Learning poems by heart - and censorship of "foreign"

A nice piece in the Guardian about the benefits of learning poems by heart at school.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2011/nov/03/fielding-poetry-rime-of-raving-dotard
My comment was inexplicably deleted. Here it is anyway - followed by my follow-up comment...



One of the best things you can give the kids at school - all categories.
And the better your choice, the greater the treasure they carry with them through life.
If it's memorable, they'll memorize it - even if it's memorable only for your own enthusiasm or the blood and thunder Fagin/Frankenstein presentation. 
That's a teacher's view. As a kid, I remembered a lot - as pointers, not as whole poems. The mountain sheep are sweeter/But the valley sheep are fatter./We therefore deemed it meeter/To carry off the latter... Ours not to reason why/Ours but to do or die/Into the valley of death/Rode the six hundred... St Agnes Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was/The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass./Numb were the beadsman's fingers as he told/His beads. His beads he told, this patient holy man.... O Wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being...  If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind. 
Non-pointing wholes were the exception - Ozymandias (how not!), a couple of Wordsworth's things, Tyger, Jabberwock, and a fair few Donne Falling Stars. 
But later, learning languages and having runs to pace, I got into Chaucer - original Prologue some way in, and Latin, Catullus, Horace and my special favourite the invocation to Venus and Spring and Epicurus of De rerum natura.
Banging it in.
Benefits so great I even got my 8th grade immigrant kids in the Stockholm ghetto school to work through Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus in enough detail to get it by heart if they wanted to. (The Latinos helped with the first vocab runthrough).
Rhythm, word music, real life - all resonating inside as Wystan says. Ignore crabbed age and celebrate golden youth.
In der Jugend goldnen Schimmer... Unter den linden,/ an der heide/da unser zweie bette was,/da muket ir finden/schone beide/gebrochen bluomen unde gras./Vor dem walde in einem tal - /tandaradei! - /schone sanc diu nahtergal... 
And if you want to learn Swedish, try Fröding... 
Havet välte, stormen ven,
vågorna rullade asklikt grå.
"En man är vräkt över bord, kapten!"
"Jaså."
So much for God.
"Den dröm som ej aldrig besannats,
som dröm var den vacker att få.
För den som ur Eden förbannats,
är Eden en Eden ändå."
So much for the cynics.
Or Ferlin:
"Du har tappat ditt ord och din papperslapp, 
du barfota barn i livet.
Nu sitter du åter på handlarns trapp,
och gråter så övergivit.
Vad var det för ord, var det långt eller kort?
Var det väl eller illa skrivit?
Tänk efter nu förrn de föser dig bort,
du barfota barn i livet..."
So much for the Tories and Gradgrinds of this world.
Or Diktonius:
"Röd Eemili ramlade perklande raklång i snön..."
Or Almqvist:
"Men utur rike prästens ko 
var den söta mjölken.
Barnen fingo stå
vid modrens bål."
So much for White Terror and witch-hunters...
Or the shortest sweetest poem I know (Yugoslav folk):
Дај
Боже
да драги 
може!
Time to leave?
I will arise and go now,
and go to Inisfree,
and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...
And savage indignation there will no longer lacerate my breast.


[Follow-up:]
Since my comment above was deleted presumable cos some of the quotes were in foreign, I'd just like to say that most of my school learnings-by-heart were pointers not full poems. Full poems and long stretches came later when I needed to pace long runs and fill queuing with some meaning if I couldn't read or think. And a lot of the time they were in foreign.
Wystan's "resonance" is spot on. And so is the teaching power of making poems (or any resonant language artefact) your own.
That's it. As for the quotes etc you don't know what you missed.

Dealing with dumping..

A nice question and answers in an agony aunt column in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/22/private-lives-relationship-ended-upset
dealt with the end of a relationship. A modern one with no professions of love for instance, but still leaving the woman devastated when she felt dumped. 


My comment was:
You were spinning a cocoon, he perceived that you were erecting a cage. 
As for saying you love someone or not, words don't count. He probably thought he was being honest and that you wouldn't accuse him of betraying Love. You probably thought he expressed Love by his actions and the way he looked at you and held you.
My guess is that any neediness came from a deep desire for affirmation, and that this is a wish rooted in something missing in your emotionally formative years as a child. Think about this, because if it's even partially the case you want something from a partner (ANY partner) that you can't get in an adult relationship. Affirmation between two adults is different from that in the relationship between a parent (or equivalent) and a child.
And if you weren't affirmed (ie loved for what you were) as a child, you'll be screwed as an adult till you mourn your loss (no solid emotional ground to stand on). We need firm ground to stand on, not straws to clutch at.
On a cheerful note - the abyss we keep slipping back into is never bottomless - if we touch bottom (which we can do by "letting go" ie surrendering to our misery ie mourning the loss) then we can push off up again.
Cocoons and cages (or, in the case of a lot of men, harness, reins and whip) won't do the trick. The only constraints we thrive on, that we feel good and human within, are voluntary and reciprocal.
That'll do for now, I hope. 
(Maybe some other time I'll have an opportunity of developing the positive aspects of all this - they are many and strong. One to think/feel about is that deep down inside we're all the same, and have an emotional strength and resilience (capacity to spring back again) that keeps us going - and this would be impossible without great love and warmth. Our *own* inner warmth and love, deep within the heart of humanity.)

Faster than the speed of light...

An article in the Guardian this morning refers to experimental evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos
This would be a revolutionary discovery if it's corroborated.
I made the following comment from a materialist dialectical perspective :


Time is just an accident of interacting material forces. So the direction of time just reflects the direction of interaction. Cause and effect is an even more fundamental axiom in our understanding of the world than the constancy of the speed of light. Meaning cause comes first and effect follows it. Without cause and effect not only would we be buggered, there wouldn't be any us to be buggered.
So indeterminacy and the rest of it is an arse-first way of saying we don't clearly understand it all yet.
So, whatever the relative speeds of photons and neutrinos, ie however rapidly they change their positions, they don't make time into a substantial phenomenon we can travel in. Things happen, including us. Because of the constancy of this, and because of our understanding as a reflection of it (ie back to front) we invented time as a measure of change. Just as we invented logic to tame the regularity in change.
Being (things and forces) is there. Thought (our inventions) helps us deal with it.
No Thought without Being. Plenty of Being without Thought.
I'll save Nothing and Becoming for another comment.

The British riots - symptoms aren't causes

An article in the Guardian by Zoe Williams, who has her headed screwed on, discussed vigilanteism and its relation to a functional society.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-vigilantism-big-society
I made the following comment:

Zoe writes: "Big society might look like people on the streets with brooms or doner knives; but that's not what functional society looks like."
For a long time society has been very functional - for the bourgeoisie running a capitalist society for their own benefit and enjoying a monopoly of violence (army and police) and public judgement (ie condemnation, punishment and criminalization of their antagonists).
Now not even the bourgeoisie and its public representatives (damn near everyone in politics and the media) can run a functional society. "Those above can't rule, and those below can't be ruled".
Which leads to unofficial attack groups (ultra-right thugs, ultimately death squads) attacking the enemies of capitalism and the bourgeois state, and others who are singled out as scapegoats.
And since the rest of us need to mind our backs, we organize self-defence groups. An "invisible", organized and "orderly" class war breaks surface and becomes visible, 2-way organized (ie polarized) and "disorderly" from the rulers' perspective. And since organization, education about society and politics, creative and benevolent treatment has been cut out of the non-ruling body of those living and working (or jobless) in Britain, no one should be surprised when the social eruptions are disorganized, ignorant, anti-social, apolitical, destructive and malevolent. It happens in the slums of the US (LA) and France (Paris) and now (once more) Britain.
Given all this we should note that given the degree of damage to property there has been very very little damage to person, and given the number of the rioters the state response has been disproportionate, vindictive and divisive, to say the least. A typical image from the riots has been of a half-a-dozen heavily armoured, anonymous (super-hoodied), armed police, with leash-tugging dogs and armoured cars in the background standing over a single unarmed lad who's about to be carted off and done over (if not physically, then civically).
The howls of rage at the symptoms (sometimes ugly symptoms) are hypocritical and cynical given the wilful neglect of the causes underlying these symptoms.
And the causes are inseparable from this bourgeois capitalist society, and will only become more deeply rooted and virulent as this society becomes less and less functional even on its own terms.
Temporary alleviation was achieved with the New Deal and the Welfare State in the 30s and 40s. However, this only occurred in powerful countries after their bourgeoisies were threatened with extinction by colonial independence and revolution - oh, and after a world war that ended with ultra-imperialist Churchill being unceremoniously dumped by the workers who had fought his imperialist war for him.
So now New Deal or Welfare State for a while yet, just more of the same gouging out of living flesh. And more and more panicky squealing and scapegoating from defenders of the state as quo (with no quid).

The riots in Britain - London, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool so far

I made the following comment on the live coverage of the riots in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-violence-looting-live)



Very briefly - it's not the government, it's the class they represent. The bourgeoisie has a monopoly of everything public in Britain Europe and most of the world today, and they're using this public authority to smash all public enterprise, goods, services and amenities they can. To put the profits from this into their own pockets (that's what profit is - private money after productive capital investment and unproductive military and ideological expenditure are taken care of). They're looting the general public (us) using the monopoly of public violence (military, police) their system gives them, not us.
Now the most reviled and criminalized and impoverished section of the general public - immigrant, slumdwelling working class lads are reacting in the way they have seen the ruling class acting towards reviled, impoverished and criminalized foreign countries - burning and looting. But they show none of the indiscriminate ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie on the rampage in the colonial wars of Britain and France, or the imperialist wars of the US.
They are a barometer showing the way the rest of us are feeling. They can react spontaneously this way because they aren't tied down by property debt, car and other loans, or a job to lose. And have the energy of youth. The rest of us don't challenge state (class) violence so lightly.
But when we do, it will need more than thousands of police to curb us. There are so many of us that we'll be kettling them, and occupying their lives the way they have been occupying ours.
And we'll be organized, and have a clear idea about what we need to do to get them off our backs for good, and tear public wealth out of their greedy, gory hands.

Cochlea implants and discrimination against the deaf

An article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/05/deaf-people-cochlear-implants
took up the arrogant and authoritarian attitudes of hearing experts in relation to deaf people and cochlea implants. A lot of the commentators piled in on the side of those vilifying the deaf. So I added this comment:


TimSkellet's early comment is excellent - the historical perspective is absolutely necessary here. Since sign language is a native language like any spoken language (lexicon, syntax, semantics, brain location) this whole business is the same as the ignorant and vicious attacks common in relation to bilingualism or language diversity.
The audiologists campaigning against sign language users are no different from race biologists or ethnic cleansers - or the academic thugs attacking minority languages or languages on the brink of extinction.
These implants are very expensive. The people working with implants have a vested interest in promoting the intervention. They are like Microsoft Windows propagandists in IT.
Look - as hero of the intolerant and bigoted Maggie Thatcher used to say and probably still does - minorities can chew gum and walk at the same time. If I know two languages well, say Finnish or Welsh and English, then I use them both as I choose, as I see fit, according to my whim. It's my right, just as it's my right to go into a shop and spend my money any way I like. It's none of your damn business to tell me what to buy or how to use what I buy. Western civilization. Right of ownership. What's mine is mine to use and abuse. And my language is more important to me than any consumer crap. These audiologists (and the other geocentrics I've mentioned) would scream blue murder and call in the cops and the court of human rights if they were forced, or even just pressured into using their school French instead of their native language (presumably English). Well, sign language is the English of deaf people, and oralism or cochlea speak is their school French.
And we all know that women are imperfect men and blacks are imperfect whites, so let's operate them too to assimilate them and lift them out of their miserable victimized status.
What a shitty society where imbeciles in a position of authority and status insist on either/or instead of both/and.

The Oslo bombing and massacre - right-wing terror

On a discussion list a Swedish contributor was quite right about the blindness of the established bourgeois/imperialist rulers to the right-wing threat. I added a few reflections:

First a couple of general remarks beside the main point:

1) Swedish TV has been broadcasting Norwegian TV more or less non-stop since yesterday afternoon, in Norwegian, with no subtitles or translation, just as is. It's astounding how easy it is to follow. Easier than local comments from football managers or players around Sweden. Few linguistic or cultural barriers to greater political unity in the Nordic countries (the slightly greater initial linguistic problems with Denmark etc would only require a little extra good will).

2) The characteristic informal and democratic tone and approach between people in the Nordic countries has been very evident in the main. Also the lack of hysteria and the thoughtfulness in the responses even of those injured or witnessing the destruction and murder.

3) More than 80 youngsters slaughtered in a country with a small population like Norway will have a huge personal and social impact. That's a lot of families and friends and communities with a gaping emotional hole suddenly ripped open. And a whole youth movement traumatized. 500 young Social Democrats were at the camp, and almost a fifth of them were wiped out.

And now some political thoughts:

1) The immediate reactions, although guarded, were full of the established "security" (ie insecurity) perspective. Parallels to the Twin Towers, the naming of Al-Quaida, the naming of a fundamentalist cleric with asylum in Norway, discussions of police and secret police and political security readiness - the lot.

2) They all chimed in "on message". Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. Australia. The EU. Obama, a complete reptile, obviously didn't give a fuck about the victims, but preached the need for increased cooperation between (imperialist) secret services and greater political unity (ie "toe the line").

3) The damage was huge - the street and district looked as if they'd been hit by an Israeli or US bomb or two. But more like Oklahoma City than Gaza or Fallujah.

4) The before and after contrasts were very telling. While the assumption was a fundamentalist Islam cell, the talk was all strategic, international, "security" and politics. When it was discovered it was a right-wing reactionary all this vanished and the personal aspects took over. Less "atrocity" and more "tragedy". No more stiff upper lip spirit of the blitz, but let the tears roll. In other words it was sentimentalized, personalized and trivialized. The insecurity experts were allowed to slouch off home to lick their wounds, so to say.

5) The arrested suspect (clearly responsible) is a reactionary Freemason fundamentalist Christian militia guy with a number of powerful guns (legal) who ran a small farm so he could buy 3 tons of bomb-grade fertilizer and assemble his car bomb. Blond, tall, business education. Wore police gear and looked like a cop so he had no trouble calling the youngsters at the party camp to a meeting to talk about the bombings in Oslo and then shoot them like sheep in a pen. So of course everyone started baying for Freemason blood, for total control and clamp down on the militia-like gun groups (legal), a ban on right wing Christian groups and propaganda, business education, and reactionaries. Right...

6) The full crocodile cohort was rolled out - archbishops, royalty, the more unctuous anchor guys.

7) The political implications of the party attacked (the (very unworker, very pro-bourgeois) Labour Party) were toned down immediately. Socialism and the welfare state as obvious targets for reaction were never mentioned.

8) It's easy to hate a swarthy raghead Ay-rab, but not so easy to hate a reactionary blond beast in evening dress swathed in posh orders.

9) The massive scale of the destruction and carnage (in peacetime Nordic circumstances, not Gaza, Fallujah or Kandahar) has made it difficult to find a single victim to tether the personal sentimental response to.

10) Total absence of discussion of the need for a mass, class-based mobilization aiming for secure housing, health, employment, and living conditions as the only real, deep, long-term solution to this kind of problem.

11) On the bright side, no polarizing hero-worship and demon-hatred as at the Twin Towers - no beatified fire-fighters or vilified Saudi allies (oops, I meant middle-eastern Muslims). No glazed-eyed Bush panic. Dignity and restraint. Unlikely to be any ring of steel around Gardemoen airport the way Blair surrounded Heath Row with tanks.

12) Yet again the futility of individual terror as a political weapon has been revealed. The victims had no power over policy, their deaths will harden opinion against the perpetrator(s) and encourage yet more repression and spying on citizens in their everyday lives. In this case however, the bomber and assassin may actually have furthered his cause - any repressive measures taken will almost certainly impact his enemies more than his political friends. Islam will be accused of creating an atmosphere of terror that encourages this "madman" (he will certainly be written off as a lunatic in a further trivialization of the affair) to act the way he did. So perhaps it's not the futility of individual terrorism that has been revealed, but the way it can be exploited if used cunningly and indirectly. The strategy of a successful "agent provocateur" (as used in India in Bombay for instance, regardless of whether the provocateurs are Pakistani or Indian government agents).


These are my immediate reactions.

Dialectics and the history of maths and technology

Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica maths software and Alpha engineering search software) has just blogged about his acquisition of a Swedish modelling software company.

http://blog.wolfram.com/2011/03/30/launching-a-new-era-in-large-scale-systems-modeling/

Very interesting stuff.

One of the comments caught my eye. Mark wrote:

"If only someone could have effectively modeled the consequences of building six nuclear reactors next to each other in an earthquake zone right beside the ocean and a hundred and fifty miles from the thirteenth largest city on the planet. Yeah. A good model would have made all the difference. [coughs] Really. Is the answer improving our technology or is the answer improving the idiots using our technology?"

I responded:@Mark. Any model (whether made by an idiot or not) depends on the axioms involved, the first principles the algorithms have to obey. Aristotle (and Hegel, too, bless him) distinguished between dialectical reasoning and formal logic. The reasoning discovers and refines the axioms underlying a system – and since they can’t be formally proven (Gödel) they are what Hegel calls apodeictic – you can just point at them and explain that the logic of investigation, discussion, and demonstration has got you here. Euclid is about as clear as you can get on this.
None of this is Kantian, however – he expels dialectical reasoning to the black box of the Thing in Itself, and tells us basically to go hang when it comes to discovering axiomatic principles. And so much of the work of today’s science and study is based on Kant (at least lip service is paid) and the worship of formal logic, that the axioms are arrived at by trial and error.
In the case of economics and politics, the investigation process is constrained by ideology and prejudice. Our system cannot deviate from equilibrium (eg linear development) over time on average. Great. And then the crises come and are dismissed as soon as they’re over as anomalies. Inadequate axiom, catastrophic result, regardless of whether the algorithms are created by a rocket scientist or an astrologer. Sun around the earth? Same thing. Nukes on earthquake faults – our models assure us bad things can’t happen, so they won’t and they haven’t.
Bottom line, the quality of our axioms depends on our freedom from ideology and prejudice in our search for fundamental principles.
Most politicians and economists today have clout without quality, they’re always getting it wrong. Quality without clout exists too. But clout is a political thing. The Inquisition had clout without quality, Galileo had quality without clout.
In other words, Quality is Us, and US is a political war with THEM.

The necessity of Big Nuke - Monbiot again

George Monbiot in the Guardian sounding off again about the necessity of nuclear power.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/mar/31/double-standards-nuclear

My response this time:

So, you're making bets with human lives for the next ten thousand years, at least. Less than one hundred years of 100 centuries have passed, and we've already seen the Bomb in action, jerry-built first generation plants, nuclear waste in the US and the USSR gone AWOL, "accidents" like Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Ten thousand years. The final solution to waste management hasn't been solved. The history of (literate) human civilization only covers five thousand years. One or two epochs of chaos and barbarianism and we'll see Nuclear Fission generating a Final Solution for humanity - that's all of us, now and ever after. 
Big Oil, and Big Coal don't threaten civilization as such. And over a perspective of ten thousand years!!
You, George, are gearing up for a really plush job as a shill for Big Nuke.
Your cred has been washed away with the toxic spill water in Fukushima they can't find storage for. And the toxicity shredding your cred will accumulate (it accumulates, remember?) over the next, oh, ten years or so, at the very least, according to Big Nuke fans. That's what they're saying about the situation as it is NOW. But this "accident" looks to non-Nuke fans very much like the beginning of a catastrophe, not the end.
Two developments will solve our energy problems in the next couple of decades. 
One is certain - renewable fuels and improved efficiency. 
The other still sounds hypothetical and speculative to most people, but I can assure you it isn't. It's a successful mobilization of the massed working classes and peasants of dozens of countries around the world to put an end to capitalism and its dictatorship (when did the bourgeoisie ever permit the diversity of a competitive alternative non-capitalist workers state to show its paces?)
After that Big Nuke (and yourself as Little Nuke) will be as relevant as the people who used to think the sun circled the earth.

Emergency regimes in the imperialist heartlands

George Monbiot writes indignantly in the Guardian about illiberal and repressive legislation in Britain, and the tightening of the screws since Thatcher. 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/free-protest-clegg-oh-dear?
A commentator indicated that what's good for the goose should be good for the gander. I quoted him and added my own comment:

TheGreatRonRafferty
28 March 2011 9:05PM
On the BBC earlier tonight - the announcement that hooligans wearing face coverings would be banned from demonstrations. On screen at exactly the same time - a line of police officers ....... with face coverings.
You couldn't make this stuff up!

Well, anything and everything they do to protect their economic, social and state interests is fine, even if they have to set aside constitutional rights and freedoms in the process. We've seen this in the emergency dictatorial regimes used to protect a bourgeois capitalist state in Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), Spain (Franco), Chile (Pinochet), etc, etc (just riffle through the diplomatic history of the US, Britain and France for a more complete list. If the threat from the working class and its mass of poor allies isn't quite as immediate, but still acute, you get permanent regimes of emergency mostly military goons (as in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia etc) protecting the capitalist system. A bit less acute and a bit more constrained by the deadlock between the classes underlying classical bourgeois democracy and you get what we  see in eg the US Britain and France. Sometimes desperate concessions (as in the postwar Welfare States and their equivalents) and sometimes (when the bourgeoisie feels it's got us on the ground) a good kicking and a lot of harrassment (the Thatcher/Reagan/neo-lib-con era).
If we did the same to them, their choir of media angels would stop singing hosanna in the highest and start belting out a doom-laden dies irae. We'd hear no end of the evil being done to Freedom, Democracy, Justice, National Glory, the Economy, and Joe down the Pub.
If we managed to exorcise capitalist economic insanity and set up a workers state or two, they would protect their interests (ill-gotten gains) by all measures necessary, in the name of National Glory, the Economy  and Joe down the Pub, and in flagrant disregard of Freedom, Democracy and Justice. (Using Joe down the Pub to do their dirty work, of course.)
In all these instances they are evidently operating a dictatorship in the interests of the bourgeois class, all the while screaming that a corresponding dictatorship in the interests of the working class is totally indefensible, has no right to exist and must be exterminated.
Over the past couple of decades it has become obvious that Classes are still with us, and that they are still engaged in Class War. Obvious but unacknowledged, and unmentionable in respectable public discourse (eg the Beeb and the Guardian). George M and others describe the symptoms, but refuse to diagnose the cause, even less the cure. But until the cause is diagnosed and publicly acknowledged, and until there is a massive public debate on the best cure, then the symptoms will just get worse and worse.
The New Deal and the Welfare State were just desperate palliative measures (morphine to keep a dying system from feeling the agony). As soon as the worst fever abated, the mercy measures were withdrawn, and the system was back on the street as its old rapacious self, hungrier and more ruthless than ever. 
And if anyone can imagine a new dispensation of Welfare State palliatives being prescribed today, in the first place they're out of their minds, and in the second place, if the inconceivable should happen, it would all be rolled back again in a few decades, for ever and ever.
So, would you rather be a naive non-combatant torn limb from limb by Freedom and Democracy Peace-Builders, or would you prefer to bite the bullet and defend yourself and yours and your own interests - the interests that are shared by everyone in the world except the rich and powerful few and their mercenary thugs and parasites? 

Energy Effluent

Same energy bollocks as the last blog took up. This time it's George Monbiot in the Guardian who's condemning us to millennia of fear, uncertainty and doubt:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima?


I commented:
So much for Monbiot's progressive credentials (I won't bother with "left" or "socialist"). 
I'm sure he's gone through the litany a thousand times... Sellafield, Chernobyl, Murmansk...
And all the US and Soviet weapons and plutonium that's been misplaced and is unaccounted for, and the fact that 100,000 years is a geological time scale, and that Sod's Law rules...
If Monby thinks that the Japanese run "crappy old plants" then god knows how he'd describe what they have in other less "timid" countries. How about some jerry-built breeder on an earthquake fault in some jerry-built nation? (err, China? the Balkans?) Volcanoes? Asteroids? Nuclear bombing (err, Israel finally loses it and bombs Iran).
There's any amount of depleted uranium just lying around in Iraq...
Final deposition? Not even "crappy old" Sweden has found the answer, let alone errr Sellafield.
In fact Monby's lost it... put all the money, scientific research, propaganda and international cooperation into renewables that's been wasted on nukes and you'd have an alternative up and running in a decade. Solar in North Africa, China, India and Australia coupled with High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines coupled with advanced storage capabilities we haven't got an inkling of yet (think video over the internet on mobiles just ten or fifteen years ago). And that's just solar.
M is either headline-hungry, money-hungry or power-hungry - we'll see which in the next few years. A Christopher Hitchins of Big Nuke.

On energy policy

An exchange on a discussion list degenerated into a jeremiad about having no choice except Coal, Oil or Nuclear, whether we like it or not.


I objected, as follows:

Fossil fuels are deadly in many different ways. So are nukes.

We don't have to accept either. The alternatives are feasible, and in aggregate more than sufficient. They can (and now *will*) be developed as rapidly as nukes were during ww2 and the Cold War - money is no object when you really really want something.

Oil is shite, coal is shite, nuclear fission is shite.

Water is good (rivers, waves, tides), air is good (wind, a/c heat exchangers), earth is good (geothermal heat exchange and extraction), and fire is good (geothermal steam and direct heating in volcanic areas). Insulation and passive heating is good. Sun is good (passive heating of water and buildings, solar film, solar concentration plants). 

Storage and battery technologies will soon be up to the task of evening out supply and demand, and large scale provision of power by utilities will be smoothly linked with small-scale local production, and transmission technologies will even out geographical disadvantages (High Voltage Direct Current).

There will be immense economies of energy by way of local production of power, food, etc - rooftop solar collectors, wind-turbines and gardens. Every stream will be able to produce electric power for local use. 

Nuclear fusion and extraction of electricity from the environment (Tesla lives!) are good, but a few decades from use on a mass scale.

There's no point whatever in us lobotomizing ourselves to put ourselves in the position of today's rulers and fuel/power profiteers. We don't have to pretend it's a choice between Death by coal, death by oil, or death by radiation. 

Their "realism" is reptilian self-interest trumpeted as the General Good by corrupt media, prostituted expertise, and worshippers of the Established Fact tm.

Our realism is removing these bastards from power and setting in motion an international drive to realize the potential I've sketched above on a scale a thousand times greater than the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan or the Race to the Moon.

Their approach reduces human beings to passive victims, ours magnifies them into active makers and doers.

Some elementary points about getting to socialism

In a discussion on Facebook, AM wrote:

"For real socialism, look at Germany, plus the Scandinavian nations. Free elections, trade unions are respected, health care for life for all citizens, & free enterprise to make the money that makes all the above possible. China is headed in this direction, I think. Do you really want to go back to the USSR, with no money & a five-year wait for an apartment or a Trabant (car)?"and"... there are better, successful models of socialism than the old Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist one. I wish the workers of Bangladesh success in preserving trade unions!"

I responded:

AM, you can forget Scandinavia as a model of Socialism. The idiots running the crippled remains of ex-Warsaw Pact countries like Czecho/Slovakia after the so-called Velvet Revolutions had all kinds of crazy ideas about Third Way socialism based on eg Sweden. Fat lot of good it did them. Not much left of the Welfare State these days. Both Conservative and Social Democrat governments have been rolling and racheting back all the postwar gains of the workers. Education, health, pensions, workers rights, public services of all kinds all going down the drain while the "country" ie the rich just gets richer and richer.
And there's nothing odd or remarkable about it - workers get better conditions when they threaten to boot out capitalists for ever. As soon as the capitalists feel less threatened they force worse conditions on us as soon as they can.
And as Mike said, Mao and Stalin and their bureaucratic regimes have as little to do with Marx and Lenin as Hitler and Mussolini - with the exception that Mao and Stalin used Marx and Lenin as masks to fool the workers. They had to do that cos their privileges were sucked from the blood of a non-capitalist state, a workers state. Bureaucratic regimes always try to turn themselves into real hereditary bourgeois, though, rather than let the workers take power democratically. In the USSR they went the whole hog and handed over the state to capitalism. The Chinese haven't got there yet (what's the point? They're doing fine as it is,and what on earth has imperialism got to offer them that they can't fix better themselves?)
If the imperialists don't destroy the world, real socialism will come, don't worry about that. What we don't know is where or when. What we do know is that the start will be a bloody mess following the battle to oust the capitalists - they'll go far less quietly than Gaddafi - and that when things settle down they won't look ANYTHING AT ALL like the Stalinist USSR or Red China.


Almost immediately AM responded with this friendly post:

" ‎@ Choppa: best explanation I've heard yet! Thanks. Is there any country today that comes close to your ideal? Just curious."

and I replied:
Nope. But more on that another time. 
Think modern bourgeois democracy before the English Revolution of 1640-60. There were no countries then anyone could point to that came close to that ideal. Yet after two centuries all the advanced countries were bourgeois democracies. 
The thing is that socialism will be a worldwide system improving on the highest levels of production and quality reached by capitalism, and it will be run on the basis of workers democracy and universal cooperation and planning. We'll get there, but there's a lot of spade work to be done before we do.

Mary Beard's blog reflections on a successful reunion with some old college friends and public cuts
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2011/01/old-girls-reunion.html
provoked a reactionary outburst from "Anne":

"So why this unanimity?"Because you're all knee-jerk left-wingers who are typically intolerant of anyone who disagrees with you. I went to Cambridge and I know your type: seemingly likeable and intelligent, but underneath you are actually very narrow-minded (cf "crap arguments" and the spiteful attack on Toby Young) and genuinely think you are cleverer than everyone else. Wake up and take a look at our horrendous schools, appalling healthcare and bankrupt economy and then at least have the respect not to silence and dismiss your opponents.

I commented:

Happy continuation! (of the New Year) as they say here in Sweden.When you're with friends you talk from the heart, and that's refreshing and revitalizing.When you're with acquaintances or colleagues you spice up the platitudes with the odd shared in-joke, but not much more.So the intimate reunion is what I go for. The "official" one might release lots of very unpleasant feelings (especially if the context is somewhere as schizophrenic as Cambridge).I say "intimate" cos "private" smacks too much of Anne's ideological single-mindedness right now. Perhaps Mary could give us a riff on the real meaning of the word "public" as in "public-minded/spirited" or "open to the public".One of the things that galls me about Anne's self-righteous and strident preaching is her obvious contempt for the vast majority of her fellow-citizens and fellow human beings. She and her ilk strike out their own humanity and promote the inhumanity of the war of each against all. If everything human except this selfish part of herself and a select few other individuals is alien to her, then her life doesn't deserve to be called human. But at least she isn't spewing the "Western civilization", "humanitarian principles" hypocrisy of the smoother brand of Conservative."Homo sum: humani nil me alienum puto""No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main".

Another comment on the Middle East

An article in the Guardian by Seamus Milne about the Palestine situation after the recent leaks ended on a miserable capitulatory note.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/26/authentic-leaders-middle-east-peace
I wrote the following comment:

Milne details one humiliation and betrayal after another, and the violence from Israel's and the PS's side accompanying these acts of brutal oppression. He makes it clear without saying as much that the whole setup involves the National Question to a very high degree. Good reasons for war and regime change - "at the very least".
But the usual litany of "democratic overhaul", representation and respectable unity is then churned out as a solution for "anyone who cares for the Palestinian cause", with the usual pre-emptive weeping and wailing. The only sane reason for such an argument I can think of is to avoid being smashed to pieces and final-solutioned by the Israelis. In which case the choice offered seems to be between the peace of a real graveyard and the peace of a virtual graveyard.
Real sanity will not accept such a choice.
JFK once said (mirabile dictu) that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." His words ring truer than ever today in the Middle East and the Maghreb, and make Milne's whining Jeremiad into an utterly useless piece of writing "for those who care about the Palestinian cause".

This was deleted by a moderator, so I posted this instead:

Hm... deleted for being too inflammatory no doubt.
So let's just say that there isn't the slightest possibility of any "peaceful" solution in Palestine (or indeed the Middle East in general) and that any claim that there is a pure illusion.
Palestine (especially Gaza) is both a real and a virtual graveyard. Rousseau said that "peace" under the wrong conditions just meant the peace of the graveyard. This kind of "peace" might be imposed temporarily, but (as events in Tunisia etc and many other places at many other times show) it won't last.
JFK once stated the obvious:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
This is what we're witnessing on an escalating scale in the world today. Palestine is no exception.

A comment on the Middle East

Someone in Israel complained about the Hizbollah take-over of Lebanon in a discussion group. I made the following comment:

"No country is an island..." and certainly not in the Middle East (and North Africa). 

The only key to understanding the tortuous shifts and tempestuous hostilities there is imperialist interference to grab and safeguard strategic fuel supplies (and profits). First the British and French, now overwhelmingly the US (plus Nato and the EU as bit players). 

It's not just a question of Israel or Syria or Iran (or the bogey-de-jour) in themselves. It's the whole antagonistic system. The reactionary Zionist state of Israel is a bloodthirsty US surrogate, enclave, bridgehead, thug and assassin. A Frankenstein's monster composed of body parts sewn together and galvanized into movement - only Mary Shelley's monster was gentle and cultured. Its corrupt oppressive neighbours are either imperialist creations themselves (like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and now Iraq) or non-imperialist states based on anti-US(-French-British) popular hatred and surviving because of this (Iran, Syria, Libya, Algeria).

Democracy etc is as irrelevant to the Middle Eastern setup as God, Jehova and Allah are to humanity. And as irrelevant as human rights violations against the Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, and homosexuals in Nazi Europe. 

The only hope for a resolution of this toxic world-historical tangle is political organization and work to remove foreign and local oppression. Until then chopping individual heads off the hydra will only make things worse. Passive residents of the Middle East are at the mercy of the violence sloshing about, whether they take part in it or not. The more they support the various killers (whether "official" as in the Israeli armed forces, or unofficial, as in Mossad) the less involuntary and arbitrary is their fate. Supporting the killers but pretending the violence is only perpetrated by the Other is acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand waiting for its heads and legs to be scythed off.

If Israelis want to blame anybody for their insecurity and anxiety and guilty consciences they should blame the US and Britain. But they won't so the insecurity and anxiety and guilt will continue until the Zionist utopia is blown away (by the hurricanes of history).

(NB Zionists (and of course Zionists are not all ruthless bloodthirsty reactionaries, although you'd hardly think so these days) may be Jews, but Jews aren't necessarily Zionists.)

So if you live in Israel, or the Middle East in general, you're living in a very turbulent and violent part of the world. Inventing scapegoats and pointing fingers won't help. The class war going on worldwide is open and deadly, and needs to be resolved deep down.

Pro-terror control laws in Britain

Some superficial pie-in-the-sky whining in the Guardian about undemocratic control orders in Britain. No call for action, no call for a system that won't spawn this kind of repression, no attempt to look at the brutal reality of the interests the politicians are defending.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/02/control-orders-human-rights-coalition-review

My comment:

Everyone seems to think that there is some scientifically based justification for the orders. But just look at the war on terror itself. The only logical justification for it has nothing to do with children's debates about principles of human rights or defending democracy or international law.
It's pure self-interest on the part of the ruling bourgeoisie mediated through its lackeys in the official political bodies of the state.
Now how can such apparently bone-headed irrationality serve the interests of a state? Well, if it's an imperialist state it has to keep its power to coerce its enemies, most visibly hostile rival states but fundamentally including the national and international working class. And how does it keep its power? First of all by arming its military and police to the teeth and using them to kill, break, cripple and intimidate to the greatest possible extent. And second by using a strategy of divide and rule.
The arming is proceeding (let's focus on the US and Britain) full tilt flying in the face of democratic values and natural justice. Police are used as militias and trained to be as brutal as possible to increase the intimidation. If the police fail, the army is called in. If the army fails, a fascist regime is brought in for some no holds barred defence of the state. Bugger the regime (democracy etc), it's the state that matters.
Overt murder, breaking and material destruction is a US speciality. It deters rivals and enemies from confrontation. It wins no hearts and minds, but it's not intended to. Deeds are what matter, not words.
Divide and rule is a British speciality. Weaker than the States in material terms it's way ahead in diplomacy and strategy. It knows it's fighting a rearguard war on a road to nowhere, so it aims to survive as long as possible. Hence it balkanizes everywhere it loses direct control. Nation against nation, "race" against "race", cultures and religions against each other. It's good at making the victims of its policies do it's dirty work and making them look like ruthless aggressors out to slaughter innocent bystanders.
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka; Nigeria; Cyprus; Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi; Malaysia, Singapore; Yeman, Aden; the whole Middle East with Israel as the jewel in the crown (Balfour was British); white colonists vs Indians vs various black ethnicities; Christians vs Muslims vs Hindus; etc etc.
And that's just the old colonies.
Ireland is the gold standard of British strategy. 90 years of divide and rule since nominal independence, and still going strong. Who cares about mayhem and national prostration - Ireland is crippled and fettered still.
Foreign policy is the same - throw spanners into the works every chance you get - France vs Germany is the big one there, updated into sabotaging the EU (as if that was needed!).
And the war on terror? Scare the shit out of people with a scape-goat bogeyman - the Mau-Mau de jour - and fill the media with one-sided tales of demons and dragons. Kettle public opinion. Be as over-the-top as you like - surround Heathrow with half the army!
So, there's no way these creatures of the capitalist class dictatorship will ever be converted or even enlightened. They must be removed and their state replaced with one backing and protecting the working majority of the people. Till then we'll live in chains and so will our kids and their kids to the 10th generation.
A good start is getting up off our knees and saying a resounding NO.