When people start to do really bad things....

On 14 December 2012 a maniac, Adam Lanza, in Newtown Connecticut went on a shooting spree that left over 20 children and 6 teachers dead. At the same time a similarly incomprehensible event took place in China, where one Min Yongjun stabbed 23 children, including chopping one child’s ears off. Last year, in Norway, in an act of terrible violence, a smiling Behring Breivik went on a shooting spree killing 69 people at a Youth Camp; this after bombing a government building earlier in the day, where 8 died.

 

Violence committed against children is probably the easiest and least contentious to classify as horrific and of inexcusable evil. But what about other acts? What about suicide bombers? The victims are almost always random, and are as likely to include children as not. It seems we live in a world where we are not yet able to explain, scientifically/ medically, why these sorts of things happen.

 

Some, on the face of it, might appear easier to explain, if not justify. A suicide bomber has presumably been brainwashed into believing whole sale slaughter and sacrifice will lead to a positive outcome for him or her, both in terms of the cause they support and for them personally as individuals. In these cases, personal dysfunction has met collective dysfunction as morally and intellectually bankrupt ideologies confront the 21 century and are exposed by its immense challenges and realities. Classification of them as lunatics or fanatics is easy, truly understanding what turn individuals into these killers is not so simple, but it is becoming increasingly important that science is able to do so.

 

Take Youngjun above, a severe epileptic. Local Chinese Government reports say he had been “strongly psychologically affected” by the wave of ridiculous speculation and hype about the end of the world on 21 December. If this somehow triggered his horrifying attacks, then in retrospect, could this ever have been predicted? At the very least, his and the others acts should focus our attention on the science of mental instability, and specifically, what genetic, environmental or sensory triggers, internal or external, can suddenly compel people to behave like this.

 

This is becoming increasingly important, because the world is becoming an ever more challenging environment in which to exist, both for individuals and collectively. Our ways of life are changing faster than at any previous time in the history of the human race. And it is these changes, which as they speed up and multiply, it will prove ever more difficult for dysfunctional individuals, communities and the more conservative sectors of society to adjust in future.

 

As individuals, we are facing pressures and challenges that simply did not exist just a few generations ago and for which perhaps our current state of evolution is going to leave us increasingly unprepared. As technology arcs at increasing speed up a curve of progress tending towards the vertical, it draws lifestyles, social behaviours, economies and all sorts of issues which influence us along in its slipstream. It seems highly likely that the speed of this transformation will mean that increasing numbers of us, individually and collectively are destined to be left stumbling in its wake as it accelerates away from us.

 

For instance, in the east, the move from an agrarian society to an urbanised one has taken place in a generation; it took place at a much slower more measured pace in Europe (although still quickly). In East Asia and China a generation is emerging from universities with degrees in computer science that will have grandparents, if not even parents, who worked in an agrarian economy. Although this illustrates just one particular aspect of this huge process of global change, clearly just from this we can see how the scale of economic and social transformation is simply breath-taking.

 

Change on this scale and at this pace can only have major implications for the societies experience them, and indirectly, on all of us regardless. How as individuals we respond is going to be increasingly difficult to predict. The impact upon established norms of behaviour will become increasingly powerful (and disruptive), and how those mentally "less able to cope" respond (and I don't mean those who we might currently classify as suffering from any mental condition) may seem to be increasing dysfunctional.

 

The same will apply to societies and social groups who find sacred and cherished beliefs and perspectives challenged, even overwhelmed. The manner of their reaction cannot always be known or predicted yet, in one small and chilling illustration of this risk, the recent attack by the Taliban on a Pakistani teenage girl for promoting the right of girls to attend school, demonstrates how ridged and backward ideologies react to perceived changes to their status quo.

 

I am not for a moment suggesting in any way that the terrible killings or acts mentioned above, can simply be blamed on poorly managed lunatics' inability to cope with accelerating technology or medieval mind-sets confronting reality.

 

It may be though, and this is the somewhat obscure point to the blog I guess, in the years ahead an inability to adapt smoothly to what will become a technological, social, economic and political tsunami that gets faster and faster, may see increasingly frequent acts of dysfunctional and often tragic behaviour. This will be from the swelling numbers of individuals, groups and communities whose coping mechanisms have become redundant in a world that is overwhelming all that they understand and whose speed of endless transformation means their previously manageable and understood ways of life are vanishing before their eyes. 

Also see "Future Shock"

Does Russian Prime Minister Medvedev believe in UFOs and the end of the World?

When asked during a very recent interview (08 December) on Russian Television, the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev advised his incredulous audience that “the president of the country is given a special 'top secret' folder. This folder in its entirety contains information about aliens who visited our planet."

No doubt this caused more than a frisson of excitement to go rippling through the already over-excited ranks of those eagerly and morbidly preparing for the world to end on 21 December 2012. On that day all sort of terrible things are due to happen as we have been informed with more than a touch of sadistic glee by those somehow in the know. The Mayan calendar is ending (shocked gasps all round) and a rogue planet called, somewhat unimaginatively, “X”, and peopled by zombies…sorry,…alien reptiles (note to self…get facts right!) is just going to miss us (which I thought would be cause for relief but evidently not).

Now it seems a volcano in Yellowstone is also going to join the fun and erupt (which is most annoying as we were planning to go on holiday there next year). I hear reports of other terrible, yet unconfirmed happenings too, including Arsenal moving closer to winning the FA Cup and the Pope supporting gay marriage (ok, the last one is the most unlikely of the lot) converging on this day. No wonder there is global panic.

Then, to add to all this awful worry and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Mr Medvedev confirms to the world that the aliens are already here – perhaps an advanced raiding and reconnaissance party? He didn’t clarify. I wonder what Mr Putin is going to do about it as Russian President – perhaps he has challenged them to a karate contest? Is there is a cover up?

Well, does Mr Medvedev knows more than he is letting on? More information is available, he dead panned, “from a well-known movie called 'Men In Black' ... I will not tell you how many of them are among us because it may cause panic".

Don’t say you weren’t warned….
also see Starmap-of-doom-aliens-asteroids and The long shadow of the dark ages

Motorhead: 100 things to do before you die

Last weekend I survived another Motörhead concert. I’ve been a fan of the band for more than 30 years, which amounts to a great deal of sonic abuse over the decades.

A Motörhead concert is a unique experience, perhaps worthy of inclusion in those lists of 101 things to do before you die. The volume is pulverising, and the crowd is a seething, heaving sea of people seemingly plugged into another wavelength. It is like no other concert, it is like no other place on earth, it is Motörhead live.

Formed in 1975 just before the birth of the UK punk movement, Motörhead were outsiders from the get-go and, in truth, nothing has changed after all the years. Band founder  Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister has passed during that period, from being a rock and roll joker through to a counter culture icon. Motörhead are called after a song of the same name penned by Lemmy. The song epitomised the band at the time, which epitomised a lifestyle and outlook that seemed almost impossibly excessive and over-the-top in every respect:

 

“Sunrise wrong side of another day
 Sky-high and six thousand miles away
 Don't know how long I've been awake”


Motörhead's music however is much misunderstood; casual observers (if that’s the right word to use when referring to those confronted with the band’s sonic blizzard) experience only a loud, if not shocking aural assault. But Lemmy traces his roots back to the music of the 1950s and 60s and the band’s music is based upon, an admittedly very heavy very fast form of, pure rock ‘n roll, infused with a dose of blues that might even have had Robert Johnson smiling:

 I seen 'em come, & I seen 'em go,
 I seen things & been people, that nobody knows
 I'm talking in pictures and I'm painting them black,
 I seen Satan coming honey in a big black Cadillac

The magic, or perhaps even the genius, of the band is something that is hard to define. The uncompromising, jagged sonic tsunami that is Motörhead combines a surprisingly accomplished range of lyrics that go careering across the exploding landscape of the music. Lemmy writes about those issues which preoccupy him most, from that trio of sacred cows: war, politics (he doesn’t like them) and religion, to his personal demons, and, of course, his memories. He writes as the outsider, as someone who has never been part of the normal world that you and I inhabit and when he rasps out the poetry of his philosophies, it is often a thing of dark tortured beauty, even sadness. It is all this which adds the unique, often hidden dimensions to the band’s music that simply cannot be appreciated by those who only hear a loud noise, from a strange looking man.

Death in the stars, rain on the wind,
 Came to the mission, couldn't get in,
 Came out of nowhere, guess I'll go back,
 All down to bad luck,

Fire in the sky, nowhere to run,
 Came to the desert, burned by the sun,
 Came out of somewhere, I ain't never been back,
 All down to bad luck

With Johnny Cash’s death nearly 10 years ago it is Lemmy who has now ascended to that strangley popular pedestal Cash occupied. Like Cash, it is Lemmy who has now become the iconic rebel, but somehow with an image softened by a public affection that transcends boundaries and generations. Lemmy is 67 (next month), now only four years behind Cash. For all that Lemmy seems near indestructible he seems to recognises the limits of time and age in his profession in his typically uncompromising way:

 

“Stay on the right track, you can't live a lie
Make sure you don't come back, look me in the eye
Know I ain't no angel, broken wings don't fly
I know the law, I know how to die”

 

Yet, towards the end of his career, it is now that he has gained the recognition, whether sought out on not, for what he has done, and not “sold his soul” to become. Motörhead and Lemmy have escaped the cloying gravity of fickle, transient media opinions, chart fashion and record label pressure. He is his own man; there is no need for shallow posturing, no one left to impress, no corporate schmoozing. His music remains brutal, un-tempered and honest, yet it is sometimes strangely fragile, sad and bittersweet, the reminiscing of a hard life on the road, of times, faces and places long gone.

This is music written to rupture the sweet dream we have been sold, where the only reward is obsolescence and a fading promise of an eternal life somewhere else when the shutters come down ….

…I have nothing but the world
 I have nothing to take its place
 I don't believe a word, I don't believe a word...

At nearly 67, Lemmy has joined a small unique group of musicians who have  escaped the straight-jacket categorization of their generation. It’s inevitable now that he looks back, not just on times good, but with the haunted memories of dark times too,

…..Out of the night comes a song that I know
 Twisted and ruined and black….

And the tragedy of the wasted lives of those now long passed on. The dark pain and poignancy uncurls itself in band’s the harsh guttural anthems:

….I can remember the people they were
 Nobody knows if they ever come back
 Lost in the ashes of time they still sing
 Echoes of romance gone bad
 I can remember them better than you
 I shared the darkness they had
 Dead and gone, dead and gone”

But the real thrill is of course seeing Motörhead live. Standing there, the very clothes you wear vibrating against the crushing volume, the giant reverb like a second heart beat beneath your skin, physically feeling that you can lean forward at 45 degrees into the sonic wall coming at you; shouting out the words to songs that vanish wordlessly into the hurricane of sound. And all the while, carried irresistibly along on the giant pulsing, overwhelming surge of the music, the heavy fast moving waves of primordial, crashing musical thunder rolling across the crowds, washed in strobe and blinding neon, and for a few precious moments, nothing matters any more.....

INNOCENT UNTIL FOUND GUILTY BY JOURNALISM

The current fits of guilt, fury and outrages swirling around the BBC are the latest symptom of the dilemma posed by and for traditional media in the early 21 century. There is an increasingly sinister confluence where objective news reporting seems to have been overwhelmed by the subjective, dark art of “news analysis” and the commercial imperative to “break the story first”. To this add the frenzy around the hunt for ratings and audience reach and the media’s seeming intoxication with its own sense of importance in the affairs of the world.

Following the recent scandal around the late Jimmy Saville, an allegedly notorious paedophile, last week the BBC’s (formerly) respected News Night programme found itself in very hot water(again) by “outing” a senior political figure in all but name, and accusing him of paedophilia. Incorrectly. Without any reliable evidence. Without checking their story properly. Without giving the target of their attack even the courtesy of a response before airing their fictions. In complete disregard for even the most basic tenants of fairness and proper journalism.
 

Only days ago ITV also pulled a similarly shameful stunt where a shoddy and dubious list of alleged paedophiles was compiled by one of their “allegedly serious” presenters quickly searching the Internet for a few minutes and then chucking his “list” at the UK prime minister in a live television interview. This stunt was no more than shameless media bandwagon jumping and political game playing where trying to embarrass politicians is now the emblem of the serious news reporter. In this instance it backfired spectacularly, although the wretched ITV presenter in question will probably exercise a little more care and humility in future, given the volume of opprobrium he has so deservedly brought down on his head.

However, what journalists and news reporters are managing to do is rather amazing. They are on the verge of making themselves even more reviled than politicians – no easy task. And that is surely not as it should be. Yes, much of the media is probably over-powerful, irresponsible, arrogant and on the evidence, even out of control in many cases. Yet, in so many countries, it is the media that is the first line in defence against governments and other powerful organisations that would otherwise abuse their power without fear. It is the media’s spotlight that corrupt officials fear most. It is the media that exposes wrongdoing, crime, waste and inefficiency, oppression and state violence. Just think of Syria and Libya. In oppressive states, it is journalists that often suffer threats and violence for seeking to expose wrongdoing and abuse.  In this sense its value is hard to over-state. Yet there is a nagging worry about the media's own immense power too, for surely power corrupts all its handlers equally and none are immune.

About the most unfashionable thing to point out at the moment is that Jimmy Saville would have been considered innocent until properly proven guilty. Saville would also have had the right to a fair trial in a sober court of law. He may have been the world’s most monstrous paedophile and found to be so – but once we make exceptions to that right we are on a slippery slope.  That a man like Saville would still have had that right is the best guarantee of all our rights to such a fair process.

There is a risk now that people, more than ever before, are being judged in the inferno of hysterical headlines and disgraceful journalistic posturing. The role of the media is pivotal to the proper functioning of civil society. However, it has no role whatsoever in the weighing of evidence and the passing of judgement  under the law and should be scrupulously careful not to undermine this, one of the most basic and fundamental right in a free society.

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.