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.

SYRIA, ASSAD AND THE CURSE OF EDMUND BURKE

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

 

Seems this has been quoted quite a lot over the past few days.

But what are good men supposed to do, for, in Syria's case, is not every option fraught with risk and danger? So the option of doing nothing becomes the most attractive. It's justification all the easier if we listen to the shrill voices warning of the unknown consequences of trying to stop an evil man. We assume that there is less risk if we sit on our hands. We convince ourselves it is so, like a drunk dilutes a lack of resolve with a litre of vodka and finds the shame of his circumstance to be the fault of others, not himself. And like that drunk, we marinate our abdication with self-serving arguments about the risk of the future, or the errors of the past, or the arrogance of thinking we can do anything at all.

 

We have also allowed the ghosts of Iraq to crowd around, obscuring the difference between doing the right thing (confronting Burke's evil men) the wrong way and doing the plain wrong thing. It's easier then, not to risk getting it wrong, but to look out of the corner of our eyes at this problem. It's far away from our homes and we are safe. Our Government will not drop fire bombs on our schools. We are better off as spectators this time.  Yes, of course it's all awful, but its someone else's awful and why should we have to help beyond our tut-tutting in the United Nations and those other pointless feel-good talking shops so beloved of our politicians and leaders. If we look the other way for long enough, perhaps it will go away.

 

Yet, we know this wont go away, because it doesn't work like that. A fire ignored only dies once it has consumed everything it can possibly burn, and so too with "evil men". Sticking one's head in the sand is not a solution. Hoping to reason with barbarity is not a strategy. Pontificating  loudly about alternatives that have already failed may salve the conscience, but is really only a counsel of despair.

 

Last week I watched a BBC report, with an image of a fire savaged Syrian school child, fire bombed by its own Government. Naked and burning, it's gender seared away, it was only just alive, now become a breathing piece of charred human meat, open mouthed in its incomprehension at the terror of its circumstance that mere words like this cannot describe. I watched the child in HD television, whilst eating an over-heated TV dinner off a tray, listening to the voice-over giving it less than an even chance of living. What have things come to? Next up one of our politicians. So pleased he was, democracy was in action (in the UK), he said. We will not get involved in this, he said. We want proof, he said. Perhaps he had not seen the BBC report. He seemed very pleased with himself, but then they always do. I expect he went home to a large, comfortable house and a good meal.  I expect his children were already tucked up in their beds and asleep by the time he has walked up his garden path to his front door. They will not be fire bombed.

 

So, is it true that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"? Maybe. Perhaps however, "men" who stand by doing nothing whilst evil flourishes all about them, are not good men.

 

They are cowards. And when we let them speak in our name, so too are we.

 " Too many flames, with too much to burn, and life's only made of paper"- Ronnie James Dio

 

 

SYRIA: TERROR WITHOUT END

SYRIA: A TERROR WITHOUT END

We have now seen the pictures that no cameraman should ever have to take.  Chilling pictures of small dead children, wrapped in shrouds, each pale face drawn as if sleeping through a haunted dream that does not end. But they sleep the sleep from which none will ever wake, for in these still terrible pictures we see a land from which all hope has fled.

Syria is the nightmare scenario where all the options that available are horrific, and all its roads seem to lead to a place of destruction and ruin. As it descends into a barbaric civil war involving chemical warfare, civilian massacres, a tyrannical dictator and cast of several insanely radical Islamist groups hell bent on destroying anyone and everyone else, any once fragile opportunity to resolve the crisis has evaporated. The nominally moderate Free Syrian Army is seemingly crowded out in the shouting and shooting of the madmen and mad movements on all sides.

The West has been, once again, left trembling anxiously on the side lines. Afraid to do something, fearful of not doing anything, its only recourse is in sound bite and speech, where, like a minister in an empty church, it sermonises from within the echo chamber of of its increasing irrelevance.

The real power players, Russia ( and to a lesser extent China) observe events through the pitiless scopes of their geopolitical self interest, which, in the case of Russia, is a corrupted lens that finds only satisfaction in the humiliation of the west and particularly the USA. Putin in particular, is the puppet master of the Assad regime, and for him, the real enemy is the USA. Whether it comes in the form of pathetic and frightened pawns like Snowden, or a hellish civil war in the Middle East, all are merely tools with which to wage a new Cold War against an old adversary.

 The UN is again exposed as a toothless old hound, on a chain and issuing forth with the odd bark, the teeth in its jaws blunted rotten stumps that no robber would ever fear. And so too with Obama and his red lines, originally drawn out in the comfortable expectation they would never be breached. Now their only purpose is to demarcate a failure of resolve and to serve as the ribbon for a state policy wrapped in its own indecision.

And for Syria? It has no future. Indeed the worst of all outcomes might be that a victor emerges from this war. For what we are witnessing is the Gordian knott of conflicts, where intertwined are a monstrous collision of nationalistic and tribal aspirations, violently intolerant and militant  religious extremism, sectarian hatreds within Syria and across the wider Arab and Persian world, the interference of unstable neighbouring states, all of which is underscored by the lack of congruence between Syria's current borders, imposed by hastily departing and squabbling colonial powers in the later 1940s, and the long history of Syrianism.  There are no good guys anymore. No cavalry will ride in from the sunset. And if out of this maelstrom of barbarity a victor should emerge, he will more likely than not be consumed with thoughts of revenge.

Towards the end of the Second World War the Germans spoke of their preference for an end in terror rather than a terror without end. For Syria right now it seems they face only a terror without end.

Princess Diana is sending message to Naomi Watts (and other delsions)

In the latest news to emerge from the world of “Hollywood”, formerly sensible across Naomi Watts claims she has had messages from the late Princess to confirm that it’s alright for her to play the part of Diana in the upcoming film about her life.

 

Apparently Ms Watts has confirmed that she "felt Diana's presence during the film. I asked her if I could carry on - and she gave me permission”.

 

What absolute tosh.

 

That actors are somewhat deluded will not come as much of a surprise to most people. That they are now also able to liaise with the dead is a more unexpected development. However, before we snigger up our sleeves, let’s recognise the commercial possibilities here, for they are endless.

 

How long now before some lucky author is contacted by Michael Jackson to ghost write his Bio – perhaps we will finally really know what happened? But why stop there? Perhaps Bach has a few more Brandenburg Concerto’s up his sleeve that he has spent the last few centuries working up. I wonder which lucky composer he might be thinking of approaching with his works.  Will Genghis Khan feel it’s about time to explain his invasion of medieval Europe to a ghost writer (no pun intended), or perhaps Cicero will tell us more about the politics of the Roman Empire. My guess is he might contact Silvio Berlusconi, a modern day emperor if there ever was one, to help him.

 

Joking aside though, the dead do not send us messages. That’s because they are dead.  Anyone who believes that they do is deluding themselves. And although Watts’s revelations are of themselves as harmless as they are silly, its unsettling that there are people who believes they are hearing messages in their heads or have some other form of supernatural guidance, telling them what to do or what to say or, most seriously of all, how to treat other people .

 

Terrible wrongs are perpetrated by those convinced of the rightness of their ways. Often grounded in delusional assumptions and beliefs, many of the world’s current problems and conflicts can be traced back to these rigidly and fanatically held views.

 

It seems there is no end in sight to the influence of these delusional views either, seemingly stretching from Watt's harmless trivialities to the killing fields of the Middle East….