I am becoming quite fond of my little corner of Schiphol airport. I have put up my Christmas cards and a few bits of tinsel. I now have a boarding card for the 0800 to Manchester. This is the sixth boarding card I have had. It is very hard to understand why, time after time, they don’t know a flight is cancelled until some time after it was due to leave and all the passengers have queued at the gate for hours.
Of course, Manchester is a lot further from Ramsgate than Schiphol is, so even if the flight atually goes, this represents rather dubious progress.
Happy New Year everybody.
Remarkably, KLM delivered my lost luggage, including my laptop, at 9.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. At that time a pretty lively party was already in full swing,much improved by the presence of a great many beautiful young women, mostly from Latvia. I am not sure why; my life as ever consists of a bewildering succession of chance encounters with really nice people. I am in the fortunate position of being able to say that Nadira was the most lovely of all, without indulging in dutiful hyperbole.
It was an extremely happy Christmas. Having my mum, both my brothers and all my three chidren together was as great as it was rare.
We have been through the laptop in lost luggage discussion before. The problem is that my shoulders dislocate at the drop of a hat, and I travel without hand luggage to avoid an accident.
2011 is going to be a very important year for me. particularly the first quarter. A number of crucial events are going either to set me up financially for the rest of my life, or result in real distress and failure. At present I have reason to be very optimistic. I am also very absorbed in my life of Alexander Burnes, which I hope will help establish a serious academic reputation.
The Portuguese edition of Murder in Samarkand has sold unexpectedly well in Brazil. The translation of the Turkish edition has just been finished.
I hope to do a Wikileaks retrospective in the next couple of days. Just a quick thought on the case of the poor young gardener in Bristol. Of the Jill Dando case, long before Barry Bulsara’s succesful appeal I blogged that this appeared to be a miscarriage of justice in which the police had fitted up the local weirdo.
Despite not being enamoured of landlords in general, I fear the same dynamic is at work in Bristol, albeit Chris Jefferies is much more intellectually capable than Bulsara. My instinct is that the police have picked up on Jefferies for being camper than a boy scout jamboree and archer than Trajan.
Jefferies’ release on bail has me worried that there was nothing against him other than the “He’s a weird one, guv” instinct of some not very bright cop. The case needs to be closely watched as history shows that the powers of the police to make the evidence fit the suspect are considerable.
Jon
‘Surely Craig is the conductor?’
No, his role is one of us. Maybe the media is the conductor.
‘Those mental shackles need to be thrown off..’
No, those mental shackles are a 50% part of the religion of Islam. I know dismissing them makes it easier for people to try to dismiss the harder premises of Islam than sexual morality.
Neo-capitalism would do that even if there were no Israel.
No, the zionist bankers heat up and cool down the economy by controlling the availability of money. A bit like an air-conditioning heat pump, reversible both ways. The fact that they know the timing of the variations puts all the cards in their hands.
Just invading other sovereign countries sporadically wouldn’t achieve the same results. You take money out of the pockets of the people to invest in countries that their governments have recently invaded and the land is dirt free, then you bring it back to buy up the health service when you have bankrupted the rich country by recession.
New Labour gets its share, and so the slimy Con-dems. Do you really still not understand??????????????????????
Suhayl
If your’e with Hazrat ‘Eesa, Jesus peace be upon him, maybe you read his mention of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the day of Judgement, you pooper-scooper of atheist, Darwinian, monkey-droppings.
The fact that I get the message of Islam from two enourmous speakers simultaneously, the Gospels and the Qur’an, is one of the proofs of the authenticity of Islam.
You could get more faith message out of a piece of wet monkey poo wrapped in a piece of tissue as a crystal radio set, than what your’e getting out of your expensive, fuck off amplifying machines.
‘Tony Operation Mockery’ brought up the excretory functions, but it doesn’t mean we have to continue being obsessed, or fixated, with them. Oh dear, the blog has deteriorated. What are the “expensive… amplifying machines”, btw? Do you mean Rabia al Basri, Yusuf Islam or David Byrne?
Ah well, liberal quantities of flak from neocons, Islamophobes, white supremacists/white separatists, uber-Zionists and the devoutly religious… that’s life. “Pooper-scooper of an atheist”… It’s the language of Monty Python. It’s the Life of Brian.
Perhaps it is I who ought to assume form energetic. Wait, while I fetch my lamp!
Never mind, I send you good wishes, anno.
(stopping lurking) good heavens, anno, are you muslim?
seriously, i don’t think shouting on about how great Islam is, and how right you are in your definition of it, is actually helping any? So what’s the point? Other than a quite amusing insult, sadly delivered at entirely the wrong person.
Here’s a critical piece on Noam Chomsky, from right-wing libertarian, Lila Rajiva. It’s the second item down.
http://mindbodypolitic.com/
Mind you, the author of the piece, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of one of those ‘Terrorism Experts’ departments, so I guess one ought to take what he says with a pinch of coke, I mean, salt. Nonetheless, it’s an intriguing piece and if true, may be a valid critique. To be fair, I’ve heard not dissimilar critiques of Chomsky from the Left as well.
Good piece by Michael J. Barker, in three parts about the manipulation of the Civil Rights movement in the USA during the 1960s/1970s.
http://www.swans.com/library/art16/barker68.html
http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=64
http://www.hitchensweb.com
more debunking by someone in the know.
The Julian Assange Investigation — Let’s Clear the Air of Misinformation – Nick Davies, Snr Correspondent, The Guardian
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-davies/post_1506_b_802680.html
Sorry, conspiraloons. From the Davies article:
“And by publishing our story, we achieved something: Julian Assange was forced to admit, in interviews with the London Times and with the BBC, that there is no evidence of a honeytrap. That matters very much. The news media don’t want to report that — there’s a much better story in the dirty tricks. Some of the most active tweeters and the bloggers have not picked up on it — they are much too happy with their conspiracy theories. The celebrity disciples like Bianca Jagger don’t mention it. They simply move on to insist that there must be another conspiracy at work in the legal process. But the honeytrap story is dead: our story killed it. Whether or not Assange is guilty of a crime is a separate matter: the facts are not yet finally established, the law is not yet finally interpreted. At some point in this coming year, a court will decide that….”
Cont’d:
In exactly the same way, I think it was right to publish our story about the Swedish police file without being frightened by Julian Assange’s lawyer or indeed by the clear prospect of being attacked online by people like Bianca Jagger. There are millions of them out there. They have come to a conclusion about Assange and the sex claims in Sweden and they are not interested in evidence. They tweet and blog in the most eye-wateringly aggressive tone and often, like Bianca Jagger, they do so without even the slightest connection to the truth.
It has been a depressing experience to see some of those who were most furious at the global propaganda run by Bush and Rumsfeld now leading the cheers for a new campaign of misinformation, happy to be manipulated, content to recycle falsehood and distortion no matter what damage they may do.
@anno, good heavens indeed, from me too! I guess we’ll always disagree about religion, and that’s fine. I want to try to impart to you how to *talk* about religion, though, if I can.
Belief has lots of areas of grey, and if two people have different versions of it, they may both be *right* as well as all the other permutations (read Edward de Bono and his ideas on Parallel Thinking and The Other Point Of View, if you’re interested in this approach).
Consider the possibility also that something in your belief system is wrong, since you’re a human reader, and the people who wrote the aforementioned holy books are only human too. Having divine inspiration, as a writer, probably does not let the writer lay claim to godly perfection (sadly).
I’ve just read a theoretical account of how Christianity came to be in its present form, spiced up with sun-god mystery schools, the Knights Templar, female priests in ancient times, and the Holy Grail. Whilst a lot of it is conjecture, it touches on some points about the NT Gospels that you might be interested in. Firstly, that there were other gospels that were omitted from the bible for various reasons, and that the ones that were included were likely propagandised for the writers’ own political purposes, and that there are a large number of central things in the NT that are disputed amongst experts and historians of today. I don’t want to start burning bibles, but anyone (including many people I know) who relies on the Bible for their religious ‘proof’ should be willing to modify their belief system as historians discover new clues about Palestine 20 centuries ago. Wouldn’t that make sense, in case all religions are inadvertently (and earnestly) worshipping God presently in a way He doesn’t want?
I sort of understood your point about economic theory, but bankers are not necessarily ‘Zionist’. Again, I guess that’s a point on which we’ll have to disagree (and I continue to maintain that, broadly, we’re on the same side). The ‘system’ is not Zionist – it’s Capitalist.
Perhaps the solution is not to ‘prove’ that one religion is right, and to have one’s faith quietly. That would, of course, mean peacefully co-existing with atheists without loudly insisting on the hell and damnation you think they should be carted off to. Try wishing an atheist a long and happy life instead: you’ll feel better for it!
Happy Near Year to all, by the way. Trust all good people here will be with family or friends.
Suhayl, thanks! I’ve not tried transmogrification before, but I would be willing to give it a go. Can the Sat Nav take me to a Transmogrification Centre, or does it only go Straight To Hell In A (GPS) Handcart?
Anyway, ’tis late, and I have an Amplifying Machine to watch and listen to. This Christmas, someone kindly gifted to me a Terry Pratchett movie trilogy, so tonight: The Colour Of Magic.
Anno: There’s a small but important difference in your religious assertions, and the understandings of an atheist. That is, the atheist is only prepared to accept that for which there is evidence. Your beliefs are based on no evidence whatsoever, none, period. All religious beliefs (and I’m not talking about philosophies here) stem from primitive understandings from highly ignorant people in ancient times who had no idea about anything outside their tiny domains.
If religion makes you happy, knock yourself out. I find a lot of things make me happy too. Difference is, my entertainments are not provided by tax exempt organisations who never have to open their financial accounting books, and have laws specifically protecting them. Yours do, as persecuted as you think you are, in a country that you hold in contempt. So yours are probably a little more subject to corruption than mine.
Jon
Religion: It’s all a fairy story designed to stop men feeling alone in the universe and give high-priests the authority to tell people what to do and how to behave. And, most importantly, to keep women and their vaginas in their place.
Well, we seemed to have moved ever-so-slightly from one part of the human perineum to another. Perhaps, in Freudian terms of infant development, this is progress.
WikiLeaks. The actual cables vs. BBC coverage:
http://williambowles.info/2010/12/29/wikileaks-the-book-of-revelations-not-if-you-read-the-msm-by-william-bowles/
“A further analysis of the BBC’s ‘Wikileaks’ stories reveals the following:
Of the 103, 35 referred to actual cables […] The remaining 69 either deal with Assange himself (29) or ‘Cyber War’ and ‘hackers’ or the attempts silence Wikileaks (40). In other words there are more stories on events surrounding Wikileaks than there are on the cables themselves.
Not surprisingly, the cables the BBC omits from its (limited) coverage paint a very different picture. See for example, ‘WIKILEAKS: Yours Obediently, Europe’ By David Cronin that covers the relationship between Europe (groveling) and the US (dictating)”.
Alan Campbell, religion is an emergent phenomenon; that’s why it has been universal to humanity. It isn’t “designed” at all. What are you, a conspiracy theorist?
700. Magic number.
Fair enough. It’s still all a fairy story though.
700. Magic number.
Most religions also institutionalise marriage, which is probably one of the greatest achievements of collective female power.
Alan (and Glenn, I reckon), you really need to re-think religion. Any religion is vastly bigger and more complicated than any fairy story. Yes, stories are an important element, but there is also ritual, authority, organisation, hierarchy, records keeping, employment, trade, celebration, conditioning, centralisation, calendars, and on and on. Our current societies grew (and continue to grow) from societies that were organised by religions. Discounting religions as daft nonsense is as silly as disowning our evolutionary ancestors.
The societies we have now could only have come about as the end result of a developmental process of which religion was a vital component. If you have climbed a ladder and reached a window sill, is it wise to kick the ladder away on the basis that you’ve finished with it?
There is a time in our lives when it’s nice to have Santa and the Tooth Fairy. Doesn’t make them real or healthy things for adults to continue to believe in. Especially the Bad Santa that organised religion is.
No. I still haven’t stated it strongly enough. Religion has been Humanity’s most important organising force for thousands of years. Some of the most important things it has provided are socialisation of the masses, education, and standardisation of moral codes. Admittedly, all of these have been flawed, but I reckon some is better than none.
Religion must impart some powerful advantage for it to have developed in almost every human society. Religion is a product of evolution (in the broad sense).
Funny how things from the past look out of date, but if you look closely at the modern equivalent, you’ll see that it’s based upon the same principles.
Alan, what’s happening now is really an inevitable crisis and tragedy. The religions helped their societies grow and advance, human ability in agriculture and technology advanced. Humans became very successful, and the population increased and became more mobile. Increasingly, the various religions were forced into contact with each other, but the dogmas were incompatible – the emergent phenomenon had dictated the structure, causing the religions to be structured similarly, but the dogmas were arbitrary (of course, because they’re imaginary), causing strife.
Now we need a solution.