Why does the rising moon look so big?
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¡Amigo de Amazon!
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Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Beautiful fictions
Maybe I’m a pessimist, or maybe it’s because it’s February and there is a constant grey drizzle with the occasional excitement of something between sleet and rain - no, now it really is raining, fine grey rain - but it seems that we are on the brink of a new Dark Ages, like the time in Europe when Popes and Priests and Bishops and Kings controlled what we thought and how we thought it; the time when Gallileo was shown the instruments of torture to encourage him to retract his statement that moons circled Jupiter, you could see them through this here telescope; and therefore the anomaly of planets being embedded in crystal spheres had to be addressed. Now we who share a culture that has evolved through the Enlightenment will have to explain to ourselves what has happened - which is that a way towards an understanding of the world and the universe based on the evidence of our senses, which are the only pathways between the universe and the brain, Galileo's way; working together with a tradition of conceptualisation which I’m not sure that we have a good name for, but can be pedestrianly labelled with the philosopher’s “what is the case”; that kind of understanding based on evidence is being rejected, by politicians as well as popes, in favour of a way of understanding based on stories, beautiful but fictional stories, made up by men, always men, from far away and long ago.
Evidence. It’s such a boring, dusty word. It is however crucial, a fulcrum for how we think and therefore what we do.
By and large we human beings operate on two levels as to evidence. We ignore it in our account of ourselves, our significance, our stories, our creations, our bigotries and chauvinisms and loves. But we take very careful notice of it, hopefully, when standing on the edge of a cliff or changing lanes at 150 kph on the motorway.
And there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of God, gods, fairies, ghosts, the soul, life after death, alchemy, or double decker buses on the moon.
There is a mystery about where everything came from. It is the mystery of existence. But once you have accepted that something, anything, exists, then the problem is in theory soluble - not necessarily by us, maybe our brains aren’t right for it, but given our record so far, progress in that direction seems likely.
The mystery of existence is conceptually difficult. It’s opposite, a thought experiment, that nothing exists, nothing has ever existed, is just as inconceivable as the supposition that something exists and maybe, in some sense, has always existed. But once you accept that something exists - quantum foam or space-time or p-branes or a naked singularity - and you wonder how it came about, where whatever existed first came from; then positing God, or gods, does absolutely nothing for that ultimate mystery. It merely defers the question with a fiction, God, evolved by the human brain over historical epochs that we can trace. God does not answer the question, it merely adds a redundant term. There is evidence for quantum foam - according to the cover of the New Scientist I saw in WH Smith’s yesterday there is palpable evidence. But there is no evidence for God, or fairies, as independent and discrete anythings that are sensate and aware of their own existence.
Evidence. The millions upon millions of the superstitious, those who base their understanding of the world finally on the beautiful, primitive fictions of men, as if the aesthetics and politics and dietary laws of a wondering West Asian tribe was the only portal to all truth; all those Jews and Christians and Muslims with their wars and murder and torture, their misogyny and genocide, along with the Nazis and the Stalinists, all whose access to truth is through a [sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous] fiction; all of them reject evidence. There is no evidence, they say, for evolution. God did indeed create the world in six days.
Evidence next. But I must go and change the brake pads on my mountain bike, the rear ones are through to the rivets and making a mess of the discs, as well as not actually doing any braking. All palpable, evidential stuff.
And scaring yourself [with me this is easily done] by hurtling [in my case not much of a hurtle] downhill through mud and over rocks is as good a way of staying sane as any. (More....)
Evidence. It’s such a boring, dusty word. It is however crucial, a fulcrum for how we think and therefore what we do.
By and large we human beings operate on two levels as to evidence. We ignore it in our account of ourselves, our significance, our stories, our creations, our bigotries and chauvinisms and loves. But we take very careful notice of it, hopefully, when standing on the edge of a cliff or changing lanes at 150 kph on the motorway.
And there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of God, gods, fairies, ghosts, the soul, life after death, alchemy, or double decker buses on the moon.
There is a mystery about where everything came from. It is the mystery of existence. But once you have accepted that something, anything, exists, then the problem is in theory soluble - not necessarily by us, maybe our brains aren’t right for it, but given our record so far, progress in that direction seems likely.
The mystery of existence is conceptually difficult. It’s opposite, a thought experiment, that nothing exists, nothing has ever existed, is just as inconceivable as the supposition that something exists and maybe, in some sense, has always existed. But once you accept that something exists - quantum foam or space-time or p-branes or a naked singularity - and you wonder how it came about, where whatever existed first came from; then positing God, or gods, does absolutely nothing for that ultimate mystery. It merely defers the question with a fiction, God, evolved by the human brain over historical epochs that we can trace. God does not answer the question, it merely adds a redundant term. There is evidence for quantum foam - according to the cover of the New Scientist I saw in WH Smith’s yesterday there is palpable evidence. But there is no evidence for God, or fairies, as independent and discrete anythings that are sensate and aware of their own existence.
Evidence. The millions upon millions of the superstitious, those who base their understanding of the world finally on the beautiful, primitive fictions of men, as if the aesthetics and politics and dietary laws of a wondering West Asian tribe was the only portal to all truth; all those Jews and Christians and Muslims with their wars and murder and torture, their misogyny and genocide, along with the Nazis and the Stalinists, all whose access to truth is through a [sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous] fiction; all of them reject evidence. There is no evidence, they say, for evolution. God did indeed create the world in six days.
Evidence next. But I must go and change the brake pads on my mountain bike, the rear ones are through to the rivets and making a mess of the discs, as well as not actually doing any braking. All palpable, evidential stuff.
And scaring yourself [with me this is easily done] by hurtling [in my case not much of a hurtle] downhill through mud and over rocks is as good a way of staying sane as any. (More....)
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Olive Mukarugziwa
This is in response to this.
Dear Hazel Blears,
This will be an open letter.
As a father and grandfather I am distressed at your continuing intention to deport Olive Mukarugwiza and her three children, Olive, Sandra and Yvan.
I can quite understand that at one time the New Labour Government wanted to confirm with the tabloid press its credentials as pitiless, authoritarian and reactionary. This could be achieved by not only removing thousands of asylum seekers widely perceived as fraudulent, but in demonstrating a "firm but fair" policy of removing deserving, vulnerable and ultimately, as the result of your actions, pitiful cases. By, as it were, kicking in the teeth the legally powerless, you could show how tough you were to the racist bullies of the gutter press. In fact, let's be honest, you could get much more electoral credibility with what you may hopefully call the Far or even Extreme Centre by persecuting one family of exemplary human beings than you could with the (far more difficult) business of deporting, say, a thousand people-trafficking knuckledustered pimps.
Olive Mukarugwiza’s seems to be just such a case of exemplarary citizenship. Her children are all doing well in their education, and indeed her eldest daughter Sandra is just about to take her A levels. I can see that in the past you could have made huge capital by bundling them on a plane with their mouths taped, out-Howarding Howard, out-Widdecombing Widdecombe.
But, believe me, that battle is long won. Nobody in their right mind could now doubt New Labour’s commitment to authoritarian administrative brutality. The Mail, the Sun, the Express, can be proud of you. The fact that they are not is more down to their blind bigotry than to any objective situation.
You have nothing to lose. Under the circumstances, I ask you, as someone who I’m sure still has beneath the New Labour veneer, much humanitarian compassion, to allow Olive and her family to remain in this country.
Yours sincerely,
Dear Hazel Blears,
This will be an open letter.
As a father and grandfather I am distressed at your continuing intention to deport Olive Mukarugwiza and her three children, Olive, Sandra and Yvan.
I can quite understand that at one time the New Labour Government wanted to confirm with the tabloid press its credentials as pitiless, authoritarian and reactionary. This could be achieved by not only removing thousands of asylum seekers widely perceived as fraudulent, but in demonstrating a "firm but fair" policy of removing deserving, vulnerable and ultimately, as the result of your actions, pitiful cases. By, as it were, kicking in the teeth the legally powerless, you could show how tough you were to the racist bullies of the gutter press. In fact, let's be honest, you could get much more electoral credibility with what you may hopefully call the Far or even Extreme Centre by persecuting one family of exemplary human beings than you could with the (far more difficult) business of deporting, say, a thousand people-trafficking knuckledustered pimps.
Olive Mukarugwiza’s seems to be just such a case of exemplarary citizenship. Her children are all doing well in their education, and indeed her eldest daughter Sandra is just about to take her A levels. I can see that in the past you could have made huge capital by bundling them on a plane with their mouths taped, out-Howarding Howard, out-Widdecombing Widdecombe.
But, believe me, that battle is long won. Nobody in their right mind could now doubt New Labour’s commitment to authoritarian administrative brutality. The Mail, the Sun, the Express, can be proud of you. The fact that they are not is more down to their blind bigotry than to any objective situation.
You have nothing to lose. Under the circumstances, I ask you, as someone who I’m sure still has beneath the New Labour veneer, much humanitarian compassion, to allow Olive and her family to remain in this country.
Yours sincerely,
Monday, February 20, 2006
A mini-bar of sex toys
Possibility of a week mountain biking with the lads around Chamonix. We are meant to be looking for suitable accommodation. What’s this? ....seven rooms including the “Myla” suite complete with a mini-bar of sex toys.
The moral imperative to spend is strong, I know. Work and spend and shut your face, and follow a “Faith” to keep you segregated from, in passive enmity to, others with the same ostensible interests in a good life and freedom (in the Enlightenment, not the American sense), knowledge, health, a decent childhood and constructive hope for the future. Work, spend, self-segregate, and you won’t perceive BushBlairBrown for the post-democratic horrorshow they are.
And people obey, so sweetly, so like cattle; the lumpen in Odeons and UCIs, dutifully making a purchase of (not buying, a subversive word, rooted in our history of independent nations) a five litre tub of popcorn and a five litre tub of Pepsi for a bargain price of £7.50 (more than the ticket, but the corps have got to make their profit somewhere) the arms rising and falling in robotic unison, stoking the lard, stoking the lard, brain and body.
People buy what they’re told to buy. That’s how mini-bars work. I guess. I have never used one, but I’ve been behind Americans paying bills in hotels, and they are dutiful makers of multiple purchases and tot up huge sums. I always look at the very small bottles of whatever it is in the minibar and if I feel whisky or wine is what I need, I go to the shop next door and buy a very big bottle for the same amount. Americans are not allowed to do this. Especially the ones with a “Faith”.
Similarly with sex toys. I assume. This is my first inkling of a minibar of sex toys. And I’m not sure whether a week with the lads in Chamonix is an appropriate setting for exploration of its delights. And if I was going to, I think I’d stock up on the Internet before I left. But then there could be a problem travelling with the gear. Not just the embarrassment of disclosure as a whole potential minibar’s worth or Rampant Rabbits and Twisterellas are spilled across the counter by airport security personnel; but I’m not sure where these things stand, especially the more voluminous and rigid, in terms of weapons of terrorist aggression. There is at least a risk, if your searchers are agents of the quisling StrawBlairBrownGov, of being rushed away with a bag over your head and handed over to Americans, put in a cage, and tortured with sex toys even more worrying than the “anal invader” (Qui s’excuse... but that was ten seconds on Google, honest).
So there may be some role for the minibar (would the toys be refrigerated? Is that a good idea?) Personally, if I find myself in sudden need, as with the whisky and the wine, I’ll slip out and find the nearest Ann Summers or equivalent. Otherwise, improvise. As I do at the cinema; by eating and drinking something other than popcorn and Pepsi before I go.
The moral imperative to spend is strong, I know. Work and spend and shut your face, and follow a “Faith” to keep you segregated from, in passive enmity to, others with the same ostensible interests in a good life and freedom (in the Enlightenment, not the American sense), knowledge, health, a decent childhood and constructive hope for the future. Work, spend, self-segregate, and you won’t perceive BushBlairBrown for the post-democratic horrorshow they are.
And people obey, so sweetly, so like cattle; the lumpen in Odeons and UCIs, dutifully making a purchase of (not buying, a subversive word, rooted in our history of independent nations) a five litre tub of popcorn and a five litre tub of Pepsi for a bargain price of £7.50 (more than the ticket, but the corps have got to make their profit somewhere) the arms rising and falling in robotic unison, stoking the lard, stoking the lard, brain and body.
People buy what they’re told to buy. That’s how mini-bars work. I guess. I have never used one, but I’ve been behind Americans paying bills in hotels, and they are dutiful makers of multiple purchases and tot up huge sums. I always look at the very small bottles of whatever it is in the minibar and if I feel whisky or wine is what I need, I go to the shop next door and buy a very big bottle for the same amount. Americans are not allowed to do this. Especially the ones with a “Faith”.
Similarly with sex toys. I assume. This is my first inkling of a minibar of sex toys. And I’m not sure whether a week with the lads in Chamonix is an appropriate setting for exploration of its delights. And if I was going to, I think I’d stock up on the Internet before I left. But then there could be a problem travelling with the gear. Not just the embarrassment of disclosure as a whole potential minibar’s worth or Rampant Rabbits and Twisterellas are spilled across the counter by airport security personnel; but I’m not sure where these things stand, especially the more voluminous and rigid, in terms of weapons of terrorist aggression. There is at least a risk, if your searchers are agents of the quisling StrawBlairBrownGov, of being rushed away with a bag over your head and handed over to Americans, put in a cage, and tortured with sex toys even more worrying than the “anal invader” (Qui s’excuse... but that was ten seconds on Google, honest).
So there may be some role for the minibar (would the toys be refrigerated? Is that a good idea?) Personally, if I find myself in sudden need, as with the whisky and the wine, I’ll slip out and find the nearest Ann Summers or equivalent. Otherwise, improvise. As I do at the cinema; by eating and drinking something other than popcorn and Pepsi before I go.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Invasion
The spiral stairs thunder continually, there is noise from dawn to dusk; furniture is never where you expect it to be, you are constantly stumbling on piles of detritus, clothes and boots, forgotten arms caches, animals and gunmen, fallen, littering the landscape; foraging expeditions move constantly from place to place, looking for toast, honey, chocolate and cake; like occupying forces everywhere, impatient of being fobbed off, with banana, raw carrot, dried apricot, they demand luxury; wheeled vehicles will suddenly career round the kitchen just as you are getting something involving boiling oil out of the oven; drums beat from the second floor; there is carousing far into the night. How can a mere five constitute such a total presence?
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Frogspawn pap and fury
I hope Tony Blair has sent a suitably stiff school prefectly rebuke to the US Congressional committee that found that Bush’s reaction to the New Orleans flooding had been marked by "fecklessness, flailing and organisational paralysis". Because we remember how furious Tony was at Matt Frei’s “anti-Americanism” when Frei, himself visibly enraged by the US government’s criminal neglect and abuse of the hungry and homeless, said exactly the same thing as the congressional committee, only a little sooner.
But Blair, you’ve got to admit, he’s a loyal guy. When Dave Cameron suggested that the Royal Prerogative might be modified so that the Prime Minister could not take the country to war against the wishes of Parliament, Blair said that this was impractical because it might interfere with our treaty obligations to NATO. Put more crudely, Blair meant that he would not have his unconditional loyalty to Bush and the United States interfered with by something as venal, volatile, unprincipled and irresponsible as the elected representatives of the British people. You can see where he's coming from - his own temperamental bent for Public School Stalinism aside. It’s the proximity thing. Just as the gaggle of Downing Street courtiers known as The Government experiences nothing but London, and thinks that the huge problems and distortions of the capital represent the condition of the rest of the country (thus their constant chatter about supposed dreadfulness of the education system), so Blair knows only the formless, malleable pap of New Labour loyalism, the frogspawn-like matter of those with an unblemished voting record, and rightly despises them as worthless, without principal or insight; certainly not fit to judge whether this country should go to war. And of course in that particular he was right. They had a chance, those New Labour parliamentarians, to do the right thing, what clearly in retrospect would have been the right thing and was equally clearly the right thing at the time, and they chose, for the sake of their mortgages and their vanity, to follow the gaseous fantasies of their leader.
One of these feckless cyphers was on the five minutes of Question Time I caught last week. I have no idea who he was but it seems Blair has put him in charge of a commission on future energy provision to fix the nuclear “choice”. His voice was the oily, wheedling, bullying yap of the salesperson who knows he only has shit to sell, he kept saying that he had yet to "make up my mind on the nuclear option” . The more he spoke of his honour... no prizes for guessing who after the election will be filling the pockets of this authentic voice of New Labour.
But Blair, you’ve got to admit, he’s a loyal guy. When Dave Cameron suggested that the Royal Prerogative might be modified so that the Prime Minister could not take the country to war against the wishes of Parliament, Blair said that this was impractical because it might interfere with our treaty obligations to NATO. Put more crudely, Blair meant that he would not have his unconditional loyalty to Bush and the United States interfered with by something as venal, volatile, unprincipled and irresponsible as the elected representatives of the British people. You can see where he's coming from - his own temperamental bent for Public School Stalinism aside. It’s the proximity thing. Just as the gaggle of Downing Street courtiers known as The Government experiences nothing but London, and thinks that the huge problems and distortions of the capital represent the condition of the rest of the country (thus their constant chatter about supposed dreadfulness of the education system), so Blair knows only the formless, malleable pap of New Labour loyalism, the frogspawn-like matter of those with an unblemished voting record, and rightly despises them as worthless, without principal or insight; certainly not fit to judge whether this country should go to war. And of course in that particular he was right. They had a chance, those New Labour parliamentarians, to do the right thing, what clearly in retrospect would have been the right thing and was equally clearly the right thing at the time, and they chose, for the sake of their mortgages and their vanity, to follow the gaseous fantasies of their leader.
One of these feckless cyphers was on the five minutes of Question Time I caught last week. I have no idea who he was but it seems Blair has put him in charge of a commission on future energy provision to fix the nuclear “choice”. His voice was the oily, wheedling, bullying yap of the salesperson who knows he only has shit to sell, he kept saying that he had yet to "make up my mind on the nuclear option” . The more he spoke of his honour... no prizes for guessing who after the election will be filling the pockets of this authentic voice of New Labour.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Beggaring belief
Blair has said that failure to get his new terrorism laws through Parliament on Wednesday would send a signal that “beggars belief at such a time”. No, Tony, the message that it would send is that, despite your nine years in office, your missed opportunities, your huge and ever-swelling errors, your arrogant anti-democratic authoritarianism, the shifting quicksands of your lying, your increasingly hysterical frenzy to get a “legacy” beyond some loony managerial fiddling and twiddling, and the lethal mess large parts of the world are in somewhat, though not entirely, because of your gargantuan misjudgement; despite all this, there are still the vestiges of democratic freedom stirring in the mother of parliaments.
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