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

“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…

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

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...

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ROD LIDDLE - HUMOURLESS IMBECILE...

“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...

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)

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

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

“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...

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)

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)

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...

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

THE 9/11 MEMORANDUM

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...

(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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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