EBOLA AND A DISEASE OF THE MIND

Gays are under attack in Liberia.  According to Catholic Archbishop Lewis Zeigler of Monrovia (along with many other many Christian leaders in Liberia), Ebola is a punishment from God for the act of homosexuality.

 

However, John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, thinks different. In his view, the current Ebola outbreak is God’s punishment for U.S. President Barack Obama attempting to divide Jerusalem. Who would have guessed?

 

However, the “Before its News” website, which appears to produce baloney on an industrial scale, has a more terrifying assessment to share. It tells us that “our culture is becoming morally degraded with each passing year. Additionally, mysterious events are happening throughout the world and many prophecies are being fulfilled right before our eyes: Pandemics rising (Ebola, TB, cancer, aids), … God’s judgment is coming” it announces gleefully.

 

If you thought that was bad enough, then according to Ronnie Baity, (or should that be “Batty”) a Baptist preacher in Winston-Salem, N.C., much worse awaits us all, for God is about to send something even worse than Ebola. This is because he (God that is, not Ronnie) is so angry over the decision of a federal judge to strike down a ban on gay marriage in North Carolina. Why isn’t there Ebola in North Carolina then?

 

All of this is palpable nonsense of course.  Ebola is not a biblical punishment – it is a blood born virus, like HIV. Transmission is by infected body fluids alone and as such, is probably about as easy, or difficult, to catch as HIV. The most important differences between it and HIV are that, instead of years, it manifests itself within days with an incubation period of between 2 and 21 days. Ebola kills up to about 60 to 70 percent of its victims under truly gruesome, horrific circumstances. Hence all the anxiety and fear. However, a person with Ebola is not infectious until they have developed the symptoms. It is not airborne; you can’t contract Ebola from sitting next to someone on a bus or breathing the same air as them or through casual contact. It’s a virus, virulent, deadly, non-discriminatory but also weak. For instance it does not like heat and it can’t survive for long outside its host and is quickly killed by soap and water. The full attentions of our health institutions are now lasering in on it and it’s likely an effective treatment if not even a cure, will be found soon.

 

Yet, in addition to this, Ebola also seems to activate a “disease of the mind”, as the opening quotes above by these religious figures seem to show. Whilst most Christians will find these sentiments as ridiculous and crass as anyone else, this fundamentalist religious style of viewing the world’s misfortunes is still pervasive. The desire to attribute divine intervention to all earthly events, especially those causing suffering and misery speaks not to holy interventions, but to a form of possession of the mind. The notion of God and its much wider philosophical dimensions are cast to one side in favor of a small minded, malevolent and mercilessly brutal Old Testament monster.

 

There is a virus of the mind at work here, a meme, which prevents the mind from exercising any form of balanced rational examination of the facts. The capacity for sensible thought has been taken captive by an extreme philosophy of unreason. Many people are easily able to see though these mad statements - why does God not hate gays in countries where Ebola has not broken out? Why is God punishing Africans in Liberia for America’s attempt to divide Israel, and so on?

 

We see evidence everywhere of these memes that cultivate perverse ways of thinking, from suicide bombers believing that, though mass murder and self-immolation, an eternal reward awaits them, though to the a preoccupation with the great doomsday event, replete with all its terrible judgments and damnations. The outbreak of Ebola induces another outbreak of perverted thinking in those who see God’s handiwork in this horrible sickness. Their only intellectual currency is anger, misery and despair, and either consciously or subconsciously, an almost sadistic yearning for the final human Götterdämmerung, secure in the delusional assumptions of their own immunity from it.

Our Crazy Polarised Politics

Why do we hate politicians or is that a dumb question? Listening to all the vitriol you could be forgiven for thinking that they are some kind of separate species to the rest of us; that they have a different DNA predisposing them to corruption, dishonesty and all those other negative attributes with which we so readily condemn them.

 

Of course there will be really bad ones, but overall, are they really so different to the rest of us – and I’m thinking here of reasonably sensible and established democracies?  If we were in the same positions, would we be any different or better? The answer to that is probably not. Power corrupts, so they say, and if any of us were to be given access to that power, then we may already be starting to delude ourselves if we think we would be different. We look at politicians with their elastic morality. "We are not like that; we would not be corrupted like them, or do or say the things they do", or so we think. And as we do, are we not becoming guilty of dressing ourselves up, like proverbial emperors, in the cheap robes of our own smug, self-delusions. I'll bet most politicians, left, right, up, down or inside out, all thought exactly the same, when their individual idealism and honest intentions were yet to confront the real world.

 

Perhaps some of it is down to how they are now so often career politicians who've never really worked or lived in the real world, remote from the public and obsessed with clinging on to office. It's that ruthless streak of self-preservation and the willingness to do or say what necessary to stay in power. Sounds like an emotion a lot of us share, especially if our jobs or livelihoods are threatened.

 

It's the same with political parties. Just listen to them. Have they all gone mad? And more seriously, have we as we journey down the super highway of angry intolerance, hoarse with shouting and the waving of our verbal fists.  Every side spews forth its own torrent of effluent for this is no longer about a civilised difference of opinions; all reason seems too often to have fled way to be replaced by something that sounds like it's based upon raw fury alone. Just listen to the anger about the outcome of the US mid-terms for instance. Anyone might think there had been some kind of military putsch. It's an election and a mid-term one at that. Put it in perspective - these things are cyclical. People die for the right to vote. It seems some are now on the verge of giving themselves near fatal aneurysms based upon the outcome of one.

 

It's the same in many other places too. The outcome of an election too often heralds a period of rioting, clamp downs and messy compromises. Why are we all so angry and intolerant (wait for the retorts "it's not us, it's them")? Generally, humans are seeing a broad trend towards living longer and have rising standards of living and health care. Poverty and child mortality are on the decline and have been for years. More and more people now benefit from improving levels of education; literacy is rising. Yes, perpetually angry pedants can always point to painful exceptions, however, we seem to be getting more and more angry about less and less. Everybody....just chill out a bit.....after all, they've just legalised marihuana in Washington DC.

 

Julian Assange to tell his secrets - but not just yet...

So Julian Assange might be making a move.  In a weird press conference a rather pasty looking Julian announced in that languidly disinterested tone he so seems to enjoy boring us with that “I’m Leaving but I’m not leaving yet”. There doesn’t seem to be any point to delaying the inevitable any further if that is the case. Perhaps he thinks there is still a little more publicity to milk from this saga. By his side sat the Ecuadorian foreign minister with a rather sickly smile on his face no doubt wishing he was somewhere else and who must surely have better things to do with his time.

 

I imagine that our Julian does not make a particularly easy guest and that, behind the scenes, the Ecuadorians would love to see the back of him after 2 years of hosting what we can probably, and charitably, describe as a very self centred, delusional, egotistical prima donna. That he should make a lengthy self-serving public announcement bewailing his sorry (and self-imposed) circumstances when the level of suffering in places like the middle east is so vast and terrifying, is a measure of just how out of touch he is.  The world has changed and moved on, where as Julian has stayed put, both very literally and figuratively speaking too.  Most likely, the Ecuadorians, fed up with him,  have politely (or not so politely quite possibly) given Julian notice that he has to move on by a certain date; hence the strange mixed-message press announcement. I wonder what they have said to him, perhaps they have told him he has to move out because they want to redecorate his room, or perhaps they need his room because the ambassador’s granny is coming to stay. Any excuse to move him along.

 

So has Julian decided to face his accusers? He is very keen for the secrets of others to be shared as widely as possible on his Wikileaks website, although I doubt he will publish his own secrets up there. However, two years on, it sounds like he is now prepared to answer those allegations of sexual assault. He wants to face justice, tell the truth to a waiting world and clear him name…but not just yet.

See Julian Assange reappears

Israel, Gaza, Syria and Iraq: An (Un) holy mess….

Sharing an opinion about the Middle East is like moshing in a mine field, so here goes, for a slightly different perspective.
 

 Accurate numbers of casualties in these conflicts is always difficult to establish with any reliability. Yet, for what it's worth, here are some very general ball park figures to give some sense of measure to these respective wars along with hopefully some sensible observations and assumptions (ok, that's being optimistic if it's about the Middle East).
 

 The raw data

• Syria: 170 000 dead and 9 million displaced both within Syria and in neighbouring countries.

·         Iraq (since the ISIS invasion): 9000 dead, displaced around 500 000

·         Gaza Strip:  Just under 2000 Palestinians (as at 08 August 2014) and 64 Israeli soldiers and 3 civilians dead. Minimal numbers displaced from Gaza yet significant shifting of the population within its borders. Only the figures for Gaza and Israel are going to be very accurate.

 It goes without saying that a mere casual recitation of figures around displacement does in no way illustrate the great trauma and distress of the refugee crisis.
 

 “Woman and Children”
 

 In the case of Syria the number of woman and children dead will run into many tens of thousands. One estimate is that this number is about 60 000. By November last year it was estimated that just under 11 500 children had been killed. By now that number will be much higher.

 

In the case of Gaza it is around 1500 civilians, almost 75% of the overall fatalities which are approaching 2000. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Both Hamas and Israel must know that inevitably civilians will bear the brunt of the casualties. If Hamas want to fire rockets at Israel, almost inevitably therefore it will have to be from areas close to civilians. That they still do so must mean this is part of their strategy, for when Israel retaliates, as Hamas know they will, these civilians will inevitably suffer.

 

In Iraq the chaos and disorganisation in that disintegrating country means it’s hard to have a remotely reliable picture of this figure. Reports seem to suggest in the region of 9000 civilian deaths this year but this does not even begin to reflect the level of trauma being inflicted over a prolonged period of time. It currently appears to be reaching an apogee of terrifying inhumanity and ideologically driven barbarity and cruelty which has now forced a very carefully calibrated response from the US, naturally concerned at how any “humanitarian” intervention could be used as a precedent for formal Russian intervention in the Ukraine.

 

In all 3 conflicts there is or has been deliberate targeting of civilians. In Gaza however, whilst Hamas must by virtue of its military actions have this as a specific goal (including both Israelis directly and its own population indirectly), Israel has said it has sought not to do so and has gone out of its way to avoid doing this. This is logical because it knows that it will lose the media battle for the conflict's moral high ground if it does so (and which has already happened). This intention appears to have been undermined a number of times in excessive and brutal fashion. What is a fact however is that, if its intention had been to specifically target civilians, then the casualty figures would have been much higher given its overwhelming military advantage.

 

In Syria the targeting by the State of civilians forms part of a deliberate ethnic cleansing drive based largely upon religious belief (Alawites (Shia) and Sunni in this case). This is similar to the position in Iraq although in this case it is the invading Sunni terror-army of ISIS taking the lead against any faith not their own, yet with the Iraq state (Shia dominated) also politically guilty of this against Sunnis but not on the same crusading and murderous scale.
 

However it is in Syria where the numbers are the most horrifying.
 

The world's Media
 

Syria:
 

The media appears to have some ability to access and report on the conflict, however understandably this is not a complete picture, much material being “unverified” and any reporting from the Syrian State’s side is likely to be or have been heavily distorted or supervised. Despite its causality count dwarfing the other 2 conflicts, it receives the least media attention currently.
 

Gaza:
 

The reporting is the most comprehensive of all the 3 conflict zones, probably for several reasons.

·         It has long been a flash point and the media, like the BBC, are well established there;

·         The Palestinians will be more media savvy / experienced that those in the other 2 conflicts

·         It's a much smaller land area, making reporting much "easier" from a purely geographical and logistical perspective.

·         The conflict is at the fault line between Middle Eastern and Arab states and Israel, which is western backed

This is despite the causality figures and the levels of barbarity being far less than in the other 2 conflicts (which is not to down play the suffering in Gaza).
 

Iraq:
 

Media coverage is only from the Iraqi and Kurdish controlled areas, there is very little reliable reporting from ISIS controlled areas, for obvious reasons. The chaotic violence and shifting front lines no doubt also makes this very hazardous. However ISIS have demonstrated that they are social media savvy to a certain extent in recruiting new members and reaching out to and influencing new audiences in a recruitment drive

The questions about media coverage are very important. Whist “War is hell", apparently first said by General Sherman of the US Civil war, ever more so now, war is also about media management and manipulation (which, to use another conflict momentarily, is why Russians think Putin is a hero for what he is doing in Ukraine and the West thinks he is a murdering monster).
 

 All this raises some questions and observations:
 

 1. Why is there seemingly more media concern with the conflict in Gaza than in Syria or Iraq when the casualty count in Gaza is, for instance, less than 2% of the level in Syria? It has taken near genocide in Iraq to shift attention from Gaza.

 

 2. There have been angry demonstrations against Israel in many European cities.  I cannot recall any such comparable demonstrations against the tyrant in Damascus or his regime, either now or at the time when that conflict had led to a comparable number of casualties to those we have seen in Gaza. Why not even an equivalent level of public protest for a slaughter of Syrian innocents on a massively greater scale?
 

 3. Religion: each of these conflicts has religious ideology either as its basis or as a heavily contributing / influencing factor. This intolerance expressed in terrifying violence makes it seem almost impossible to imagine a time where peace might reign across all these regions. If all the protagonists were secular, would these conflicts be taking place, or, if so, would they be easier to resolve?
 

 4. In all the cases in "4" above there are different beliefs involved.

·         In Syria there are Shia, the Alawite (a form of Shia Islam) and Sunni Muslims.

·         In Iraq there are Shias, Sunnis, (which includes Kurds who are however the most religiously diverse and tolerant) Christians and ancient sects, like the Yazidis.

·         In Gaza it has of course been Judaism, and Sunni Islam in the form of Hamas,
 

In the case of Shias and Sunnis, they are different strands of the same overall religion. Believing different things, all these various, sometimes disparate sometimes related faiths, cannot all be right. Each of these faiths is of course convinced it is the true faith however, at best, only one can be right. But why should one be and not the others? For that matter, why should any be? Finding a political solution to wars that have such powerful religious underpinnings is almost impossible.
 

 5.  It’s an interesting observation that 2 of the world’s most secular countries, Denmark and Norway are also the rated the world's happiest and second happiest countries respectively. Whilst the latter measures are open to argument as lists always are, in does beg the question - would a little less God  be good for everyone in general and particularly good for the Middle East.

 

Amen?

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Stupid Rules OK: GM Food

Using biotechnology, science is now increasingly able to grow GM crops or GMO (genetically modified organisms) as it is more correct known, that bring benefits that only a few years ago would have been inconceivable. Using this technology, increasingly drought resistant, disease resistant and more healthy crops can be grown. This is good for the environment  and also good news for farmers, especially in the poorer, more populated parts of the world in often drought prone regions. You would think everyone would be celebrating these developments - but they are not.

Many on the political extremes, left and right, the misinformed and scientifically ignorant and the gullible, object to GM food. This is largely because it's cast as dangerous and sinister. For example, the ever incandescent Daily Mail brands it Frankenstein food, reaching for depths of idiocy impressive even for that noisy, vacuous organ. Casting potentially transformational developments as the stuff of nightmare and horror fiction is right up the Mail's street, but as a whole, it and those who share its views are doing us all a major disservice. The debate is not about evidence or fact, it's all about fear and suspicion. Fear of completely speculative dangers unsupported by any evidence and suspicion that we are all being secretly poisoned by big, normally American, corporations with nasty track records who are secretly putting something new and experimental into our food.

Likewise, the green lobby is up in arms, along with the organic food industry ( no surprise there then), painting all sorts of wild images of the dooms we are about to bring down on our heads if we eat anything not grown naturally and no doubt fertilised with chemically free night soil.Ok, I made up the last bit, but Greenpeace have said that the "introduction of GM food and crops has been a disaster, posing a serious threat to biodiversity and our own health. In addition, the real reason for their development has not been to end world hunger but to increase the stranglehold multinational biotech companies already have on food production". What they do not say of course is that there is a  clear weight of scientific research to back up this view. That's because the evidence points to quite the opposite.

None of GM's detractors seem to be able to accept that those seeking to develop this technology might not be agents of evil corporations. They are scientists, who just might be motivated by the challenges posed  by trying to feed a growing world population with healthier,  more affordable food that can be grown in increasingly challenging environments.

I'm no scientist, and have no grasp of the complexities of genetics and biotech. So, in such a case, how do I make my own mind up? Well, we have to rely upon those who do understand it. What is the scientific consensus on GM food? It is that genetically engineered crops currently available to the public pose no greater health risks or environmental concerns than their non-engineered counterparts. No reports of ill effects have been documented in the human population from GM food.  The reason the evidence is therefore compelling is because the sheer reliable weight of it means the vast  majority of scientists agree with this view. That includes outfits like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society of London ( one of the most respected scientific bodies in the world), the French Academy of Science and its German and USA equivalents, the World Health Organisation, the U.S. National Academy of Science etc, the list goes on and on.

Perhaps they are all wrong and the likes of the Daily Mail and its odd bed fellows and allies out of left field are right and all these organisations are part of some vast global conspiracy  being orchestrated by the Monsanto's of this world. More likely though, as with virtually all popular conspiracy theories, there are no real, dull facts or stats to support it. However, if we let this vociferously vocal but uninformed lobby derail this science, then truly we are letting Stupid Rule OK.

Ed Milliband and the curse of the bacon-butttie

Wannabe prime minister Ed Milliband is struggling to define himself. Much has been made of his recent attempt to put on show his solid, old labourish sort of credentials and burnish his image with what is one of Labour's traditional core constituents.  In a stunt mixing parody, comedy and hypocrisy in equal measures, he recently decided to invite the press along to join him for an early breakfast, in one of those ghastly contrived events so beloved by out of touch politicians. They all do it, from Cameron hugging hoodies and huskies, through to the more recent, toe curlingly dreadful attempts at false bonhomie summoned up by Nick Clegg and that eternal cure for happiness, otherwise known as Vince Cable, as they choked their way through a pint and warm helpings of mutual loathing in a pub in Soho

But, back to our friend Ed.  He must seriously underestimate his target audience if he thinks that by sitting down to chew and rip his way through what transpired to be a treacherously uncooperative breakfast bacon butttie , all those "working-men" (and women too of course, Ed is a study in gender equality) will suddenly see in him as one of their own. They won't, quite simply, because he isn't. 

Ed and his spinners are now trying to cast what we can now term the "great bacon butttie moment" as symptomatic of how our shallow and vindictive press focus on the inconsequential when matters of far greater substance, such as Ed's policies and philosophies, are not deemed as newsworthy. In a way he is quite right; to focus upon how he eats a bacon sandwich is of course a nonsense. What he does not understand though, is that this is not really the story.

Milliband deliberately wanting to be seen by the press eating a bacon butttie serves as the metaphor to illustrate how he is seeking to portray himself as someone who we all instinctively know he is not. And it is this metaphor that, not just his target audience, but the wider public too, latch onto, either directly or even at a subconscious level. He is not a working man, preparing for a hard days graft (literally) by carbo-loading at his local cafe each morning. In truth he is all those things they are not, he is what he seeks to brand his opponents; namely a creature of privilege.  He is Harvard educated, erudite, academic, married to a barrister, and living in a London property worth several million Pounds. Yet he seeks to eschew the later by trying to pretend he can get down and do the "bacon-butttie" with former. His comical inability to do so in practice is for him far less serious than the self evident discomfort of trying to pretend, disingenuously, that he is something that he palpably is not. 

None of them get this.  Milliband does not realise that we are not laughing at his eating habits (well, perhaps for the first few moments). What in fact we are laughing at, now several weeks on, is the fact that he thinks we will do not see through this stunt and through him. This is the same reason we laugh at Clegg and Cable pretending to enjoy a pint in a pub together. We know how much they loath each other. We laugh not just at the sight of them unhappily together in a pub but, more seriously because they consider that, we, the electorate, will so easily be fooled by a few photo opportunities into somehow believing that they are drinking buddies and best mates. More fool them.

Milliband has now is seems recognised this and is attempting to rebrand himself as the serious politician, focused not on shallow frivolities like public image, his personal grooming and silly press events, but on issues that concern us all. There again, he overestimates how easy it is to do this, and underestimates how easily we will see through it.

His biggest failure is that his party has not apologised for the mess in which they left the economy 4 years ago. This is the single biggest millstone around his neck; it is not choice of breakfast sandwich, his looks, or that he thinks that we think that he is a weird policy wonk or whatever. Whilst economists can argue and write thick tomes about who is responsible for what aspect of economic failure, what Milliband and his party do not get is that, in nice simple terms, if you are captaining the ship when you sail it into the iceberg then ultimately, it is your fault. A bit of a mea culpa moment a couple of years ago would have been in order. But it's too late now, breakfast is long over and it's now time for his night-cap

Arizona Stars

I'm looking up into the star sparkled Arizona night sky, lanced with the pin pricks of a thousand stars. Many of those stars are no more, burnt out; burnt away. Yet still the reach of their light arcs towards us across the great empty gulfs of space; a bright reminder to us of worlds we shall never know, for even as we admire their lights, they are perhaps for light years of time now, no more.

One day our sun will go out. Our own so-familiar planet will also be consumed and reduced to a spiral of dust. Yet even then, our messages, our signals and lights, will long have been beamed out into the emptiness, racing away from us as the speed of light. Long after all we are and will become has passed into forever, our story will still be eking its way across the great dark void of time and space, on a return message to those stars in the Arizona sky.

Mad Memes and Crazy Beliefs – it’s just not Kosher!

British PM, David Cameron, has this week been touring Israel and Palestine. So, with typical political timing, he has taken advantage of an opportunity to say a few rare things of which, both his hosts, on either side of the Wall, will no doubt approve. The timing of his announcement that the ancient practice of the religious slaughter of animals under Jewish and Muslim custom (so its kosher and halal) will be “safe” in the UK for as long as he is British prime minister, comes just after Denmark said it would be banning this practice. Nice safe one, Dave.

Setting aside the obvious political opportunism of the moment, this has raised much larger questions though, namely where to draw the line between ancient religious or cultural practices and what is legal and/or sensible in this day and age.

To back track for a moment; Denmark has recently banned the killing of animals under these ancient rituals as this inflicts unnecessary pain and distress. These animals have to be conscious at point of death under these religious customs – the animal is killed by slitting its throat while it is alive and letting it bleed to death. Suppose that was about the best that could be done several thousand years ago - but perhaps its time to move on a bit. Not so, thinks Dave.  

Well done Denmark though. Instead the animals must first be stunned before being slaughtered. I guess all Denmark's goats must have bleated with relief.   However, what Denmark's decision does do is challenge that annoyingly frequent and quite irrational convention that a practice, irrespective of its merits, should be respected if it's part of someone (or is that anyone's) religious belief system.

That these respective faiths should rely upon a dogma that is ancient, and it must be said, pointless in terms of practical worth, to justify inflicting pain and cruelty on harmless animals, is something that should be stopped everywhere, not just in Denmark. One measure of our civilisation is how humanly we treat animals, which must ironically include how we kill the beasts we eat. Against much of what else we do as a collective race, it's probably not a bad measure for us to choose (although right now elephants and rhinos could be forgiven for wondering why they shouldn't be included is some equivalent form of consideration).

To be clear, I don't object to this practice on the grounds of its religious significance. I really don't mind what prayers, incantations or other words the devout or the crazy want to chant over their food before they eat it or slaughter it. However, there is no need for any cruelty to be involved in the killing of animals intended as food. Defendants of the practice will say this is hypocritical. Denmark's record on killing of whales is a case in point. However, it would be churlish to argue that, just because all wrongs cannot be righted, none should be where ever possible.

What this issue does raise though, is another more difficult question to confront. It's the conflict between custom, tradition, belief and the evolving views of society as a whole. Ancient dogma and custom is frequently viewed as something unique and valuable; some kind of especially important heritage that speaks to where we came from and of our cultural roots. Sometimes it is, but where it speaks to these origins in ways that are cruel, repugnant and barely legal by today's standards, then they should be eradicated or reformed. Often these customs are powerful memes*, defying logic and driving behaviours across the ages, perhaps based in semi religious belief systems or still practised rituals surviving from ancient times.

These powerful memes could perhaps be described as the equivalents of mental or psychological software programmes from which the users cannot depart. They are transmitted down the generations through inflexible dogma and sustained by ways of life where tradition demands the unthinking obedience of its adherents.

Consider female genital mutilation (FGM) for instance and the hold that this barbaric tradition still exerts over people.  Imagine, just for a moment, how powerfully embedded, even hardwired into a parent's cultural outlook such a meme / tradition  must be that it compels a presumably loving mother into forcing her child to be subject to what can only be described as barbaric, horrific physical and mental torture. Sometimes this young girl will die. This is a classic example of how people become subservient to and prisoners of their cultural traditions and belief systems. They appear to have completely lost their capacity to rationalise their way out of these situations – to say, “Whoa, stop, this is just crazy – I won’t do it”.

Our way of life is evolving at an ever accelerating rate; our lives becoming ever more transformed. Very often though, when we try to drag ancient beliefs and ways of life into this modern context, then conflict and all too often, violence result. This applies at an individual level, as with FGM, and at international levels too. Take Syria as a case in point. There, extremist religious armies possessed by ancient, competing ideologies (memes) from out of the Dark Ages, do their best to exterminate each other in subservience to their brainwashed, unassailable view of a terrible world of mad Gods and great Satans. They are beyond reason, beyond rational thought, obsessed with and imprisoned by their mad ideology where bloody murderous martyrdom is the gateway to an eternal paradise.

We are in the age of genomics, of artificial intelligence and machine sentience, of space stations, iClouds and Nanotech. Yet, just as we have one foot in this age, so we remain trapped by these ancient memes, rooted  still in a place of shadow, slaves to our obsessions with the supernatural, the plainly impossible and the down-right, bat-shit crazy.....

 * A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures

DENNIS RODMAN GOES TO A BIRTHDAY PARTY.

This week the very strange Mr Denis Rodman (international basketball star (Rtd), Celebrity Big Brother contestant and, er, international practitioner of basketball diplomacy with the most body piercings) has gone to his new best buddy's birthday party. That buddy is none other than Kim Jong Un, North Korea's Stalinist Dictator and full-time deviant psychopath.

 Hopefully Dennis and his friends will cheer him up. It’s been a rather sad time for Kim of late, also affectionately known as Fatty the 3rd by his many face book friends. Just last month his Uncle, and political patron, most carelessly got himself executed for various nefarious deeds, the exact nature of which is still not very clear but probably related to his feet starting to exceed the size of his shoes (Note to Dennis R: this unfortunate Podiatric ailment is almost always fatal for those who get too friendly with Dictators and you already have very large feet).

 

If that wasn’t bad enough, only a few days ago Mr Fatty’s paternal aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, also died. Rumours are that it was suicide, or possibly a heart condition. She was rumoured to have been an alcoholic. Almost certainly though, as the daughter of Fatty's grandfather and the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Ill-Sun (aka the Eternal President of the Republic ) she was a significant power behind the scenes in North Korea’s otherwise male-dominated politics. She represented that last link between the new young leader and the deified, eternal head of State.

North Korea is a paranoid dictatorship, run by a family obsessed with its blood lineage and survival, where threats of nuclear war are not uncommon, where purges and political execution is now the norm and where the state's starved, brainwashed citizens live in what is one vast gulag. More so than her husband (the unfortunate uncle), Kim Kyong Hui’s death could have far reaching and frenzied political implications. Who will Kim turn on next? How long can it continue?

And so it is, that, into this bloody melee, leaps the idiotic Rodman, replete with his nose studs and ridiculous views. Perhaps he doesn't judge his friends. Perhaps he believes the North Korean propaganda about it being a workers’ paradise. He should be more careful. If I had a best friend who suddenly and viciously turned on and executed his uncle, I might think twice before accepting an invitation to his birthday party. Perhaps Dennis should have sent a card instead.