I was at a friends this afternoon when the telephone rang. Her ten year old son answered, took a message, hung up, then said “That was John. The blanket has gone”. After a brief moment of confusion we understood. There was a sense of relief, for clearly, this political hot potato was fully baked some time ago. It is amazing that Tony tried to cling to him for so long, like a kiddy with his comforter … “don’t take away my blanket”.

David Blunkett quits - coverage from the BBC.

Atheist finds ‘God’ after 50 years - The Guardian

Professor Antony Flew, a lifelong campaigner for atheism, has decided that DNA is so complicated that there must be intelligence behind it. He said: “I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins.”

Professor Flew has missed the development of the “Pattern of Stupidity Theory”. Formulated to account for the fact that Donald Rumsfeld appears to be human, it also explains why complicated things with a lack of intelligence look clever. (I realise Rumsfeld fits the theory in both forms).

On the latter level, the theory is basically the old monkey/typewriter situation. Try it yourself: randomly press four keys on the keyboard without looking: eventually you will come up with a real word. Will you explain this to yourself by saying “my fingers thought what to type?”. No, because you know that your fingers do not have the facility to think, and nor will you say “It was God wot done it”.

“Scientists now say we are in a new stage of the Earth’s history, the Anthropocene Epoch, when we ourselves have become the globe’s principal force.” from BBC News, “Planet Under Pressure”

Fantastic news … scientists agree only us to blame. If we are the principal force shaping life on the planet (for this is what they mean) then we only have ourselves to blame for the mess we find ourselves in. The reality is that whilst the first part of the last sentance is false, the second true: Life is still shaped more by the laws of the universe than by man; The problems life is encountering right now are more shaped by man than anything. And whilst we can escape the worst of the damage we might cause by modifying our behaviour we will never escape the laws of the universe: We will not gain control over earthquakes, we will not beat the evolving nature of pathogens and we will most unlikely ever stop a giant asteroid wiping us all out. The true nature of life is, when extrapolated to the final destiny of each of us, hopeless: we shall die.

I once spent an evening in the company of Three Hundred London Hippies, Ken Babs and his wife. It was a talk Ken was giving in London with Video clips and soundtracks. “Ken Babs and the Merry Pranksters, A multimedia Experience” is what they’d call it now.

Anyway, Ken was on Stage and the Three Hundred Hippies lay between he and me and my girlfriend, sitting at the back in suits having gone straight from work. Sitting next to me was a well dressed and pleasant middle aged American lady who turned out to be Kens wife.

I seem to recall we made some polite conversation but embarrassingly my girlfriend and I left half way through what was billed to be a four hour show. I am not sure now if it was the overwhelming nature of the “multimedia experience” which was in itself an assault on the mind, Ken dressed in a black cowboy suit reeling off stories as six screens behind him showed footage of “the bus” and tapes blared out recordings - or the additional assault on the sense of smell: specifically the smell of three hundred London Hippies.

Ken Kesey is dead after all. This I am sure is news to few people except a few weirdos like myself. He was supposed to be one of my heroes so I spent a night sleeping well having deliberately not answered the question I asked of myself several days ago. I forgot about the issue for a while, largely perhaps because in the back of my mind I knew it to be so. www.pranksterweb.org have all the answers in their Kesey Bio and I thank them for confirming what I knew, I think. Although come to think of it I was seriously engaged in being a buddhist when he died so I do have some sort of an excuse. It’s hard to keep up with the news if you meditate enough. Or sleep enough. Actually it must have been sleep … it’s a timing thing.

Freedomforall.net has decided to copyright and trademark the “Pattern of Stupidity” Theory TM. See post below This has been decided because some damn American woman Stole my “google your fridge contents” idea and made a million bucks and a name for herself from it. I first demonstrated the benefits of the internet to fat lazy housewives seven years ago using this technique and they all bought it. Then I became Buddhist and got all these fuzzy ideas about a world of peace and justice where all men lived in harmony. After I threw my ideas of ownership out with the buddhist bathwater I got poor and hungry for a bit. That wasn’t nice - so by trademarking and copyrighting the “Pattern of Stupidity Theory” I aim to make a squillion dollars and save all the poor people from Donald Rumsfeld.

The Persuaders - All about selling by PBS correspondent Douglas Rushkoff who used to write for the Guardian newspaper suggests we may end up in a world made of advertising …

Douglas for once has missed the point: We already do. Just look at the adspend of the US elections. How many starving children could that money have saved?

The Persuaders

One hundred years from now wealth limits will be seen as a normal and natural part of economics. It will be obvious long before then that the lack of them is the chief facilitator of ecological destruction. Future generations will not forgive us for the profligate way in which we treat the finite natural resources of our planet. People of our age will be seen as the most destructive, least civilized and least considerate ever. However big, bold and civilized we like to think we are, history will not be kind to us.

As we wage war against nature and each other we are fighting wars which can never be won. These wars, fought in the name of freedom turn us all into slaves and are rapidly destroying much of the natural world. Times are hard and getting harder for most people on the planet. As Africa starts to feel the pinch of topsoil erosion over the next twenty years and other parts of the third world flood the scene will get uglier. As mans numbers grow and grow, these things will become only more pressing. Sixteen thousand children die needlessly every day and this number will grow. Is a man owning more than he can use in a lifetime really worth this?

We need to live more simply and conserve natural resources for the good of all and so that our planet can start to breathe again. We need to be civilized, and we are not.

It is an annoying fact of British life that every government contract will run over budget and over time. The same is probably true of most modern and not so modern nations. Yet France builds the worlds tallest road bridge and does it on time and on budget. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this is that the french construction industry and government contracting were both so corrupt only ten years ago that this could not have happened. Assuming the bridge does not fall down in the very near future, one can safely assume that the French have learned lessons, lessons they could rightly teach most other nations.

Psychologically the timing of this interests me. The French were condemned under the “you’re with us or against us” banner as being against all that is good and right and true. This was for trying to build bridges and avoid a war - a war that now turns out to have been sold on lies. It seems in some ways as though the Millau bridge over the River Tarn is a big finger in the air to the USA.

See it on BBC News.

Tight security at airports, biometric passports and flights being turned back from Europe could convince Americans that their security is being taken seriously. They would be foolish to believe this, however, as the black hole of the USA-Mexico border shows clearly. Last year some three million illegal aliens attempted to enter the USA across its southern land border. Two million of them succeeded.

This throws into a stark light the reality of US border security: there is none. And let’s face the truth, if you were an international terrorist with a grand plan to damage the USA, would you try to fly in on a well-monitored British Airways flight, fake passport in hand? Of course not, you would fly south of the border where security is weaker then go in by land where no passport real or fake is needed.

So what have the American authorities gained by their “Fortress America” policies? Firstly, they have achieved an image of ’security’ which has been enough to ensure the re-election of Mr. Bush despite the on the ground reality. Secondly, they have gained ongoing access to an awful lot of information about what their own citizens, and legal visitors, are doing and thinking.

It’s pretty difficult not to become a conspiracy theorist in the light of such simple evidence, however, there is an explanation for these things which is both more simple and more profound. The people who have power in this world all see things through pretty much the same world-view. Their actions, which may look like conspiracy, are actually founded on common misunderstandings. In other words, there is no conspiracy, just a “Pattern of Stupidity”.