kind of challenge that Mr H would easily ignore, there are a number of issues yet to be resolved. Seductive women on a mission are apt to be
determined. And if you have a plan, it is to be provocative to those who ignore
you...

About infidelity I find there is nothing to say...

As for sex, you are adamantly opposed to any form of repression. You
tend to ignore your partner’s sense of convention and explore new ideas and concepts for the sheer joy of acquisition - even if that means you have to fake experience in order to attain it. In other words, you do not see yourself as a woman forced to kneel, a perennially thwarted female struggling to make do with lesser surrogates. Instinctively, if you lose interest in sex, you know something is wrong. Indeed, no judgement on your person or your role in life can avoid references to your sense of intuition, or accuse you of overestimating the conscious components of the human personality at the expense of the instincts. In the same way that I experience this knowledge indirectly, you find (or have found) yourself courted by men for whom the threat of personal (or sexual?) inadequacy gave leave to strange uncertainties.

LIFE THE FOURTH
As a rule, you avoid uncertainties of any kind. You are a cool, intelligent
young woman, a student of life, intellectual in your tastes, who has a not
unpleasant air of upper-middle class calm in moments of emergency. In truth, the
central theme of all your life has been the fight against control, albeit dealt
with in an immensely subtle fashion. It always has a logical, purposive meaning,
and may strictly be called a motive force. An outside observer might even say
you exercised free will. But at the very least, you have a shrewd sense of life
and the living of it, which embraces reality, and a steadfast way of thinking
and acting. And yet, your self-fulfilment lacks a very important component. In
fact, there is a link between these two poles, if I could just put my finger on
it...(and if there is a link, Mr H cannot claim to have solved it).But your
vocational life, and one of which you might not even have thought of in those
terms, seems to lack adequate, let alone total, fulfilment.

LIFE THE FIFTH
One thing, above all, is beyond argument: I see a great life in the making.
Whether it’s your own or someone else’s - becoming the repository of your hopes
- that for me is hard to tell. Am I hallucinating? I promise you I'm not. I’ve
checked it very precisely, and the stars don’t lie. Every full moon, can bring
changing circumstances and your own anticipations to a head. You may wonder why
this is relevant. Whether stars are formed by gravitational condensation of gas
nebulae or by some other conceptual process is not yet entirely clear, but it
seems fairly well established that whatever one’s feelings about the application
of the term “ovulate” to invoke the image of the Full Moon, it all adds up to
one of those providential moments when the planets are in exactly the right
alignment for a truly productive conclusion.

THE SIXTH LIFE
It has been said of Helen H. that she was Veronica Lake in a previous life.
An established star who took pride in the quality of her production. But the
facts underlying this sort of regression are far from transparent, other perhaps
than that you have enough real or apparent similarities to justify the claim.
The stars are vague on sources, and ambivalent, even misleading, in their use of
connotation. So that to divine things is to crack a hidden code...or, to put it
differently, to explain the synchronicities of nature which are altogether
unintelligible within the commonly accepted hypotheses of cause and effect, but
which involve the freeing and revitalisation of precisely those atavistic
instincts whose chaining and restraint has been the work of some three thousand
years of domestication. Incidentally, everything I have experienced in my own
life tends to underline the truth of this perception. Nor do I lack the
self-confidence to draw active conclusions from the spirit that has been keeping
me awake at night - though, at the end of the day, you cannot foretell a person
anything; you can only help them to discover it for themselves...

LIFE THE SEVENTH...
...about which there is no knowing. Anything is possible, if you will allow
me this generalisation. But I can see a gym, a film-script, or a play perhaps,
the numbers 3, 15, 19 and 72, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Hunter S. Thompson, an
optician, an academic ã, and probably an obstetrician too. All our acts have
consequences, and no doubt, one can infer anything or nothing from that
enigmatic inventory. Either way, it would be fey to claim that I was being
directed from beyond the stars after the manner of the angels who have fallen, but I'll let
you into a little secret, over time they have come to seem familiar...

Dreamy

THE KILLING OF ART...

2008-09-22T20:05:00.007+01:00

Brilliant exposé on Channel 4 last night: The Mona Lisa Curse. Veteran art critic Robert Hughes said it all. Contrary to the rumours I have been trying to spread for some time, nobody is going to smell a rat. Nor will the jig be up. I'm bound to say the problem absolutely baffled me. But I can see my mistake and understand what I totally failed to grasp: Art is a commodity admired only for its pricetag.

As Jeffrey Archer blithely observed: “There are dealers holding Hirst works in their galleries that they can't afford to see drop to record lows, and therefore decide to join the bidding.”

Ultimately responsible for these encroachments, then, and prepared to justify them at all cost, is that dark, hidden bureaucracy of profit, which comprises the art establishment. Here is the dissemination, through myriad
channels of information based on very specific deception themes, some of which
are colluded in by the artist himself. In the biggest unregulated market in the
world this scam is pursued with precision and bureaucratic thoroughness. It
comes in high places and extreme forms. The dealer’s s' approach to profit
mirrors Cecil B. de Mille’s entertaining spectacle of the Hollywood blockbuster,
where the cost of the production becomes part of its commercial attraction. But
whereas the art establishment’s great skill has been to convince the buyers they
are being done an enormous service by being allowed to acquire the work, this
does not mean the introduction to humanity of great works of art, but the
diminution of the artistic faculties, the forfeiture of judgement, the loss of
aesthetic reflection, of genuine artistic genius and imaginative appreciation.

The hypocrisy is so perfect it's almost delinquent.

No moral principle guides the actions of an industry which is
anatomically separated from the rest of our economic culture. In contrast with
the elaborate rituals of the international banking system, the art business is a
relatively simple financial instrument of the sort used by Nick Leeson, the
rogue trader who brought down Barings bank in 1995. You actually bet on a
profitable future, rather than on derivatives, which are so called precisely
because their value is derived from that of an underlying asset.

I am at a loss what to say.

It is almost as if the sheer effrontery has drained my capacity for
reflection. While there is no accountability because there is no criterion,
artists, in our time, are nevertheless the bastard offspring of Arts Councils
founded by chunks of public money. Indeed, no other profession has been so
copiously blessed. And yet, its very principle is negative. Stop all art
subsidies, is what I would suggest. And I am very clear on this. I have a vivid and
I think certainly no false grievance: Give art back her innocence, I say...

Dreamy

ON THE MATTER OF FREE WILL (Or Part Three Of A Triptych In Which Miss Dreamy Is Finally Coming To The Point...)

2008-09-19T18:34:00.006+01:00

Bob: “(unconditional free will as in 'the choice that I make now is totally independent of the circumstances and the history including myself'), because we will never know which was the predetermined path and what happened when we took a turn from there.”

Excellent!

But this is hardly to concede that the whole question of free will can thus be summarily dismissed. That an indomitable will can always make itself felt is a matter of historical fact. For even though no such conscious will may exist, the entire past and future history of man must have been implicit in its unconditional configuration at the point of its creation.

Thus one may say, with scrupulous accuracy, that Pitt, Marlborough, Clive, Cook, Nelson and Wellington belong to the foremost rank of British imperial heroes. Where vital processes are at work, willpower and determination can gain an imaginative foothold, or make a breakthrough of far greater importance than the mere application of free will. The enormous ramifications of what, for want of a better term, may be called cosmic intuition found its most profound expression, perhaps, in Heraclitus and the intellectual impulse towards the modern idea of becoming. One is conscious of the legacy of this great man - Nietzschean rather than Euclidean. Galvani and Watt, Volta and Ohm, Ampere and
Bunsen dominated the early nineteenth century and the science of electro-chemistry. Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction. Maxwell founded the electromagnetic age.

But crucial to all was vision. Either that, or call it intuition.

Einstein had remarkable powers of perception. He was both the detached
observer and a reader of riddles. Newton, apart from a strongly marked
individuality, was at once the magus of the universe and a man of the
Enlightenment. The sheer scale of the man is breathtaking. But both Newton and
Einstein were preoccupied with the modus operandi of the law of gravity, and
their achievement is a triumph of the imaginative will gained not in the
interest of the individual, but of humanity. Men of such note are unique to any
period, but they are a force rather than a power. The broad currents of history
may not have been, and cannot perhaps be fundamentally altered by such impetus.
You need a thousand more to grasp the source and origin of human civilization.

Cultural contexts, then, whether psychological or technological, social
or scientific change their identity through vision and intuition, rather than intellectual
discrimination or free will. No individual freedom of will remotely fulfils the
collective purpose of mankind’s inner spiritual and its outer cosmic
development. Individual events are just part of a probability distribution.
Quantities and numbers come to hold a sovereign significance, pertaining to life
in a way that a metric unit pertains to a poem and are probably amounting to the
greatest single sociological force. Admittedly! In fact, the dependence is such
that social behaviour becomes a commodity charted in financial institutions.
That social patterns are the foundation of corporate profitability and the
rationalization of commercial law is an accepted doctrine of financial
establishments sanctioned by Marx and Adam Smith alike. Indeed, Marx points out
that a social context “can accurately predict the number and kind of crimes that
will be committed over any given period of time,” even though the offence itself
is casual.

Society's socio-philosophical content is, consequently, identical with that of
the first law of thermodynamics governing random motions of particles. However
haphazard they turn out to be, the determinate element is paramount. Free Will
is a myth contrived in scholastic institutions.

Dreamy

ON THE MATTER OF FREE WILL (Or Part Two Of A Triptych In Which Selena Can Be Seen Enjoying The Freedom Of Her Movement In Predictable Ways...)

2008-09-18T18:14:00.005+01:00

David B.: “Perhaps it's not that we lack free will but that we merely
choose to exercise it in predictable ways.”

Jonathan: “Maybe free will is more of a goal to attain, as opposed to a
given state for all.”

It is all a very contentious business, but, as you have seen, I have no patience with those who subscribe to that pathetic phenomenon known as free will. Though the tendency in question is I believe more a matter of the past. It has attracted a good deal of attention, indeed, fromphilosophers of all kinds, determinists and idealists alike. Avoiding that debate, it seems clear nevertheless that, according to the universal understanding of mankind, some actions result from effective choices and hence are free, while others do not and are predetermined. But in all cases on record,
the outcome is essentially determined by the number of choices at hand: When the telephone rings, you can let it ring, or you can pick it up. Full stop! Nor does it make any difference to the overall pattern of a given frame of reference whether individual choices and events are causally determined or in any way free, for as long as the ratio created by dividing the sum total of such actions is part of the probability distribution. And this is self-evidently so. One might expect a certain disproportion where the numbers are low, but given a large number of decisions that essentially only fit the logical choice of yes or no, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Jonathan: “Perhaps, though, it depends on what is meant by free will.
Do we mean the freedom to choose between two or more available options according
to our inner promptings and tastes. Or do we mean something deeper and more
truly free than this.”

Nor must we fall into the trap of supposing
that a greater number of alternatives in any way affects the distribution of
individual events. Where issues of principle are concerned, free will perishes
in the finite and predetermined confines of a closed system. The obvious failing
of the idealist is a concern for individuals rather than principles. But, in his
rendering of a sanguine and wonderful faith, neither he nor any possible choice
or event ever succeed in seriously embarrassing statistical method and
contextual constraint. Even to assume it may, is utopian. The measure of the
volitional freedom of human society is to be found at the core - against all his
own intentions - in the limitations of the individual himself. He springs forth
from his mother‘s womb and is ushered onto a stage. He’s become a performer
reading from a cue, a mere player in some eternally revived production. To be
human is to live in the country of the blind, the land of sealed and closed
perceptions. What intrigues one about it, is not so much its apparent
determinism as the air it seems to possess of being both, finite and unbounded,
indicating claims to a personal freedom which is deprived of significance by
limiting the conceptual context in a way which conditions individual responses
and entails actions that are always predicable en masse.

Schopenhauer summed it up: ‘We can will, but we cannot will what we
will!’

Dreamy

ON THE MATTER OF FREE WILL (Or Part One Of A Triptych In Which Miss Dreamy Can Be Observed Reading From Her Book...)

2008-09-17T18:12:00.005+01:00

If mind is a property of the brain, and human behaviour a result of cultural conditioning, can there be such a such a thing as free will?

The idealist is necessarily affirmative: he avers the possibility of more or less fundamentally defying constraint and substituting human determinism for an act of volition. The realist acknowledges an encoded process of
development which he is powerless to change. To him a human being is a finite and dependent being: He cannot fly, he cannot make it rain on demand, he doesn’t get to decide if it’s day or night, he doesn’t even chose the language he’s
going to be born into.

If physical reality, then, can only be predicted by invoking the
mathematics of probability, human behaviour, too, in terms of probability, can
always be predicted en masse. As has already been noted, it is an intriguing and
inexplicable fact that - in the matter of spontaneous nuclear disintegration -
there is no criterion for deciding which atom, on an unprompted impulse, is
going to decay. For while observation has shown that the time it takes for a
given quantity of radioactive material to decay is precisely that predicted by
theory, by any measurement we can make, the process itself is random. And
admittedly, on the basis of mere supposition, this aimlessness hardly seems true
of the individual human activity. No collective rule or pattern seems quite to
apply. We may speak of a baby-boom, or a suicide-wave, but only by the
deliberate resort to free will, the reasoned determination of persons pursuing
their own fate, can one define individuality.

And yet, the supposition is wrong: collective behaviour displays
symmetry with a rate of conformity proportional to numbers!

In their aggregate capacity, when large collections of people are
considered, free will plays none but a statistical role. Human behaviour is
fundamentally pattern-forming. Indeed, as soon as one begins to look into the
subject, one is confronted with the idea of co-ordination of human activity by
means of systems of impersonal or collective patterns, within which alone
spontaneous situations may arise. Beyond that, the question of free will does
not admit of a single exception. And once this is realized, it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that single events, by the inevitable pressure of numbers,
must occur with a predictability so close to certainty as to appear an
inevitability.

Dreamy

SULLIVAN’S SORROWS..

2008-09-15T19:57:00.005+01:00

Sarah Palin: the most underqualified vice-president ever?

“It is a farce. It is absurd. It is an insult to all intelligent
people. It is a sign of a candidate who has lost his mind. “

“McCain has rendered himself unfit to run a branch of Starbucks, let
alone the White House. “

“She had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was – the central and most
controversial foreign policy innovation of the past eight years.”

“Then we have the now mountain of lies that follow Palin everywhere she
goes, lies she keeps repeating as if they are not subject to factual scrutiny” -
etc. etc. ad infinitum

There you have him, Andrew Sullivan, Sunday
Times correspondent, and - for reasons that elude me - “one of America’s most influential commentators“, frothing at the mouth.

Needless to say, the courtesy of the political journalist is usually
inversely proportional to his common good sense. More pertinently, they often
lose sight of the difference between wishful thinking and a reasoned conclusion.
And Andrew is no exception. For if, instead of quarrelling over how many angels
can dance on the top of a pin, he’d taken a single step backwards, he would
clearly have discerned that denying the truth does not change the facts. For
even though the racial mix of America is altering as immigration fuels
population growth, Obama is, in fact, at this moment in time, unelectable. And
so, for that matter, is McCain - pickled, as he is, in Botox and walking like
the Golem of the Ghetto. Let us not pretend otherwise. In fact, it is hard not
to admire what either Obama or McCain achieved, but the histrionic conduct of
their thousands of helpers also suggests that an element of ever more desperate
self-deception has long since pervaded their respective electoral campaigns.

So with the electorate caught between a rock and a hard place. Sarah
Palin is, in truth, the answer to a prayer. So far from being “a massive,
unforgivable, inexplicable decision by someone who has either gone insane or is
managerially unfit to be president of the United States“, she is, in all
probability, the single most effective recruiting agent ever to be nominated for
the vice-presidential responsibility. A stroke of immaculate conception, in
other words, rather than an act of Biblical savagery.

But, of course, when a media war is waged on someone thought to have
done wrong, the executor in the one instance can easily become the victim in
another. And if you really have a problem with women being nominated to the Vice
Presidency while not knowing the Bush Doctrine, she seems to me to be a
prophetess of the changed world one so longs for. She doesn't know, as yet, what
the eyes of the dead are like. For here's the point. The perniciousness of its
ideology can easily be acquired, whereas a guiltless personality is a divine
bequest.

Or think of it this way, Andrew, at least when she’s kissing them, we
know she’s been the mother of, rather than murdering, babies...

Dreamy

GOOD BYE ENGLAND, WE LOVE YOU...

2008-09-11T18:46:00.003+01:00

All Shook Up: “We have no ideals left to which we can be asked to aspire to
on an inherently, almost subconscious, level. Our idea of Britishness is rooted
in the notion of history and a sense of belonging by birthright to a superior
tribe - it's not one which can easily be extended to incomers. Much as we might
be uncomfortable with this fact, and wish to reinvent it...we've thrown out our
Land of Hope and Glory and can't find its successor.”

The bearing of these remarks, I should surmise perhaps, is a mere
summing up, and not as might wrongly be supposed, in any spirit of support for
an imperial philosophy of state. Nor, in the name of an idea, would it be
presumptuous to assert that England is a very different nation today, or that
in her case one might consider the really decisive loss to have been
virtues, which are, in a quote, “something that is inborn, and subtle , and
everlasting...something like a solid principle, and masterful like an instinct -
a disclosure of something secret - of that hidden something, that gift of good
or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations”

Joseph Conrad, who thus endeavoured to formulate the conditions, was
peculiarly perceptive on this point. Unfashionable though they may sound to us
today, his words nevertheless make it clear, if only for rhetorical purposes,
how completely the genius of those who once took pride in the thought that they
were God‘s Englishmen has become diluted by egalitarian ideologies implying
that we have ceased to be British, ceased to be the defenders of invincible
Armadas, the “pugnacious and unconquerable bulldog race.”

There is an old biblical saying that God rejects the proud and gives
grace to the humble. Humility, therefore, is doubtless a praiseworthy thing. But
- to the best of my belief - if the evolution of the civilized world depended to
a considerable degree on English national or racial ingredients, it is
nevertheless the case that their chief and foremost contribution to it has been
the long and fortuitous history of a Charmed Life, rather than the humility of
those who can surrender themselves, for the sake of pity, to pacific or passive
influences. There are further considerations, of course, which point in the
direction of development which, in a country the size of Britain, is not perhaps
at liberty to desist, but essentially it is England and the English spirit for
which we mourn.

“A nation behaves like itself,” it has been succinctly said. And
accordingly, in a contribution to the 1939 edition of The English Genius, its
central doctrine could still be expressed as follows: “What pleases us we take
from Europe, what displeases us we leave to Europeans; for only accidentally to
we consider ourselves as such.” Few, even a short while ago, would have liked to
read this differently. But we live in the age of “Confederalism” and its
mastering doctrine abdicated, the new policy of this country and its
discontinuity with her old traditions has become quite unmistakable. And to the
extent this is an issue, not of national polity but of the logic of events, it
must clearly lead to results that are in profound contradiction with the age-old
assumption that its own inherent genius is the soul and body of a nation.

But whether we admire it or not, and regardless of whether or not it is
to be subsumed under a confederate ethos, this , at all events, is the very
genius which conquered the world, ’Hellenised’ it and formulated the conditions
under which the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number was
actually going to be achieved. Imperial or not, one might as well admit that
it has brought into existence laws and rules of behaviour that we now recognize
as universal; liberties not so much of Englishmen as of all men; rights that are
constituent elements of our very own time. And that, in fact, is why we are
compelled to say, when brought face to face with the enduring quality of certain
unalterable codes of British conduct, with “that perfection”, finally, “of
moral, intellectual, and professional qualities” which Trevelyan called “The
Nelson Touch”, that This was their finest hour...!

Dreamy

DAMIEN HIRST - A JACKASS’ TAKE ON BRITISH ART!

2008-09-09T18:41:00.006+01:00

The value of Tracy Emin's Bed is said to have risen to more than £1m. And still, I wouldn’t swap it for my own. Which is how, this very morning, I came to
realize the truth of the fact that the value of money is measured not by what it will buy, but by the number of monetary units you can append to it.

Nor does it matter in which order the 000.000s are placed.

Buying “art” is a numbers game - a commercially inspired misnomer. And much more widely spread around the world than in the 1980's when it was largely dependent on American wealth and irresponsible Japanese speculation. Meanwhile,
the rulers of Qatar have paid tens of millions of pounds for works of British art. The al-Thani family are trying to build up their collections in the Gulf
state. Accordingly, Francis Bacon’s Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X was
acquired for £26m and a Damien Hirst sculpture for just under £10m.

I wish I could feel this deeply about art!

Hirst the artist - as he is often mistakenly called - is compulsively common with his vocabulary. And with the bearing of a ravenous rent-boy plus the technical know-how of an
entrepreneur, he has reduced artistic creativity to a marketable formula: Gilded Trash!
A fascination with carcasses pervades his work, adding a commercial element of
horror to an otherwise conventionally manufactured production line. But in a
market that refuses to yield to the logic of an international recession, the
real horror is, of course, the ongoing serial production of artefacts for a
collector’s market almost hysterical with anticipation.

“I’ve definitely had the goal to make the primary market
more expensive”

Noticeably eager to please, he is putting up 223 new works for a series of auctions at Sotheby’s beginning Monday, Sept. 15th. Not - if I’ve got this right - his wisest executive decision. No Sir, at
the end of the day, they’re bound to smell a rat and the jig will be up.
Compulsive shopping, on the other hand, is not a specific mental disorder.
Indeed, some experts see it as an addiction associated with low self-esteem, and
it is significant, is it not, that that buyers are not expected to come from
either Europe or America, but such forthcoming places as Qatar and Brunei where,
fired, perhaps, by feelings of cultural inferiority, they’re willing to buy a
jackass’s take on British art complete with an enormous price tag. It will be
one of the things we'll remember them by.

But enough of jackasses and the rest of that garbage! I’m with Toulouse
Lautrec on this one. "The ones who say they don't give a damn, do give a
damn, because if they really didn't give a damn they wouldn't bother to say they
don't give a damn."

Elementary, my dear Toulouse! Elementary!

Dreamy

THE McCAIN MUTINY

2008-09-07T18:01:00.008+01:00

“McCain stands in front of a great green screen that makes him look like the undead, which in so many ways he is. The years in captivity, the cancer and age have made a mess of him. He can’t lift his arms above his shoulders. He walks like a man who’s been bayoneted in the groin. He is a man who’s been bayoneted in the groin. But most worrying is his head, which behaves like a rejected muppet.”

Thus, in today’s Sunday Times, the incomparable AA Gill. One of AA’s amazing qualities is the scholarly precision he applies to even the meanest personal detail - and no one put this aspect of the presidential election more brutally than he. It may seem cruel, but it’s long overdue. Let’s face it, unlike Hirst’s Cow in Formaldehyde, McCain put
himself on stage. And this is no pygmy-minded giant-slaying but the honest, if
heart-rending truth.

Stupidity, though, is a different matter:
Not of his appearance or manners necessarily, but of the surfeit of mental rigour and of the free-flowing absence of wit. For AA also speculates that McCain, exemplifying as he does
the spirit of uprightness and integrity, is painfully unprotected against the
conniving nature of political trolls. A symptom of his downfall. And as far as I
am concerned, if Robert E. Lee had had McCain at Gettysburg the outcome might
well have been different. But, now, it just so happens that “He stands there, stiff
and twitching, with his skull grin, a good man, a decent, humane and committed
man, fated by bad luck. It is his destiny to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time, to fall from a great height into the hands of bad people.”

Perplexed? You ought to be, and here's why:

Actually, I'm all for Obama - powerful, charismatic and a natural
talent. But in a predictable reversal, McCain will be elected, precisely because
in America nobody with the name of Barrack Obama can ever enter the White House.
Nor will McCain see the end of his own administration. Washington will endure a
major psychological crisis before 2010 is out. There’ll be rumours of hernias,
rheumatism, melanomas, goitre, scrofula, convulsions, cerebral paralysis and a
riot before the end of his term. He’ll have his head pickled in Botox, and
nothing will move. He’ll then retire on health-grounds, and Beauty Queen Sarah
Palin, the legitimate heir to the throne of America - and now the title proves
prophetic - will be sworn into office...

Gosh, don’t you just love a fairy-tale...

Dreamy

AFGHANISTAN: THE UN-HOLY WAR...

2008-09-05T17:30:00.005+01:00

THE MILIBAND MYTH:
“Civilian or at least non-military interventions are
at the heart of sustainable progress - hence the emphasis in Anglo-French
discussions of the need for a political surge in Afghanistan, led by the Afghan
government at national and local levels.”

THE FACTS OF THE MATTER:
“Sixty children were among 90 civilians killed in an American airstrike in
northwest Afghanistan according to a United Nations investigation. More than 700
civilians have died this year!”

The Spanish Civil War was the most conspicuous, perhaps, of its kind to witness the launching of the great Communist lie that the republicanos were fighting for democracy. Idealists from
all over the world joined the International Brigades, led and organised by the
Republicans, and made up of young believers whose common goal lay in fighting
Fascism. They included Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Andre Malraux, Arthur
Koestler and many others, while the Nationalists received the support of the
major European powers, such as Italy and Nazi Germany. Of course, the Taliban
don’t even pretend they are fighting for either freedom or democracy. Albeit
that news of British recruits among the Taliban strongly suggests that the war
in Afghanistan, like that in pre-fascist Spain, has become a magnet for
International Brigades determined to fight the infidel. For as an amalgam of
veterans and press-ganged extremists trapped in ideological circumstances, they
too, from their own particular perspective appear to be fighting for freedom.

Yet, while Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus tainted liberal
democracy in America, even today in Western liberal circles the view that NATO
entered the fray in Afghanistan to defend democratic ideals remains pretty much
the unchallenged consensus. But can it really be upheld, that refractory
individuals, let alone entire tribal cultures, that do not accept these premises
are not worthy of equal protection in a liberal democratic world?

Ostensively, Anglo-America's policy is committed to the idea of
freedom, often aggressively so. But in reality, the civilisations of the
European enlightenment, of which Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy claims to be the
heir, can never own such cultural prerogative since Islamic societies, too,
exist in their own moral universe. Enclosed in a separate ethical biosphere,
Islam has its own hereditary values regarding the worth and dignity of
individuals. It is all a matter of perspective. And just how honestly can anyone
claim that the world promised by America is the best of all possible worlds. On
the one hand there is the promise of temporal freedom with its doctrine of
ever-present pleasure, on the other there is the essentially religious character
of all Islamic institutions. And as for that freedom America does propagate so
much, we have counted its blessings alone...

It is no doubt the case that by surrendering habeas corpus for enemy
combatants the US has lost the moral high ground and replaced it with a complete
disregard of legal process, a highly repressive system of state security, and
the idea of revenge uppermost on their minds. At the same time, on the critical
matter of individual liberty, President Hamid Karzei's cabinet has long since
approved the proposal to re-establish the notorious Department for the Promotion
of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was first set up by the Taliban, so that
all that remains now is to make war on an entire Islamic culture in which
everyone is a Taliban at heart!

It’s madness!

Indeed, I have the most hideous premonition that the only possible
solution to the great American conspiracy to democratise Islam — and I’m looking
at five decades into the future here — is extraordinary rendition, deep
interrogation, indefinite detention, targeted killings and all-out warfare
between Mecca and Rome.

Dreamy

MINIMUM AND MAXIMUM - A Post In Which Selena Plays Hostess To An Assembly Of Thinkers And Philosophers...

2008-09-03T18:48:00.006+01:00

THE DISCIPLE:
Jonathan: “Nothing is an ambiguous concept. Does nothing
mean no- thing, as in no particular thing and therefore rather potentially everything, or the 'all' (plenitude as the hidden face of void), or does nothing literally mean absence (of both subject and object, and anything else for that matter)?”

THE LOGICIAN:
Crushed: “The reality is, infinity is not a property
of the universe, but it must logically be a property of primary reality, where time and space do not exist, where are everything is both eternal and simultaneous, where everything is unbounded, yet takes place in zero dimensions.”

THE EMPIRICIST:
Gordon McCabe: “And then a third existential transition creeps upon us. The internal system begins to decay and fail. The reproductive drive shrivels. The layers of linguistic understanding erode, and eventually even the kernel of self-awareness becomes brittle. Thought
evaporates, and only feeling and experience remain. At the end, you are without
knowing that you are. Beyond, there is nothing.”

THE SCIENCE FICTION WRITER:
Poul Anderson: "Death! Nothingness! Not even the world can exist when one is dead. Not when you've no brain left to know about it. Just - nothing. As if you had never been! Haven't you ever been afraid of the thought?"

THE METAPHYSICIAN:
Nicholas of Cusa: “The absolute maximum is one
and it is all; all things are in it because it is the maximum. Moreover, it is
in all things for this reason that the minimum at once coincides with it, since
there is nothing that can be placed in opposition to it. By definition the
minimum is that which cannot be less than it is; and since that is also true of
the maximum, it is evident that the minimum is identified with the maximum.”

Very well argued!

In fact, it is impossible not to admire this comprehensive, truthful,
and indeed accomplished observation by Nicholas of Cusa. There can be no doubt,
that the point at which no further information can be added is the maximum and
that the concept most completely divested of meaning or content would have to be
the minimum. Applied to the ultimate synthesis - nothing can be placed in
opposition - both coincide. At any rate, de Cusa’s legacy has less to do with
the extent to which his line of reasoning is truthful or accomplished than with
the way in which it points directly to other far-reaching syntheses.

The minimum, essentially, is that which remains when every possible
qualification for meaning has been eliminated. We can, on the other hand, add
nothing to infinity. That is clearly impossible. Or take the concept of Space.
If the primary function of Space was to provide a fixed frame of reference, it
still required the reduction of content or meaning to the lowest possible level
consistent with nothing. Though it occupies a unique position in every
philosophical system, no one can see it, weigh it, or isolate any part of it.
Which eliminates at a stroke both definition and the measure that serves as a
basis for definition. Nor can we picture anything that has no boundary and no
definition. And yet, it is so fundamental a concept that it is impossible to
propose any scheme of nature from which it is entirely excluded.
This, however, is not a practical problem, only one of principle. The fallacy, in short, is to
mistake the ideal for the real. It has a serenity which is already beyond
comprehension. Hence it would seem that immortality is of two kinds: infinite
and incomprehensible. For in identifying the maximum with the minimum it also
emancipates non-being from the customary deception that the total absence of
comprehensibility should be a form of imperfection. The plenum and the vacuum
cannot possibly be distinguished.

Death has been robbed of its triumph!

It may seem odd to suggest this, but a brief indication of their
relative properties merely states that either must be infinite in substance and
total in extent. Nor can there by anything identifiable which limits it or
constitutes its boundary or origin. It simply does not answer to anything
recognizable. It owes nothing to human imagination. Not force, nor shape, or
measure. Nothing approaches consciousness. Time and place and plot and meaning
are all absent; yet none of this matters, by the measure invoked - Nothing is Everything!

Dreamy

NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING - A Post In Which Selena Explains To Stephen Hawking That There Can Never Be A Theory Of Everything Because...

2008-09-01T18:25:00.009+01:00

‘...it would have to be something that was neither subject nor object, neither force nor matter, neither spirit nor soul: but shall I not be told that such a thing will resemble nothing so much as a phantasmagoria? ...Of course, it must resemble that and everything else which exists or could exist, and not only a phantasmagoria! It must have that dominant family likeness by virtue of which all that is recognizes itself as related to it.’

Here before us, in the unsuspecting tones of the nineteenth century philosopher, is the entire Theory of Everything. There is a consummate completeness about it. In fact, Nietzsche may have expressed the inexpressible better than the physicist. For whatever the physicist may have to say of it, everyone knows that once he sets himself to construct by pure mathematics, and without appeal to any empiricism, a theory which aims to be the only complete and essential form of knowledge, that it ‘must have that dominant family likeness by virtue of which all that is, recognizes itself as related to it.’

And to this extent, the significance of an eternal law of nature as
something divorced from man, is in fact identical with the idea of a completely
consistent and unified theory of the differential equations that would unite all
possible co-ordinates. And yet, it can hardly be a simple matter to show that
one single theory may explain the baffling complexity of infinitely divergent or
even opposite phenomena. Certainly, various attempts have been made to explain
the idea of unity as a pre-existing norm in terms of a logically consistent,
self-explanatory physical principle, this depending mainly on the mutual
conversion of electromagnetic and gravitational forces, but so far without
success. Efforts have also been made to combine general relativity and quantum
mechanics into a coherent hyper-dimensional theory, but inevitably, the
mathematical analysis that permits the physicist to use a terms like self-explanatory with any measure of precision is still incomplete, and we can only grasp it by grasping that it is causa sui, which is to say that it cannot have been caused by anything other than itself.

On the edge of large events in the evolution of the human mind, we have expanded the frontiers of knowledge beyond all intellectual grasp to include even ourselves. In this sense modern scientific enquiry is profoundly inclusive. Indeed, no one can have failed to notice that one of the greatest difficulties in the whole unification of physics is to arrive at any kind of objective measure of an isotropic law of nature as something which is divorced from man. Something whose attributes are therefore self-evident and not contingent.

Self-evidently therefore, and not contingently, it should be born in mind that
it must be deducible from its own essential nature as well as providing the
ground for every possible contingent deduction. For if it were not, it would in
some measure be limited to being a necessary consequence of our own essential
nature, rather than this unique all-inclusive totality which Spinoza called “God
or Nature” (Deus sive Nature), and which Kant referred to as “the thing in
itself” (das Ding an sich). Nor can we ever assign a higher degree of continuity
to such a theory than continuation in our thoughts - ex nihilo nihil fit... (nothing comes from nothing)!

Dreamy

GIVE THEM HELL, PUTIN...

2008-08-29T20:14:00.005+01:00

Mutley: “Well you know a lot about politics but unless you are suggesting a
cataclysmic nuclear exchange then in a military sense the Russians lose every
time. ...If we are going to talk about like weapons and war and stuff then I
will win by the way - you have wandered into my territory.”

Nor is all this this about military conflicts, Mutley. It’s just all about adding fuel
to the fire. Besides, theories of Nato’s state-of-the-art weaponry are a weak
basis for discounting the power of endurance and will. And here the Russian
Army excels.

Let’s face it, in 1941 it was expected the Red Army would collapse in a
matter of weeks against the overwhelming power of the Wehrmacht divisions.
Barely two years later they were driving the Panzers back, having contained over
250 German divisions, while the combined Allied armies up to the invasion of
Sicily, had only faced the few vastly undersupplied divisions of Rommel's Afrika
Korps.

Of course, there was Hamburg in late July of 1943, when the
RAF annihilated more people in one stroke than would perish in Britain during
the entire war.

You may well think, then, that the tide turned at El Alamein. Or that
Britain’s principal ally, the US, supplied the major military
muscle for putting paid to the Nazi armoury. But the Russians - with no concern
for Allied pretensions - are absolutely adamant that the actual rout came in the
Soviet Union, the real turning-point of the war. On 19 November 1942,
simultaneously with the arrival of winter, the Soviet counteroffensive had
began. It resulted in the encirclement of the German Sixth Army, parts of the
Fourth Army, and a number of Romanian auxiliary brigades - a total of 250,000
soldiers. The greatest defeat the Wehrmacht had yet sustained. With that, the
high tide of German military victories had come and gone. Hitler’s vast
mechanized war-machine in the East had not only been bled dry in the horrendous
winter battles but was about to be turned back. By the end of January 1943 the
Russians had substantially defeated the invading host. The collapse of the Axis
alliance followed as a matter of course. For their own part the Americans are
deservedly conscious of the competing burden of the Pacific theatre of war,
while D-Day, like a culminating fireworks display, has been built up as the
decisive moment.

Again, I add but one word: Bollocks!

What is never acknowledged is that without the Red Army grinding into
dust 150 crack Nazi divisions, the Allies would never have landed in Normandy.

Mutley: “If Russia attacks NATO it signs its own death warrant.“

Are you quite sure we are here talking about the same multi-national
Nato force, Mutley, that is struggling to keep the hapless mule-skinners of
Afghanistan from kicking their arse. Or are you thinking of England, a nation
where children are outnumbered by pensioners clamouring for their heating money
- while Russia turns off fuel supplies? Germany? - there is military history, it
is true, but little heart, and the French lost theirs at Dien Bien Phu. Italy -
to them at least goes the honour of the last successful cavalry charge in
military history. Out into the fields they went, on 24 August 1942 , on the
banks of the River Don, with no objective in mind save for a famous victory and
personal oblivion...

I, for one, feel perfectly capable of judging events on their own merit regardless of being accused of supporting the Evil Empire. Then, of course, I could muse about the cold war actually being a battle between hostile conglomerates. But I guess what I really mean is, that I can’t stand
political nancy-boys claiming the moral high ground while talking rhetorical
gibberish.

Over to you Mutley...

MY CONDOLENCES TO YOU ALL...

2008-08-27T17:45:00.004+01:00

"Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has warned that his country may respond
to a US missile shield in Europe through military means. Mr Medvedev said the
deployment of an anti-missile system close to Russian borders "will, of course,
create additional tensions. We will have to react somehow, to react, of course,
in a military way..."

Harsh words indeed - and worse is to follow...

Kennedy made just this point when he warned the Soviets about Cuba in 1962. A period
which has been condemned for recklessness and glamorised for its demonstration
of ultimate diplomacy. Though my own guess is that he built up the hype so high
that nothing less could meet the profligate expectations he had raised. It was
either fish or cut bait. So he broke a rule of diplomacy: “Get out or get
nuked!”

The result, of course, was The Cold War.

History has been stood on its head. There is something outrageously
hypocritical about the contrast between Cuba and Poland. And nothing proves
quite as inflammatory as US-led efforts to integrate post-Soviet territories
into the North-Atlantic Pact. But how come that we all accept this as evidence
of our own good will, when in fact it looks to me like the very opposite of it.
One is reminded of the proverb about people in glass houses. Such things rankle,
and worse is to come: so far as incorporating the Ukraine into Nato is
concerned, the Crimea has a Russian majority population just waiting to be
“freed”...

And who the heck is going to oppose it?

Sarkosy? The pint-sized little busybody with a chip on his shoulder
whose penchant for bling so well complements Carla’s rather more broad-minded
approach to ambassadorial activity...Or Miliband? The boy scout whose Clark
Kent-style transformation from geek to superman has yet to be ratified. For
until that happens, permit me to doubt!

George Brown? I am afraid that his limitations of expression (and my
own impatience) - have inevitably meant that his opinions are valued only on
matters of Olympic ceremony, low-energy lightbulbs and greenhouse gardensheds.
Or bring back Blair, perhaps, who gets as high as a kite on blueprints
describing weapons of mass destruction. Come home, sweet Bambie, all is
forgiven...

So what about Berlusconi, idling his way through wealth and corruption,
he is, even by Italian standards, unusually thick-skinned. But then, Mafia and
Medvedev are not synonymous. And Frau Angela Merkel? I am aware that my bias is
Anglo-Saxon; but a German woman turned war horse? God help us all - that may
well backfire...

All is not lost, however. For no one who knows about horses could ever
confuse Frau Merkel with Herr Paxman. A British institution that is steeped in
nothing but a distinguished voice, exceedingly high-brow manners and the tone of
an offended mandarin duck. Still, it is hard to argue with Paxos raised brow -
probably the best weapon we ever had...

And yet, help is at hand - it seems, in the veteran and near-incumbent shape of John McCain whose rugged,plain-speaking record is seen as a welcome boost to sagging Cold-War morale.
Besides, Barrack Obama has to be rendered ineffectual. You may talk a good game,
McCain, but don’t start messing with the Ruskies. They do not associate war
with pleasure! Bombing hapless mountain tribes in Afghanistan is one thing, but
to take on the might of the Mongols, already bruised by the loss of their
empire, is quite another. If you don’t think you’re Custer riding into Little
Big Horn, then let me warn you, nor are these Sioux and Cheyenne braves. These
are the boys that tore the heart out of Operation Barbarossa and put paid to the
Axis Powers; they’ll have your balls for breakfast...

My condolences to you all! Be prepared for some disappointment. Death
is not selective...

Dreamy

SAVING RICHARD MADELEY...

2008-08-25T21:07:00.009+01:00

“I’m looking for a good reason not to close this blog....I’ve lost my sense of fun.”

Evidently in a state of mental exhaustion, here’s a man who believes that
he has lost his call. A man who is looking for a reason not to close his blog. A
common complaint among authors, together with imagining they’re suffering from
writers’ block, and can’t, for the life of them, think how to escape it.

And yet, this is a valuable moment, Richard. A moment of catharsis.

We all crave attention, status and approbation. Indeed, approbation is
fine thing, but what about scepticism, spite, jealousy and ridicule? The fact of
the matter is, that I’ve often been in precisely that position and, invariably,
I have found that, by persisting, I left something inferior behind and advanced
to new and higher levels.

Only way to go!

Such are the necessities of war! And so far as your blog is concerned,
apart from momentary lapses, I have seen some absolutely cracking posts, crafted
to an exacting standard. In fact, rather depending on those standards, The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society is arguably the leading weblog of its kind. Equally witty,
equally mercurial, but more in the Wodehouse mode, perhaps, than Elberry’s
somewhat surrealistic or Mutley’s sardonic dogs-day humour - Richard’s is a
compromise between genius and farce...

My own blog, too, I see as having a strongly farcical and ingenious
flavour. But what matters, as in every literary hyperbole, are the effects
created, and Richard’s effects are striking. Their derivation, indeed, is
ambiguous, caught between Channel 4 celebrity and Manchester anonymity, they owe
a credible touch to both. If he is a writer of rare eloquence, his talent is
something more than just loquaciousness. It may well turn out to be valuable,
certainly in the sense that some observers have already commented on his blog
being an ill-disguised form of self-disclosure. If so, Richard may even be the
first celebrity to be found guilty of impersonating himself. But since the sheer
length of some posts makes his droll and almost compulsively ironic manner
somewhat heavier to absorb, my first suggestion would be, leave some of your
volume behind.

Also, for the record, you’re the recipient of some of the blogosphere’s most sincere declarations of love and loyalty. All six-foot-one of you, have a flair for rapid captivation of the opposite sex. And female fans in particular - especially myself - are prone to write to you, pleading that you
are an essentially misunderstood, even quite tragic, figure whose intense moral
revulsions for the job in Manchester are all the more wounding for being so true
to life.

One senses genuine outrage! And here's the rub:

You might say that Madeley is a man of curiously mixed motivation, and
that it is sometimes difficult to discern a logical purpose in his meanderings.
But it is the contradiction between his semantic eloquence and his ready
acceptance of temptation and a willingness to compromise that makes his blog so
complex and intriguing. Richard is a compulsive player of power games. A master
of dissimulation. A raging egocentric possibly, totally wrapped up in the
frivolities of his own existence. But that's the real point of being a blogger.
Whatever our literary preferences, blogging is all about the subtle
reverberations of scale, about the critical relations between things that the
majority of us spend the greatest part of our days steering clear of. And since
bogus literary pretensions are invariably the most tedious aspect of any
biography, what is clear from Richard’s confessional is, that he gets those
of us who care too little about others into caring about life in the first
place. Which is why, if it is any consolation to you, Richard, nobody but a
blogger worthy of salvation can be troubled to go to those lengths for the mere sake of
a lousy post....

Dreamy

PS.: (God help me if the blogosphere finds out that I am Richard Madeley)

TO BE AND NOT TO BE...( Selena Reflects On The Nature Of Being While Doing Aerobics And Wearing A Leotard)

2008-08-23T14:51:00.006+01:00

“Reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere
else. You are deluding yourself believing that the nature of reality is
self-evident. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we
often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that
the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you
suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be
near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that?”

Thus O’Brian, the Party Indoctrinator in George Orwell’s 1984.

To him there is but one crime: the Truth. He believes that one can
prove almost anything from an astute deployment of scientific principles. He
states his case with the dispassionate simplicity of the true professional,
arguing with perfect accuracy that ‘Reality is not external.’ Of course, if one
took the simple view of things, and interpreted observations in terms of basic
principles, then the sum of the three angles of a triangle is always 180
degrees. No single fact is more clearly established. If, however, we pass from
Euclidean geometry into either Riemannian or hyperbolic space, we find that the
angles, by a kind of conceptual unreason, will each amount to more - or less -
than 180 degrees. By a somewhat similar ‘anomaly’, the geometry of the
three-dimensional universe, taken literally, may be flat and Euclidean, or in
terms of Einstein’s four-dimensional geometrical arrangement, be either bounded
or unbounded. But because we have no experience directly relevant to a
four-dimensional continuum, the conventional distinction between time and space cannot be literally taken out of one frame of reference and translated into another, without a formal breach of three-dimensional obligations to structure, motion and balance.

A sufficient condition for the reality of a physical quantity, it has been said, is the possibility of predicting it with certainty, without disturbing it. Without, in a word, creating events that are properly speaking contingent only. We see not the thing itself, but merely associations. Indeed, for the sake of an easy generalization it has become possible to say that describing the electron is but a description of our knowledge. Expressed in still more rarefied language, the predominant quality implied by quantum theory is that of non-locality. Due to the curious mechanism whereby the application of knowledge alters the state of matter, the wave function only indicates the relative probability of finding a particle at some particular point in space. It would seem uneconomic, therefore, not to take advantage of this and merely state that when matter is abstracted from our psychological experience, the world as perceived by the eye and the ear is a figment of the imagination.

It may well be a source of wonder, therefore, that this figment
represents a whole knowable universe, its moving parts beautifully conceived and
designed, endowed with meaning and capable, therefore, of providing purpose and
inspiration of every possible kind. This is a development such as the Classics
would have understood. Spinoza’s was an agnostic universe, of course, but men
were united with one another, and with God, by the measure of their common
experience. A sort of double indemnity between God and Nature, in which one was
a variation of the other. If the matrix itself was neutral, it was also endowed
with divine characteristics, both accommodating and detached. Hence, it is with
absolute fidelity to the same inspiration that man’s sense of his modern
identity compensates for this detachment and imposes structure on chaos and
disorder, while it is a valuable corrective to orthodox uses of the word God,
that the properties required to pass the test of divinity are not one’s own
experience and perception but, on the contrary, their requisite omission.

Dreamy

TWO FINGERS TO THE RUSSIANS...

2008-08-21T18:13:00.007+01:00

“The Monroe Doctrine means what it has meant since President Monroe and
John Quincy Adams enunciated it, and that is that we would oppose a foreign
power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere, and that is why we oppose
what is happening in Cuba today. ..That is why we worked in the Organization of
American States and in other ways to isolate the Communist menace in Cuba. That
is why we will continue to give a good deal of our effort and attention to
it.”

Thus John F. Kennedy in 1962. The Invasion of Grenada followed in 1983.
Codenamed Operation Urgent Fury, it was an unspoken, if perfectly illegal
invocation of the same doctrine. The United States, and members of the
Organization of Eastern Caribbean States landed troops on Grenada, defeated Cuban resistance and overthrew the military government.

Throughout the history of Empires, superpowers have always adopted local client regimes, each of which rivalled its opposite in viciousness and provocation. History will come to realise, as many contemporary Americans did not, that John F. Kennedy, too, was a dangerous imperialist, whose egomania almost precipitated a catastrophe. In the event it was but an interlude of maritime confrontation and, one supposes, of mutual discomfort. For the history of the next thirty years
turned on the attempts to solve this discomfort. Finally, in 1991 came the total
abrogation of the Soviet Union. Its collapse was so complete, that even America
was uncertain of how to proceed...
Today, history has been stood upon its head for the victim is Russia.
As if to underline the change of status, Americans have been invading her traditional spheres of influence, entering into dangerous political alliances which blatantly contradicted the very principles for which, in their own case, the Monroe Doctrine stood. Recriminations haven
taken the place of facts. And finally to top it all, a US-educated lawyer, aged
40, and President of Bush’s client state of Georgia, has became a swaggering
agitator in Cuban heels.

Two fingers to the Russians!

To court Mikhail Saakashvili - a man of wildly inventive statements - without at least
neutralizing his belligerent fervour, would, in my view, be a terrible calamity.
The move to arm Baltic subs with nuclear warheads is just one of Russia’s
responses to American plans for a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe.
Another is the threat of nuclear retaliation, directed at Poland, for agreeing
to host US rockets on its soil. An act which nothing can justify, and which
simply increases Russia's efforts to prevent Soviet successor regimes from
joining the Western Alliance. Indeed, the consensus on the part of Nato for the
inclusion of Georgia into the Western defence system is nothing but farce. As an
unproductive, not to say insane idea - and let’s cut to the chase on this, shall
we? - it is rather like suggesting Alabama should have become part of the Warsaw
Pact, some twenty years ago.
And I‘m being conservative here!
In truth, the man who presides over all this has already been dismissed as a moron, a
cowboy, a bigot, and hailed as a dedicated advocate for the war on terror. A
statesman of no vision, of little wit and a buffoon, little more than first
cousin to a mule. A post-modern man in his ignorance and freedom from
imagination. A madman in an age dominated by political extremists. Whereas
Vladimir Putin has been justly described as “the most effective leader in the
world today”. Determined, decisive, and direct, he has made his point.

RICHARD DAWKINS - PUPPET ON A STRING

2008-08-19T16:28:00.007+01:00

It is hard not to agree with Bertrand Russell, who once said that no one would proclaim with fervour that 5 + 5 equals 10. Except, of course,
Richard Dawkins. Nothing restrains him in the passion of his crusade. Or as Basil Fawlty might have suggested - why not go on Mastermind:

Special Subject: The Bleedin’ Obvious...

Many fruitful attempts have been made to reason against the unreasonable. But last night wasn’t one of them. In truth, watching the third and last instalment on Channel 4, I was mortified to find that Dawkins the advocate of The Genius of Charles Darwin found himself constantly and embarrassingly on the defensive. His
blue eyes were charming, even though I did not see the persuasive power they were meant to possess. A trace of breathlessness in his voice, perhaps. Occasionally it occurred to me that the worthy man was completely outfoxed.
Still, one has to admire him for his combination of courage and foolhardiness.
Outscored by a couple of creationists who allege to believe in a God
that created the earth and all its creatures in six days some 5,000 years ago,
he had some considerable trouble legitimising himself.

I add but one word: bollocks!

To be Dawkins is to be very dull indeed. It is hard to see him as
anything other than an intellectual adolescent. Quite obviously, the Oxford
professor of the public understanding of science, and author of The Selfish
Gene neither understands the role of science nor that of Creationism.
Albeit that something of its true nature shines through all the myth-making to
which this religion is subjected. Action begets reaction. And creationists may
well have calculated on that. They made little effort to be agreeable. Surely The God Delusion has to be the greatest recruitment drive for Creationism since Noah peopled his Arc with monkeys. It’s Grandmother Moses’s idea of God, but there is no doubting the scale of the lady’s objective. The bigger the lie, the more self-righteous she is in defending it. And the kids, in
fact, are thrilled. Facts and fossils mean little to school-children who love to
be enshrined in the glow of myth. Meanwhile, the state looks on approvingly: The
world has been corrupted by philosophies of revolutionary enlightenment for
centuries. And this new-fangled religion of reason and scientific elucidation
may well be considered its primary evil.

Wake up Dawkins!

This is not about God. In fact, no one has even half an inkling about
the nature of this debate. This is about religious partisanship and cultural
divisiveness. Fundamentalism in general plays an important, community-forming
role in social ecology, and this Biblical farce amounts to a hectoring
triumphalism of the most potently political and divisive kind. For the fact of
the matter is, that nothing with the word religion in its name can ever be truly
benign

God is a metaphor. A synonym for the imagination. People are forever
fashioning God in forms He never takes! To some, indeed, the idea of a personal
God is to win the lottery. Others pray for a miracle. Some even bargain with
Him. Elsewhere penitential and pietistic cults flourish. America is becoming a
collection of weird cults and sects. And yet, relics and fossils of the
Darwinian evolution remain visible for millennia to come...

But can he disprove the existence of God?

Certainly, he can disprove the existence of something created by the
human imagination. But clearly, there is nothing obscure about the nature of
God, or what Spinoza called the “effecting cause of the existence of things.”
For if God and man are self-evidently the cause and effect of one another, then
why make a crusade, let alone a fantasy, out of a plain, physical fact?

Dreamy

PROMETHEAN MAN - A Post In Which Superwoman Explains How The Gods Are Robbed Of Their Fire...

2008-08-17T13:50:00.008+01:00

"Men have always tried to be better and grander than they are. Their Promethean endeavours to become supermen, ...or to 'be God', ... though laudable in their intentions regarding the desire ...(even to escape mortality), fail, I think, because of a lack of balance and self-awareness of humanity's place in the universe..."

That, my dear Jonathan, is an involved and intricate way of expressing a simple point.

The practical fact is that today we have a turning point in scientific
evolution. A revolution of man’s view of himself and of his function in the universe which is perpetual self-overcoming. Raised to the highest possible level one might elevate this function by using mythic ideas and images, even by stimulating the gloomy optimism of the Son of Man which, as one of the few unbroken threads in the tissue of Christian philosophical thinking over the past two thousand years has borne and shed its finest fruits, to yield fresh fruit with a new dispensation of Man: The Promethean Man in which scientific and ontological understanding are combined to deliver the world from the world.

There is no mysticism in this!

Nor is this to say that science should proceed as much by faith as by
reason, or that it should reject reason for intuition, but from the point of
view of our present state of knowledge it is no longer possible to deny that,
within certain well-understood limits, science itself is subject to the same
uncertainty relations as is its peculiar power to render life into logic and yet
retain its mystery.

At such moments we are apt to solve the riddle of creation.

Then, of course, there is the question of scale. For such evidence as
there is in quantum electrodynamics by no means disposes of the necessity to
believe that - according to Freddy Hoyle - “astronomers will eventually
discover that much of what they currently believe concerning the behaviour and
formation of galaxies, has to be modified to take account of intelligent
control.”

But, that apart, the important thing to remember is that the future
belongs to the scientist and his all-powerful need for knowledge. Science alone
can lead the world out of its difficulty. No other institution can. Science
holds the key to the greatest age of faith in the history of the world, even if
we cannot define it. For the problem is basically a psychological one and
involves a spiritual recrudescence and enhancement of human values.

This consideration lies at the heart of everything.

Indeed, the Promethean assault upon the Riddle of Creation, both
absolutely and relativistically, is not simply a technological feat, but a
psychological revolution. It is an attempt, is it not, to rediscover something
profound and deep-rooted in the human psyche; an expression, I believe, of both
a penetrating utopian recognition and a desperate search for a new identity on
the part of the men and women who are plainly in need of a more transcending and
persuasive experience than the outdated religious mysticism to which they can no
longer relate. For the chief importance of a new psychological dimension lies
precisely in the fact that ultimately it gives redemptive power to that
irrepressible desire for intellectual scope and spiritual activity which has
always been, as it remains today, a fundamental part of human evolution.

Dreamy

TOWARDS INFINITY...(A Post In Which Dreamy Baby Can Be Seen To Make A Long-Distance Phone Call)

2008-08-14T17:46:00.005+01:00

Evolutions have surprisingly simple origins.

Nor is it difficult to trace the stages whereby the universe and its cosmic processes evolved from the mechanistic view of the eighteenth into the
electromagnetic perspectives of the late nineteenth century. At that time, the atom, doubtless, looked rather innocuous. Indeed, the consensus of scientists in 1930 still was that matter was made up of two elementary particles: electrons and protons. In the blink of an eye , however, that consensus was called into question. What happened was that Paul Dirac published his relativistic wave equations for the electron. It confounded all attempts to quantify the atom. The next important step came with the positron discovery of 2 August 1932. It was a
moment of high drama. Once the validation of Dirac’s theory had appeared, the composite result was the total abolition of the hypothesis of simple protons and negative electrons. “Physics as we know it,” Max Born is reported to have said, “will be over in six months.”
And yet, it was one of the contradictions of the search for a single
unified field theory that, in an atmosphere thus charged, progress would be
inflationary, pointing towards ever increasing complexity. For the next seventy
years scientists set about ransacking space, time and circumstances, forcing
back the conceptual horizons of cosmological thought and achieving multiplicity
and particle variegation rather than the unification of forces which, after all,
had been the principal concern of modern theoretical physicists ever since.

One may of course insist that the relevant sciences have yet to be
born, that methods have not matured, that the inaugural utopian purpose of
solving the riddle of creation is probably as far removed from fulfilment as
ever. And yet, it may not be fanciful to say that the very science of modern
physics has been evolved out of this utopian speculation. Indeed, one could
already make a tolerable case for physic’s ongoing attempt to ground the
universe in mathematics or, beyond the limit of acceptable physical enquiry, to
propose “something that is neither subject nor object“.

But we can distinguish only by observation and, as Plato blandly but
accurately remarked, an object of perception contains both substance and form.
On the other hand, no physicist of the last fifty years is likely to be too
dogmatic about this. At very high energies all forces are predicted to
assimilate: the strong interactions are unified with the weak and composite
atomic nuclei would cease to exist. At 1016 degrees, it is
worth noting, the weak nuclear force would exhibit the same enduring
characteristics as the electromagnetic force. There is no point in adding to the
effusion of expert commentary on the supposed implications of the Big Bang. No
prediction yet made has revealed any reason for suspecting that the subjective
concepts of time and extension would not also come to an end. Indeed, the
absence of any concept at all is especially noticeable. Nor is it to be supposed
that any unified theory we might evolve was related to our own sense of identity
or to our perception of empirical measurement.

The finite cannot grasp the infinite. In the struggle towards
wholeness, towards the Original Unity, it must first dissolve and eliminate
itself. To suppose, therefore, that the universe is some nameless, unilateral
entity which can be grasped or comprehended in dissociation from the manifold
forms in which life and intelligence reveal themselves, is to express a meaning
unknown to life and to intelligence itself.

Dreamy

EASTENDERS - A POST-TRAUMATIC MEMORY

2008-08-13T16:01:00.006+01:00

Ever feel like you’ve been landed on the wrong planet? God knows I was!

I’ve never found soap-operas particularly good viewing, not when involving chaps on horseback in tweed, nor desperate and insufferably dull housewives. But the sordidness confronting me on watching EastEnders surpassed even my worst expectations - and that was some ten years ago. Or rather, it took me all of ten years to recover and get over its post-traumatic wretchedness. Less inspirational a setting or more narrow a space for imagination cannot be imagined. Certainly, one place in dire need of ethnic cleansing is Albert Square, the administrative headquarters of this particular Soap.

Pardon my hubris, but so far as the male cast are concerned, all I
remember is a couple of shavepate potato-headed gets who posed as the local
domestic heartthrobs - something, and here I mean absolutely no offence,
resembling a pair of anthropoid apes. Nor do you have to change a Chimpanzee's
brain pattern at all for it to discern that EastEnders portrays the worst of all
possible worlds on this here planet of the apes. And why, for the life of me,
anybody would want to wallow, on a daily basis, it in all its grimy
manifestations and indescribable piggery, is entirely beyond me.

But who am I to be picky?

I always thought soaps were all about escapism, not intellectual
bondage. The moral side of it does not bother me particularly, but this curious
borderline oppression inevitably has its effects on the public’s mind, which
then becomes further impregnated with the bigoted, limited outlook of the East
End community with their pro-alcoholic and anti-social aberrations. Wittingly or
unwittingly, the human being is here revealed in his ultimate dissipation.

So, why the hell should I be sympathetic?

Bondage, as you may not know, is a matter of neural synapses and
altered psychological states - not too difficult to either implement or inflict
by a director with the requisite gift of loathsomeness and the basic touch of
hidden dereliction. In its most effective form, it is an ideology that perverts
reality. In fact, studies have revealed that unconscious cultural assumptions
and prejudices emerge from such sordid social serializations. And this addictive
pattern is superimposed electronically on the matrix of your frontal lobes,
while at the same time you are drawn more and more deeply into the virtual life
- with the result that your horizon narrows until it seems to fill the whole of
your daily existence. Which particular condition, incidentally, was well
described by the excellent Gordon McCabe when - in a different
context - he concluded that...

“...The internal system begins to decay and fail. The reproductive
drive shrivels. The layers of linguistic understanding erode, and eventually
even the kernel of self-awareness becomes brittle. Thought evaporates, and only
feeling and experience remain. At the end, you are without knowing that you are.
Beyond, there is nothing.”

And so EastEnders grinds on for another indistinctive, unmemorable
issues...

Dreamy

VIRTUAL REALITY - (A Post In Which Miss Dreamy says not to worry - she doesn’t know what any of it means either...)

2008-08-11T11:08:00.005+01:00

The language of physics is pre-eminently mathematical - the necessary foundation of all other enquiries. Speculation takes a new direction. Propositions become self-evident. Necessity precedes analysis. If therefore necessity anticipates and conditions thought, it is not perhaps surprising to find that when logic by its force or use of necessity precedes and conditions reality, reality should be seen to assimilate.

And that, precisely, is what I myself mean by virtual reality: the dynamic embodiment of a conclusive idea. The raw material of creative thought one might almost say, rather than a mere interpretative model of the universe. By the simplest possible definition, a particle, such as a photon, can suddenly come into existence out of nothing. Or, in terms of the simplest possible definitive case, the virtual particle
excludes all but the most pertinent aspects of objective reality and material fact. Though it would be rash to assume that such transitory particles - and not just photons, but electrons, protons and all the other ephemera of the
sub-nuclear domain - exist only in relation to the function they perform, we can
hardly doubt that the ‘participatory’ effect of intelligence plays its own
transforming part in the process.

It is true, most educated persons
already know, that owing to quantum indeterminacy, virtual particles can
materialize out of “empty” space as a matter of course. But it should also be
common knowledge by now that the mere mention of quantum indeterminacy implies a
recognition of the interdependence of matter and the pattern of scientific
knowledge thus envisaged. To their credit, scores of physicists treat
intelligence as the ultimate kinetic catalyst. Less imaginative, an “older”
tradition of constituent physics runs the risk of essentially treating
intelligence as the contingent consequence of material facts.

On this distinction, indeed, rests a substantial part of my case.

For the
traditionalist, in denying any participatory quality to quantum-mechanical
theories, and in proving them to be rooted in facts, does not fail to resurrect
a determinism which maintains that intelligence, being nothing more than the
rationalization of a predetermined design, is pure derivation and powerless to
alter the sequence of events. That is as it may be. But the utopia of modern
elementary particle physics has no difficulty in perceiving that virtual
propositions are contingent, perhaps, but not illusory; that they belong to the
conceptual, not the interpretative mode. That, even considered as virtual, it is
nevertheless perfectly proper to say they are ad hoc concept, connected to a
world of reality in a manner in which it becomes essential to the proper
appreciation of authenticity to realize that the inherent dynamism is not in the
thing but in the thought. For the truth is that even though human consciousness
is by no means fully engaged in the intangible details of the action, the
processes of thought are powerfully at work.

Created purposefully and
unmistakably by an idea, it does give the virtual universe a measure of
suggestion that tends to match up to the expectations, the imagery and the
vocabulary of the mind. For even dimensions so remote and inanimate - and that
does not mean illusory - that one is bound to reflect whether they have any
existence at all, do carry in their insignificance the seeds of further
innumerable universes...

Dreamy

THE LUMBER ROOM CALAMITY - Or Oracular Notes On The Benefits and Disasters Which Have Sprung From Elberry’s Misfortunes...

2008-08-08T16:14:00.007+01:00

“This I write so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are, in truth, nought, or at the most of small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.”

Peter Abelard (from the Foreword to History Calamitatum)

Here is a complex man!

Recent comments made it clear that the
Witchfinders - at the office or in your personal life - either don’t recognize
how important certain pursuits are to you, or simply don’t approve of them. And
having no wish to appear a failure in your own eyes, your feel bound to tackle
the problem.

You’re sharp, quick-witted, with an satirist's eye, subtle and
self-mocking with an acute and almost constant sense of life's irrationality.
Less reassuring will be the realisation that many who’ve already admired your
dedication to quality, your dignity, and your sense of self, have also known
Elberry the eccentric, the riddler and dissimulator who has all the irony of a
condemned person walking to the gallows. Irony gives colour to thoughts and
things in a way that not everyone understands. Indeed, you have a way with
words, a somewhat reckless appreciation of the sardonic and the grotesque. Your
writing rather transcends that of a scurrilous and witty misanthrope. You can
hold forth with some authority on topics as diverse as Manchester’s Thai
lady-boys and the Italian renaissance. You’re superbly simple, understated, yet
quite unaffected by pettiness, jealousy, and other humdrum concerns. But you
also seem to be created with a special legacy.

To wit, your condition forecasts the agony to come.

What is second nature to most of us, is misery for you. Though there
are plenty of arid personalities and characters starved by stress of
circumstances, few have that same sense of introversion, or of sealed persona
contained within itself. Indeed, your own growing isolation, objective as well
as subjective, makes you feel that you are sustained and animated by the virtual world - rather than life - and it is that which seems to have
detached you from reality. Your concerns seem distanced and uninvolved,
everything happens by proxy. The misanthrope, in truth, rarely wants to be
cured. In fact, owing largely to autosuggestive forces you seem to see your
situation as comical rather than tragic. But the literary levity used for the
darkest subjects has a very serious purpose: to rob trepidation of its terror.
For the fact of the matter is nevertheless, you’re terrified!

Nor am I sure I want to go there.

But I‘ll say this: I've never once met a gifted man who is not haunted
by his talents. Your position is difficult, your future a matter of far-reaching
complexity. The lone rider is a familiar figure in American mythology. It is his
aura, the fact that he lives on his own terms, trusting nobody but only a select
few - rather than a lot of gratuitous gunplay - which suggests inner reserves of
power as well as detachment and intense seclusion. Archetypes are a mirror of
the psyche - sometimes benign, often afflicted, occasionally genuinely
inspirational. But nothing is more suggestive of the mythological use of the
archetype than the way we respond emotionally. They are a sort of purgatory
within, or a heightened form of self-consciousness, often revealing a disturbing
depth of knowledge of an individual's dilemmas and predicaments. Little may you
know, but these are forces of extraordinary power.

So its time to carve:

Most of your intimate interests set you apart from other humans; if not
an intellectual exactly, you are certainly endowed with considerable
intellectual athleticism and substantial powers of communication. You yourself
clearly believe in the legend of your life. In your sense of mission. Two
centuries ago you might have been accused of magical incantations, witchcraft
and sorcery. Today you are frequently seen as netherworldly; and though patently
sensual, are at the same time almost asexual, savouring everything, yearning for
sensual comforts, but, as it were, vicariously, and as if fixed in unending
adolescence.

Let there be no mistake, Elberry is not a troll released from Mordor.
He is a strong, intelligent, not unfriendly elf who wrought colossal good. And
to string him from a lamp post, soak him with diesel and set fire to his butt
would be complete and utter recklessness...

Indeed, if you can make
friends with your inner self, come to terms with your own darkness, then there
will be no trouble from without. Which may also be a reminder that fortuitous
connections are often the key to advancement. And so, finally , I’ll come to
your many attempts at presenting an acceptable curriculum vitae. Nearly
as many potential employers as have been acquainted with it, refused to honour
the curriculum you’ve set forth in the past, so that it will have to be
supplemented in some fashion. And my recommendation is for you to offer this
reading with your next CV. I doubt it will advance you prospects in any way
whatsoever, but, should you succeed on the basis of this, I’ll promise you, the
rewards will be intense...

Meanwhile, in the face of the Witchfinders General - and your
considerable and varied talents - the only thing is to keep your head down and
do what the Schatzgräber did in the scenario below:

Die Schatzgräber

Ein Winzer, der am Tode lag
rief seine Kinder her und sprach :
In unsrem Weinberg liegt ein Schatz ,
grabt nur danach ! " --
Auf welchem Platz ? "
schrie alles laut den Vater an .
" Grabt nur " -- O weh, da starb der Mann !

Kaum war der Alte beigeschafft ,
so grub man nach mit Leibeskraft
Mit Hacke, Karst und Spaten,
den Weinberg um und um gescharrt .
Da war kein Kloß, der ruhig blieb ,
man warf die Erde gar durch`s Sieb .
Und zog die Harken kreuz und quer
nach jedem Steinchen hin und her ;
.Alleine, da ward kein Schatz verspürt ,
und jeder hielt sich angeführt .

Doch kaum erschien das nächste Jahr ,
so nahm man mit Erstaunen wahr
das jede Rebe dreifach trug .
Da wurden erst die Söhne klug
Sie gruben nun jahrein , jahraus
Des Schatzes immer mehr heraus.

Gottfried August Bürger (1747 - 1794)

IN MEMORY OF AUGUST 7th - The Day When My Father Died....

2008-08-07T12:51:00.003+01:00

When I found out that my mother had returned from hospital and was dying of
cancer I determined she would not end her days in a nursing institution. Nothing
is more demeaning. Except, of course, that things got worse. My old man suffered
a massive stroke. But I will spare you the details. Let me just say that I
nursed my mother for over a year, spending the last six weeks of her life on the
floorboards beside her bed.

I never got much sleep.

There is no way for me to describe the pain my mother endured, nor for that
matter, my own when she died. I didn't know what to do with myself. I would just
sit on the floor rocking. Backwards and forwards. It’s all I did. Then to the
biggest dilemma. Someone had to tell the old man. He worshipped her.

Well, I permitted myself a single brandy - then I went in.

He looked at me solemnly, and it was as if I perceived, deep down in his
eyes, all their years together as they ebbed away, unalterably, like an inner
ocean of darkness. Prostrate though he was, I saw him bodily rear up in such
total, utter, and black despair, that I had to physically throw myself on top
just to keep him down. I tried to make him understand that my mother’s departure
was only temporary. That finally, inevitably, she would return. But words was
all I had. I felt alone and helpless. And then it was one afternoon, August 7th
a year later. I sent the nurse away. I knew his time had come. Sitting beside
him, I held his hand. Though, I’m sure, he knew nothing of that.

I could never have sustained these grave times, if I had not been involved
in the book that became the measure of my life. I’d been working at it for some
ten years. Of course, it took me all of five years merely to establish the
topics that would constitute my lifelong monomaniacal attachment to the ideas
involved. But by then I had crossed the invisible, inaudible road to knowledge
and escaped into the fifth dimension. Knowledge - which had to be paid for! I
was living in a completely different time frame, totally absorbed. Indeed, it
took me a long time to recognize the sheer scale of my own ambition. I wasn’t
realizing it at first. The press, in the run-up to publication, was all agog. Or
lets say that part of the media which had been targeted. The marketing
department proclaimed it a triumph of the will. I had half a dozen reviews
coming up. One of the most unlikely from the Jewish Chronicle.

Then I initiated my self-destruction.

In fact, I had no idea what forces I set in motion when I informed my
publisher of potential legal repercussions. I did this spuriously, but it is a
fact and I acknowledge it. England’s strict libel laws usually result in a
play-safe policy. And even though the charge could in no way have been
substantiated in court, it troubled my publishers so much that they withdrew the
book.

And that was the last of that.

Thus did my epiphany finally begin: “If you can make a heap of all your
winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again
at your beginnings, And never breathe a word about your loss.....“ etc.,
etc. you know the drill.....

Meanwhile, I spend my days punching keys and entertaining Memoranda, or what you may aptly call “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz“, and am slightly concerned to discover how continuously and implacably courageous you have to be to ward of an immense feeling of pointlessness. Saying this, though, it is hard not to remember that - out of some sombre precognition - I instructed
my publishers to add an extra page at the end of my book and to inscribe it with
the legend: "O Will, my essential, my necessity, dispeller of need! Spare me
for one great victory!"

My passion is the future, not the past.

Selena Dreamy