I Think I've Raptured Something...

There is this theory about something called a self fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes that if someone believes a predicted event will happen strongly, fervently, enough, they can actually make it happen just through the unconscious influence their belief has upon their behaviour. A parallel can perhaps be drawn here with the placebo, and nocebo effects, and with the concept of learned helplessness, but they are all a little too dry and rational for my tastes this morning...

So lets talk about the end of the world!

An octogenarian evangelical preacher from the USA has calculated that today, Saturday 21st May, will witness Judgement Day. The happy day when the Lord Jeebers will return and lift the chosen, bodily, up into heaven in the Rapture, there to look down on all the worthless sinners, left behind to suffer the time of tribulations before the end of the world. It's supposed to happen sometime this evening just after Dr Who, which is disappointing as its a two-parter and looks quite good.

The rational humanists of the world have been falling all over themselves, laughing their arses off about it all week, but worryingly, there are actually a vast number of people who not only believe it's going to happen, they actually want it to happen. In a 2004 article for the Guardian newspaper, George Monbiot reported that between 12 and 18% of the US electorate belong to churches which preach the rapture as fact. It's what they've all been waiting for, the day they will be swept up to heaven to receive their eternal reward. They want it to happen.

For them, the apocalypse = Winning!

So if enough people want Armageddon strongly enough, and believe it in most zealously, is there actually a danger that they might make it happen? Well, its worth remembering that those guys just had their man in the White House for 8 years and lets face it, they're never that far away from the big red button that says "Nuke em all, and let God sort 'em out!" First of all, however, certain events have to come to pass including, according to the rapture prophesy, a massive religious war in the Middle East and the arrival on earth of the Anti-Christ.

Hmmmmmm, so far so fucked.

I don't believe in the rapture, and pretty much everything else in the book of revelations sounds like the sort of story anyone would come up with, after wandering in the desert for forty days without a hat or adequate sun block, but I have to admit the thought of anyone who holds those beliefs having even the slightest influence on American foreign policy gives me a really bad case of the screaming heebie-jeebies!

So enjoy rapture day, Twitter has already turned it into a global event for us all to share a patronising chuckle over, but for as long as there is a large supply of the kind of people who spent the week looking around for atheists to care for their pets after they've been carried up, to sit amongst the angels and have a good laugh at all the suffering down on earth, the end of the world is surely not something we should stop worrying about altogether.

As an interesting sidenote, I scanned through quite a few news sites for references to today as the beginning of the end. Admittedly I did not find a whole lot on any of the more reputable news agencies, just a joking article here or there about how crazy the religious right can be or how annoyingly sarcastic those pesky atheists can get.

But I still found more references to it than I did to the tens of thousands of people currently camped out in the centre of the Spanish capital Madrid, protesting against their governments planned public spending cuts, and emergency laws banning legal forms of protest that the Spanish government brought in to prevent them.

It's a funny old world isn't it?

Old Money, New Money, No Money

Well, Alternative Voting appears to have crashed and burned out of this months referendum, so lets have a look at the idea of political parties and see where the 70% "No" vote to electoral reform leaves us. First, we need to take a quick ramble through history.

Once upon a time, all wealth and power was derived from the ownership of land, and we had a simple "one man, one vote" political system.

That man was the king, he owned all the land, and he had the vote.

When King John had his run in at Runnymede in 1215, I believe that the feudal baron's who forced him to sign Magna Carta, a charter limiting his powers and protecting their own privileges, where the first political party in our history to represent the interests of the people. Well... the interests of people with wealth, power and noble lineage anyway, and we remained as a one party state for the better part of half a millennium.

Over the following centuries, people developed new ways of generating wealth that didn't stem from the ownership of land, sheep and peasants. Advanced manufacturing techniques created new goods to be traded, shipbuilding and navigation technology gradually opened the whole world up as a market in which goods could be bought and sold, and a new class of people came into being. They had wealth, and they had some power, they may not have been the scions of aristocratic bloodlines but quite frankly, they didn't care. This created a division in the political classes of Britain that ultimately led to "the divine right of kings" taking a bit of a tumble, along with Charles the First's head, in March 1649 during the English Civil War. In the aftermath of revolution and restoration, Britain emerged as a two party state.

On the one hand you had the Tories, the successors of the Cavaliers who sided with the king during the war and, arguably, the descendants of the feudal baron's who imposed Magna Carta. They represented the upper class.

On the other hand you had the Whigs, the political offspring of the Roundheads; the merchants, dissidents and non-conformists who had sided with parliament against the king. They represented the middle class.

At that point, the first past the post electoral system pretty much made sense, and British politics remained a two horse race over another two hundred and fifty years of more or less radical social change.

There followed an Enlightenment, a scientific revolution, an agricultural revolution and then an industrial revolution. Also an American one and a French one too.

By the 19th century, England was the heart of a military-industrial super-power, capitalism had replaced feudalism but little else had really changed, other than in name, the Whigs having mutated into the Liberal Party at some point along the way. Some of the the middle classes had grown as rich and powerful as the nobility on manufacturing and export, on international finance and on the slave trade, whilst the peasants, who had moved to the towns and cities when the agricultural revolution threw them off the land, had transformed into the industrial working class.

They still went off to die in the nation's wars of conquest and empire. They still lived in abject poverty and squalor, working 18 hours a day, six and a half days a week, from the age of 5 upwards in dangerous and back-breaking conditions. If they lost their job and became destitute there was the work-house, if they became too elderly or infirm to work, there was death in the gutter. The difference was that whilst it had been extremely difficult to organise large numbers of illiterate peasants who were scattered across the length and breadth of the English countryside, the industrial working classes were all crammed together in the towns and had much stronger social networks, some of them could even read and write! They could be organised by the factory gate, in the pubs and in the streets, messages could be spread between them very effectively and they could be quickly gathered together in huge numbers.

They protested, they rioted, they went on strike and, in due course, the got the vote.

If the Tories were the party of "Old Money", and the Liberals were the party of "New Money", then the Labour Party, founded to represent the newly emancipated working class, were the party of "No Money".

Dragging ourselves back to the 21st century, kicking and screaming into the post New Labour years, we should be starting to realise that our current electoral system does not take account of the plurality of interest groups within our society. It encourages a bi-polar split between parties that represent old money, and new money, Tony Blair and co having started the cannibalisation of the Liberal Democrat vote that David Cameron's Conservatives, still very much the decedents of those civil war Cavaliers, are now completing with great gusto. We are becoming once again a two party state, with the Liberal Democrats having been virtually subsumed by their Conservative coalition partners and the Labour Party rushing into the vacuum created in the centre.

There is now much talk of creating something called Blue Labour, of the labour party adopting more conservative policies and moving to the right on social issues, in an attempt to win the votes of the "squeezed middle classes" and win back the votes of working class votes alienated by issues such as immigration and crime. Support for this idea of a cross-class consensus, comes from the way the super-rich of the upper class keep getting richer and more economically distanced from middle class workers, even when you include doctors, solicitors, teachers, civil servants and directors of small to medium enterprises.

With the rejection of electoral reform, even if AV was a pathetic little compromise, I suspect that a collapse back to a two party system is now inevitable and the Liberal Democrats will no longer exist by the time of the next General Election, with one party, the Conservatives, to represent the interests of the wealthiest elite, and another, Blue Labour, to represent those of the ordinarily well off. In effect we will be transforming our political landscape into something similar to that in place in the United States, with the Republicans on the right, the Democrats in the middle, and no one at all on the left.

One of my biggest fears about this is the prioritisation by Tories, Lib Dem's and Blue Labour alike of social mobility over social equality. By putting the emphasis on a system that values the ability to move up the social scale over the eradication of differences between different points on the social scale, we set in stone the idea that there will always be the working poor.

The people who do all the dirty, menial, laborious, boring, unglamourous jobs, with the longest and most antisocial hours, that pay minimum wage with minimum paid holidays, no sick pay, pension or benefits, where you end up with no savings, pension or property, broken down and old way before you reach a retirement age that keeps being moved upwards. The people who are more likely to get heart disease and more likely to get cancer, who get the worst health care and die the youngest, who are more likely to be the victims of crime and are more likely to go to prison. They are the most likely to be hit with long term unemployment and they live in neighbourhoods where their kids have a choice between a school that is failing and a school that has failed, and the one that is failing is already full up. They are not "doleys" or "scroungers", they are the people who work hard but ultimately do not get a better quality of life than they would have if they had been on state benefits all their lives. And without free education, the chances of their children ever having anything more than them are rapidly diminishing.

So personally I am opposed to two party-ism, and opposed to Blue Labour. I favour a Proportional Representation electoral system, and a society with a multitude of political parties that are free to represent the interests of everyone in society, not just of the people with the money, whether it be old or new.

Emmanuel Goldstein is Dead...

It was a fantastic week for manufacturers of patriotic novelty souvenir flags, firstly because of the British royal wedding lining the streets of London with a sea of red, white and blue union flags (anyone possessing flags of any other colour having been arrested the previous day, just in case) and then with a surprise last-minute bulk order for the stars and stripes coming in on Monday, following the news that U.S.special forces had found and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Yes, a good week for the flag sellers indeed, whether you were waving them, or burning them, they really couldn't care less.

So it was clearly a good week for President Obama too, despite Fox News taking full advantage of what will probably not be their last opportunity to make their favourite "accidentally on purpose" captioning mistake. (see picture).

What isn't so clear, however, is pretty much everything else. I guess that is unsurprising really, considering that the man himself was twisted up inside half the currently active conspiracy theories on the planet, but surely you would expect that the Americans would want to make this one look as above board and by-the-book as possible? Considering they have invaded a couple of countries, killed tens of thousands of people and spent trillions of dollars in the process of supposedly looking for the fucker?

Well, the very first thing I heard about it was that they had killed him and almost immediately dumped his body in the sea. Which sounded mightily convenient to me. I always at least half suspected that Bin Laden had died of kidney failure sometime in early 2001, admittedly making him responsible for releasing more post-humous material that Tupac and Biggie combined but it made a lot more sense than an old man on a dialysis machine running around the Afghan mountains giving US Special Forces the slip.

Things went from curious to curiouser with the news that the pictures of a dead Bin Laden released through the media were actually photoshopped fakes, followed hot on the heels by news that the US would not be releasing any pictures confirming what happened because of the potential for "negative consequences", not that it stopped them from televising Saddam Hussein's last drop. Meanwhile the western worlds media outlets was absolutely on-fire with all kinds of gloating, crowing and sick jokes guaranteed to have the negative consequence of reaffirming to half the planet why the USA is indeed the Great Satan.

The official story seems to have mutated every single time someone has asked a question about it. First it was a mission to capture or kill Bin Laden that met with fierce armed resistance in which the target was shot during a prolonged firefight. Then it transpired that the special forces teams actually met very little armed resistance (one armed guard) and Bin Laden was unarmed when he was gunned down in what may sound quite a lot like an assassination, but wasn't an assassination at all, oh no, not according to the White house.

I have really only just scratched the surface of the convoluted contradictions surrounding what happened on the 2nd of May, and have not even touched upon the ramifications of where Osama was found - not in an underground lair, complete with doomsday device and shark-tank, deep in the Tora Bora mountains, or even in the disputed tribal regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in a villa in a suburb of Abbotobad, home of the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst where their military elite are trained.

To be honest, almost every single aspect of this story stinks!

If Bin Laden had died years ago and this was just an opportunity for President Obama to score a much needed propaganda smackdown, then I am fairly sure that George W Bush would not have failed to take up that opportunity himself, some time before the end of his own administration. If they had captured Bin Laden alive and without a fight, you would think the obvious thing to do would be to put him on trial for the numerous acts of mass murder he has taken credit for - truth, justice, the American way and all that? Or maybe they would want to ask him a few questions about this global terrorist organisation he was apparently the mastermind in direct control of?

So maybe, just maybe someone decided they wanted the best of both worlds?

Did they capture him, and then rather than put him in a position to spill all kinds of inconveniently-juicy-secrets which may potentially have found their way into the press, they only said they had killed him and then spirited him off to some secret prison in a third-world hell-hole, and had the electrodes attached to his testicles before you could say Camp X-Ray? That way they could torture the hell out of him for as long as they wanted and then kill him at their leisure, without all the pesky inconvenience of having to put him on trial and convict him first, or of giving him a burial place that could become a pilgrimage for fanatical nutcases from all over the world.

That sounds like common-sense to me.

I am by no means an apologist for cunts like Osama Bin Laden, but our Governments in the USA, UK and Europe really do try to represent us as "the goodies" in the war against terror, we are supposed to be the the ones fighting for peace, liberty, freedom and democracy. Aren't we supposed to do the right thing? If they had the opportunity to bring him to trial for the things I am pretty certain he did, such as the murder of 3000 people on September 11th 2001, then surely that is exactly what they should have done? Not bumped him off and then disposed of the body like in some kind of mafia style gang-land execution.

Personally I would have liked to see him spending the rest of his days sharing a prison cell with Slobodan Milosovic (former president of Serbia responsible for anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars) I'm sure they would have gotten along famously, but unfortunately, one way or another, people who commit the really huge crimes never seem to come to trial.

Perhaps some people are scared that it might set a precedent.

So instead we are left with this murky, unsatisfactory, fundamentally confused conclusion where the body of Osama Bin Laden may well be dead (by now anyway, I'm not sure how long a 54 year old man who must have had a kidney transplant at some point in the recent past would last under CIA enhanced interrogation) but the idea of Osama Bin Laden is still going strong.

So I guess we'll just have to wait for the WikiLeaks on that one!