USA TO BLAME FOR HUGO CHAVEZ DEATH (AND EVERYTHING ELSE TOO)

So, after a long struggle, Mr Hugo Chavez has succumbed, like so many others, to the dread disease of cancer.

Chavez was not just the President of Venezuela, he was also an ardent Revolutionary, a patriot and a populist, a former paratrooper, a fiery socialist and also, undoubtedly, a hero to many of his people too. He was ferociously ambitious, intolerant of any opposition and, had he continued, likely to have become increasingly authoritarian and despotic. Unsurprisingly, his mentor and at the same time one of his greatest heroes, was Fidel Castro, a man who after about 50 years of uninterrupted power himself (some might say dictatorship), had yet to work himself up into any excitement over those annoying trivialities like democracy and freedom of speech or association.

Chavez's ambition was to be seen as the scourge of the former Imperial powers of the West, and in particular, as the South American leader of the pack against the great evil, formerly known as the USA.  Like all good romantic stories of revolutionaries, his end needed to be heroic, fighting against massively superior forces (that’s the US and its imperialist lackys), encircled by treacherous "enemies of the people" (that's the Venezuelan opposition party) but supported by loyal comrades, who can be selected from those on the guest list for his funeral, including theocratic maniacs, ageing dictators and a couple of apologies from those, like Mr Assad, currently otherwise to occupied butchering his own people to spare the time to attend.

Cancer is a terrible disease and not to be belittled or made the subject of cheap comment. Yet, it does not quite fit the here's death ordained for Hugo Chavez. Fighting this cruel horrible disease from the media blackout of a hospital bed is not quite how revolutionaries are supposed to meet their end. The bad guy in the political narrative of Chavez's life is unfortunately absent at the critical moment in the plot.

So, in a makeover worthy of a good Hollywood epic, history must be re-written to meet it preordained outcome.  Dark accusations are now being made about how the USA is responsible for his cancer and how it is the USA, the enemy of freedom, that is the evil hand behind the demise of the hero. Imperial enemies have given him this illness. The leader of the Russian Communist party concurs, claiming it was far from a coincidence. Well, I’m not sure how he knows but facts are not part of this novel or traditionally the lexicon of old school communists. Reassuringly though, it’s all contained in classified documents that, conveniently, will be only released in 50 years’ time. What has been going on? Perhaps there really is a shadowy CIA Oncology tactical hit squad roaming through South America led by Lt Colonel Oliver North (Rtd). Who knows?

In reality, few know. Chavez could have died some time ago, perhaps even in Cuba. Irrespective of that however, the narrative is gaining traction and events can now be manipulated to fit the required story line. The hero can die fighting to the end against the sinister forces of imperialism (read USA). His successors are fired up to continue the struggle (that means motivated to vote for Chavez's chosen political successor in the pending Presidential elections). His story continues and the struggle against imagined enemies goes on. Whats more, our hero, like so many other heroes (or mass murdering despots depending on your point of view) on the extreme fringes of the political Left, will undergo some bizarre form of secular immortalisation by being embalmed and kept on public view in a glass coffin where he can be “with his people" forever and ever amen.

VATICAN VACANCY

Just what might a satirical job advertisment for this high profile vacany look like....well, read on as this is the leaked text of the draft advertisement being drawn up to fill the newest vacancy in the Vatican. In fact its so current that the drafting corrections are still in place! A Vatican ordered phone tapping exercise is being rolled out as you read (thats not a joke is it?)...

JOB TITLE: POPE (Vice Mr Joe Ratzinger)

ROLE OVERVIEW

The incumbent will be expected to exercise full, supreme and universal authority over the faithful, with a specific remit to lead it out of the dark ages and its believers through the challenges of the 20 21st century.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

1. To courageously and ceaselessly confront and root out evil where ever it is found without regard for personal reputation.
2. To resist the temptation to believe the numerous scurrilous lies being propogated by renegade elements within the Vatican and other innocent members of the Agents of Satan, claiming that numerous senior employees of the Church have been engaged in acts of grave depravity activities that some might consider not necessarily compatible with their trusted status in the Church.
3. To follow and uphold the 10 13 Commandments. (For the information of all applicants the final 3 Commandments are: (11) Use of Condoms is Forbidden (12) Ordination of Women into the Priesthood is Forbidden (13) Homosexuality and Gay Weddings are Forbidden (14).Philately is to be forb …Pending review…
4. Cover up or pretend not have known about Must always adopt a dignified silence (remember you will be infallible) when confronted with clearly serious and convincing examples of intrinsic moral evil baseless allegations about wrongdoing involving ordained church employees past or present. 
5. Where time permits, the successful applicant will also be expected to give some thought to other matters, like stopping wars, relieving world hunger (Note: As long as it does not breach Commandment 11) and poverty (Note - sale of Vatican assets in this regard is forbidden) and curing / preventing disease (Note: As long as it does not breach Commandment 11) and promoting the goodwill and communal well-being of all of God’s people regardless (Subject to Commandment 13) and exposing vice and corruption.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

 Ideally, the successful applicant:

• Should preferably be a Catholic who believes in God and has a working understanding of the Bible.
• Must be a very old man, celibate, be prepared to wear a long white dress, strange looking headgear and funny slippers whenever in public. 
• Must dispense advice and teachings to over a billion followers on correct sexual relationships.
• Have some experience of public speaking. Note: Successful applicant will be expected to make speeches in Latin to thousands of people, most of whom may not understand what is being said.
• Management Skills: As effective President of the organisation, applicants should  be possessed have a wealth of great Management and Leadership ability, given the divided and treacherous cadre of subordinates that Mr Ratzinger had to oversee and unsuccessfully sought…
• Skilled courdon bleu chef (surely this is for the vacancy in the canteen  – plse check - Vatican HR Manger(Recruitment))

3. BENEFITS AND REWARDS

1. The successful applicant will find reward in the eternal hereafter (Note: In the event any of the other Religions are correct, this clause is null and void).
2. Accommodation and your own small city is provided as is a company car in the form a bullet proof, glass covered golf caddy for day to day business. (Clubs not provided)

Equal Opportunity

We apply an equal opportunities recruitment policy and do not show favour on any grounds (except faith, gender and..). Women are welcome to apply provided they do not breach Commandment 12

Interested?
Interested applicants should submit their curriculum vitae to the Vatican HR Manager (Recruitment), Senior Level Vacancies, Recruitment Office of the Vatican.

The successful candidate will be notified by smoke signal.

Kim Jong Il returns to the Land of the Living

Miracles abound. The second Dear (departed) Leader of North Korea has returned to this mortal coil, embalmed in sweet smelling oils and other essential preservatives (of a more functional nature).  Pictures appear to show him dressed in the same sort of khaki jumpsuit he always wore (it could be a onesie of course but I’m not sure how fashionable they are in North Korea yet) He is lying there peacefully and apparently snoozing, covered in a nice bright red  blanket.

Given that Kim Jong Il has been afforded the status of a near immortal in North Korea, his reappearance so soon after his passing is presumably an event of some excitement. Perhaps his return to the land of the living is a reward for North Korea's military finally being able to launch a rocket without it falling back on top of them (see Mr Kim's expensive firework).  This same rocket also launched a satellite which was given his nickname, Kwangmyongsong, so he was probably very excited (apparently that passes for a term of endearment in North Korea, although it’s unlikely many impoverished and long suffering North Koreans feel much genuine endearment towards him).

He is also happily accepting visitors including members of the press, which is probably more than he did in life. This surely demonstrates the good, humanising effect that mortality has had on him. Well-wishers are able to spend some time in his hallowed company (not much mind you, he is a busy fellow these day). Reports are that he is not very talkative yet, and doesn't make even the most rudimentary of hand gestures.  Supplicants are expected to bow and scape at his feet before shuffling past him, as he lies there, looking slightly perma-tanned with a benevolent and wise expression on his face. He is encased in glass, a bit like a sort of horizontal pope mobile but without the wheels, and surrounded by nice flowers instead. Perhaps he doesn’t want all those well-wishers breathing all over him.

Yet, perhaps Kim's return does herald a change for North Korea. His son, and successor, Kim Jong-un (AKA Kim 3) may recognise he needs to do more to resuscitate the sclerotic North Korea economy. So, his first move was to have his father stuffed and then put on public display as some kind of macabre tourist attraction. Perhaps the next step is to charge foreign devils to gulp and gawp at the mortal remains of the repulsive old monster. Who said entrepreneurship was dead in North Korea....

Also see Three Kims for the price of one.

REAL AND VERY TERRIFYING VISITORS FROM OUTER SPACE

This is true. Ok, that’s enough to get people doubting for a start, but scientists, astronomers and NASA state quite unequivocally that next month (Feb 2013 for those still suffering mental disorientation from the last time the world ended) a very small asteroid referred to, with rather a lack of dramatic flourish, as 2012 DA14, will go whizzing past us on 15 February.

 

They are sure it will miss but it will be rather too close for comfort. At only 45m across and weighing in at 130,000 tonnes, it will still be so close that it will pass between us down here and our communication satellites up there - at a distance of just 14 000 miles above our homes, if you want to put it another way. This is closer than any other asteroid of its size in recorded history. This is so close it will be visible with binoculars, if you know where to look and are in the right place.

If it were to hit earth, it would do so with the impact of an atomic bomb.

The last significant asteroid strike was in 1908, in the middle of Siberia at a place called Tunguska. That asteroid, estimated to be about twice the size of  2012 DA14, exploded between 3 and 6 miles above the earth flattening 830 square miles of forest and about 80 million trees. It killed several thousand reindeer, but no people thanks only to the remoteness of the region. Still, it serves as a chilling warning and a remarkably lucky escape.

What would happen though, if an asteroid the size of 2012 DA14 didn’t explode in the atmosphere but struck the earth directly? What kind of impact would that mean?  The Barringer Crater in Arizona was made by a comparable asteroid of approximately 50 m diameter, and gives a good, and very chilling, example of what we could be facing. I happened to visit the impact site a couple of years ago and its a mighty impressive dent in the suface of the earth. However, in the context of 2012 DA14, its not a pleasant thought, given the size of the impact crater, to contemplate the consequences if something like that were to hit a modern city.

The last major asteroid impact, which is known as a meteorite if it gets to hit the earth, was probably about 3500 years ago. It landed in the Indian Ocean which is probably why there are so many legends of a great flood (Noah, Gilgamesh etc.) broadly contemporaneous with this event. It’s estimated that these rather large (1 mile across or more), terrifying and very real space visitors, infinitely more dangerous than UFOs and lesser-spotted aliens, arrive every 3000 years or so. Although this is of course a very crude measure, it does mean we are rather overdue another visit.

In cosmic terms 2012 DA14 is not just a near miss, it’s like a bullet taking a skin-thin wrist watch off your arm but leaving you unharmed. For all intents and purposes, you could just about reach out and scribble your name on it as it goes past. They don’t get much closer….and sooner or later, one won’t miss.

BAD PRESS

After returning from a 2 week holiday in Thailand, I couldn't understand why I felt so good. Ok, you always feel pretty relaxed after a good holiday, and no, before anyone asks, it's wasn't the calming and relaxing after effects of any massages.

Well, the good weather played a part, and the food was fantastic, but, it was something more than that, that strangely Zen-like feeling of being at peace with the world. Was it the lingering after effects of visiting too many temples and contemplating all those reclining Buddhas?

No, it was none of the above. I discovered what it was when I walked into the first News Agent the very day we got back.  There they were, all lined up on the news rack....the British papers. The therapeutic effects of being largely separated from these vile publications had been immeasurably positive.

Shattering all my inner calm were those headlines, randomly screaming, choking, fuming and fulminating about everything and anything. Winter was too wet...winter wasn't cold enough….but Arctic freezes were being predicted (the worst for years).  Elsewhere they were ranting about Government austerity. Savage cuts to the welfare state, inhuman and cruel ministers deliberately targeting the poor and unemployed, fumed a couple of red tops. At the same time another rag raged and wept about welfare cheats being paid too much benefit and the Government's totally pathetic attempts to cut the deficit by insisting on paying excessive money to these lay abouts. Balanced, sensible reporting? Forget it.

Others choked and fumed about Europe.  “Too much of it” howled some. “Not enough of it” shrieked another, with such anger I could almost imagine the foam flecked and rabid editor hammering at his or her keyboards with their clenched fists. A couple made furious and indignant demands for a referendum so we could all leave the Eurozone for some imaginary red-tapeless free-market nirvana. In response others made loud and dire, horror-filled warnings about what would happen if we did and that economic Armageddon waited where we should surely abandon all hope.

Almost every story, subject matter regardless, it seems is reviewed through the most twisted, miserable of prisms; facts are used as selectively as possible so as to mislead, confuse and depress the reader. Everything is subject to maximum distortion, skewed through the politically myopic lens of the publication regardless of which end of the political spectrum it finds itself. And the irony of it all, is that every day they are served up for us, as regular as breakfast, their captured and well cultivated readership-fodder, who in our near bovine-like state, cough up the pennies or pounds required to buy or download then read their despairing and twisted content.

Yes, I know the price of a free press is having to put up with all the bile and nonsense they churn out incessantly. But, for a New Year resolution, I thought I would try to avoid these wretched and poison spreading feasts of misery for a bit. I'll stick to the sports section (as long as it’s not Arsenal winning) and read Private Eye instead. Anything to extend that lingering, post holiday calm for a bit.....
 

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