NuLab (New Labour) review 1997-2010
By now most of us have given up on politicians. At the election on 6 May 2010 only about 62% of voters managed to lift their bum off the couch and do their duty – a disgrace as this was the most advertised election campaign ever in British history. The full brunt of Twitter, Facebook, eMails, mobile phones, smart posters and big budgets were brought to bear, all, apparently, to little effect. In this age of automation 1000s were not allowed to vote, as the polling stations’ capacity was exhausted across the country and people were refused entry.
Is this Britain or Afghanistan?
Politicians and politics have clearly topped lawyers, estate agents and traffic wardens in un-popularity.
What was it that New Labour promised us in 1997, when euphoria broke out as Labour won a land-slide election?
A new and fairer society? (Did I hear that again in 2010?)
New politics? (Did I hear that again in 2010?)
A society based on strong values? (Did I hear that again in 2010?)
How dare politicians pander to public amnesia and think they can keep promising the same broken promises over and over again?
Let us therefore take a look at some of Labour’s 13 years’ record.
Today we have a society that demonstrates an unprecedented gulf between rich and poor. It has become a society of money, materialism and celebrities. When I bought my house in 1994 it cost roughly 3 times my yearly salary. I couldn’t buy it today for 12 times that amount. If you don’t know what rich is, then take the Alfa list of the 50 people with the highest income in the world. 8 are UK based and most are involved in the financial industry. These 8 managed an average of £200mill income each in 2007 and these 50 account for a total income of approx. £20bill. Hedge funds, Derivatives, Sub Prime Mortgage speculations in a free-for-all market with little regulation – all under the nose of a NuLab government that promised the end of Boom-and-Bust - have done more damage to our lives than we will be able to catch up with in the next 20 years.
When you are blessed with a Labour Prime Minister, who didn’t hesitate raiding our pension funds for £100bill and sell our gold-reserves at a dumping price, it is no wonder that those who were still awake kicked him out in the 2010 election.
It is a bigger wonder why so many still voted for him.
There’s public amnesia for you. Or plain stupidity?
In ’97 Blair trumpeted his 3 major priorities for all to remember: Education – education – education. Recently the UK was placed at nr. 24 on a list of maths teaching in Europe, but some of us didn’t forget the speech Blair gave and the applause he received.
The same positive promises were made on the alleviation of child poverty (it’s worse today than then), drink issues and criminality. When recently the lead was ripped off my neighbour’s house and my car was stolen the police bragged: no serious crime was committed in the area last month. Lies, damned lies and statistics seem to be Labour’s method.
One can argue endlessly (and we do) over the objectives and justification of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Personally I believe that the devout catholic Blair knew very well that the arguments were dubious and that he followed Bush’s tail, putting an almost religious spin to the matter. The follow-up to the invasion was dramatically disastrous. In short, NuLab took us to war without putting the country, or rather the military, on a war-footing. Demonstrated lack of military equipment and a public discussion drowning in political waffle have showed NuLab to be callous to an extent bordering on criminal laissez faire. In the end they had to admit that despite a rise in money spent on the military, the rise in real terms was nil. For a country at war?
This is unforgivable, even if there were a shadow of justification left.
It is almost trivial to make an account of the plethora of mismanagement NuLab has been responsible for. To err is human, but to really screw things up obviously took a Labour government. Here are a few examples.
Tonnes of spin were brought to the fore, when Labour tried to wriggle out of the 10p tax scandal as they mistakenly cancelled the lower tax bracket. It was another example of a party, that has ‘Labour’ to its name, protecting the rich more than the poor – something they always accused the Tories of doing.
Historically Labour has always been a big spender, almost a squanderer of state funds. That’s the reason we can now see the bottom of our coffers, finding ourselves trapped in the worst recession in 60 years, with the Pound at an all time low and unemployment at its highest ever despite the ’97-promise of full employment.
Public spending happened as if there was no tomorrow, even during the last days of NuLab in office and the Brown government had planned to continue as if there actually was a tomorrow, had they not been stopped dead in their tracks at the election.
The Millennium Dome cost in excess of £1.3bill against an original budget of £400mill. 70,000 family houses could have been built for this amount, eliminating the problem of Britain’s homeless. And then there is Ed Balls, the Education secretary, who had planned funding for massage rooms and contemplation suites in our schools. Eh? For distressed teachers, who have lost all control over the kids?
Identity cards would have cost £1bill, at least, and everyone except Labour agrees it would have been a complete waste of money. Quangos, e.g the “Potato Council”, spin doctors and ‘Consultants’ had the life of Roman governors under NuLab.
When the house started to come down after Blair’s departure and an un-elected Brown took over, it looks as though the emphasis changed to lining one’s own pockets before the gravy train stopped.
The MP scandal broke under Brown’s watch. The speaker had to be sacked for the first time since the 17th Century, as he refused to clean up the matter. Labour MPs were caught asking for cash (allegedly £3-5000) for lobbying. ‘Cash for honours’ was another juicy undertaking in which donors to the Labour party could obtain a Lordship. Compare this to Blair’s end-of-sleeze promise in 97. Free holidays for senior politicians also became the heading of the day and Blair was one of the frequent recipients. Then there was Blair’s wife, who excelled in snubbing the queen, using convicted criminals to broker the purchase of apartments and generally the Blairs operating a presidential life style that certainly had little relationship with the 97 promise of labour values. This, by the way continues today, where Blair is rewarded £2-400,000 an hour on the speech circuit with 16 publicly paid police officers as protection – and no contribution by him self - costing the taxpayers £5mill/year, while he retains another costly sinecure job as a ‘Middle East Envoy’.
Is that what he called ‘Labour values’ in 1997?
There must have been something sinister going on at an early state in the NuLab government. Why, otherwise, would the herostratically famous Jo Moore otherwise have said “This is a good day to bury bad news” just after the 9/11 disaster?
Peter Mandelsohn, who was twice sacked from the government, first time over lying about a home loan, was later asked to return as a “Business Tsar” by Brown, with whom he had dramatically fallen out. This prompts the question: what kind of dealings and wheelings were going on behind the curtain? What kind of person is Brown actually? After 10 years of constant arguments and rows between him and Blair, accusations of Brown bullying his staff and a public derogatory remark about an old voter as being an ‘old bigot’ – who did this un-elected prime minister think he was? And on that kind of question one can extend the curiosity to the daily comings and goings of the Unite Trade Union bosses’ daily visits to Brown in nr. 10. These are people who underpin the NuLab party budgets and at the same time try to bring down British Airways while twittering during confidential ACAS-talks. Talk about sinister people and events - - - - .
Then there’s the case about foreigners in Britain. NuLab has been completely unable to clarify what is going on, how many foreigners there are in this country and how many come and go.
The general popular attitude is that foreign immigration is a bad idea. But they forget that a lot of British people work abroad – in the EU and elsewhere.
Recently there was a TV-feature about foreign workers, East Europeans in particular, who worked as farm labourers in Norfolk. According to the local English employers there would be no business without these workers – and yet people on the street were complaining that foreigners took away work from the British, maintaining this was the reason for the local 10% unemployment figure. With great (actually enormous) effort the TV-producer managed to get a few of the English jobless out of bed, sending them out in the field together with the East Europeans.
Most of them didn’t last a day, the rest didn’t turn up on time and none of them was able to work effectively.
Why hasn’t NuLab created better conditions for work? Then you could say: You work, you get paid. You don’t want to work, support stops. Hardly rocket science.
In addition no one knows how many illegal immigrants we have. Poor people from all over the world have found that Britain is a soft target for their ambitions of a life away from extreme poverty. The stream of illegals, making the channel crossing hidden in lorries from Calais is endless. How difficult can it be to ‘defend’ an island? And are these people really such a big problem? In order to exist, they need money and they will only get money if the work, i.e. produce. Consequently they contribute to the economy. It all boils down to proper management and political regulation, something NuLab seems totally incapable of instigating.
As far as the EU-workers are concerned, Britain has a political and contractual obligation to accept them and they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t see the benefit. This is perhaps why the flow goes the other way at the moment, as the value of the Pound is falling.
Non-EU people also seem to leave faster than they arrive.
In other words: where is the problem, other than perhaps a social problem with misuse of people, who are in need of support and who live outside the system – and thousands of British job-seekers, who are too lazy to make an effort? The fact is that there are lots of jobs available, but few willing takers. Isn’t that just a management problem? The Tories seem to think so – a welcome change.
Labour’s record on political correctness and support of human rights is also tarnished.
Ostensibly 900 foreign criminals, some of whom are highly dangerous terrorists, have disappeared in the system, i.e. no one knows where they are. The Home Office is in a mess. Letting dangerous criminals loose on the streets of Britain is not a good alternative to sending them back to their home country. But obviously someone thinks it is better to absorb them as a local danger than potentially violating their human rights.
We don’t all agree!
Finally a word on Climate change and energy management.
NuLab lost the plot!
Britain only produces 2% of their energy in a renewable fashion against some other European countries’ record of 20-30%. The ploy today is to ‘pay’ yourself out of a carbon foot-print. This is disgusting, irresponsible and a mismanagement that shows no understanding of the problem nor commitment to the future. And yet Brown, at the charade conference in Copenhagen in 2009, said that “Britain would lead”. From the back seat? When he decided to print money and kept borrowing from abroad in 2009, very little went into green investments. The wind farms and North Sea grids now being planned will all be financed abroad and none of the materials used will be produced in the UK. It will take us at least 30 years to eliminate the Russian and Arab stranglehold on Britain’s energy. In the economic vice that a spendthrift NuLab has created for us, the consequences are difficult to oversee.
What a lost opportunity. We could have rebuilt our industrial base. Instead we missed an obvious chance to change Britain’s economic platform from becoming based on B&Q, Homebase, MacDonalds and Supermarkets. Will we all end as hairdressers? Perhaps the lack of a business vision for Britain is the worst crime NuLab have committed.
Unfortunately the new Conservative/LibDem government keep talking about a commitment to halt climate change. Although they have a sensible objective of building the nuclear power stations we so badly need, they don’t seem to have seen the light either: that we probably have no impact on climate change whatsoever (see elsewhere on my blog: AGW-nonsense), that we have no money to invest in a dramatic turn-around and that the promised investment in small industry leads nowhere, when the big industry suffers and a green energy industry is left for others to build.
One of the Tories just spent a week in Bangladesh to see for himself the effect of climate change. Eh? When cutting Himalaya’s forests are the main cause of flooding in a country that probably never should have occupied the land they have. Why didn’t he go to Germany, Denmark – or the village in Scotland, where people have made themselves 100% independent of a carbon energy supply, except when used in cars? No one seems to understand that realistic adaptation is far more important than preventing something over which we have no control. NuLab killed the cat and the Tories seem to be just as confused and drowned in political correctness.
My fear is that now the ‘toffs’ are in power, they may lean back and relax. Politicians only work for politicians.
Is there hope for the population, then?
Will the banks stop repossessing the homes of people, who must suffer the consequences of the financial mismanagement by the very same financial institutions? These are the banks, who lend the money in the first place and who now continue to pay billions of pounds in bonuses to their employees – the same money the banks received from the taxpayers to stay alive? In this light repossession is deeply immoral.
Thank you NuLab for creating these conditions through lack of vision, lack of honesty, broken promises, false values, a messy relationship between The Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority, lack of proper regulation – and a colossal mismanagement across the board.
This was done on the watch of what Labour-voters still call the “best chancellor we ever had”, referring to Brown’s 10 years in nr. 11 Downing Street.
His unelected time in nr. 10 showed in less than 3 who he really was!!
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Sunday, 11 April 2010
My friend Peter Wessel Zapffe
Peter Wessel Zapffe – and my philosophy.
I am against idolisation. I hate the idea about being a “fan” – but SHOULD I, in a weak moment, ever give in to this kind of unquestionable admiration, Zapffe would be very high on my list of idols. His philosophy suits me to the core; I understand what he says – with every nerve in my body; and I fail to see that his message is as negative as many people claim. In fact I find it a thoroughly positive, life-confirming message and it removes the mythological veil and gobbledygook, with which the human species constantly surrounds itself, leaving a clear and unpolluted message about our existence.
Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer and an author of many humorous short stories about climbing and other adventures in nature, taking a very early interest in environmentalism. He was also an atheist – and so am I. I used to be an agnostic, mainly from an intellectual point of view: you cannot prove or disprove what is improvable, so better leave the door open if one day something proving a god’s existence should turn up. But that is a stance that put me on the side of wet noodles while performing a mental balancing act leading nowhere. All religious people – without exception – can be pushed into saying: “I just know”, while having to admit that theirs is nothing but a firm, unwavering belief. And it remains a belief. Face it: there is no argument whatsoever that proves the existence of a god. Full stop. Luckily it is a prerogative of ours to believe what we want, as long as we leave people with different beliefs in peace. Unfortunately most religions carry an anachronistic luggage that doesn’t allow such tolerance.
Zapffe defined 4 dimensions describing the way we live our lives:
* Isolation is "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling". We are probably all familiar with the tendency to ignore bad news, as it “disturbs our circles” – and if we can’t do it with a positive mind, there are plenty of drugs available that can help us. But it is hardly a viable way to help us live full lives. Living in isolation must be a short-term solution and as such good enough – just consider holidays, an evening’s binge drinking, an LSD-trip or falling madly and unconditionally in love with no thought for the consequences. The Chinese would probably add ‘gardening’ as a happy escape to a mental paradise!
* Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the maelstrom of targets for our consciousness". The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal that allows them to focus their attentions in a consistent manner. It is a hook to a virtual reality that saves us from drowning in unending possibilities. Zapffe applied the anchoring principle to e.g. society, and stated "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future" are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments. You could add ‘Political Manifestos’ to this array; this explains why someone claiming to side with e.g. the Labour party will believe blindly in – and fight for – everything the party gurus claim to be eternal truths and accepted values. Without ‘anchoring’ there would be total chaos within each party as everyone would have their own interpretation of the party-line. As we can see, this doesn’t happen, or at least only to a very small degree. Humans are indeed special!
* Distraction is when "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions". Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself. This is clearly related to the ‘Isolation’-dimension, but it has a more positive ring to it, as it is enforced by a level of activity. Distraction is perhaps more related to escapism in its pure form.
* Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, towards positive ones. The individual distances him / herself and looks at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g. writers, poets, painters.) Zapffe himself pointed out that his work was the product of sublimation. Should I be forced to choose any single dimension for my life, this would be the one. I have often described my mind as being lodged – like a donkey – between a carrot and a stick, but always seen the carrot more clearly than I felt the pain from the stick. I can assure any reader that it is a feeling that more than anything else will bring you rather unscathed through difficult periods in one’s life.
Here is a number of quotes that more than anything else illustrate “Zapffism”:
* "Each new generation asks - What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be - Why do we need a meaning with life?" Who says? Why can’t we just determine a set of sociological, political, humanitarian values and establish our own meaning? Where does this blind belief come from, that someone ‘out there’ should have introduced a higher objective with our being born and passing away? Why not accept that we are a fluke of nature’s many awesome processes?
* "Human beings are a tragic species. Not because of our smallness, but because we are too well endowed. We have longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfil. We have expectations of a just and moral world. We require meaning in a meaningless world". Where is the ‘fair and just’ world for ants when their hill is turned upside down by a passing deer in the forest? During billions of years we happen to have developed the incredible ability of abstract thinking, which has made life so complex for us. It is a curse as well as a blessing. An ant in Australia behaves by and large like an ant in Brazil and an English finch sings the same tune as a Danish one. Only humans develop and behave unpredictably. As a consequence of our possessing an incredible bio-computer we have the ability to create a multitude of behaviours. It helps us invent and use tools that empower our weak construction beyond the imaginable and enables us to create intellectual discontinuity jumps in areas we cannot even fathom ourselves. But when we compare with the rest of the animal – or plant! – world, each species appears to be endowed with an equally amazing performance ability – only far more selective and specialised and highly constrained in freedom. The difference is that humans have no preset level! We are a fluke of nature and it is up to us, whether we decide to use it positively or negatively. It does NOT prove the existence of a god. At best you can say that you BELIEVE, but that is a completely personal matter with no scientific value.
* "The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn't seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer". Why are we so hung up on the idea that there must be an answer to everything? Take the concept of ‘time’, for example. My childhood’s eternal questions were: when did the universe start? What is on the other side of the universe? And what was there before? The answer may be startling simple: time is our invention! It is irrelevant to talk about time, which we have defined as various fractions of the Earth’s movement. We must realise that Earth, in a cosmic sense, is nothing! We can of course use a more universal definition of time: the oscillation period of Caesium atoms. We know that time dilutes the closer we get to the speed of light or close to a strong gravitational field. This we can verify by experiment. But to make Einstein's equation E=mc2 work, he also made mass a variable. That is the reverse of science! New theories (Frank Atkinson) indicate that mass is constant while the speed of light varies. It may always be maxed out at 300,000 Km/sec - but if a second only lasts "half as long" in a different time domain, e.g. close to a galaxy, then - - - - ? Perhaps the Universe always was? perhaps the red-shift of light is NOT an indication of the doppler effect of the Big Bang, which therefore never was? Einstein can easily be debunked (see my 2011 blog entries), using his own relativity arguments and a speeding train. We are left with only serious mathematics in our attempts to explain cosmic theories, while the mind, that tries to perceive the existence of parallel universes or string theories and the concept of endlessness (both in time-terms and distance) has had to be parked in a quiet spot long ago. We are not built to relate to such metaphysics. We must give up believing that WE have invented everything. The only thing we have ever invented is a load of religious nonsense, demonstrating our smallness.
'Nature' is beyond our wildest imagination - from superfast Neutrinos to Galaxies 50bill light years away.
So what remains?
As long as we keep asking questions and are curious, we are alive.
Perhaps THIS is the true meaning of life?
* "We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness". And is that so bad? We came out of the primordial soup after the big bang - and may disappear in another big bang one day. I wish someone could tell me why this is such a negative notion. What it is all about is “what do we make of it while we are here”. I believe Zapffe had the same idea. When we disappear, someone else will take over and it is our responsibility to make sure that the heritage is worth while. We, ourselves, are left to become dust and time limited memories – and therein lies, hopefully, some value. The Ptolemaic Egyptians kept the richly decorated mummy coffins containing their ancestors piled up against the wall in the triclinium of their dwellings. That way dad, granny and great-great grand dad were kept integrated with daily life for a while. When none of the later generations recognised who they were, the coffins were dumped in the desert sand - and found by Flinders Petrie in the 1860s.
* "The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end". – We must concentrate on the consequence of our immediate decisions for the sake of ourselves, while we are here and able to create a brief flash of meaning, and perhaps to pass one iota of accrued knowledge to our children. Experience shows that they have little interst in receiving "old wisdom", but perhaps we become wiser in a billion years?
* "Death is a terrible provocation. It appears almost everywhere, presenting a stern but effective scale for both values and ethical standards. It is the most certain and the most uncertain event there is ". This is why we must learn to accept death as part of life. Darkness doesn’t exist without light and happiness not without pain. We must learn to accept it as natural for us, as for the ants we tread upon during a forest walk. Our routines and rituals around death ought to focus on the passing of learning, memories and values, which is what each generation has a responsibility to take on board. Sadly, our track record for learning in a historical sense is terrible – there is a lot to learn for future generations in this respect.
* "In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation". I disagree slightly with Zapffe. While there basically is no meaning with life as such, our existence only has value (if any) as a chain. Each generation is a link, but only the chain itself can have a value. Yes, we are terrible at setting our priorities, but ants don’t ask to be born either. They just are – like us! Where I agree with Zapffe is in the notion that if you don’t want to have children, it’s philosophically a totally defensible position. And here we differ from any other species: we may choose not to have children. The rest of nature sees it as its main objective to populate “the cosmic brutality”. At best, you can say it is a sign of our imperfection that we concentrate on the coin and not the question of children. That is our curse.
* "Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will". On this point I disagree completely with Zapffe. Unfortunately I can’t ask him for clarification – for me it’s better to be a Don Quijote fighting for unattainable ideals, than to consider suicide. Why? Because if there is any meaning with life at all, it is imbedded in the here and now. Let it last, for each generation, as long as it can and let’s cut as many windmills down as we can in that time!
* "I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness". This notion supports my statement that it is the here and now plus the learning we may pass on to the next generation that counts. But should it happen that a black hole comes our way in the Universe and swallows our solar system, then I fully agree: no damage whatsoever will have been done! Not more, at least, than a dead ant under the foot on a warm summer’s day in the forest.
* "If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains "peace of mind"". I couldn’t agree more. I have never felt so much at ease with my own philosophy about life and death, as when I finally took the small step from agnosticism to atheism. Some people find peace in believing that the Easter Bunny can lay chocolate eggs – but isn’t it more relevant, justifiable and easier to believe in what I call ‘dust and worms’ than living your life in imagined guilt and anxiety about what awaits you on the other side? Have your 99 “white raisins” this side of the threshold, rather than losing out through a bomb around you waist!
Jorgen Faxholm, London 9 April 2010.
I am against idolisation. I hate the idea about being a “fan” – but SHOULD I, in a weak moment, ever give in to this kind of unquestionable admiration, Zapffe would be very high on my list of idols. His philosophy suits me to the core; I understand what he says – with every nerve in my body; and I fail to see that his message is as negative as many people claim. In fact I find it a thoroughly positive, life-confirming message and it removes the mythological veil and gobbledygook, with which the human species constantly surrounds itself, leaving a clear and unpolluted message about our existence.
Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer and an author of many humorous short stories about climbing and other adventures in nature, taking a very early interest in environmentalism. He was also an atheist – and so am I. I used to be an agnostic, mainly from an intellectual point of view: you cannot prove or disprove what is improvable, so better leave the door open if one day something proving a god’s existence should turn up. But that is a stance that put me on the side of wet noodles while performing a mental balancing act leading nowhere. All religious people – without exception – can be pushed into saying: “I just know”, while having to admit that theirs is nothing but a firm, unwavering belief. And it remains a belief. Face it: there is no argument whatsoever that proves the existence of a god. Full stop. Luckily it is a prerogative of ours to believe what we want, as long as we leave people with different beliefs in peace. Unfortunately most religions carry an anachronistic luggage that doesn’t allow such tolerance.
Zapffe defined 4 dimensions describing the way we live our lives:
* Isolation is "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling". We are probably all familiar with the tendency to ignore bad news, as it “disturbs our circles” – and if we can’t do it with a positive mind, there are plenty of drugs available that can help us. But it is hardly a viable way to help us live full lives. Living in isolation must be a short-term solution and as such good enough – just consider holidays, an evening’s binge drinking, an LSD-trip or falling madly and unconditionally in love with no thought for the consequences. The Chinese would probably add ‘gardening’ as a happy escape to a mental paradise!
* Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the maelstrom of targets for our consciousness". The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal that allows them to focus their attentions in a consistent manner. It is a hook to a virtual reality that saves us from drowning in unending possibilities. Zapffe applied the anchoring principle to e.g. society, and stated "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future" are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments. You could add ‘Political Manifestos’ to this array; this explains why someone claiming to side with e.g. the Labour party will believe blindly in – and fight for – everything the party gurus claim to be eternal truths and accepted values. Without ‘anchoring’ there would be total chaos within each party as everyone would have their own interpretation of the party-line. As we can see, this doesn’t happen, or at least only to a very small degree. Humans are indeed special!
* Distraction is when "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions". Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself. This is clearly related to the ‘Isolation’-dimension, but it has a more positive ring to it, as it is enforced by a level of activity. Distraction is perhaps more related to escapism in its pure form.
* Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, towards positive ones. The individual distances him / herself and looks at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g. writers, poets, painters.) Zapffe himself pointed out that his work was the product of sublimation. Should I be forced to choose any single dimension for my life, this would be the one. I have often described my mind as being lodged – like a donkey – between a carrot and a stick, but always seen the carrot more clearly than I felt the pain from the stick. I can assure any reader that it is a feeling that more than anything else will bring you rather unscathed through difficult periods in one’s life.
Here is a number of quotes that more than anything else illustrate “Zapffism”:
* "Each new generation asks - What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be - Why do we need a meaning with life?" Who says? Why can’t we just determine a set of sociological, political, humanitarian values and establish our own meaning? Where does this blind belief come from, that someone ‘out there’ should have introduced a higher objective with our being born and passing away? Why not accept that we are a fluke of nature’s many awesome processes?
* "Human beings are a tragic species. Not because of our smallness, but because we are too well endowed. We have longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfil. We have expectations of a just and moral world. We require meaning in a meaningless world". Where is the ‘fair and just’ world for ants when their hill is turned upside down by a passing deer in the forest? During billions of years we happen to have developed the incredible ability of abstract thinking, which has made life so complex for us. It is a curse as well as a blessing. An ant in Australia behaves by and large like an ant in Brazil and an English finch sings the same tune as a Danish one. Only humans develop and behave unpredictably. As a consequence of our possessing an incredible bio-computer we have the ability to create a multitude of behaviours. It helps us invent and use tools that empower our weak construction beyond the imaginable and enables us to create intellectual discontinuity jumps in areas we cannot even fathom ourselves. But when we compare with the rest of the animal – or plant! – world, each species appears to be endowed with an equally amazing performance ability – only far more selective and specialised and highly constrained in freedom. The difference is that humans have no preset level! We are a fluke of nature and it is up to us, whether we decide to use it positively or negatively. It does NOT prove the existence of a god. At best you can say that you BELIEVE, but that is a completely personal matter with no scientific value.
* "The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn't seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer". Why are we so hung up on the idea that there must be an answer to everything? Take the concept of ‘time’, for example. My childhood’s eternal questions were: when did the universe start? What is on the other side of the universe? And what was there before? The answer may be startling simple: time is our invention! It is irrelevant to talk about time, which we have defined as various fractions of the Earth’s movement. We must realise that Earth, in a cosmic sense, is nothing! We can of course use a more universal definition of time: the oscillation period of Caesium atoms. We know that time dilutes the closer we get to the speed of light or close to a strong gravitational field. This we can verify by experiment. But to make Einstein's equation E=mc2 work, he also made mass a variable. That is the reverse of science! New theories (Frank Atkinson) indicate that mass is constant while the speed of light varies. It may always be maxed out at 300,000 Km/sec - but if a second only lasts "half as long" in a different time domain, e.g. close to a galaxy, then - - - - ? Perhaps the Universe always was? perhaps the red-shift of light is NOT an indication of the doppler effect of the Big Bang, which therefore never was? Einstein can easily be debunked (see my 2011 blog entries), using his own relativity arguments and a speeding train. We are left with only serious mathematics in our attempts to explain cosmic theories, while the mind, that tries to perceive the existence of parallel universes or string theories and the concept of endlessness (both in time-terms and distance) has had to be parked in a quiet spot long ago. We are not built to relate to such metaphysics. We must give up believing that WE have invented everything. The only thing we have ever invented is a load of religious nonsense, demonstrating our smallness.
'Nature' is beyond our wildest imagination - from superfast Neutrinos to Galaxies 50bill light years away.
So what remains?
As long as we keep asking questions and are curious, we are alive.
Perhaps THIS is the true meaning of life?
* "We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness". And is that so bad? We came out of the primordial soup after the big bang - and may disappear in another big bang one day. I wish someone could tell me why this is such a negative notion. What it is all about is “what do we make of it while we are here”. I believe Zapffe had the same idea. When we disappear, someone else will take over and it is our responsibility to make sure that the heritage is worth while. We, ourselves, are left to become dust and time limited memories – and therein lies, hopefully, some value. The Ptolemaic Egyptians kept the richly decorated mummy coffins containing their ancestors piled up against the wall in the triclinium of their dwellings. That way dad, granny and great-great grand dad were kept integrated with daily life for a while. When none of the later generations recognised who they were, the coffins were dumped in the desert sand - and found by Flinders Petrie in the 1860s.
* "The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end". – We must concentrate on the consequence of our immediate decisions for the sake of ourselves, while we are here and able to create a brief flash of meaning, and perhaps to pass one iota of accrued knowledge to our children. Experience shows that they have little interst in receiving "old wisdom", but perhaps we become wiser in a billion years?
* "Death is a terrible provocation. It appears almost everywhere, presenting a stern but effective scale for both values and ethical standards. It is the most certain and the most uncertain event there is ". This is why we must learn to accept death as part of life. Darkness doesn’t exist without light and happiness not without pain. We must learn to accept it as natural for us, as for the ants we tread upon during a forest walk. Our routines and rituals around death ought to focus on the passing of learning, memories and values, which is what each generation has a responsibility to take on board. Sadly, our track record for learning in a historical sense is terrible – there is a lot to learn for future generations in this respect.
* "In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation". I disagree slightly with Zapffe. While there basically is no meaning with life as such, our existence only has value (if any) as a chain. Each generation is a link, but only the chain itself can have a value. Yes, we are terrible at setting our priorities, but ants don’t ask to be born either. They just are – like us! Where I agree with Zapffe is in the notion that if you don’t want to have children, it’s philosophically a totally defensible position. And here we differ from any other species: we may choose not to have children. The rest of nature sees it as its main objective to populate “the cosmic brutality”. At best, you can say it is a sign of our imperfection that we concentrate on the coin and not the question of children. That is our curse.
* "Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will". On this point I disagree completely with Zapffe. Unfortunately I can’t ask him for clarification – for me it’s better to be a Don Quijote fighting for unattainable ideals, than to consider suicide. Why? Because if there is any meaning with life at all, it is imbedded in the here and now. Let it last, for each generation, as long as it can and let’s cut as many windmills down as we can in that time!
* "I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness". This notion supports my statement that it is the here and now plus the learning we may pass on to the next generation that counts. But should it happen that a black hole comes our way in the Universe and swallows our solar system, then I fully agree: no damage whatsoever will have been done! Not more, at least, than a dead ant under the foot on a warm summer’s day in the forest.
* "If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains "peace of mind"". I couldn’t agree more. I have never felt so much at ease with my own philosophy about life and death, as when I finally took the small step from agnosticism to atheism. Some people find peace in believing that the Easter Bunny can lay chocolate eggs – but isn’t it more relevant, justifiable and easier to believe in what I call ‘dust and worms’ than living your life in imagined guilt and anxiety about what awaits you on the other side? Have your 99 “white raisins” this side of the threshold, rather than losing out through a bomb around you waist!
Jorgen Faxholm, London 9 April 2010.
Monday, 4 January 2010
The Human Condition IV
“When she was freed of the fear of her enemy and her rival in empire was out of the way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in a headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new”.
You may have 2 guesses about whom this quote is concerned.
If your first answer was “the Roman Republic after 146 BC”, when Carthage was finally nothing more than a field of ploughed furrows full of salt, you would be absolutely spot on, although there is another answer as well.
Velleius Paterculus, who authored the sentences quoted above at the time of emperor Tiberius as part of his historic account of the death throes of the Roman Republic, was close enough to the Republic’s last 100 years BC. This was a period full of personal greed, infighting, self aggrandizing, proscriptions, state expansion and individual megalomania. After the civil war of 88 BC and the presence of an exceptional number of personalities larger than life (Sulla, Marius, Pompeius, Cicero, Caesar, Antonius and a vile range of provincial governors like Gaius Verres and Catilina, there was no system in place to restrain neither the state nor the incumbents, who tried to make the best out of a time of confusion.
The rather unique Roman characteristic of individual- and state hubris created a range of extraordinary situations, which are well described in e.g. Cicero’s letters: Being a Roman citizen would be a better argument for being right than any legally convincing argument provided by someone from the provinces, colonia or socii.
There were Romans and there was the miserable rest of the petty world.
The humanitarian protagonists were few and far between, although Cicero perhaps could be mentioned, provided we realise that he was a lawyer – and a good one at that. He would, as all super-lawyers, win cases where the accused was guilty beyond doubt. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were probably more genuine humanists in their attempt to create land reforms, but this, typically for the period, cost them their lives.
In short: The Roman Republic and its key players were in it for the money, the power and the ‘auctoritas’, i.e. the authority with which they could express an opinion and have the people follow. This created more power and money. The only object of becoming quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul and senator was to improve wealth and 'auctoritas'. It became a competition with not only other Romans, but with one self. There was only one way ahead: more wanted more.
Velleius could in my opinion easily have been suspected for having had a glimpse into a far distant future.
So, if your other guess was “the USA after 1991”, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed – wouldn’t that be a correct answer as well?
I am not the first person to compare the Roman state of affairs of 2000 years ago with the scenario of ‘deja vu’ of today.
With the Soviet Union well out of the way for some 20 years now, an un-opposed drive to expand the state, using the devices of today, was to be expected: money and one-way political influence, peppered with a good portion of righteous religion.
The economic criminality and the Iraq wars are perfect, but sad illustrations.
The country that produced the Declaration of Independence (i.e. human freedom) in 1776 and who keeps bragging about “we liberated you guys twice from the “Huns” (see my previous blog on the Human Condition) has started a headlong, not gradually, course of corruption while abandoning the path of virtue.
Consider Enron, Ponzi, Madoff, greedy bankers, credit fraud and pyramid schemes.
And then there are the Oil-wars with all their lame excuses of WMD, and the hypocrisy around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Not to speak of ‘justified torture’ such as water-boarding, a self-created terrorism plague and the incredible Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison scandals.
A country that faces no serious external threats or imperial competitors and which possesses a huge surplus of assets and energy will inevitably begin to mortgage its resources and start to compete inwards – just like the Roman Republic. With no need to defend itself and no opponent with the capacity to whip it back to the path of virtue, the ‘capital’ can be used to augment its own interest, in competition only with one self, while continuing to use the arguments from the ‘virtue’ days to build power. It takes some naivety not to see how arrogant this is - but an excess number of blind spots is always the hallmark of such states, whether the Roman Republic or a modern super-power without competition.
Hubris again.
As the world has become global this attitude spills over on the ‘partners’ – the UK being the primary one.
UK MPs soon realised that the world was one big jam pot and started sucking it empty. After the intense scrutiny in 2009 more than 200 have chosen to leave parliament, taking the golden handshake while they can.
Oone of the worst offenders is the Home Office Secretary, who managed to get away with an illegal £100K mortgage. Had unemployed Mr. Smith managed illegally to squeeze 80 Pounds out of Job Centre Plus, the might of the state would have hit him with a ton of bricks.
So, what’s the difference from the Roman Governors looting Corinth, Africa and Sicily and keeping their loot?
Gordon Brown glues himself to the stool with mistake after mistake, leaving a bankrupt country in his wake and the UK’s ex-PM, Tony Blair, who accepted a cream-job as a mid-east envoy in which he has done absolutely nothing for his excessive fee, abandons all decency and goes for the talks-circuit with his gained ‘auctoritas’, lining his pocket with millions of pounds. At the same time the tax-payers have to fund a security operation for him costing £6mill pr. year with Blair contributing nothing.
Is there any hope with the Conservatives, then?
I doubt it - they are as elusive on actual change-plans as everyone else and obviously as fiddling with both promises and funds as every other politician.
The Romans in the time of the Republic had the 3 remaining books of the Sybil, which they could consult in order to find a way out of trouble.
We are left with the mediocrity and continued greed from our politicians - and no clear way out.
They can't even agree to help save the planet through better husbandry of our energy resources, proving the point, that if you are rich, all you want is more.
How Roman.
It is not difficult to conclude that the world may have changed considerably in 2000 years, but the human species has not.
“When she was freed of the fear of her enemy and her rival in empire was out of the way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in a headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new”.
You may have 2 guesses about whom this quote is concerned.
If your first answer was “the Roman Republic after 146 BC”, when Carthage was finally nothing more than a field of ploughed furrows full of salt, you would be absolutely spot on, although there is another answer as well.
Velleius Paterculus, who authored the sentences quoted above at the time of emperor Tiberius as part of his historic account of the death throes of the Roman Republic, was close enough to the Republic’s last 100 years BC. This was a period full of personal greed, infighting, self aggrandizing, proscriptions, state expansion and individual megalomania. After the civil war of 88 BC and the presence of an exceptional number of personalities larger than life (Sulla, Marius, Pompeius, Cicero, Caesar, Antonius and a vile range of provincial governors like Gaius Verres and Catilina, there was no system in place to restrain neither the state nor the incumbents, who tried to make the best out of a time of confusion.
The rather unique Roman characteristic of individual- and state hubris created a range of extraordinary situations, which are well described in e.g. Cicero’s letters: Being a Roman citizen would be a better argument for being right than any legally convincing argument provided by someone from the provinces, colonia or socii.
There were Romans and there was the miserable rest of the petty world.
The humanitarian protagonists were few and far between, although Cicero perhaps could be mentioned, provided we realise that he was a lawyer – and a good one at that. He would, as all super-lawyers, win cases where the accused was guilty beyond doubt. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were probably more genuine humanists in their attempt to create land reforms, but this, typically for the period, cost them their lives.
In short: The Roman Republic and its key players were in it for the money, the power and the ‘auctoritas’, i.e. the authority with which they could express an opinion and have the people follow. This created more power and money. The only object of becoming quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul and senator was to improve wealth and 'auctoritas'. It became a competition with not only other Romans, but with one self. There was only one way ahead: more wanted more.
Velleius could in my opinion easily have been suspected for having had a glimpse into a far distant future.
So, if your other guess was “the USA after 1991”, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed – wouldn’t that be a correct answer as well?
I am not the first person to compare the Roman state of affairs of 2000 years ago with the scenario of ‘deja vu’ of today.
With the Soviet Union well out of the way for some 20 years now, an un-opposed drive to expand the state, using the devices of today, was to be expected: money and one-way political influence, peppered with a good portion of righteous religion.
The economic criminality and the Iraq wars are perfect, but sad illustrations.
The country that produced the Declaration of Independence (i.e. human freedom) in 1776 and who keeps bragging about “we liberated you guys twice from the “Huns” (see my previous blog on the Human Condition) has started a headlong, not gradually, course of corruption while abandoning the path of virtue.
Consider Enron, Ponzi, Madoff, greedy bankers, credit fraud and pyramid schemes.
And then there are the Oil-wars with all their lame excuses of WMD, and the hypocrisy around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Not to speak of ‘justified torture’ such as water-boarding, a self-created terrorism plague and the incredible Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison scandals.
A country that faces no serious external threats or imperial competitors and which possesses a huge surplus of assets and energy will inevitably begin to mortgage its resources and start to compete inwards – just like the Roman Republic. With no need to defend itself and no opponent with the capacity to whip it back to the path of virtue, the ‘capital’ can be used to augment its own interest, in competition only with one self, while continuing to use the arguments from the ‘virtue’ days to build power. It takes some naivety not to see how arrogant this is - but an excess number of blind spots is always the hallmark of such states, whether the Roman Republic or a modern super-power without competition.
Hubris again.
As the world has become global this attitude spills over on the ‘partners’ – the UK being the primary one.
UK MPs soon realised that the world was one big jam pot and started sucking it empty. After the intense scrutiny in 2009 more than 200 have chosen to leave parliament, taking the golden handshake while they can.
Oone of the worst offenders is the Home Office Secretary, who managed to get away with an illegal £100K mortgage. Had unemployed Mr. Smith managed illegally to squeeze 80 Pounds out of Job Centre Plus, the might of the state would have hit him with a ton of bricks.
So, what’s the difference from the Roman Governors looting Corinth, Africa and Sicily and keeping their loot?
Gordon Brown glues himself to the stool with mistake after mistake, leaving a bankrupt country in his wake and the UK’s ex-PM, Tony Blair, who accepted a cream-job as a mid-east envoy in which he has done absolutely nothing for his excessive fee, abandons all decency and goes for the talks-circuit with his gained ‘auctoritas’, lining his pocket with millions of pounds. At the same time the tax-payers have to fund a security operation for him costing £6mill pr. year with Blair contributing nothing.
Is there any hope with the Conservatives, then?
I doubt it - they are as elusive on actual change-plans as everyone else and obviously as fiddling with both promises and funds as every other politician.
The Romans in the time of the Republic had the 3 remaining books of the Sybil, which they could consult in order to find a way out of trouble.
We are left with the mediocrity and continued greed from our politicians - and no clear way out.
They can't even agree to help save the planet through better husbandry of our energy resources, proving the point, that if you are rich, all you want is more.
How Roman.
It is not difficult to conclude that the world may have changed considerably in 2000 years, but the human species has not.
Saturday, 19 December 2009
The Human Condition-III
Everyone uses the term “the Human Condition” without thought of what it actually means. Normally it seems to describe the misery of our daily survival attempts, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
The ideal ‘anthropogenic’ society prescribes characteristics such as being cooperative, loving and selfless.
However, more often than not we are judgemental, competitive, aggressive and selfish.
Kammerat Napoleon (1984), Oligarchs, war-mongering, Business Competition, Party Politics, neighbour-gossip, ordinary human interaction and the prevailing promotion of self-interest (UK MPs come to mind) illustrate what I mean quite well.
We seem to be able of limitless love and sensitivity, but unfortunately it doesn’t eliminate our capability of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war.
Words are too poor to describe this contradiction.
It seems to be something we just have to live with.
That’s why we call it the “Human Condition”.
In my opinion nothing describes the Human Condition better than the art presented by this marvellous young Ukrainian woman:
http://pelapapas.com.mx/htmls/animacion-arena-2.html
Compare this to the trash produced by the YBA or for the Turner Prize.
That is also "a human condition" - - -
Everyone uses the term “the Human Condition” without thought of what it actually means. Normally it seems to describe the misery of our daily survival attempts, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
The ideal ‘anthropogenic’ society prescribes characteristics such as being cooperative, loving and selfless.
However, more often than not we are judgemental, competitive, aggressive and selfish.
Kammerat Napoleon (1984), Oligarchs, war-mongering, Business Competition, Party Politics, neighbour-gossip, ordinary human interaction and the prevailing promotion of self-interest (UK MPs come to mind) illustrate what I mean quite well.
We seem to be able of limitless love and sensitivity, but unfortunately it doesn’t eliminate our capability of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war.
Words are too poor to describe this contradiction.
It seems to be something we just have to live with.
That’s why we call it the “Human Condition”.
In my opinion nothing describes the Human Condition better than the art presented by this marvellous young Ukrainian woman:
http://pelapapas.com.mx/htmls/animacion-arena-2.html
Compare this to the trash produced by the YBA or for the Turner Prize.
That is also "a human condition" - - -
Monday, 14 December 2009
Saturday, 5 December 2009
The great Climate scam – or AGW nonsense.
The revelations from East Anglia University in Nov. 2009 are terrifying in many ways. Slowly a lot of us begin to realise that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) theories may be a load of poppycock. The focus on the impact of man-made CO2 is turning our minds away from the real problems.
And that is why signing of the proposed treaty in Copenhagen in December may not only be a red herring but outright dangerous, as it will address the wrong reasons with the wrong measures, investing the wrong money in the wrong causes.
The world has become warmer in the last 50 years. This is beyond dispute.
Just look at the rising sea levels, most significantly apparent in the Island states of the Pacific Ocean, and the slow, but certain disappearance of glaciers across the globe.
Anyone with a 50-60 year memory can remember the icy winters in the 1950s with intermittent re-occurrence in 1970s and 1980s, but what have we seen after that? Temperatures have stabilised since 1998, despite increased “anthropogenic” pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, ostensibly close to 10 % more now than in the 90s.
If the Earth's atmosphere were 1 km deep, 781 m would be Nitrogene, 209 m Oxygene, 9 m Argon, 18 cm Neon (Ne) - and only 38 cm CO2, the remaining few cm made up of small amounts of other gasses, one being Methane (1cm), apparently the most dangerous of all.
Most of the 38cm CO2 is nature's own and has always been so.
The question is: how large a percentage of the 38cm is man-made?
Even if we assume that 10 cm is the product of our industrial activities (indications from ice-cores and sea-bottom point in that direction) is it then realistic to expect a few cm to have the claimed impact? And couldn't it be something else, e.g. wholesale burning of the rainforrest?
Right now everyone is looking for hard evidence of a correlation between the CO2-emission and rising temperatures, but having great difficulty finding one.
If there were one, the last 10 years would have provided dramatic evidence and these are the 10 years, where we don't see any warming.
Sorry folks: we can’t find it and the Hockey-Stick model is wrong.
Research, deep into the ice-sheets of Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere, has proved that CO2 emission and global warming is uncorrelated the AGW-way. Temperature rises appear to have come before CO2 levels increased, and often with a time-lapse of 50-100 years, so perhaps it is the other way around: the world warms up and then either the oceans or jungles or something else release more CO2.
Scientific research shows that it is much more likely to find the reason behind the climate swings amongst the many possible parameters totally outside of human control, e.g variations in solar activity and radiation, the Earth’s elliptic path around the sun, the tilt of the Earth’s axis (which seems to ‘wobble’ a couple of degrees around a 23 degree norm for some reason), volcanic activity, ocean currents and, sometimes, an unlucky combination of these. Once started like in the last ice age, which everyone can agree was not initiated by human activity, the process may become self-amplifying.
This could happen if a massive release of icebergs from Greenland suddenly changed the Gulf Stream (the Atlantic conveyor). In that case a northern hemisphere ice-age could be induced in just a couple of months.
A lot of scare-mongering has taken place around ice and sea-levels, in particular the melting away of Antarctica.
At present ca. 50 Bill tonnes of ice is supposedly breaking off, causing a millimetre rise in the level of the oceans pr. year. For comparison, Antarctica holds more than 3.000.000 Bill tonnes of ice. Greenland’s ice and the world’s glaciers are also on retreat, contributing to a small rise in sea-levels, a fact we can measure. However, nature seems to have a built-in breaking effect on the melting process, causing the melt-down to stop.
But something else could happen. At present the Atlantic conveyor and the impact of a high volume of ice-bergs is closely monitored. We now understand that an ice age could happen within a few months, if the Gulf stream is stopped, as it happened 12.000 years ago during the Younger Dryas period, when fresh water from huge American lakes broke into the ocean. A 3 km thick sheet of ice above our heads and 40m lover sea-levels are quite unbearable to consider.
Around 1100 CE we had a globally warmer period than today, allowing the Vikings to settle in Greenland and harvest a crop, while in 16-1700 there was a so-called mini ice age that caused failed harvest and much misery.
None of this was impacted by human activity, only by Mother Nature’s mood.
And then there are the computer models.
We can hardly predict the weather a day before, so how much faith should we put into the AGW Computer models? When you hear that
- the programmed sensitivity to CO2 has been adjusted to be many times greater than
actually measured
- the solar activity has been downgraded despite measurements and better knowledge
- the models predict a warming of the troposphere (6 miles above the tropics) that we have
not been able to verify despite countless weather balloons and
- the models so far have failed to “predict” the climatic weather we can verify, namely by
inputting the data from the past and correlate them with actual observations
then it seems to me that we have a responsibility to ring the alarm bells.
Why is this information suppressed? 1984?
The UN climate models apparently predicted a 20th Century temperature increase of 2-3°.
Actually measured was 0.7°, 3-4 times wrong!
The conclusion is scary.
If we cannot do anything about the change in climate and if the AGW is a false assumption, then we are about to embark on a series of investment programmes that will make the bank bail-out in 2009 look like pocket money. We will fail to have resources left to invest where they should have been invested in the first place, namely in alleviation of the unavoidable effects of Mother Nature’s little games. We could have prevented deforestation, planted trees in the whole of Sahara, ensured evaporation-free irrigation systems world wide to help feed a growing population, generated cleaner energy for all, etc.
The list is endless.
The conference in Copenhagen may represent one of the biggest decision-disasters in our recent history, if the suggested declaration is signed. There will be no way back and the already vested business interests will, for a while, see even greater profits. Politicians will pat each other on the back, in particular the UK politicians, who have now decided that they will “lead the way”.
Ehh? Lead from the back seat? A country that has no double glazing, that produces much more pollution than the agreed limits and that flows over with professors, who state that renewable energy production is useless while the politicians maintain they are doing everything they can? (The UK has 2% green energy production against e.g. Denmark’s 30%).
Just wait until the permafrost, unavoidably, sneaks through the Watford Gap. Perhaps we should look differently, and more friendly, at Afghanistan?
The revelations from East Anglia University in Nov. 2009 are terrifying in many ways. Slowly a lot of us begin to realise that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) theories may be a load of poppycock. The focus on the impact of man-made CO2 is turning our minds away from the real problems.
And that is why signing of the proposed treaty in Copenhagen in December may not only be a red herring but outright dangerous, as it will address the wrong reasons with the wrong measures, investing the wrong money in the wrong causes.
The world has become warmer in the last 50 years. This is beyond dispute.
Just look at the rising sea levels, most significantly apparent in the Island states of the Pacific Ocean, and the slow, but certain disappearance of glaciers across the globe.
Anyone with a 50-60 year memory can remember the icy winters in the 1950s with intermittent re-occurrence in 1970s and 1980s, but what have we seen after that? Temperatures have stabilised since 1998, despite increased “anthropogenic” pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, ostensibly close to 10 % more now than in the 90s.
If the Earth's atmosphere were 1 km deep, 781 m would be Nitrogene, 209 m Oxygene, 9 m Argon, 18 cm Neon (Ne) - and only 38 cm CO2, the remaining few cm made up of small amounts of other gasses, one being Methane (1cm), apparently the most dangerous of all.
Most of the 38cm CO2 is nature's own and has always been so.
The question is: how large a percentage of the 38cm is man-made?
Even if we assume that 10 cm is the product of our industrial activities (indications from ice-cores and sea-bottom point in that direction) is it then realistic to expect a few cm to have the claimed impact? And couldn't it be something else, e.g. wholesale burning of the rainforrest?
Right now everyone is looking for hard evidence of a correlation between the CO2-emission and rising temperatures, but having great difficulty finding one.
If there were one, the last 10 years would have provided dramatic evidence and these are the 10 years, where we don't see any warming.
Sorry folks: we can’t find it and the Hockey-Stick model is wrong.
Research, deep into the ice-sheets of Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere, has proved that CO2 emission and global warming is uncorrelated the AGW-way. Temperature rises appear to have come before CO2 levels increased, and often with a time-lapse of 50-100 years, so perhaps it is the other way around: the world warms up and then either the oceans or jungles or something else release more CO2.
Scientific research shows that it is much more likely to find the reason behind the climate swings amongst the many possible parameters totally outside of human control, e.g variations in solar activity and radiation, the Earth’s elliptic path around the sun, the tilt of the Earth’s axis (which seems to ‘wobble’ a couple of degrees around a 23 degree norm for some reason), volcanic activity, ocean currents and, sometimes, an unlucky combination of these. Once started like in the last ice age, which everyone can agree was not initiated by human activity, the process may become self-amplifying.
This could happen if a massive release of icebergs from Greenland suddenly changed the Gulf Stream (the Atlantic conveyor). In that case a northern hemisphere ice-age could be induced in just a couple of months.
A lot of scare-mongering has taken place around ice and sea-levels, in particular the melting away of Antarctica.
At present ca. 50 Bill tonnes of ice is supposedly breaking off, causing a millimetre rise in the level of the oceans pr. year. For comparison, Antarctica holds more than 3.000.000 Bill tonnes of ice. Greenland’s ice and the world’s glaciers are also on retreat, contributing to a small rise in sea-levels, a fact we can measure. However, nature seems to have a built-in breaking effect on the melting process, causing the melt-down to stop.
But something else could happen. At present the Atlantic conveyor and the impact of a high volume of ice-bergs is closely monitored. We now understand that an ice age could happen within a few months, if the Gulf stream is stopped, as it happened 12.000 years ago during the Younger Dryas period, when fresh water from huge American lakes broke into the ocean. A 3 km thick sheet of ice above our heads and 40m lover sea-levels are quite unbearable to consider.
Around 1100 CE we had a globally warmer period than today, allowing the Vikings to settle in Greenland and harvest a crop, while in 16-1700 there was a so-called mini ice age that caused failed harvest and much misery.
None of this was impacted by human activity, only by Mother Nature’s mood.
And then there are the computer models.
We can hardly predict the weather a day before, so how much faith should we put into the AGW Computer models? When you hear that
- the programmed sensitivity to CO2 has been adjusted to be many times greater than
actually measured
- the solar activity has been downgraded despite measurements and better knowledge
- the models predict a warming of the troposphere (6 miles above the tropics) that we have
not been able to verify despite countless weather balloons and
- the models so far have failed to “predict” the climatic weather we can verify, namely by
inputting the data from the past and correlate them with actual observations
then it seems to me that we have a responsibility to ring the alarm bells.
Why is this information suppressed? 1984?
The UN climate models apparently predicted a 20th Century temperature increase of 2-3°.
Actually measured was 0.7°, 3-4 times wrong!
The conclusion is scary.
If we cannot do anything about the change in climate and if the AGW is a false assumption, then we are about to embark on a series of investment programmes that will make the bank bail-out in 2009 look like pocket money. We will fail to have resources left to invest where they should have been invested in the first place, namely in alleviation of the unavoidable effects of Mother Nature’s little games. We could have prevented deforestation, planted trees in the whole of Sahara, ensured evaporation-free irrigation systems world wide to help feed a growing population, generated cleaner energy for all, etc.
The list is endless.
The conference in Copenhagen may represent one of the biggest decision-disasters in our recent history, if the suggested declaration is signed. There will be no way back and the already vested business interests will, for a while, see even greater profits. Politicians will pat each other on the back, in particular the UK politicians, who have now decided that they will “lead the way”.
Ehh? Lead from the back seat? A country that has no double glazing, that produces much more pollution than the agreed limits and that flows over with professors, who state that renewable energy production is useless while the politicians maintain they are doing everything they can? (The UK has 2% green energy production against e.g. Denmark’s 30%).
Just wait until the permafrost, unavoidably, sneaks through the Watford Gap. Perhaps we should look differently, and more friendly, at Afghanistan?
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Art in the doldrums – anno 2009.
Channel 4 TV showed a feature in November 2010 about the 10 most promising modern British art students, who competed for the attention – and funding support – of Charles Saatchi. 6 out of the 10 would receive massive help in terms of money and logistics for the whole year.
Saatchi has made his impact on the British art scene felt for several years, but he is a shy benefactor, who’d rather let his gallery-curator Rebecca do all the hard work up front and only step in, when the final selections have been made.
True to form, this is exactly what he did in respect of the Channel 4 feature.
I don’t blame him.
At least, if these artists fail, it is not his fault.
The art scene in the UK has become a money-chasing marketing machine that does its utmost to push art into becoming synonymous with “never seen before”. Preferably it must leave the observer confused and certainly it must not reveal even a modicum of beauty in the punters’ mind. The moment an artist dares slipping into ordinary traditional boots, he/she will be cut down to the socks. Expressionism may still be accepted, as the definition of expressionism is rather loose, but only if it possesses a level of daring that makes it novel and slightly crazy – e.g. the German expressionist George Baselitz’ figures that all have been turned upside down.
What a novelty.
Beauty as an object has no place – it is passē.
Tracy Emin's unmade bed with strewn condoms, prized by Saatchi at £50,000, and her summer exhibition photos of a menstruating woman are in. If you buy her book, “The art of Tracey Emin”, you will know exactly what I mean.
Anish Kapoor’s red-sh*t canon, actually wax, shown at the RA in November 2009 and a towel handle from which a whistle was suspended, constructed by one of the winning artists in Channel 4’s feature and here copied after memory, are in.
I can assure you, it was not difficult to remember the details – here rendered publicly in all its glory!
However, praise is due, where praise is required!
One of the artists, who tried to make it above the parapet to Saatchi’s attention, had arranged 15 canteen-chairs, lying sideways in a circle on the floor. Even Tracy Emin, who was on the panel of 5 judges (a paradox in its own right), could see, that this was bull sh*t – which was exactly what she said on TV during the show.
I agree.
But I fail to see the difference between this chair-circle and most of the other ‘products’ shown. Perhaps the problem was that the ‘artist’ had great difficulty expressing, in a clear language, what was the concept behind his contraption.
The acid test came, when the budding Saatchi winners had to prove their ability to draw a simple model drawing. A faultless female beauty had draped herself on a couch in Manet’s Olympia-style. All what the artists had to do, was to show that they mastered some basic drawing technique – in my opinion the least one can demand of potential celebrities worth Saatchi’s millions.
You guessed it.
Not one of them had any idea about what it means to draw.
In one of the scribbles you’d be hard pressed to see that a naked woman was part of the object at all. Typically that was the only drawing, the judges thought was worth mentioning. Was it because no one else would be able to see the object and hence have an opinion contrary to the judges? Was it because the other drawings were just bad drawings, too obvious to everyone else?
Even worse, none of the ‘artists’ mastered a minimum of ability to express the concept in their creations, perhaps with one exception: the only one of them, who had never attended art school. The judging panel had great difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his art was both exciting and creative, but they didn’t hide their misgivings that ‘he was not cued in to the accepted art-lingo’.
In fact he spoke clearly and comprehensibly about his work.
The art world has forgotten that art must have an outward orientation and Channel 4’s feature showed this deficiency in abundance.
Art has become a totally self-centred celebrity machine: the object is the artist, not the observer; the language has to contain a high percentage of multi-syllable words that to ordinary humans mean nothing; the more ‘unaccepted’ or ‘new’, the better – anything that smacks of something that has been done before is unacceptable. This means that ultimately anything is art, even if it is a slowly dancing, clumsy bear (the Turner prize 2007), a video of someone sleeping on a sofa (the entry of one of the budding Saatchi artists) or something that preferably upsets the philistines .
At art school no one learns basic painting or drawing any more. Why waste time, when you can become a celebrity pouring a bucket of paint over the canvass and “see what happens”.
A stick in a pot of soil, on a chair, is art.
As are 500 diamonds glued onto a scull (Damien Hirst).
Or a 2m tall poo, another of Saatchi’s accepted creations, seen here – not too different from celebrity artist Anish Kapoor’s piles of concrete intestines.
Balance that with an artist like Kandinsky’s technical ability, his personal and artistic development over a 50 year career (here illustrated through his early picture of Odessa Harbour and the much later "All Saints II") and a statement made in the 1930s: "I am really happy that my early research into high quality paints has been successful, judged from the longevity of the colours."
Will we one day accept the Saatchi-protegees as the bee’s knees of what the 21st Century could produce?
Your guess is as good as mine.
The impressionists were once savagely vilified and here’s what Kurt Kuerchler, a German art-critic, said about Kandinsky in 1913:
“There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that this sort of art has finally reached the point where it reveals itself as the ‘-ism’ upon whose shores it must run aground, that is to say: cretinism.”
How wrong can one be? Does it remind you of the manager, who said to the Beatles: "There's no need for yet another guitar group".
Nevertheless, I will dare a judgement of the 2009-art seen from the year 2110:
“A good 80% of the 2009-production was mere junk, as no technique, no deep learning, no differentiation was required before it was called art. It was the result of an intensive marketing drive by money-hungry people, who couldn’t produce anything unique themselves. The objective was all about celebrity creation and it illustrated an empty, materialistic, spiritless society that had become obsessed with fast money, at any price, me-me-me and meaningless new forms of expression that didn’
t segregate ‘art’ from anything else that surrounded us. Marcel Duchamp’s urinoir, first exhibited in 1917, is a good example, and as we now know, it never made it to become a ‘piece de salon’ in the following 200 years, proving my point.
Only, very few people in the art world took the step to say: bullocks.
Of course they forgave Malevich for his black cross on a white canvass, and Matisse’s 10-sec charcoal-drawn women, as they had other, and more serious, stories to tell. And they had the ability!
But make no mistake: like in 2009 you still often pay for the signature, not for the painting.”
Back to 2009.
Saatchi has become a ‘God’-maker (Obs.: not an art promoter), an art-world’s Simon Cowell, who, like in the X-Factor, is able to push art in a celebrity direction with a heavy focus on the artist, not on art itself, simply because he has the money to do so and not because of the artist’s talent. It worked for Damien Hirst, whose latest skull-obsessions, in oil on a blue background exhibited at the Wallace Gallery in London, have been cut to the socks with the conclusion: he can’t paint! That could have been a shot under the waterline to the marketing machine, but he seems to have survived.
Nevertheless, he's the richest living artist in 2009 – again proving my point.
The emperor’s new clothes are still very new indeed.
Channel 4 TV showed a feature in November 2010 about the 10 most promising modern British art students, who competed for the attention – and funding support – of Charles Saatchi. 6 out of the 10 would receive massive help in terms of money and logistics for the whole year.
Saatchi has made his impact on the British art scene felt for several years, but he is a shy benefactor, who’d rather let his gallery-curator Rebecca do all the hard work up front and only step in, when the final selections have been made.
True to form, this is exactly what he did in respect of the Channel 4 feature.
I don’t blame him.
At least, if these artists fail, it is not his fault.
The art scene in the UK has become a money-chasing marketing machine that does its utmost to push art into becoming synonymous with “never seen before”. Preferably it must leave the observer confused and certainly it must not reveal even a modicum of beauty in the punters’ mind. The moment an artist dares slipping into ordinary traditional boots, he/she will be cut down to the socks. Expressionism may still be accepted, as the definition of expressionism is rather loose, but only if it possesses a level of daring that makes it novel and slightly crazy – e.g. the German expressionist George Baselitz’ figures that all have been turned upside down.
What a novelty.
Beauty as an object has no place – it is passē.
Tracy Emin's unmade bed with strewn condoms, prized by Saatchi at £50,000, and her summer exhibition photos of a menstruating woman are in. If you buy her book, “The art of Tracey Emin”, you will know exactly what I mean.
Anish Kapoor’s red-sh*t canon, actually wax, shown at the RA in November 2009 and a towel handle from which a whistle was suspended, constructed by one of the winning artists in Channel 4’s feature and here copied after memory, are in.
I can assure you, it was not difficult to remember the details – here rendered publicly in all its glory!
However, praise is due, where praise is required!
One of the artists, who tried to make it above the parapet to Saatchi’s attention, had arranged 15 canteen-chairs, lying sideways in a circle on the floor. Even Tracy Emin, who was on the panel of 5 judges (a paradox in its own right), could see, that this was bull sh*t – which was exactly what she said on TV during the show.
I agree.
But I fail to see the difference between this chair-circle and most of the other ‘products’ shown. Perhaps the problem was that the ‘artist’ had great difficulty expressing, in a clear language, what was the concept behind his contraption.
The acid test came, when the budding Saatchi winners had to prove their ability to draw a simple model drawing. A faultless female beauty had draped herself on a couch in Manet’s Olympia-style. All what the artists had to do, was to show that they mastered some basic drawing technique – in my opinion the least one can demand of potential celebrities worth Saatchi’s millions.
You guessed it.
Not one of them had any idea about what it means to draw.
In one of the scribbles you’d be hard pressed to see that a naked woman was part of the object at all. Typically that was the only drawing, the judges thought was worth mentioning. Was it because no one else would be able to see the object and hence have an opinion contrary to the judges? Was it because the other drawings were just bad drawings, too obvious to everyone else?
Even worse, none of the ‘artists’ mastered a minimum of ability to express the concept in their creations, perhaps with one exception: the only one of them, who had never attended art school. The judging panel had great difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his art was both exciting and creative, but they didn’t hide their misgivings that ‘he was not cued in to the accepted art-lingo’.
In fact he spoke clearly and comprehensibly about his work.
The art world has forgotten that art must have an outward orientation and Channel 4’s feature showed this deficiency in abundance.
Art has become a totally self-centred celebrity machine: the object is the artist, not the observer; the language has to contain a high percentage of multi-syllable words that to ordinary humans mean nothing; the more ‘unaccepted’ or ‘new’, the better – anything that smacks of something that has been done before is unacceptable. This means that ultimately anything is art, even if it is a slowly dancing, clumsy bear (the Turner prize 2007), a video of someone sleeping on a sofa (the entry of one of the budding Saatchi artists) or something that preferably upsets the philistines .
At art school no one learns basic painting or drawing any more. Why waste time, when you can become a celebrity pouring a bucket of paint over the canvass and “see what happens”.
A stick in a pot of soil, on a chair, is art.
As are 500 diamonds glued onto a scull (Damien Hirst).
Or a 2m tall poo, another of Saatchi’s accepted creations, seen here – not too different from celebrity artist Anish Kapoor’s piles of concrete intestines.
Balance that with an artist like Kandinsky’s technical ability, his personal and artistic development over a 50 year career (here illustrated through his early picture of Odessa Harbour and the much later "All Saints II") and a statement made in the 1930s: "I am really happy that my early research into high quality paints has been successful, judged from the longevity of the colours."
Will we one day accept the Saatchi-protegees as the bee’s knees of what the 21st Century could produce?
Your guess is as good as mine.
The impressionists were once savagely vilified and here’s what Kurt Kuerchler, a German art-critic, said about Kandinsky in 1913:
“There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that this sort of art has finally reached the point where it reveals itself as the ‘-ism’ upon whose shores it must run aground, that is to say: cretinism.”
How wrong can one be? Does it remind you of the manager, who said to the Beatles: "There's no need for yet another guitar group".
Nevertheless, I will dare a judgement of the 2009-art seen from the year 2110:
“A good 80% of the 2009-production was mere junk, as no technique, no deep learning, no differentiation was required before it was called art. It was the result of an intensive marketing drive by money-hungry people, who couldn’t produce anything unique themselves. The objective was all about celebrity creation and it illustrated an empty, materialistic, spiritless society that had become obsessed with fast money, at any price, me-me-me and meaningless new forms of expression that didn’
t segregate ‘art’ from anything else that surrounded us. Marcel Duchamp’s urinoir, first exhibited in 1917, is a good example, and as we now know, it never made it to become a ‘piece de salon’ in the following 200 years, proving my point.Only, very few people in the art world took the step to say: bullocks.
Of course they forgave Malevich for his black cross on a white canvass, and Matisse’s 10-sec charcoal-drawn women, as they had other, and more serious, stories to tell. And they had the ability!
But make no mistake: like in 2009 you still often pay for the signature, not for the painting.”
Back to 2009.
Saatchi has become a ‘God’-maker (Obs.: not an art promoter), an art-world’s Simon Cowell, who, like in the X-Factor, is able to push art in a celebrity direction with a heavy focus on the artist, not on art itself, simply because he has the money to do so and not because of the artist’s talent. It worked for Damien Hirst, whose latest skull-obsessions, in oil on a blue background exhibited at the Wallace Gallery in London, have been cut to the socks with the conclusion: he can’t paint! That could have been a shot under the waterline to the marketing machine, but he seems to have survived.
Nevertheless, he's the richest living artist in 2009 – again proving my point.
The emperor’s new clothes are still very new indeed.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
The HUMAN CONDITION – 2
Hubris and religion are closely related issues.
Just because there's something we don't understand, we immediately make it the creation of a supernatural power and start genuflecting, or even killing, if other people don't agree with us.
“We are right, you are not, and it is our duty either to save your soul or to make sure your beliefs are not propagated, whilst ours prevail. And by the way: out of the 100s of choices it is OUR definition of the deity that’s the correct one.
Convert or go to the sword.”
This is a pretty serious statement with wide ranging consequences and a strong threat that will determine the destiny of our fellow human beings and sometimes animals. It is an attitude that for millennia has caused war and unrest and still does, from the crusades to Northern Ireland, from Kabul to Washington.
If that is not hubris, then I don’t know what hubris is.
What we don’t understand is continuously wrapped around a set of artificial core truisms belonging to whatever god, we happen to believe in at the time the concept was created. Layer upon layer of mysticism envelope these humanly created dogma. As time passes, they become mystic in their own right. The origin becomes part of the cult, creating yet another impenetrable layer, which, after 1000 or 2000 years of religious Chinese whispers, results in common amnesia and a firm belief that a ‘God created them’.
Smart people were quick to discover that there was power in this onion of commands. It could be used to control others, to become rich. The early popes are as good examples as is the march of the Caliphate in the 7-8th C.
As long as the great, believing masses were kept in ignorance, it was a money- and power-spinning machine (well, that’s the same). An artificial enemy, namely those believing differently, was conveniently held up in front of our own believers to provide a focus for our righteousness, or eliminated, so we could expand our power.
If you think this is a description of a distant past, you have been sleeping most of your life.
But something has been happening quite recently in historic terms.
When Richard Owen, in 1881 in London, created the Natural History Museum, he could not imagine that he was cutting off the branch he sat on. Owen vehemently opposed Darwin’s theories about the evolution being a long string of natural selections, interrupted by cataclysmic events, only to continue with whatever was left. According to Owen, species were planted, feet first, firmly on the ground, finished as a sculpture, by a creator.
But now there was an institution, which with scientific means began to ask too many questions for comfort, at least the comfort of the contemporary religious people. Humility and sensibility had finally entered the brain of a few human beings. When Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, nothing would ever be the same again and layer upon layer of the belief-onion was peeled off.
It had started before, but progress was slow. Magnetism and lightning once belonged to the onion, actually for thousands of years. But people like H.C. Oersted had removed electromagnetism from the celestial sphere in 1820 and Franklins kite and key made lightning more earthbound - literally.
Knowledge and progress had begun a slow march that would accelerate dramatically in the 20th C. Ignorance was on the way out, although not totally.
Even the National History Museum has now exchanged the statue of Owen, its creator, with one of Darwin at the honour spot on top of the first flight of stairs when you enter the museum hall.
What has happened is a major change in our minds, or at least some of our minds: we are not completely above nature, as we have thought during 2000 years of Christianity. We are just another little speck in the picture that nature is busy painting around us and we have no intrinsic, select value. We are part of nature and just another element in its meaningless evolution and natural selection.
It would be too naïve and beautiful a thought, however, to believe that enlightenment and humility would have a free reign from now on.
Action creates reaction – and so it happens.
With very little left of the religious onion, some other arguments must enter the scene in the camp of those, who for a number of reasons still close their eyes.
It can be extremely difficult to give up a belief, an idea, that has been the well trodden path for the whole of your life. In most cases it would have started when you were a child. The child’s mind is like plasticine, but once we grow older, it hardens and becomes titanium steel. Once a concept is in, it’s next to impossible to get it out.
Try to convince an old communist, or better: a member of Jehova’s Witnesses, or a scientology convict. Try to argue with a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim. Such a conversation does not follow the normal rules of debate. Once you have professed your belonging to a dead idea, how easy do you think it is to lose face and abandon it?
Exactly: too hard.
So, what argument is left?
A very powerful one indeed!
It is called: I don’t just believe, I KNOW.
This is where every discussion with a fundamentally convinced person starts or ends and it is very difficult to circumvent. In fact, you can’t.
It becomes even worse if you talk to a creationist or an end-timer, both the result of brainwashing and deliberate dumbing down. The first lot simply ignore facts in all their naïvety and orchestrated stupidity, the second are downright dangerous in their belief that the world is forecast a dramatic and imminent end as stated in the bible. This means that whatever they do, it is bound to happen. Therefore it is better to ensure you fight on the side of the God (in which they believe) and help send the rest of us to a very warm place. George Bush belongs to this dangerous clan, which may go a long way to explain American foreign politics in the past 10 years.
The general danger is buried in fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim. Neither can be contained behind a personal, private set of walls any more, as some of us with tolerant attitudes have thought for a lifetime. 9/11 and Tony Blair’s conversation with his god before going to war in Iraq are frightening examples on how religion can go astray and the message of ‘love thy neighbour’ be trampled under foot.
You would expect such people, as heads of state, to possess a little brain, but again: once the child’s mind has been boxed in, it is almost impossible to modify its confusion.
Now consider the bible and its 25 gospels. Why were 21 of them eliminated, in particular the one created by a woman, Mary Magdalena? Why were most of the dogma, to which present day Christians adhere, created by the church at the synod of Nicaea in 325 AD? Or the hereditary sin in Cluny, 410 AD? And why, oh why, do we find virtually every statement in the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ repeated in the Bible, word for word? Did God not do his/her school homework in time, so that he/she had to copy the class’ smart kid before the teacher arrived? That is, if the Bible was written by God and not by a whole army of clerics, as is the accepted knowledge.
The same can be said about the Quran, although there is one major difference between the two: the New testament flows over with good ethical advice, while the Quran is completely devoid of same, concentrating on all the bad things that might happen, if you don’t believe in their version of the almighty.
But in both cases the deity appears to be a vengeful, warmonger – something humans have been fast to copy when it suited them, but slow to accept when it was angry.
All in all: it is very difficult to consolidate the angry god in both religions with the message of love. Consequently human beings have continued to be confused beyond any rational reason. The Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, expresses it in this way:
Humans are born with an overdeveloped skill of awareness, understanding and self-knowledge – (what I call "ability to think in abstract ways") which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot provide satisfaction for. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.
In our quest to determine, factually, whether there is a ‘god’ or not, we often refer to our ‘god’s inclination for disaster management. Apparently the preacher Billy Grahams’ daughter had a comment about the hurricane Katarina and the destruction of New Orleans. Ben Stein from CNN found it very profound. It goes like this:
'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman he is, I believe he has calmly backed out.
Gentleman?
Phh.
I think this potential 'God' has had the same attitude always, even when everyone in the world was genuflecting ad nauseam.
Pest, volcano disasters, untold tsunamis, landslides, climate change and hunger as for example the 10 years in 536-546 AD, you name it, anything not humanly created, are good examples of ‘God’ walking quietly away. Or never being there.
But of course we didn't all know ‘God’ then.
If the disasters were of human origin, it was easily explained as ‘God's revenge.
Like war, torture, etc, where he commands this species, that he loves so much, to fall upon each other.
Revenge? Punishment? What a miserable kind of love!
In my view we must begin seriously to understand that the universe, of which our world is a microscopic part, is a naturally evolving environment that unavoidably and constantly turns into a killing field. Land is created through tectonic action and volcanic eruptions and animals constantly develop - not because of their strength, but because they adapt (big difference, that Hitler didn't understand), protecting them from being eaten.
This gives rise to new environments and species, a fact we can verify scientifically.
A lot of this we call "Nature's beauty".
A lot of the beauty shown is actually the consequence of erosion and breakdown. When the beauty turns violent it suddenly becomes God's wrath, because we have misbehaved. How convenient: always an explanation.
Try staying a night alone and unarmed in a Kenyan jungle and you’ll know what I mean.
With a bit of technical savvy, we could now put another You-tube video together, preferably accompanied by the very same song, showing
- the cruelty of nature (eat or get eaten) - beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, e.g. an antilope just downed by a lion or one of the early human remains found in Tanzania with a hole in the scull from a leopard's tooth
- the Indian and Samoan tsunamis
- slaughter in Rwanda, Uganda and Indonesia
- clips from "the Mission", a very powerful film showing the true face of religion as a political device
- immense poverty and suffering across the world, even amongst those who believe, from Calcutta to Timbuktou
- pollution (including natures own like the volcano in Cameroon that killed 80.000 people through spewing CO2)
- and many other examples.
Nature’s own forces have a free reign and always had, while constantly - on its own - changing the operational conditions without the tiniest sign of benign, or malign, interference.
I find the pictures beautiful - but the message disgustingly devoid of the message: be responsible for your own actions, with unconditional love and respect for your habitat and fellow beings.
Look at it again and consider how much of these sugar sweet pictures we may not be able to see in 100 years from now.
The song ends with "believe as a child" - of course; children can be impregnated with the desire to kill each other, Americans in particular as it happens in some countries - and feel good about it.
So why not twist their minds with religion from the start?
Now you only have to choose which religion of the 50 major ones on the menu, all claiming to be the only one.
We must begin to understand that we should use our powers, not our non-existing uniqueness, to protect a nature that would have absolutely no problem with 'getting on with it', i.e. evolving and killing, both animals and mountains, if you will, without our presence or interference.
Unfortunately humans have greater power to destroy than to build.
It is very sad that we have learnt so little in our miserable 1 million years of slowly evolving existence.
So the dinosaurs disappeared. According to the Creationists this happened well into the period (or after) where stone age man roamed the earth. Right!!
Well, seriously I believe that humanity will self-destruct one day.
We will take a good chunk of nature with us when it happens. Deserts, apocalyptic flooding, nuclear winters, etc. come to mind.
It could, of course, also be because of a comparable reason to why the dinosaurs disappeared: Hyper volcanoes such as Yosemite, asteroid impacts, etc.
But some sort of 'nature' will emerge again - whether a new and prolific nature such as the one that emerged after the 90% destruction of all life after the Permian period, or a silent, ice-filled quiet as on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons).
It doesn't matter. Mother nature will make up her mind when the time comes.
If you want to believe there is a God behind this, be my guest. I respect people’s freedom to choose, but I do not respect the content of the prevailing religious beliefs. Religion had its time and reason in the ages of ignorance. Not any more.
So far humanity has created 100s of gods if not 1000s.
A lot of them continue to live on in our present ‘God’(s) and their characteristics can be traced a couple of thousand years back.
Even present day Christianity (Catholicism) has over 5000 ‘Gods’.
They call them 'Saints'. People pray to them and they have godly powers.
That's polytheism in my view.
I think it is our conditioned upbringing over 1000s of years that makes us inherently religious. We needed religion when we came down from the trees in the East African jungle a million years ago. There was nothing else to help.
It is a calming thought that when we can't explain nature, then someone must have created it. It couldn’t possibly be by accident.
Well? Why not?
Hubris!
Stone age man finds a Swiss watch, lost by a missionary in the jungle or sees an airplane - and a ‘God’ is born.
The Cargo-Cult in New Guinea is a good example.
‘God’ even gave them presents (cargo).
It is even more calming to believe that when we are in trouble and no one is there to help, we can pray to someone or something.
What else is there? The weak would go under, as they would have nothing else.
And if you firmly BELIEVE it, it is better than a shrink.
The more we can enlarge our scope of wonder and learn to respect nature in all its self-generated enormity, the more we will enrich our lives, without succumbing to our tendency to explain everything through the unexplainable.
Wouldn’t it be nice, if religion were a private matter and not an excuse for righteousness, war, dominance and a need for converting 'the others'??
Hubris and religion are closely related issues.
Just because there's something we don't understand, we immediately make it the creation of a supernatural power and start genuflecting, or even killing, if other people don't agree with us.
“We are right, you are not, and it is our duty either to save your soul or to make sure your beliefs are not propagated, whilst ours prevail. And by the way: out of the 100s of choices it is OUR definition of the deity that’s the correct one.
Convert or go to the sword.”
This is a pretty serious statement with wide ranging consequences and a strong threat that will determine the destiny of our fellow human beings and sometimes animals. It is an attitude that for millennia has caused war and unrest and still does, from the crusades to Northern Ireland, from Kabul to Washington.
If that is not hubris, then I don’t know what hubris is.
What we don’t understand is continuously wrapped around a set of artificial core truisms belonging to whatever god, we happen to believe in at the time the concept was created. Layer upon layer of mysticism envelope these humanly created dogma. As time passes, they become mystic in their own right. The origin becomes part of the cult, creating yet another impenetrable layer, which, after 1000 or 2000 years of religious Chinese whispers, results in common amnesia and a firm belief that a ‘God created them’.
Smart people were quick to discover that there was power in this onion of commands. It could be used to control others, to become rich. The early popes are as good examples as is the march of the Caliphate in the 7-8th C.
As long as the great, believing masses were kept in ignorance, it was a money- and power-spinning machine (well, that’s the same). An artificial enemy, namely those believing differently, was conveniently held up in front of our own believers to provide a focus for our righteousness, or eliminated, so we could expand our power.
If you think this is a description of a distant past, you have been sleeping most of your life.
But something has been happening quite recently in historic terms.
When Richard Owen, in 1881 in London, created the Natural History Museum, he could not imagine that he was cutting off the branch he sat on. Owen vehemently opposed Darwin’s theories about the evolution being a long string of natural selections, interrupted by cataclysmic events, only to continue with whatever was left. According to Owen, species were planted, feet first, firmly on the ground, finished as a sculpture, by a creator.
But now there was an institution, which with scientific means began to ask too many questions for comfort, at least the comfort of the contemporary religious people. Humility and sensibility had finally entered the brain of a few human beings. When Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, nothing would ever be the same again and layer upon layer of the belief-onion was peeled off.
It had started before, but progress was slow. Magnetism and lightning once belonged to the onion, actually for thousands of years. But people like H.C. Oersted had removed electromagnetism from the celestial sphere in 1820 and Franklins kite and key made lightning more earthbound - literally.
Knowledge and progress had begun a slow march that would accelerate dramatically in the 20th C. Ignorance was on the way out, although not totally.
Even the National History Museum has now exchanged the statue of Owen, its creator, with one of Darwin at the honour spot on top of the first flight of stairs when you enter the museum hall.
What has happened is a major change in our minds, or at least some of our minds: we are not completely above nature, as we have thought during 2000 years of Christianity. We are just another little speck in the picture that nature is busy painting around us and we have no intrinsic, select value. We are part of nature and just another element in its meaningless evolution and natural selection.
It would be too naïve and beautiful a thought, however, to believe that enlightenment and humility would have a free reign from now on.
Action creates reaction – and so it happens.
With very little left of the religious onion, some other arguments must enter the scene in the camp of those, who for a number of reasons still close their eyes.
It can be extremely difficult to give up a belief, an idea, that has been the well trodden path for the whole of your life. In most cases it would have started when you were a child. The child’s mind is like plasticine, but once we grow older, it hardens and becomes titanium steel. Once a concept is in, it’s next to impossible to get it out.
Try to convince an old communist, or better: a member of Jehova’s Witnesses, or a scientology convict. Try to argue with a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim. Such a conversation does not follow the normal rules of debate. Once you have professed your belonging to a dead idea, how easy do you think it is to lose face and abandon it?
Exactly: too hard.
So, what argument is left?
A very powerful one indeed!
It is called: I don’t just believe, I KNOW.
This is where every discussion with a fundamentally convinced person starts or ends and it is very difficult to circumvent. In fact, you can’t.
It becomes even worse if you talk to a creationist or an end-timer, both the result of brainwashing and deliberate dumbing down. The first lot simply ignore facts in all their naïvety and orchestrated stupidity, the second are downright dangerous in their belief that the world is forecast a dramatic and imminent end as stated in the bible. This means that whatever they do, it is bound to happen. Therefore it is better to ensure you fight on the side of the God (in which they believe) and help send the rest of us to a very warm place. George Bush belongs to this dangerous clan, which may go a long way to explain American foreign politics in the past 10 years.
The general danger is buried in fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim. Neither can be contained behind a personal, private set of walls any more, as some of us with tolerant attitudes have thought for a lifetime. 9/11 and Tony Blair’s conversation with his god before going to war in Iraq are frightening examples on how religion can go astray and the message of ‘love thy neighbour’ be trampled under foot.
You would expect such people, as heads of state, to possess a little brain, but again: once the child’s mind has been boxed in, it is almost impossible to modify its confusion.
Now consider the bible and its 25 gospels. Why were 21 of them eliminated, in particular the one created by a woman, Mary Magdalena? Why were most of the dogma, to which present day Christians adhere, created by the church at the synod of Nicaea in 325 AD? Or the hereditary sin in Cluny, 410 AD? And why, oh why, do we find virtually every statement in the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ repeated in the Bible, word for word? Did God not do his/her school homework in time, so that he/she had to copy the class’ smart kid before the teacher arrived? That is, if the Bible was written by God and not by a whole army of clerics, as is the accepted knowledge.
The same can be said about the Quran, although there is one major difference between the two: the New testament flows over with good ethical advice, while the Quran is completely devoid of same, concentrating on all the bad things that might happen, if you don’t believe in their version of the almighty.
But in both cases the deity appears to be a vengeful, warmonger – something humans have been fast to copy when it suited them, but slow to accept when it was angry.
All in all: it is very difficult to consolidate the angry god in both religions with the message of love. Consequently human beings have continued to be confused beyond any rational reason. The Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, expresses it in this way:
Humans are born with an overdeveloped skill of awareness, understanding and self-knowledge – (what I call "ability to think in abstract ways") which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot provide satisfaction for. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.
In our quest to determine, factually, whether there is a ‘god’ or not, we often refer to our ‘god’s inclination for disaster management. Apparently the preacher Billy Grahams’ daughter had a comment about the hurricane Katarina and the destruction of New Orleans. Ben Stein from CNN found it very profound. It goes like this:
'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman he is, I believe he has calmly backed out.
Gentleman?
Phh.
I think this potential 'God' has had the same attitude always, even when everyone in the world was genuflecting ad nauseam.
Pest, volcano disasters, untold tsunamis, landslides, climate change and hunger as for example the 10 years in 536-546 AD, you name it, anything not humanly created, are good examples of ‘God’ walking quietly away. Or never being there.
But of course we didn't all know ‘God’ then.
If the disasters were of human origin, it was easily explained as ‘God's revenge.
Like war, torture, etc, where he commands this species, that he loves so much, to fall upon each other.
Revenge? Punishment? What a miserable kind of love!
In my view we must begin seriously to understand that the universe, of which our world is a microscopic part, is a naturally evolving environment that unavoidably and constantly turns into a killing field. Land is created through tectonic action and volcanic eruptions and animals constantly develop - not because of their strength, but because they adapt (big difference, that Hitler didn't understand), protecting them from being eaten.
This gives rise to new environments and species, a fact we can verify scientifically.
A lot of this we call "Nature's beauty".
A lot of the beauty shown is actually the consequence of erosion and breakdown. When the beauty turns violent it suddenly becomes God's wrath, because we have misbehaved. How convenient: always an explanation.
Try staying a night alone and unarmed in a Kenyan jungle and you’ll know what I mean.
With a bit of technical savvy, we could now put another You-tube video together, preferably accompanied by the very same song, showing
- the cruelty of nature (eat or get eaten) - beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, e.g. an antilope just downed by a lion or one of the early human remains found in Tanzania with a hole in the scull from a leopard's tooth
- the Indian and Samoan tsunamis
- slaughter in Rwanda, Uganda and Indonesia
- clips from "the Mission", a very powerful film showing the true face of religion as a political device
- immense poverty and suffering across the world, even amongst those who believe, from Calcutta to Timbuktou
- pollution (including natures own like the volcano in Cameroon that killed 80.000 people through spewing CO2)
- and many other examples.
Nature’s own forces have a free reign and always had, while constantly - on its own - changing the operational conditions without the tiniest sign of benign, or malign, interference.
I find the pictures beautiful - but the message disgustingly devoid of the message: be responsible for your own actions, with unconditional love and respect for your habitat and fellow beings.
Look at it again and consider how much of these sugar sweet pictures we may not be able to see in 100 years from now.
The song ends with "believe as a child" - of course; children can be impregnated with the desire to kill each other, Americans in particular as it happens in some countries - and feel good about it.
So why not twist their minds with religion from the start?
Now you only have to choose which religion of the 50 major ones on the menu, all claiming to be the only one.
We must begin to understand that we should use our powers, not our non-existing uniqueness, to protect a nature that would have absolutely no problem with 'getting on with it', i.e. evolving and killing, both animals and mountains, if you will, without our presence or interference.
Unfortunately humans have greater power to destroy than to build.
It is very sad that we have learnt so little in our miserable 1 million years of slowly evolving existence.
So the dinosaurs disappeared. According to the Creationists this happened well into the period (or after) where stone age man roamed the earth. Right!!
Well, seriously I believe that humanity will self-destruct one day.
We will take a good chunk of nature with us when it happens. Deserts, apocalyptic flooding, nuclear winters, etc. come to mind.
It could, of course, also be because of a comparable reason to why the dinosaurs disappeared: Hyper volcanoes such as Yosemite, asteroid impacts, etc.
But some sort of 'nature' will emerge again - whether a new and prolific nature such as the one that emerged after the 90% destruction of all life after the Permian period, or a silent, ice-filled quiet as on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons).
It doesn't matter. Mother nature will make up her mind when the time comes.
If you want to believe there is a God behind this, be my guest. I respect people’s freedom to choose, but I do not respect the content of the prevailing religious beliefs. Religion had its time and reason in the ages of ignorance. Not any more.
So far humanity has created 100s of gods if not 1000s.
A lot of them continue to live on in our present ‘God’(s) and their characteristics can be traced a couple of thousand years back.
Even present day Christianity (Catholicism) has over 5000 ‘Gods’.
They call them 'Saints'. People pray to them and they have godly powers.
That's polytheism in my view.
I think it is our conditioned upbringing over 1000s of years that makes us inherently religious. We needed religion when we came down from the trees in the East African jungle a million years ago. There was nothing else to help.
It is a calming thought that when we can't explain nature, then someone must have created it. It couldn’t possibly be by accident.
Well? Why not?
Hubris!
Stone age man finds a Swiss watch, lost by a missionary in the jungle or sees an airplane - and a ‘God’ is born.
The Cargo-Cult in New Guinea is a good example.
‘God’ even gave them presents (cargo).
It is even more calming to believe that when we are in trouble and no one is there to help, we can pray to someone or something.
What else is there? The weak would go under, as they would have nothing else.
And if you firmly BELIEVE it, it is better than a shrink.
The more we can enlarge our scope of wonder and learn to respect nature in all its self-generated enormity, the more we will enrich our lives, without succumbing to our tendency to explain everything through the unexplainable.
Wouldn’t it be nice, if religion were a private matter and not an excuse for righteousness, war, dominance and a need for converting 'the others'??
Sunday, 30 August 2009
From Fermentation Vat to Demijohns today
What a mess - but now we know: 7 1/2 litres pure must bubbling away in the 2 demijohns.The Triomphe d'Alsace grapes were really too small this year, but proper spur-pruning in December should prepare the vine for a bumper crop in 2010.
And now: The lively bubbling away of the fresh must is a sound for the Gods! And me.
I have learnt two things recently:
a) It is necessary to add more sugar than indicated in the ordinary tables for Brix vs % alcohol. This acts as a conservation agent during initial fermentation and also brings the wine up to a more modern 12.5-13% alcohol, rather than the previously accepted 10-11%. The rule-of-thumb is 250g/Gallon for sweet grapes; 400g for sour.
b) Triomphe d'Alsace was first created in 1911 as a cross between Vitis Ripara and Vitis Rupestris and Goldriesling in Colmar (Alsace), but didn't appear commercially before 1921-22. The grape is relatively small (Black Currant size) with large pips, which may account for the fact that it is nowhere to be found in commercial vineyards! However, the quality of the wine and its resistance to disease surely make up for these drawbacks in a patio-vineyard!
Jim Page-Roberts' 75m (length of the stem) of vine this year produced 5 Gallons!
There are about 50 bunches of Cascade (?) grapes ripening, ready to be vinified in ca. 2 weeks, depending on a little indian summer. They look marvellous, but the problem with Cascade is clearly that it ripens unevenly and rather late. Some grapes are dark blue, others Chardonnay-green.
I shall leave them until most of them are blue.
The result will be added to the half full demijohn, providing my first mix.
Clos St. Pierre Reserve Speciale 2009 !
....
There is one problem, though: I am not sure any more that it is a Cascade. Comparing leaves it looks more like Brant - more on that later.
If the mix-taste is fine I shall leave it, otherwise it will be replaced by another Triomphe d'Alsace, which I shall plant anyway this autumn!
The most handsome bloke on the block!
- and on 12 Sept. I found out: It is Brant. Picked and vinified 12 Sept. It produced 3 Litres of pulp. Brix achievement was slightly less than the 18% reached by the Triomphe d'Alsace: 16.5%, but for this I compensated with a "chaptalisation" of 170g sugar. After 3 days in my antique French jam glass which holds exactly 3 Litres, on 15 Sept., I filled it into the demijohn that had only become half full by Triomphe d'Alsace three weeks before. It is now bubbling away, promising a delightful mix of a lighter must, as Brant's juice is white.
If the Brant is to survive my critical ambitions, I shall endeavour to harvest all grapes by mid September next year.
Also - a good dollop of extra sugar to get the process going, beef up alcohol content and create a more protective atmosphere during initial fermentation, is one of the lessons I have learnt.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
