VOYAGER 1 AND THE NEVER-ENDING JOURNEY

There are few things in life that truly justify the word “extraordinary”.  The Voyager space craft though are most certainly among them.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are small, now rather primitive space probes that, at their launch way back in 1977, weighed in at just over 800kgs each. Built with early 1970s technology and nuclear powered, they were designed to visit Jupiter and Saturn and then, just perhaps, go a bit further depending upon how long their plutonium lasted. No doubt ambitious at the time, their journeys have now become quite the most extraordinary odysseys whose scale and duration are moving beyond our ability to comprehend in terms of time and distance.

For instance, when Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, NASA estimated it was about 120 miles of its pre-planned course.  At the time scientist Carl Sagan compared this to the equivalent of throwing a pin through the eye of a needle that was 50 km away. But for Voyagers 1 and 2 such statistical miracles are now common place.

But amidst the near statistical impossibilities, there is poignancy too. The last picture ever taken by Voyager 1 was to look back over its shoulder for one final glimpse of our solar system though which it had travelled so far. Even then, the picture showed our sun as just another star in Voyager’s sky, so far had our intrepid explorer travelled from home.  That was 22 years ago. Voyager’s camera has been still ever since. Yet, its other tiny measurement systems, ancient by today’s technological standards, continue to send almost impossibly faint signals home, whispered data steams arcing back over tens of billions of  miles, telling a story of a journey into the true unknown. However, scientists reckon that by 2025 the last of its instruments will fall into silence and Voyager will be, finally and utterly, alone as its last link with earth is lost.

Already though, for the Voyagers the outer planets of our solar system are long distant memories. Voyager 1 is now passing out of our solar system. Last month (October 2012) evidence emerged to show that Voyager 1 was entering deep, interstellar space, the first human made object ever to do so. In cosmological  terms, I guess you could consider it to be leaving the local neighbourhood.

As it does so, Voyager 1 is now on the verge of entering what is known as the Oort cloud, a vast area of space debris and comets, ever so loosely kept in orbit by the sun’s faint and fading gravity. Passing through the cloud, which hopefully it will do without incident, may take it up to 28 000 years. In terms of the journey that awaits Voyager 1 however, this will be no more than the blinking of an eye. Thereafter, it will continue into the nothingness that is interstellar space, a tiny mote of ancient technology moving in a near infinite gulf of emptiness.

For Voyager though time will have for all intents and purposes stopped. Perhaps, long after our sun has exploded and consumed earth and all trace of life here have vanished forever, Voyager will still be on its eternal passage across the void and into infinity.  It is destined to be a lone ambassador carrying with it the simple story of our race, with its gold record of earth recordings from the sound of whales whistling to greeting in a number of earth languages through to Chuck Berry rockin’ out to Johnny B Goode.

Yet amidst the marvels of Voyager 1, there is room for a little retrospective irony too. Aboard there are printed messages dated 1977 from the US President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Should space faring aliens ever encounter Voyager, little would they know these noble missives penned on behalf of planet earth and the human race are being conveyed from possibly the feeblest ever leader of a distant planet’s super power, and the other from a man subsequently outed as a former Nazi?

Yet the chances that alien eyes and ears will ever experience our long lost messages, is a near impossibly small probability. Moving at 37 500 miles an hour, its unlikely Voyager will ever be disturbed again; an infinitesimally small frozen dot of wires and metal on an extraordinary, never ending journey to the stars.

Emperor Berlusconi cast to the lions....but not yet

Former Prime minister Silvio (“the Stallion”) Berlusconi has been given a 4 year jail sentence for tax fraud by an Italian court. In what passes for the circus (maximus) otherwise known as Italian politics, this is quite a development. However the chances of the great Emperor Silvio ever ending up behind bars and in chains (prison ones that is) must be very slim given the number of appeals and the span of time over which it can all be dragged out. Almost certainly he is unlikely to be intimidated by this ruling. No, the King of Bunga-Bunga will come out fighting, after all this is the man who apparently held “hard-core ballet” parties (Olympic accreditation pending?) and indulged in all sorts of similarly soft-gladiatorial activities more likely to be associated with the lecherous and debauched decline of the Roman empire than contemporary Mediterranean politics. But there again…..

 

So we can sit back inexpectation of further entertaining twists and turns as Italian politics masquerades as farce and pantomime. By turn, we will see  Enraged Silvio, like a bull elephant, trumpeting his hot indignation to his media channels, the populist Silvio of the People, dismissing his accusers with smooth panache and disarming charm and perhaps warming up for another comeback? From time to time perhaps the Serious Silvio will put in an appearance, bald head (sans pirate bandana) a-shining under the glare of camera spotlights, invoking the rhetoric of the champion, bloodied but unbowed, fighting on bravely against unjust and corrupt judges (left wing toadies in Silvio’s view), and so on.

 Is Silvio though not getting a bit old for all of this now? Well into his 70s, his ageless, well botoxed and perma-orange features belie his vintage. Undimmed though, he remains a connoisseur of cultured pass times, most notably those lively expressions of the performing arts (belly dancing) and fine cuisine and entertaining (orgies). It’s unlikely Silvio will in fact be able to make any return to front line politics. Instead though, he will entertain us all, acting out the role of a modern day Roman emperor facing the treacherous tribunes trying to drag him down. Italian justice masquerading as ancient comedy – it could be worse…

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE FOR FARCE

This week the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the European Union (27 nations and counting) the Nobel prize for peace. Why we may well ask? Perhaps it’s because there is no prize for overwhelming bureaucracy and economic mismanagement? In any event, it is as ridiculous as it is meaningless and continues the trend of undermining the entire credibility of the award.

If you thought awarding the prize in 2009 to newly elected US President Barak Obama – who in fairness seemed as bemused as everyone else - was both a bizarre and sycophantic decision of the Committee (and rather misjudged in retrospect), then this goes a good stride further down the path of politically loaded decisions. (Interestingly, if you are a past US Democratic President or VP, you are statistically more likely to win the prize than anyone else).

After having birthed World Wars 1 and 2, this is apparently a reward for the EU countries for not yet having started number 3 and, for most of the time at least, being able to live in relative, democratic peace with each other. In that sense it’s deeply insulting to Germany (especially as it will be up to them to bail out their spend-thrift and rioting southern fellow EU citizens). Angela Merkel obediently made the correct noises about how wonderful it all was, although it’s doubtful if the “German street” shares her view as this week they watched her crudely and distastefully being caricatured as a Nazi by furious mobs when on a visit to Athens.

 As expected, Europe’s other politicians were also mostly very excited by this even if no one else was.  EU cheerleader in chief and president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, was positively ebullient. Van Rompuy is a caricature of a European politician. Unelected, unknown and mostly incomprehensible, he is blessed with the personality of an empty paper packet; his speeches are the verbal equivalent of a vast slow- rolling wave of thick grey carpet under-felt. “We are all very proud that the efforts of the EU for keeping the peace in Europe are rewarded” he intoned, with the implicit and unfounded assumption that, had the EU not been there, there would have been war. That it was bound up in a NATO military alliance for 40 of the past 65 years with America in a cold war against a common foe (the USSR) seems to have completely slipped his mind. Without that enormous US support, the chances of Europe having been invaded by Russian tanks would have been very high. So much for the EU keeping the peace then…

Von Rompuy’s chum and President of the European Commission (another unelected and numbingly ineffectual, overpaid bureaucrat) Jose Manuel Barroso was just as excited and also described it as a great honour. In his utterances ripe with cant, Barroso claimed “I believe it is justified for the European Union to see its work for peace recognised, not only in the unification of the continent, but also outside our Europe".  Well, I’m not sure how the tens of thousands who were victims of genocide in the former Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s might feel about all these fine words when it was the EU that stood bravely during those terrible years, resisting the temptation to try to stop the ethnic cleansing most sides indulged in.

More recently, the EU’s fractured, disjointed stance on Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya was on international display. In Libya’s case it was France (with the UK) which had to “do the deed” whilst once more the rest hovered anxiously on the side-lines insipidly wringing their hands and looking on. These behaviours are typical but hardly prize-worthy, for in truth the EU is normally afraid to “keep the peace” where it requires a little courage to first seek it out. As for Syria….

Barroso also claimed it was, “a great honour for all 500 million citizens”; a fair proportion of which are currently rebelling in the streets against the EU’s centrally imposed austerity. What intellectual, not to mention mathematical, nonsense. The concept of all 500 million people being Nobel peace laureates is of course absolutely meaningless as the vast majority of these individuals cannot play any part in this process nor on their own influence the course of national or continental events. It’s the pointless, out-of-touch, “sounds good but means nothing” language so beloved of self-important politicians like Barroso, Van Rompuy and others whose contact with the real world has long since withered and died.

If the Peace Committee cannot come up with a sensible nomination, it should rather holds its decision over for that year, instead of devaluing the credibility of the award with the silly, meaningless nomination of 27 nations and 500 million people.
 

RUSSIA: EVERYTHING CHANGES AND EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME…

Russia has in the last 12 years changed almost unrecognisably from that grim, despairing place following the fall of communism. The turning point was, in many respects, when Vladimir Putin took over from the vodka-sozzled rule of Boris Yeltsin. Yet 12 years on it’s clear now that Putin is the natural successor, not to Boris Yeltsin, but to Leonid Brezhnev. In many ways it is like other westernised societies in its big cities and the lifestyles of their inhabitants, but in other ways Russia appears to be going back to its cold war past.

Inwardly state brutality is now employed as the response to those who do not do its bidding or who criticise its ways, as seen early on with the murder of journalist Anya Politkovskaya.  Its rule of law is used by the State to crack down on its opponents in any shape or form as with the utterly pointless and heartless imprisonment of 3 harmless members of punk rock outfit Pussy Riot. The intimidation of businessmen and the targeting of opposition politicians like Yevgenia Chinikova and Alexie Navalny, illustrates that Putin’s Russia is increasingly a place of political intolerance.

Laws have been passed aimed at curtailing freedoms and preventing the free exchange of ideas not in synchrony with the state’s own desired version of the world.. Corruption is rampant and foreign enterprises are increasingly reluctant to invest in or relocate to Russia, as BP is finding out to its peril.

Then there are its vast security apparatus. The KGB was always a chilling embodiment of the dark security state. It would be wrong to say it is now back for it never really went away; it’s just emerging from the shadows with a changed acronym – the FSB. Like the KGB before it, and the NKVD, OCPU, GPU and Cheka before that, the FSB is increasingly the hammer used by Putin’s state to beat, smear and intimidate its opponents into submission.

The FSB’s lineage is long and sinister; stretching back to Lenin and his director of secret police, “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, his notorious remark “We represent in ourselves organized terror” embodied Communism’s legalized murder of untold millions of its citizens.  Whilst it would be wrong to equate modern Russia as currently being organised and run through a comparable level of state terror, its direction of travel over the past few years is not towards a more tolerant and open society, but instead back towards where this past lies.

Externally too, Russia under Putin, is steadily becoming more intransigent and bitter. Its invasion of tiny Georgia bore all the hallmarks of a crass, bullying and arrogant regional power. It’s blocking of any moves to deal with the situation in Syria verges on political perversion. It is as if there is no limit to the cost in blood it will see others pay if it means snubbing the West or holding on to its naval facilities in that ruined country.

 

Like all politicians, Putin plays to his home gallery. Although suspicions are that he rigged the last election, it is one he would still have won, relying upon a vast non-urban vote which sees him as having brought, with some legitimacy, stability and a measure of prosperity to their vast country. Yet, not unlike a paranoid dictator, nothing can be left to chance, the outcome to the game of democracy must be guaranteed beforehand.

 

When Putin came to power in 2000 there was a sense of optimism; here was a man to lead Russia into the modern age out of the chaos of the post-communist era. To an extent this has been done by the ruthless exploitation of Russia’s vast natural resources. Yet there has been minimal investment in the modern technological and industrial infrastructure to support a long term economy. Perhaps this is not something to worry about today. Tomorrow, though, will come.

 

But Putin has other plans. With his KGB background Putin has more in common with the old USSR. For him, democracy is at best a tool to legitimise the exercise of central power, at worst a frustrating threat to the ruler’s prerogative to do as he pleases for as long as he likes. Putin’s problem though, is that now too many Russians are part of the modern world, especially those in its cities, and scorned as liberals and elitists. Russia’s urbanised citizens are increasingly part of a new, challenging world the state cannot control, cannot banish by decree and does not appear to understand.

 

Earlier this month tens of thousands demonstrated against the Government on the streets of Moscow. They are part of the wave of the future that threatens to wash away the huge, crumbling dam wall of state control. Yet unlike the demonstrations elsewhere in Europe, where angry mobs vent their fury at the austerity they knew was coming and which has been introduced by the Governments they voted into power, the demonstrators on Russia’s streets require real, true courage. They do not have legions of lawyers and barricades of human rights legislation to ensure their safety. Russia’s demonstrators show their resolve in the face of a state machine that cares not for their rights or well-being; their only shield being their access, still in place, to social media, the internet and the world's savage media spotlight of which even Putin must for now remain as least slightly wary.

Russia’s history of the last 100 years is unique in terms of the terrors visited upon them by their rulers. It is now at a cross roads. Putin would drag them back towards the past. Those on its streets are engaged in a brave and high risk attempt to stop him from doing so…………….

 

 Also see "Putin - Not a punk rock fan"

2012 STARMAP OF DOOM: ALIENS, ASTEROIDS AND DOOMSDAY: ITS ALL IN THE MIND

The date is the 21 December 2012. That is when an event, momentous in its implications for the human race, is due to occur and which will entail a catastrophe in 2013 and 2014.

This is according to a “researcher” and author of these sorts of doomsday scenarios, called Marshall Masters, who used to work for CNN. Along with several books, Masters has produced a slick video viewable on line, in which he talks through his predictions and beliefs. Briefly, in his video Masters seems to be claiming, that a comet or sort of rouge nomadic planet called Planet X (or the Destroyer, Hercobulus, Nibiru amongst other names), is heading towards us and will pass earth in a sort of “near miss” on 21 December this year.

This near miss will apparently cause a sudden shift in the earth’s pole which will result in all sorts of terrible things happening (that part of the prediction would no doubt be true). Although Masters doesn’t give much detail in his video, this is a pretty well-worn doomsday scenario that mistakenly assumes that there would be a very sudden pole reversal which would momentarily leave Earth without the magnetic field that protects us. We would be left to the mercy of solar flares and sun storms and that would toast anyone wandering around without sunscreen, or not hunkered down in a bunker.

As he goes on to explain, the confirmation that this is all imminent is drawn by Masters from his analysis of a crop circle in 2008 near Avebury, which is not far from Stonehenge in the UK. If you stand at Avebury on 21 December then, so Masters believes, a second sun will appear in the sky. This is the arrival of our rogue Planet X.

In his video he talks of friendly and hostile aliens. Masters says he believes the Avebury crop circle was created by an alien intelligence to warn us of this event. These aliens are apparently the good guys, because they are warning us about the alien “bad guys” who will return at the time of this event. These bad guys are known as the Anunnaki, and apparently live on Planet X and are a reptilian super race.

There is cross over here with David Icke, who also has his reptilian fixations. Both think we are a genetically engineered slave race created by these Alien bad guys.  These doom-filledpredictions appear to be broadly drawn from the ancient creation myths of Babylon and Mesopotamia.

Masters call on others to support his contentions. Not scientists or astronomers, who would add some weight to his wild theories if they could confirm the approach of planet X on or about 21 December 2012. Instead Masters falls back on the predictable like the Mayan calendar. The Mayan Calendar also been used to claim 21 December is a special date.  Masters doesn’t mention that the Mayans believed a year was 360 days long and did not know about leap years. However the Mayan calendar already has great traction with new agers and Doomsday scenario junkies – indeed, the current theories to do with the arrival of Planet X may have been cast so as to conveniently dovetail with the Mayan’s calendar to add more weight to the theories.

Masters also resurrects the ghost of infamous American psychic Edgar Cayce in building support for the 2012 doomsday event. Cayce made lots of predictions, most of which never came true. Cayce never spoke specifically about 2012, but rather his predictions were supposedly going to happen by the year 1998. Perhaps he was being advised by mischievous spirits who deliberately confused him. Anyhow, being 14 years too early is not a matter to bother Masters and he merrily quotes Cayce as evidence for his 21 December theories.

Masters unfolds his prediction in his video, which comes complete with the normal pseudo-scientific trapping, such as pictures of shining pyramids and spaceships flying over them and the drawing of conclusions based upon the most circumstantial and flimsy of “facts”; the sort of stuff to get any conspiracy theorist’s pulse racing.

Inevitably, he discovers “evidence” of a Government cover-up (in the form of no real evidence of it – a sort of logic that is equivalent to saying that invisible teapots must exist if you can’t see them (paraphrasing Bertram Russell for a moment), taking the adverse inference to almost cosmic lengths. He claims that incontrovertible evidence of this was that an internet site hosting pictures of the Avebury crop circle site vanished (that’s the evidence of Government interference) and then reappeared again without explanation. It’s all very mysterious to the goggling Mr Masters but not to casual observers.
Masters voices over all this in clear, unemotional tones which lending some respectability to the incredulous predictions he makes. Bespectacled, balding and with the air of a lecturer, he intones like a scientist talking about his research into DNA.  For all that, Masters is genuine in what he believes yet is but one of many taken in by the tantalizing attraction of the pseudo-scientific.  Mixing ancient creation myth with selected extracts of modern science (in this case what would happen in the “almost impossible” scenario of a very sudden polar shift or the terrifying consequences of a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault line say) a superficially compelling alternative is put forward to the normal scientific narrative.

Masters is “sure” of a government cover up. With a mind set in lock down on this point, Masters would see any attempts to argue there wasn’t as confirmation of his views. In one unintentionally hilarious quip, he sanctimoniously tells “religious fundamentalists” that they have got it wrong, believing that his fictions trump theirs.

Whilst much of it is so obviously far-fetched to make serious questioning all but a waste of time, there were 2 questions that intrigued me.

 
1. Why would aliens communicate via Crop circles? Why not just land your space ship on the White House lawn, and hold a press conference. That, or some other similar display of power, would leave no room for doubt.

2. Why haven’t astronomers and scientists noted the approach of Planet X? It must be well within their range by now if it’s got to be here by 21 December. After all, it was amateur astronomers (not Governments) who, back in 1994, discovered that the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was going to collide with Jupiter. Presumably astronomers would spot incoming Planet X.

I’ve asked this question more than once. Why do people believe this stuff? What neurological or psychological constructs in our minds predispose us to accept as a form of reality those scenarios which, with a little clear though and analysis, we would soon see through?

Is this some residue from our most primitive past? As we developed the capacity for thought and as our brains and minds developed, so too we would have started to dream. For primitives confronting visions and scenes that seemed very different to the grimness of the short brutal lives we lived in those early millennia, this must have been difficult to understand or explain. How did we make sense of those dreams, how did we link them to our realities? Perhaps, therein is the basis of our earliest beliefs, myths and original religions as we sought to explain these strange nightly visions. It may be that we are not just naturally gullible then – perhaps, neurologically, in a way we don’t yet understand, we can’t help ourselves but naturally want to believe these fantastic tales.

Scientist Carl Sagan wrote an excellent book about the compelling power of pseudo-science, which he called the Demon Haunted World. Whilst he is long gone now, he would be saddened to know that, even in the 21 Century, demons, aliens and monsters still seemingly remain alive in our minds to walk with us all the days of our lives.
 

Marikana Murders: A strange form of Justice

Following the Lonmin mine shootings in South Africa, where around 34 miners were shot by the police, the public prosecutor has now arrested those responsible for the shootings. The police who shot the miners, you might well have thought?  Nope – actually, several hundred of the miners who the Police didn’t have time to get round to shooting dead are the ones who have now been arrested for the murder of their colleagues, including several wounded by the police (I wonder if they will be charged with causing GBH to themselves). Not unpredictably, this has caused an uproar. Cooler heads in the ANC Government are now wondering if this has been, perhaps, handled in a rather provocative manner.

Apparently the Prosecutor is relying upon some arcane piece of legislation from the dark days of Apartheid when some fevered mind dreamt up a piece of “legislation” that seems to imply that, in this case the survivors of a riot, because they were not the ones shot, are therefore to blame for the deaths of the others and thus the guilty parties. After all, the Police were, presumably, only following orders.

What it does demonstrate, in halogen bright light, is the inherent hypocrisy of Governments. When in exile the ANC spent its time in a state of perpetual moral outrage at the excesses of the apartheid Gov’t. Upon getting into power it seems to have decided certain aspects of the former state's laws were not perhaps as awful as it made out. As a result, it has retained various pieces of the previous regime’s odious legislation on the books…”just in case, for a rainy day, you never know when….” But its not really different to any other Government in terms of what is says it will do when in opposition, and what is does when in power.

Obama railed against the last Republican Govt over Guantanamo Bay and how, when he was President, it would be closed down once and for all. Well, Obama is running for re-election, and Guantanamo Bay is still open for business. Apparently, once in power he realised it was easier to keep it open than to close it down. Far more convenient to keep your enemies locked up in another country than have the bother of keeping them on your home turf where they could claim all sort of annoying rights. 

Elsewhere the Socialists in France went bright magenta with moral outrage when former President Sarkozy tried to tackle the problem of the eastern European Gypsies in a robust manner. Now in Government, their leader, Mr Hollande, faced with the same problem, is reacting just like the man who he vilified when in opposition.

The only surprising thing about all of this is that we continue to be surprised by it. But then again, hypocrisy is the great leveller - it seems to apply to politicians one and all, regardless of political leaning left or right, race, gender, age or any other characteristic.....

Julian Assange: Endangered Species

The President of Ecuador today surprised his countrymen by according protected species status to the rare Assange toad. It was a quite extraordinary move for President Correa, who is well known for his intense dislike of chirping amphibians. However, in a speech that critics believed was to assure his country of his pro-amphibian credentials, Correa declared that in Ecuador the rare toad, which goes by the full name of the Much Lesser (these days) Spotted “Julianne Assange” would henceforth be a protected species. Botanists pointed out that in Ecuador there are currently no Assange Toads and that this gesture was therefore largely symbolic and playing to the amphibian gallery.

Correa gave as the reason for this move his suspicion that CIA agents were trying to abduct the Assange and exterminate it for being a dangerous propagator of malicious information and unpleasant odours.

However, what is most extraordinary is that, at the moment, the Assange toad is hiding in a small box in a building in London, unable to make its way to Ecuador to enjoy its protected status. Ominously for the toad, between it and the nearest airport is a thin blue line of toad catchers, desperate to apprehend the Assange.

The Assange Toad is indeed a rare amphibian, with its origin in the Antipodes. It is currently located in northern Europe, although it is said to have an extreme aversion to Scandinavian climates, especially that of Sweden.

 It can easily be recognised by its loud and self-righteous croak. It is of rather a pale, pusillanimous appearance, and is said to be extremely harmful to the female of its species. Of late it has reportedly taken on a rather clammy appearance, having scalded itself by intentionally getting into very hot water.

……………..to be continued