Reverse-engineering the Prophet

Certain details of Mohammed's life were considered too embarrassing for Muslims to be included in his official hagiography. This article asks the question: what could they possibly be, given that the book unabashedly credits him with almost every possible crime and character flaw? It comes up with a surprising and very plausible answer.

 Richard Dawkins famously described the God of the Old Testament as the “most unpleasant character in all fiction”. Among the Divine character flaws, Dawkins lists “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. In God’s defence, it should be noted that He wasn’t all these things all of the time. His character depends on which of the Old Testament’s many authors we are looking at: His so-called prophets. It is commonly assumed by atheists that belief in a single God draws on early childhood imprints of an all-powerful father figure. Yet the prophets of monotheism, God’s designers, are a special case, in that many of them - Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, to start with - did not know their real fathers. As well as being an emotional deprivation for the growing child, in tribal societies this was also a source of shame and opprobrium from his peers. Furthermore, his guardians may not have treated him with the tenderness they would give their own sons. The budding prophet’s defence strategy in this powerless situation must therefore consist of inventing an invisible father figure to protect him from the slights of others, and invert the feeling of shame into one of superiority. In addition, he needs to defend himself against the abusiveness or cruelty of the stepfather by deflecting it towards others (other tribes, sinners, or unbelievers). Finally, to be effective, the imaginary being must outrank his real earthly guardians, and by extension, all authority. His childlike awe of that stepfather’s total power over him is projected into the property of omnipotence accorded to the divinity. In this light, Jesus’s claim to be the son of God makes perfect sense to a psychoanalyst, although “step-son” may be nearer the mark. God the stepfather In this struggle to create and forge belief in an invisible protector and ally to fortify the stunted self, the quality of goodness simply does not enter the equation. In fact the stepfather’s mean side becomes magnified and turned into the weapons of the prophet’s vengeance on the world. In this simplified picture I use the figure of the stepfather to stand for the sum of the deprived child’s early experience of adult and peer power. While we cannot necessarily identify the individual wielders of that power, it should be theoretically possible to “reverse-engineer” books of prophecy and make novelistic surmises about a prophet’s early life. Naturally, in most cases, the lack of independent corroboration would render this work unverifiable and liable to be dismissed as fanciful musing. But one outstanding exception would be the prophet Mohammed, whose bowdlerised biography, variously known as Siraat-rasuul-allah and As-siraat al- nabawiyya, or here simply as the Sirah, offers tantalising glimpses of his early life. In addition, many of the rants in the Koran itself sound like verbatim quotes from a raging parent figure. As for Mohammed’s vision of God, we shall have to assume it is a composite of various parental figures, as he never knew his own father and had several guardians in quick succession at a very formative stage in his development. His Allah is certainly just as unpleasant as the God of the Old Testament, if not more so, and it is not easy to decide which of those unpleasant traits were directly borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures and which are products of Mohammed’s own fancy. One example of the Divine capriciousness is a theme which runs through the Koran of the Hell fire which awaits the unbelievers. But who are these unbelievers, and why do they not believe? They are the ones whom Allah has not rightly guided and “Allah guides whom He pleases to the right path.” (That quote comes from Koran 2.213, but recurs in various forms throughout the book). So in fact it is Allah’s fault that they do not believe in the first place, and yet one of the main themes of the book concerns the “painful punishments” that await them. Did He create unbelievers just for the fun of torturing them? He certainly seems to savour their pain, adding some gothic details: 22:19 “… for them will be cut out a garment of Fire: over their heads will be poured out boiling water” 23:104 “… The Fire will burn their faces, and therein they will grin, with displaced lips” 44:45 “Like molten brass; it will boil in their insides,” 4:56 “Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire: as often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the penalty: for Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.” If we were in any doubt about Allah’s perverse nastiness, there is the Hadith about Allah telling Adam that of every 1000 souls, 999 were due for Hell fire (Bukhari 6:60:265). So the first conclusion we would draw from looking at this portrait of a vicious parent figure is that its author, if it was indeed Mohammed, was subject to some child-rearing practices which we tend to regard these days as outmoded, and which are certainly discouraged by the social services in most advanced countries. Some of the specific traits peculiar to his case include: - extreme fear of mockery or criticism, to the point that laughing at anything at all could be construed as an insult; - aversion to nakedness (gymnophobia) - apart from wanting all women covered up, he even banned his male followers from urinating in a standing position, which would involve raising their robes; - an obsession with female genitalia with some forty references to gardens under which (rather than “through which”) waters flow; - concern for the welfare of orphans, in particular the protection of their inheritance rights; - the obligation to submit, without protest or cries, with bending over as a sign of submission; - the ever-present threat of graphically described sadistic punishments, with nowhere to hide either one’s inmost thoughts or one’s physical self; - sedulous braggadocio, vaunting of power and superiority with hyperbolic imagery. Childhood abuse Mohammed’s ninth-century hagiographer Ibn Hisham edited his work from earlier sources, removing the parts of Mohammed's life story which could be “embarrassing to Muslims”. This tradition has naturally given rise to much surmise about what could possibly be more embarrassing to Muslims than the fact that their leader was a lying paedophile and incorrigible philanderer and rapist, a treacherous warlord and physical coward, a corrupt thief and robber, a mass-murderer, a slaver and a heartless sadist, who may have been cuckolded by Aisha in revenge for his swiving the glamorous Jewish captive Juwayriyah. That Mohammed is a walking compendium of character flaws is copiously illustrated by the stories which Ibn Hisham thought fit to include, so what on earth could he have felt obliged to suppress? The clue came to me after reading countless stories of rape victims being stoned to death while their attackers walked free in Shari‘ah hellholes such as Somalia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, (just try Googling “rape victim stoned”). Muslims who have not been corrupted by Western morals seem quite sanguine about raping, as has recently been shown in countless reports from the front lines of the so-called Arab Spring. “Rape jihad” against non-Muslims occurs in all countries where Muslims and Kuffar live together, from Sweden to Sudan, and serves as much as a tool of humiliation as a sexual outlet. The only thing Muslims would find embarrassing is the shame of being a victim. Upending the widely held but quite unsupported belief that paedophilia is a universal taboo, Lloyd deMause, founder of the Institute and Journal of Psychohistory, in his article The Universality of Incest outlines all sorts of institutionalised pederasty, including the widespread practice of farming out one’s children to others for the purpose, sometimes in the context of a mutual exchange. It may seem unbelievable to today’s loving parents that people could even dream of treating children in this way, so a brief sketch of deMause’s hypothesis might be helpful here. His researches into all sorts of offbeat sources have shown that childhood in antiquity was very different from what it is today. Only very recently, and only in more enlightened family lines, has it evolved from a nightmare of violence, neglect and sexual abuse to something approaching child- friendly. Lloyd deMause describes six stages in this evolution, ranging from the Infanticidal Mode (Antiquity to Fourth Century AD.) and the Abandoning Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.) to the Intrusive Mode (Eighteenth Century) and today’s socializing and empathic modes practised in the better kindergartens. Obviously many families are behind their times; but a few lead the way forward. Sixth century Arabia was probably behind the times according to the deMause chronology with female infanticide still rampant. In that phase of child-rearing history, it was obviously not the little dead children who made history, but their traumatised siblings. And in the grown-up world, male to female population ratios of anything up to 160:100 were an incitement to conflict over females, especially in a polygamous context. As for boys, it was a fairly common practice among city-folk to hand them over to wet-nurses from birth, and the Sirah mentions a fair where Bedouin women would tout their services to mothers in exchange for cash. Mohammed’s mother Amina was cash-strapped, and the woman who took Mohammed in after some hesitation, could well have been motivated by the boy’s good looks and the possibility of making money through the all too common practice of renting little boys out for pederasty. Parents at the time could not have been totally unaware of this and presumably turned a blind eye. One of the reservations of fathers who sold an unwanted daughter into a life of sex slavery concerned not the sufferings of the child, but the eventuality that one might one day find oneself in bed with her without realising it. This line of reasoning is perfectly normal where morality is hedged with taboos rather than founded on ethical principles of do-as-you-would–be-done- by. At any rate something traumatic did happen to Mohammed while in the care of that Bedouin woman. It is recounted twice, the first time by Halima, the wet-nurse: It was not longer than a month after our return that his milk-brother came running to me and his father, saying, “That Qurayshi brother of mine, two men dressed in white garments have taken hold of him and have thrown him on the ground. They ripped open his belly, and are squeezing him.” I and his foster-father hastened out and found him standing apparently unharmed but with his countenance quite altered. We questioned him, and he said, “Two men dressed in white garments came to me, who threw me down, opened my abdomen and searched in it for I know not what.” We returned with him to our tent, and his foster-father said to me, “O Halima! I fear something has happened to the boy. Carry him to his family ere the injury becomes apparent!” … and the second time in more hallucinatory language – and with more befitting tableware – by Mohammed: Whilst I and my milk brother were pasturing some animals in the rear of our houses, two men came to us dressed in white garments and bearing a golden platter full of snow. They took hold of me, opened my belly, extracted my heart, split it open and took out of it a black lump of blood which they threw away. Then they washed my heart and belly with snow, until they had purified them. Then one of them said to his companion, “Weigh him against ten of his nation.” And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. Then he said, “Weigh him against one hundred of his nation.” And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. Then he said, “Weigh him with one thousand of his nation.” And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. After that he said, “Leave him; for if you were to weigh him against his whole nation, he would outweigh it.” Later, the apostle of Allah was in the habit of saying that there was not a prophet who had not pastured sheep. When they asked, “You too, O messenger of God?” he answered, “Me too!” Whatever we are to make of this story hinges partly on the exact meaning of ةقلع (‘alaqah – translated as “lump”, but normally meaning “leech”). It could be an echo of the alukah of Proverbs 30:15, one of the most enigmatic verses of the Bible: The horseleech hath two daughters, crying Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things that never say “enough”. (Proverbs 30:15). The two daughters, the Womb and the Grave, suggest that the horseleech is identified with Ishtar, the goddess of Love and Death 1 , or Al-Laat in the pre-Islamic Arab pantheon. Some commentators identify it with a night-demon. Not to be missed either is the echo of the two men in shining garments who stood by the Holy Sepulchre after Jesus’s resurrection (Luke 24:3) and reappeared as he rose into heaven: They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them (Acts 1:10). They are also reborn as a cinematic cliché: the two men in white coats who come to cart overwrought characters to the lunatic asylum 2 . In fact the whole passage reads like a heavily embroidered screen memory borrowed from earlier scriptural sources, with the only clue to what really happened being the reaction of the foster parents, anxious to cover up the injury to the boy. Which they clearly succeeded in doing with this fable. 1 in The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953) Robert Graves and Joshua Podro, p.209 2 I have restored some of the story teller’s repetitive style to the translation of the passage. In his psychobiography of the Prophet, Understanding Muhammad, Ali Sina interprets this as the onset of Mohammed’s temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a rare disorder which in his diagnosis was at the root of all of Mohammed’s quasi-religious experiences. We certainly need some rare disorder to explain Mohammed’s extraordinary career, something empowering. The pattern of run-of-the-mill childhood abuse can explain his lacklustre adolescence, his later embitterment and violent paranoia that he presumably shared in similar measure with his followers. But he certainly had exalted moments of great inspiration, beautiful in their confusion, even though as we see in the above passage with the gold platter and the weighing machine, it all rather went to his head. In today's climate of anathematizing of paedophilia, it is hard to imagine a culture in which it was not only rampant but actually preferred to such adult pursuits as homosexuality. Lloyd deMause quotes from Louis M. Epstein: Even the Jews, who tried to stamp out adult homosexuality with severe punishments, were more lenient in the case of young boys. Despite Moses's injunction against corrupting children, the penalty for sodomy with children over 9 years of age was death by stoning, but copulation with younger children was not considered a sexual act, and was punishable only by a whipping, “as a matter of public discipline.” 3 In today’s Iran, the devout paedophile may indulge his tastes with the blessing of the Ayatollah Khomeini no less: A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate. If he penetrates and the child is harmed then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl, however would not count as one of his four permanent wives. The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister 4 . Paedophilia is, as we know, transmitted from generation to generation; though while most abused do not become abusers, most abusers were once abused. Its recognition as a crime against the child is relatively recent, and is not even universal today. In the United States, New York became the first state to institute child protection laws (1875) that made abuse against children a crime, and other states soon followed with similar laws. In 1974 the U.S. Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which encouraged remaining states to pass child protection laws and created the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Amazingly, under Shari‘ah law, sex is allowed with children as young as babies on condition the child's orifices are not harmed. Even that stricture probably did not apply to orphans or children outside one's own tribe in sixth century Arabia. But to a child, the trauma is the same regardless of whether it has society's approval or the blessing of clerics – who are as often as not the perpetrators. The Goat Boy When he was six, Mohammed was returned to his mother. She died a year later and the boy was given over to his grandfather, ‘Abdu’l Muṭṭalib. The Sirah has this curious passage, which bears all the signs of having been bowdlerized and possibly mistranslated: The Apostle, still a little boy, used to come and sit on [the bed] and his uncles would drive him away. When ‘Abdu’l Muṭṭalib saw this he said: “Let my son alone, for by Allah he has a 3 Louis M. Epstein. Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism (New York, 1948), p.136 4 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Tahrir-ol-vasyleh, Fourth Edition. Darol Elm, Qom great future.” Then he would make him sit beside him on his bed and would stroke his back with his hand. It used to please him to see what he did 5 . The narrative thread has been broken, and the odd detail of the stroking of the boy’s back, with his hand no less, and then liking what he saw is suspicious. Why describe such a humdrum act so graphically, or at all? Unless, of course, it wasn’t the boy’s back that he stroked – the words for penis (zubr) and back (ẓuhr) being easy to confuse in the mind of a devout editor 6 . Furthermore, in the above extract, Guillaume has innocently translated the phrase wa huwa ghulaam jafar (رفج ملغ وهو) as “still a little boy”. While bowing to his expertise as a great Arabist, it should be pointed out that ghulaam is cognate with ghalama “to be in rut”, and can be translated as adolescent or lusty lad. But even more perplexing to several Arab scholars whom I asked, was the choice of the qualifier jafar. The only online explanation I could find refers to a kid when it has just been weaned from the mother goat. Whether the universal association of goats with the Devil and rampant sexuality stems from their precocious sexual maturity 7 , or from the resemblance of their horns to a small erect penis, or all of the above, is immaterial; the significance of “goat boy” is too obvious to ignore. The grandfather’s protestation “Let my son alone, for by Allah he has a great future” otherwise makes no sense in the context 8 – unless he was making a joke about how well hung the boy was for a seven-year-old, and showing off his (presumably erect) member to the assembled relatives. This is the kind of unintended humiliation the memory of which can make a young lad cringe for life and be hypersensitive to mockery. No-one should find these suppositions shocking. The point needs to be made that in sixth-century Arabia such salacious humour and innocent child-baiting was totally normal. But by the time all these events were recorded in writing Arab society had undergone a sea change from the uninhibited bawdiness of Mohammed’s early years to the tight control of the early Abbasids, who had to tailor Islam to a much wider audience of different cultures spread over a far-flung empire. A young dynamic cult had been made respectable with layers of formalised reverence, so that any reference to the Prophet by name or even as “him” had to be followed by the little invocation “ṣalaatullaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam” (God’s prayers and peace be upon him) thankfully shortened these days to (pbuh) or (saws). Similar (but shorter) prayers follow the mention of any of his wives, companions or descendents. Mention of the Koran without some epithet such as “noble”, “holy” etc., came to be deemed disrespectful as the dead hand of orthodoxy descended. And that spelled the eclipse of a whole tradition of ribald humour and poetry with the elaborate metaphors and double-entendre at which Arabs excel and which the Arabic language encourages, and whose offshoots can nevertheless still be found in Algerian sh‘abi songs 9 . In a way, we owe this change to Mohammed's inability to take a joke. The charge of paedophilia has become one of the favourite jibes directed at Mohammed by critics of Islam. We are told that Mohammed asked his friend Abu Bakr for the hand of his 4½ year-old daughter Aisha. According to the account, the ever loyal Abu Bakr was becomingly reluctant at first, 5 Sirat Rasul Allah p.73 6 Albeit elsewhere in the Sirah the diminutive term for penis, zubayba, is preferred. 7 Male goats will start to show secondary sex traits around 3 to 4 months of age provided they are developing properly and have adequate nutrition. The traits of mounting other goats and appearance differences start to show around this time and around the time of puberty. Most goats will demonstrate mounting and erections more during the normal rutting season that starts after the summer equinox and day length begins to shorten. Younger goats generally will display these traits more than older ones during this time. 8 “A great future” is a very free translation of sha’nan, which could just as easily be rendered as “important matter” or even “luck, destiny”. The grandfather’s elegant choice of words is thus lost in translation. 9 Rachid Aous, Les Grands Maîtres Algériens du Cha‘bi et du Hawzi. Editions El Ouns, Paris 1996 but allowed Mohammed to marry her when she reached six. On reaching nine, the child had to put away her dolls when her husband came to consummate the marriage, as they came under the Islamic prohibition against representations of the human form. And yet all this criticism may be misplaced. The story shows signs of having been manipulated, most likely in order to whitewash Abu Bakr, who had pimped his daughter in order to secure the succession to the command of the Muslim army, already a force in the land. So it may be unwise to draw too many conclusions from this much quoted episode of the Sirah. Child marriages were often used in tribal societies to cement treaties, (as they still are in Afghanistan to plaster over feuds,) and the practice was not confined to them. In 1396 Richard II of England married the six-year-old Isabelle of France for very similar reasons, though we are not told what became of her hymen. Another story points to Mohammed’s dislike of being naked. When carrying stones with his friends before his revelations began, he was the only one to keep his clothes on; while the others used their robes to hold the stones. In another hadith he orders his followers to urinate in a squatting position, rather than lifting their robes and displaying their members. His unfashionable modesty was glossed as piety, but again it could be related to his childhood abuse. Believe or die But to me, the ultimate clue to this childhood abuse is to be found in one of the central elements of his prophetical message, the idea of total submission and the name of his religion, Islam. The child translates the powerlessness of the catamite, – being told to bend over and be quiet – into a form of worship: [68:42] The Day the shin will be uncovered and they are invited to prostration but the disbelievers will not be able. [68:43] Their eyes humbled, humiliation will cover them. And they used to be invited to prostration while they were sound… [68:48] Then be patient for the decision of your Lord, [O Muhammad], and be not like the companion of the fish when he called out while he was distressed. [33:36] And it behoves not a believing man and a believing woman that they should have any choice in their matter when Allah and His Apostle have decided a matter; and whoever disobeys Allah and His Apostle, he surely strays off a manifest straying. Finally, there is Surah 111, the five-line curse of the wicked Uncle Abu Lahab, the “Father of the Flame”, so nicknamed for his fiery temper. Ostensibly this is a chapter sent down in revenge for Abu Lahab’s very astute diagnosis of Islam's weak point – the promise of posthumous and therefore unverifiable reward. But the vehemence of the language and the inclusion of Abu Lahab’s wife, seem out of proportion to the crime. [111:1] Perdition overtake both hands of Abu Lahab, and he will perish. [111:2] His wealth and what he earns will not avail him. [111:3] He shall soon burn in fire that flames, [111:4] And his tale-bearing wife, [111:5] Upon her neck a halter of strongly twisted rope. Curses were no laughing matter at the time, and poets were a feared lot. Mohammed himself sent hitmen after one Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf for having composed amatory verses about the Muslim women, and another was dispatched to kill a satirical poetess, Asmaa bint Marwan while she suckled her babe 10 . The inclusion of such a curse as a chapter in the Holy Koran gives it the strongest possible weight. Which all brings us back to his grandfather's bed in the shadow of the Ka‘aba, and whatever did, or did not happen there. If all this were just a personal issue it would have been lost in the sands of time. But there was one gaping weakness in Mohammed’s invocation of his invisible champion Allah to rebuild what T. E. Lawrence might have dubbed “the citadel of his integrity”. As pithily put by Delos McCown “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.” An energetic campaign was needed to lend reality to the creation. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has summed up the basic tenet of the Koran thus: “It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough – you’ll burn for ever.’ That’s basically the message of the book.” To counter the objection that Allah is invisible, the book builds its argument by turning all observable phenomena into “signs” (ayaat) of his existence. People who cannot see these are therefore blind – an insult to boot. It was this need to exact belief in Allah from others, if necessary at the point of a sword, which gave birth to a religion which in many ways perpetuates Mohammed’s original deprived childhood down through generations of devout Muslims. Fathers (and imams) are authorised to sexually abuse their children and beat them to make them pray, and their wives if they fail in their “duties”. Allah is a tailor-made alter ego for a deeply traumatized child, tortured by shame as well as guilt. The business of praising this entity, who if he were he really omnipotent and omniscient obviously wouldn’t need any praise, can thus be interpreted as a process of shoring up one’s own confidence in his existence and boosting his power to intervene. Praising him aloud can also strike fear into the enemy – or enemy substitute. Plainly, the chief threat to such a child comes from those who would attack his belief, and thereby undermine his psychic defences. Seen in this light, the Koran’s main message is the tirade of a fragile and stunted mind, full of the grandiosity so typical of the disorder. The boy invents a divine champion to issue a challenge to his persecutors. It turns out he is not the only one with a scarred mental makeup, and thus under the banner of his champion he acquires followers. The resulting mess then goes viral. 10 Before this event, according to the Sira (p. 676), “those who were Muslims concealed the fact.” That it should take such a heinous crime to bring Islam out of the closet merits a moment’s reflection. Brazen atrocities have often heralded the emergence from the shadows of new hate ideologies.

Molecular Meetic

I can recognize my wife's voice at the other end of a busy fruit market, and she doesn't even have to shout that loud. If that fails, I can phone her on her mobile. Now if you don't have a wife, you can try Meetic. Meetic is a way to find your match - hopefully your exact fit - over the heads of not just a crowd, but over oceans, mountain ranges and through the haze and concrete of uncounted housing estates. 

But how do biological molecules, who are finding their matches and mating at speeds measured in kilohertz, find each other? We are told, - without any proof at all - it's random Brownian motion in the aqueous medium, helped along by body temperature. A nucleotide is caught by the right ribosome just in time to be added to a lengthening chain of DNA. That's so neat: was it just lined up and waiting? Or does it have to jostle past all the other stuff suspended in the bio soup, like that lady waving a bunch of bananas trying to get to where she can pay for them?

This question should be one of the biggest conundrums in science, and I'll tell you why in a second.    What algorithms would be needed to quantify the forces attracting two complementary 3D configurations through the molecular jostle? Can an enzyme's attraction to its substrate be simply calculated by totalling energy values for the covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, van der Waals forces, electrostatic forces of the final union and dividing that by the square of the distance? How do we factor in the jostle? Or does that lady zip through the crowd like Cat Woman?

Or can molecules sniff each other out over distances, and regardless of relative orientation?

OK, I'm on to sniffing, and before you think of that as just an olfactory metaphor, you need to ask yourself, what do you know about the sense of smell?

Among the questions science cannot answer, the elephant in the room is consciousness. I don't mean the waking/sleeping kind, but the subjective experience of the mind. And science's inability to explain consciousness is not due to a lack of progress, but to its reductive experimental method. While scientists put off answering the question of consciousness sine die, perhaps in the vague hope that some new discovery will pop up, Tantrik yogis have been studying it for centuries, using a completely different method. Namely by training their consciousness and expanding its awareness. Like a musical instrument: if you want to know more about it, start practicing. Their answer - that everything is all part of a single consciousness - sounds flip, and is easy to dismiss as just another example of religion being a failed science. The parallels between the Shiva/Shakti dance and the wave/particle ambiguity are just coincidence, and what do those yogis know about real things?   

But here's the thing. How could quantum biophysicists study the possibility of Molecular Meetic? If a way can be found to calculate expected values of molecular pairing rates in biosynthetic and enzymatic reactions using the random Brownian motion model, and compare these with actual values, they might be forced to revisit Rupert Sheldrake's question: how do we know a stone has no consciousness? 

I'll leave that with the specialists,  but now I'm off to crack open that bottle of Connemara single malt that's been sending me its complex molecular signals through the kitchen wall as I write.

 

Treat the symptoms and the cause will go away.

Don't you ever get ticked off by pundits assuming that there are "underlying" or "fundamental" causes for everything? Why do causes have to come from underneath? What if they press down from above?

This unquestioned thought habit is probably rooted (did I say rooted?) in Aristotle or some other philosopher's work, and carried on through the likes of Thomas Aquinas and the fathers of the Church. 

With the advance of science it has taken on new guise with the discovery of the microscopic agents of disease, magnetic fields, cosmic rays and chemical reactions. 

So is a cause underlying because it's too small to be seen? Does it have to be fundamental because you need to probe "deeply" to find it? Or maybe we think it's fundamental because it allows us to frame it as a manifestation of some basic physical "law". 

Opponents of allopathic medicine will tell you that cold medicines should be avoided because they only treat the symptoms, like runny nose and coughing etc., and not the "cause". They ignore the obvious fact that stimulating the production of mucus is the virus's way of creating a warm, moist and nutritious environment for itself, inaccessible to the antibodies ferried by the blood. 

So a pill that helps dry up the mucus makes life harder for the virus. 

Remember when New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had the idea of Zero Tolerance for broken windows as a way of curbing much more serious violent crime? Opinions are divided on whether that was effective, and Malcolm Gladwell preferred the explanation that Roe vs Wade put less unwanted teenagers on the streets fifteen years on.

But you can see where I'm going. 

The hierarchical view of causality has been an unquestioned assumption which underlies (!) so much of our thinking that it generally passes quite unnoticed. It also underlies (!) the illusion of power.

I guess I should come back to that, when I've had more time to think about it.

Crawfishing back to a Golden Age: the Yellow Vests

I just came across this word crawfishing in Norman Mailer's 1948 vivisecton of war, "The Naked and the Dead". I suppose it relates to the crawfish's mode of locomotion: on its belly, and tail first. In the Army of course, this can sometimes be the wisest thing to do; or it can be a dereliction of duty. The decision is left to the superior officer. Nevertheless, the idea of crawfishing retains a pejorative nuance that leans towards the second interpretation.

In the past week, here in France we have all received invitations to the great debate about what's wrong with La République. Typically, meetings are held in various community and town halls, where the rules for debate are explained by a chairman, and the proceedings conducted by young ladies called animatrices. One lady rules the floor, while the other attempts to condense the inputs with a felt-tip on a whiteboard. Between them, they filter out the anger and the good ideas together.

Each citizen has three cards to use for the right to stand up and speak. The discussions are kept within the confines of a single question, namely "What area of your personal experience makes you share the anger of the Yellow Vests?" Four or five sub-topics are then dealt with one by one. The animatrices are quick to discipline anyone straying outside his or her own personal experience. No politics, please!

At the end of the discussion, we are each given a copy of Emmanuel Macron's verbose letter to the French nation. Ita sugary sentiments coat a layer cake of incomprehension and obfuscation.

As somebody revently observed about the US, if an ancient Greek were to find himself in present day America, he would see an oligarchy, not a democracy. The same can be said today for any number of countries, beginning with the UK and increasingly, France. Indicative of this trend is what has happened to public services in the last 35 years.

When I was here in 1986, a Breton could traverse France in his lorry and with a fistful of francs, purchase a field whereon to park his lorry, call it home, and demand a telephone line from the state-owned PTT. Their pledge was then to connect anyone within 48 hours. And they did. What this cost in staffing levels or logistics did not enter into the equation. The quality of a public service was judged on its, er, quality. The cost to the consumer was the same to all, regardless of supply side cost.

In addition to his telephone line, he was automatically entrusted with France's very own precursor of the internet, a Minitel terminal. Along with French Railways, the envy of the world.

But the envy of the world came at a price. The PTT, (Post, Telegraphs and Telephones), along with all the other public services, utilities, transport, health, education, pensions, were manned by as many workers as it took to provide a consistent level of service across the country, all hired on ironclad lifetime contracts and backed by strong unions.

This was way back then, in 1986, when the top tax rate was, I believe, 70%. So there were obviously some less public-spirited bods who may have thought the envy of the world came at too high a price.
Your average Frenchman, though, was justifiably proud of his country's progress, and the services provided by his republic for its citizens. He felt in some sense a participant, if not a shareholder in the public enterprise. Railworkers, teachers and nurses were the salt of this republic's earth.

Fast forwarding to the present, my neighbour did up a house in the village and applied for a telephone line. The nearest point of connection was less than a meter away. A meter, not a kilometer. Over two months later, technicians arrived and he has his line. They combine other jobs in the vicinity to make it worthwhile coming the extra mile.

Services that used to be judged purely on excellence, are now evaluated for ROI. Village post offices are closing down while the cost of a stamp soars, hospitals are being regrouped, even as ambulance services to get to them are being slashed.

In the meantime, following EU directives on competition and mirroring Britain's lead in shedding its public sector, French public services have been privatised, split up, renamed and repackaged in a bewildering succession of redesigned logos. What used to belong to the citizen now belongs to private shareholders. As before, you buy your electricity from the same old, mainly nuclear-powered, national grid, but you get to choose among four different companies to bill you. Shareholders of these companies are onto a good risk-free number, since retired or failing power stations will be sold off for a nominal euro to a cleanup company funded by the taxpayer.

Taxes for the rich now top out at 40%, and new loopholes abound, so they're happy.

I haven't been to enough of these debates to give you a comprehensive list of everything that has gone downhill since 1986, even if that were interesting. Yellow Vest rage has not yet rallied around a single theme or direction.

But I do get an overall impression that if the country could crawfish back to 1986, if the republic could be returned to its citizens, if the small shops and restaurants annihilated by social charges could be brought back, if the default speed limit were 100 again, the Yellow Vests would have done their job. Unfortunately, between EU directives and the monetary straitjacket of the Euro, added to the vested interests of those now in power, that ain't gonna happen. To look back and want to undo the mistakes of the past thirty years might seem quite sensible. But you would get branded a supporter of the extremist left.

Unfair Competition

Any readers who watched the live transmissions of the recent 15th International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poznań, Poland may have been surprised, if not shocked, when 17 year-old prodigy Mone Hattori, from Japan, was eliminated after the second of four rounds.

Apart from mature and deeply felt renderings of works by Beethoven and Grieg as well as the obligatory Polish composers she had delivered a flawless performance of one the the most pyrotechnical pieces ever written for violin, the H. W. Ernst Variations on The Last Rose of Summer. You can see her here.

When she failed to appear in the third round, the shared outrage was amply voiced by viewers in the chat box that accompanied the live transmissions. The wrongness of the decision was later confirmed by the anti-climactic final round with the survivors turning in limp versions of the obligatory concertos to the bemusement of the audience. With the notable exception that is, of the eventual first prize winner, the very deserving Veriko Tchumburidze from Georgia.

So what went wrong? Hers was not an isolated case. The dismissal of another competitor, Celina Kotz, was incomprehensible to many.

Jury Chairman Maxim Vengerov explained the scoring system in a video for Facebook Violin Channel page. In an attempt to ensure impartiality of the jury members, they were not allowed to vote for their own pupils or for a player they had taught in the last 5 years. It goes without saying that teachers are fond and proud of their best pupils and want them to do well.

However, they were allowed to vote to eliminate a player, in a "yes/no" system apparently inspired by reality TV shows. And this could be where the system failed.

Imagine, if you will, a jury selected from a wide spread of countries each one jealously rooting for their own country or their favourite pupil, with no direct way of positively influencing the outcome of the competition. The only button you can press is the dismissal button. Your only ploy left is to try to see off the competition. And with only ten members it only need two or three to vote down the most obvious danger in the shape of a likely hands-down winner, for the wicked deed to be done.

Further evidence of the way this system can skew results, equally loudly decried by the kommentariat, was the survival to the finals of Vengerov's own pupil, Maria Włoszczowska. Struggling out of her depth through the two concerti, her cheeks visibly burning with embarrassment, her presence could only be explained by the reluctance of the jurors to vote "no" to the chairman's protégée.

Every year, international music competitions and all the top music colleges have to deal with applications from a constant stream of superbly turned out performers from Japan, Korea and China. To most Europeans, putting in five hours a day of violin practice from age three seems somehow inhuman, and a borderline infringement of children's rights. Something it would be wrong to expect a European child to undergo.

Turning out a world-class soloist also represents a sizable capital investment, in teaching, instruments and fancy dresses. And Asian parents are willing to make big sacrifices to pay the price to see their prince or princess on the stage. Are there no limits to how far they will go?

All this give European judges and players a feeling of unfair advantage, and for the more nationalistic among them, a sense of cute overload from an Asian female talent invasion. This shared feeling among the judges means that the hurdles are much higher for Asian musicians.

Perhaps next time, Simon Cowell should be invited to choose the jury. He would never allow such travesties.

As Bela Bartok famously noted "Competitions are for horses, not artists." At least horse races leave little room for doubt about the winner.

You Read It Here First!

For a long time now, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been exporting its barbarous hubris worldwide in a way that would suggest it is actually begging for a showdown. For some folks its successful campaign to head the UN Human Rights Council was a slap in the world's face. And kicking off 2016 by beheading 47 Shia believers in one day further underlined its contempt for the world's bleeding hearts.

Along with tolerating Turkey's abuse of the NATO umbrella, coddling the Saudis significantly weakens the USA's moral standing and claim to act as the world's policeman. And there is no shortage of volunteers to take over this role, or of nations who would love to take the Kingdom down a notch, if not to give it a good drubbing.

Plot spoiler alert!

My Extreme Nemesis scenario boils down to turning the Hijaz with its twin omphaloi of Mecca and Medina (formerly Yathrib) into an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. Some of the more spirited online comments on news items exposing Saudi backwardness even tout the idea of turning the whole Kingdom into molten glass, though clearly creating such a large window onto the Earth's glowing core would be over the top and over budget.

Of the five pillars of Islam, the Hajj pilgrimage is the only one directly operable manu militari. Whether the cult could survive on the remaining four pillars hinges in part on how much its finances depend on revenues from the pilgrimage business.

The simplest mechanism would obviously be cruise missiles fired from a submarine in the Red Sea. There is an Islamic prophecy I read somewhere that the Qureishi clan's long-running b'n'b business would be terminated from the direction of Ethiopia, just across across the water. More specific is a Russian YouTube video, which I can no longer find, that simulates a two-pronged sea-borne missile attack without being specific about the target. It could be the effect of the poor animation, but the sub commander was walking in a funny way.

For the moment a nuclear scenario may seem farfetched, but a few recent developments seem to be working towards clearing the way to making it less inconceivable.

My first alert that things could be moving in this direction came when, after years of stonewalling the USA, Iran accepted the American nuclear deal, apparently wholeheartedly and in a verifiable manner, following just one week of Russian diplomacy. I asked myself, what could Russia have possibly offered Iran in exchange for abandoning its home-grown nuclear program? And in what way are Russia's plans advanced by such an initiative?

And of course, what would those plans be?

Then there are the recent articles about Russia replacing its submarine fleet, and test-firing its latest Kalibr missiles in the Arctic. The missiles travel at Mach 5, far too fast to be intercepted by the expensive air defences that the Saudis have acquired from America.

And now this! Holy War declared by the Patriarch of the Holy Russian Church!

I give it two years.

Of course, as my wife smugly pointed out, I have been wrong before. As when I predicted that the Saudis would invade Syria on February 29th (to avoid having to deal with anniversary riots every year) after their Northern Thunder exercise involving 350,000 troops. Fortunately they chickened out, and I don't mind being wrong.

So tell me I'm wrong! Use the comments box below. And if I'm right, remember where you saw it first!

The Islamic Puffball Explodes

The current tsunami of refugees from Sharia hellholes has the entire European nanny community scrambling for moral high ground. It only took two photos of drowned children to sucker even the most respected commentators into joining the rush.

These are people we look to for the big picture, for dispassionate analysis of where we stand at this historical juncture. But their fear of being labeled, if not racist, then at least heartless, has trumped their common sense. And European governments have been morally half-nelsoned by their media into a collective tizzy.

While the West's proud self image is dependent on delivering a compassionate response to every humanitarian crisis "in the name of humanity", the architects of the current crisis, Daesh, are acting in the name of their psychotic god-figure, Allah.

So it might not do us any harm to take a gander at the other fellow's point of view. You need to see this through the lens of the Islamic view of history: the unstoppable path to Islam's world domination.

In a recent article, Robert Spencer reminds us of the Islamic religious duty of Hijrah, the act of setting up Muslim communities abroad by infiltration.

This has been compared to the way a cancer metastasizes in so many blogs that you can save me the effort of linking to them by googling "Islam metastasizes." Another highly enlightening article, that I see has been refined considerably since it first went public, entitled "The Terrifying Brilliance of the Islamic Memeplex", lists 26 "memes" that make up Islam's virality.

But my personal favourite image of Islam is that of the puffball, a mushroom which explodes to send its spores everywhere. To continue the analogy, when these spores find fertile ground, they form a mycelium, the invisible infrastructure which invades the ground, sometimes over large distances, until favourable circumstances afford it the energy to fruit, in the form of more puffballs, which in turn explode when they are ready - or when purposely trodden on by little boys.

And in this picture, Daesh are the little boys. The mycelium, or root structure, is the ummah, the Muslim community. In order for it to spread, individual level of belief, moderate or fanatical, makes no difference. It doesn't even matter if some of them, like the drowned child in the photos, are heretical Yazidis! All are instruments of Allah's will.

If our only worry were the twanging of liberal heartstrings, some solutions to the problem can be envisaged, and have indeed been mooted. Banning of circumcision and ritual slaughter of animals can both be pleaded on equally strong or stronger humanitarian grounds than the giving of asylum. Denmark is trying to lead the way in this regard.

But then, if we are expected to believe that the open-armed welcome of Muslim refugees by the German government and its silencing of protesting voices with jail and fines is a purely humanitarian reaction to the crisis, what are we to make of the double standards applied both by the media and by Western governments regarding the current genocidal persecution of Christians in the Middle East?

Sorry guys, would love to help! Not.

It just doesn't add up. Clearly, followers of one religion are being given preferential treatment over the rest, and even being allowed a pass for having massacred the others. Even stating this obvious fact can get you into trouble in today's Germany. The very Germany so recently accused of trying to dominate Europe using banks where their tanks failed.

So what is Germany's game? What is Germany's dream?

Wikipedia has some interesting quotes about how this question would have been answered three-quarters of a century ago, with these insights into Hitler's thinking:

In speeches, Hitler made apparently warm references towards Muslim culture such as: "The peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than, for example, France".

According to Speer, Hitler stated in private, "The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"[225] Speer also stated that when he was discussing with Hitler events which might have occurred had Islam absorbed Europe: "Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire."

Similarly, Hitler was transcribed as saying: "Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world."

So one must be permitted to wonder, if only in the darkness of one's prison cell, how much has really changed. And once banged up for bringing such ghosts out of the closet, can we expect any protection from the more "devout" prisoners?

Not so Potty History of England

Genocide ! Ethnic cleansing ! Minority rule ! Apartheid ! Mass expropriations ! Yes, you've guessed it. The history of England !

The kingdom of England was born of one of the most thoroughgoing campaigns of ethnic cleansing ever carried out. According to Peter Beresford Ellis in Celt and Saxon this is borne out by the complete lack of surviving Celtic place names left on the map (apart from the rivers. Go figure). We hear that a century or two after driving off the remaining Celts to the wilds of Scotland and Wales, the Saxons (sassenachs in Gaelic) were Christianised and repented. This didn't stave off their comeuppance, first at the hands of the Danes who took over the North-East of the country and then, far more grievously, with the Norman invasion.

With this event the oppression of the foul by the fair went into high gear, and was to outlast Magna Cartas, civil war, rebellions and Reform Acts. The divisions it created survive today as virulent as ever, and can be seen in patterns of land ownership, class divisions, linguistic features, as well as in the so-called "mindless violence" which is so much a trademark of the English scene. To this list must be added the extraordinary survival of the House of Lords, a chamber of the landed whose primary function has been to block the one thing England most badly needs - Land Reform.

Those who watch westerns will be familiar with the civilised ploy of usurping a preliterate people's tenure of ancestral lands by demanding to see written title deeds. This fruitful exercise was first carried out with resounding success by William the Conqueror and his aides and resulted in the so called Domesday Book. Schoolboys are given to understand that this book was a sort of census of smallholdings for tax purposes. We were also told that William brought about "much needed" strong government to Britain. In the immortal words of Molesworth in 1066 and all that, these were "Good Things".

To understand why, 935 years later, these evil acts continue to bear violent fruit, a comparison with modern Spain might illuminate. The hostilities played out in the Spanish Civil War have attenuated a mere two generations later into friendly regional rivalries. The significant difference is that in the case of Spain the victors were not land-grabbers. As a thought experiment, it is easy to see that if my grandfather murdered yours in the heat of war, you and I can still carry on a normal relationship. But if my grandfather killed yours and stole his land and you are now paying me rent to live or work on it, I will always be your enemy no matter how nice I try to be about taking your money or crops.

For nearly 400 years the official language of the administration in England was French. The adoption of English in 1457 was hailed as some sort of victory for the underclass, but from a linguistic point of view the divisions remained intact. The blond invader's "fair speech" was a creole of Saxon, Danish and French far removed from the basic Saxon or Danish-based "dialects" of the grovelling field labourers. Even today Fair Speech and Foul Language still represent the two irreconcilable poles of English society. In an imaginary slanging match between a member of today's ruling class and a cockney cabbie, the former might use terms of French origin such as "imbecile", "unpleasant individual", "stupid person", while the cabbie's Anglo-Saxon reply would get this page blocked by half the firewalls of today's schools. And while the colour of a man's hair and even his dress are no longer a guide to his ascendance, his vowel sounds are a badge of allegiance which he would do better to disguise if he walks into the wrong class of pub.

What the Normans started, the Tudors were prepared to carry on with a vengeance (their takeover was, actually, vengeance). Their first obsession was to improve their own racial stock as well as their landholdings by imposing themselves on as many blonde Norman ladies as possible. As a reaction to this, Norman snobbery ("my family goes back to William the Conqueror") probably dates from this time. The new royalty's landgrabbing task was complicated by the aforementioned title deeds, and new methods of expropriation were invented. "Morton's fork" was invented by a chancellor of the exchequer who was a past master at the art of squeezing the barons, who in turn squeezed the peasants. As a last, or sometimes first, resort there was always the hanging method. This involved paying spies to fabricate evidence of treason against rich landowners. The lands of those executed on this charge became, and in many cases remain, Crown property. But the biggest prize was the ecclesiastical lands. Henry the eighth's bust-up with the Church of Rome was just the prelude to a long and very profitable tide of expropriations both of lands actually owned by the church and of lands belonging to so-called recusants. The new Church of England provided a way of vastly widening the purview of "treason", using the protestant religion as its pretext. Founded on greed for land, it was to reach its logical conclusion when exported by Oliver Cromwell to Ireland with the Penal Laws debarring Catholics from all ownership of land. These laws were a stroke of English genius, a double whammy for Ireland, for when they were repealed 150 years after their introduction, apparently in the name of Justice and "Fair" play, they produced such a huge rise in land values owing to the suddenly increased demand, that even the reform's opponents were won over.

The one large remaining block of unseized land was the so-called Common Lands. They were a thorn in the flesh of the oppressor class who didn't enjoy the sight of dirty-faced, insolent shepherds browsing their flocks on land for which they paid no rent. The Enclosure acts which put an end to this intolerable situation were predicated on a neat and novel argument - efficiency ! The idea was that people who had to pay rent were more likely to put the land to more intensive and efficient use. The food shortages which added weight to this argument may or may not have been engineered to this end. The only remaining question was: Who should they pay rent to? Why, obviously, to those who would then make sure the Crown got its cut - the landowners.

Unfortunately the labouring class were still very much in evidence. The threat of prosecution (or a bottom full of shot) for Trespass could keep them at bay, but no amount of tree planting could render them completely invisible. Their untidy hovels were a blot on the landscape even when they weren't rioting under the influence of drink. How much more enjoyable country life could be if a way could be found to dispense with their services ! They could be sent to war, for example. Now there was an idea ! They could be used to grab land abroad !

The nineteenth century saw the putting into effect of various solutions to the "unwanted people" problem, from the Industrial Revolution which started by replacing agricultural workers by machines, and corraled the dispossessed into the grimy Bantustans of Greater Manchester and Birmingham, and the rise of the British Empire, culminating in the carnage of the Great War.

The global increase in scope for dubious real estate management practices afforded opportunities for new upstart players to join the ranks of the old Norman elite. On the whole they met with such success worldwide that a new optimistic feeling of putting the world to rights became the normal swaggering style of the British as a nation.

Since the Brits went global the results are everywhere to see. A glance at today's world map shows that no continents bar South America have escaped the British mania for redrawing boundary lines. Millions of lives have been lost and continue to be lost in wars over lines drawn by British colonisers. In the Twentieth Century various dictators and maverick states have taken leaves out of the British book - some more grotesquely than others. Most have failed to hang on to their winnings not because they used the wrong brand of sanctimoniousness or picked the wrong victims or were too crude. They failed because they arrived too late. The Brits got there first then rewrote the rules.

Today huge swathes of the most expensive rent-bearing urban land in Europe are owned by the Church and Crown of England, and a large slice of the working lives of city dwellers is devoted to swelling the coffers of these two entities, who through the unique British system of leasehold manage to perpetuate the ruthless hold of PLU (People Like Us - i.e. sons and daughters of the nobs) on the bloody winnings of their forebears.

Brits, doncha love 'em? Now we are showing Afghanistan the way to peace ! Watch out !

It's not about good versus evil

But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:
Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where:
No creature owns it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he!
Ev'n those who dwell beneath its very zone,
Or never feel the rage, or never own;
What happier natures shrink at with affright,
The hard inhabitant contends is right.

As noted by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man, morals are relative, and may not even be about morals. You all know the famous George Carlin quote “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” Here we are looking at a sliding scale situated somewhere between the extremes of staying in second gear and total recklessness. A different scale, one that we might characerize as more a moral scale, operates when we find a wallet on the ground. For someone not scrupulously honest many factors come into play, starting with how much cash is in it? Did anyone see you pick it up? Does the wallet contain the owner's ID? Is the owner an attractive potential mate? Is there anyone nearby you could hand it in to, and could they be trusted not to pocket it themselves? Not everyone praises honesty in such a situation. Some might call a poor person who passed up such a windfall an idiot for having missed a chance to change his life. Like the driver in Carlin's example, we judge others' reactions to this situation by comparing it to what we would do faced with the same variables (Amount, presence of ID. etc.). They are either too honest (handed the wallet in with no ID) or really stupid (could have been 700 dollars better off).

In nature we see a sliding scale between peaceful symbiosis and raw predation that has little to do with scruples and everything to do with survival imperatives. Parasitism and invasiveness complicate the picture somewhat, but at a more abstract level we can describe the sliding scale as stretching between a conservative attachment to the status quo and a violent urge to overthrow it. Ancient History has highlighted the dichotomy between agriculturalists and pastoralists, or settlers and herders. The conflict in Darfur is only one recent resurgence of this age-old opposition, now mirrored in the hubris of Corporate Power as it continues to herd and manipulate the supine, tasting-panel-simulated consumer-hobbit. Tolkien saw it all coming!

24eme Salon de Peinture de Clairac

True to form the 24th Salon de Peinture de Clairac kicked off with a riot of globular breasts, paint spills, harlequins and merry-making cubistic peasants, with guest of honour artist Jean Coladon. With the fitful meticulousness of the self-taught the man paints bare ladies with eyes like decals, geometrical tits and smudgy muffs, and has been doing so for 30 years. He places these in various imaginary contexts, sometimes adding an accessory here, a pair of wallpaper wings there. One would like just once to be spared the up-the-nostrils chin shot intended to represent Earth-shattering orgasm (a nod to ecclesiastical images of saints in ecstasy) but more often than not suggestive of acute back pain. Taking the mike at the opening vin d'honneur, the artist listed the various labels he had been given, and said that his favourite was to be called a symbolist. Too soft to be soft porn these silicon breasted naiads have become the dominant theme of French village art, though they make you wonder when any of these artists actually last saw a real woman in the buff. Clearly influenced by photoshopped images from lads mags and Lara Croft, the formalised anatomy and generic (where not totally blank) faces incarnate half-formed idealisations of the female object. What is so strange is that half the artists that produce this stuff are women. Needless to say the selection committee didn't like my stuff and hung it under a spotlight that drilled a shaft of light down the middle of my sunset creating an alarming nuclear armageddon effect.

On Ted Hughes being admitted to Poet's Corner

To the residents of Poets Corner

Budge over ditty-mongers, Ted
Is here; and lugging rhymeless tomes
He comes to join the rhyming dead
And here engrave his timeless pomes
(That’s timeless in a modern sense
As in “no time to pause and think.”
It doesn’t mean they transcend tense.)
No long re-writes – why waste the ink?
The stuff just poured out from his heart
With that berating earthy voice
Committees love; and hence their choice.
Now Ted can share with you his art:
“When inspiration fails use guile!
Who reads all that? Just weigh yon pile!!”

Auenis player

I was recently intrigued by the above caption, mirrored on several sites, to an image of a Roman mosaic depicting a man with a panpipe. Sensing the red herring, it didn't take me long to narrow down the source of the information to an online article whose author claimed to have “stumbled” on a Latin word, undiscovered by previous Latin dictionaries, meaning “panpipes”.

He found this word “auenis” in a line from Ovid. “Sub galea pastor iunctis pice cantat auenis”. As anyone who knows his Latin can see, “avenis” here is an ablative plural, confirmed by the presence of “cunctis”, ablative plural of cunctus, meaning “joined”, in agreement with it. A quick search in the dictionary will turn up “avena” meaning “oats” and by extension, a stalk of a grass or cane, and therefore “tube” or “chalumeau”.The passage comes from book V of Tristia, in which the poet bemoans the civil strife in the countryside, causing the ploughman to plough unhappily with one hand, holding a weapon in the other, and here, the shepherd, under his helmet, to play on reeds joined with pitch (a makeshift panflute) to calm his sheep, who are afraid of the wolf.

Ovid also used the expression “avenae structae” to mean panpipes, literally “arrayed tubes”. These were presumably of better manufacture than the ones made by the shepherd with the materials to hand in the war-torn countryside.

Supposing for a moment that there was a word “avenis” or “auenis” (i-stem 3rd declension) meaning panflute, what is it doing in this sentence? If it is a nominative that would make it the subject in competition with “pastor”. The only other possibility ending in “-is” is a genitive. Either way, that leaves poor “cunctis” orphaned, a participle with nothing to qualify. The correct parsing of the line is therefore, as I tried to explain to him, “sub galea”=under his helmet, “pastor cantat”=the shepherd sings/plays, “avenis”= with tubes, “cunctis pice”= joined with (coal tar) pitch.

While there may yet be undiscovered words of the Latin language, they are unlikely to inhabit the verses of Ovid, a poet already studied by millions of schoolchildren and professors.

When I made contact with the author to put him straight I was treated to a barrage of vituperative messages in which he claimed as his authority the Internet, specifically an online Latin dictionary compiled by an amateur from Texas. Blind faith in dubious sources goes back to before the printed word, where at least the name of the authority quoted carried a certain amount of weight. But today the argument "Just Google it and you'll see" seems to trump common sense.

So who was the authority in this case?

Well it turns out that he makes no bones about not even being one. By "just Googling" the name of the compiler of the dictionary, one William Whitaker, I came upon the following engaging disclaimer:

"I am not a Latin scholar, only a dictionary hacker (in the old sense of one building with only an ax as a tool). While I try to [...] do the best I can, I am a very unreliable source [...] And I am not qualified to even try English-to-Latin."

Ah, my faith in Google is restored!

The Frog and the Scorpion: Fable or Prophecy?

Today at last, even the most Panglossian, chai-drinking Utopian dreamers are being grudgingly forced to admit that the Koran, a book held sacred by a fifth of humanity, contains a 1400-year-old call to arms against the other four fifths. Muslims are enjoined to fight them to convert them, squeeze them for tax or kill them.

There is a well known folk tale about a frog and a scorpion which typifies albeit in caricature the present confrontation between European do-gooders and Islam. The scorpion asked the frog to give him a ride over a river. The frog demurred, saying that he didn’t want to get killed by the scorpion’s sting. The scorpion argued that he wouldn’t do something as stupid as that since they would both drown. This made sense to the frog who agreed to carry the scorpion across. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog and as they were both sinking the frog asked why. The answer came: “Because it’s my nature, and I cannot change that”. The learned Arabist Hans Jansen, testifying at the trial of Geert Wilders for incitement to hatred, stated that what distinguished Islam from other religions is precisely its immutability. Everything in it is based on what is written, mektub, and that cannot be changed by man.¹

A variation on this story puts a fox in place of the frog. The scorpion’s last words in this version were: “It is better we should both perish than that my enemy should live.” An answer which succinctly encapsulates the attitude of those sworn to the destruction of Israel: the current Iranian leadership, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Gaza strip. By their indifference to taking casualties, both Hamas and Hizbollah have already demonstrated with “conventional” weapons that the Cold War doctrine of balance of deterrence - which kept the peace for so long - is no longer valid. Speaking of Iran in the film Iranium Bernard Lewis remarked: “With these people with their apocalyptic mindset, mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent, it’s an inducement.” Iran, famous for having prepared a generation of schoolchildren for martyrdom during the war with Iraq, now waits to up the ante.

For nearly a century United States foreign policy agents have been assiduously playing frog to scorpions worldwide, in Latin America and Africa, but above all in the Middle East and South Asia. American money has been naïvely funnelled in huge quantities to support regimes or the resistance groups which oppose them, on a “lesser of two evils” basis. Generous funding enables these “allies” to buy sufficient arms to become in effect a greater evil than the one the US was hoping to use them to defeat. At which point they turn against their erstwhile mentors and Americans are left to rue their ingratitude. Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Mujahideen – later to morph into the Taliban – in Afghanistan are only the best known examples. The astonishing thing is how often the mistake is repeated, in a chain sequence. By deposing its former ally Saddam and bringing a semblance of majority rule to Iraq it has taken the lid off a can of worms by empowering the much more religiously deranged Shia section of the population, which Saddam had successfully kept down. To balance this error and in an effort to limit the consequent growth in Iran’s influence, the CIA now funds the Jundullah, a separatist Sunni terror organisation in south-east Iran. Who will be the next beneficiary of American largesse? Already the Taliban, a bunch of murderous goons, are being invited to talks likely to lead to power-sharing arrangements in Afghanistan. Doubtless, a condition of their participation will be a second helping of US funding, and so it goes on. The US seems to have boundless faith in its ability to buy buddyhood matched by a total blindness to the contempt engendered by its efforts to do so. As a result it ends up setting political wildfires and wondering why its hands get burnt.

A similar sucker role is also being played in Europe by governmental coddling of Islam. Every political and religious concession made to Muslim “sensibilities” adds a plank to the platform of those who would see democratic governance replaced by God’s law, as dictated in the seventh century by an illiterate serial rapist, mass murderer and armed robber – to keep the list short. Just like the frog, who had nothing to gain in the deal even if Scorpion were to keep his word, European governments are motivated by a futile desire to be liked. They will be lucky to earn pity. As for votes, they are beginning to get some surprises in that direction too.

What is most instructive in this cautionary tale is not so much the self-defeating spite of the scorpion (which we cannot change anyway), but the frog’s blithe acceptance of the scorpion’s arguments. By assuming the scorpion to be motivated by common sense and a shared survival instinct the frog judges the scorpion by his own rational standards. The scorpion has astutely based his arguments on his understanding of the frog’s thinking. Conversely, the frog is unable to form a conceptual framework to deal with the scorpion’s mindset. The frog takes the Confucian view that man’s nature starts off fundamentally good². It is this incomprehension which puts the frog at a disadvantage and is the biggest threat to frog survival. How best to overcome this barrier to understanding? How can frogs brought up to believe with Candide that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” learn to deal with a culture which says “If there is a dwelling purely for you in the hereafter with Allah to the exclusion of [other] people[s], then long for death if you are truthful.”³

There is an urgent need for frogs to come to an intuitive understanding of scorpion mentality. They will need to accept not only that such a mentality is possible in today’s world, but also that it is probably beyond a frog’s power to change it by kindness or persuasion. At the same time, if we can question the frog’s naivety, we might be able to avoid drowning in our own goodwill, and quit offering a free ferry service.

The frog’s weak spot

If we try to take a big step back and compare today with Churchill’s time, it is interesting to ask why the West seems to have lost the ability to breed principled leaders, or even stout defenders of national sovereignty or identity. And even if one Western country could produce such a person, what freedom of action could such a leader have in today’s world? The democratic seesaw tips between the so-called “left” (buying the votes of the poor with the money of the rich) and the “right” (letting the rich get quietly richer in return for electoral campaign funds). This meaningless dichotomy means that the public debate is centred on totally spurious priorities, built around two opposing strategies of getting elected.

After World War II, national sovereignty was eroded first by multinational companies who could simply threaten to relocate, taking jobs and tax revenue with them if they didn’t like a government policy. But in the 1990’s, old style industrial capitalism became terminally corrupt. Stock option remuneration packages turned executives from loyal corporate officers and pillars of the community into raiders with a three-year grab-and-run plan. Honest reporting gave way to accounting legerdemain, and tax havens opened their arms to those on the run both from their governments and from angry shareholders. As currency controls evaporated in the unquestioning rush towards the “ideal” of free trade, Big Capital took over the reins from Big Industry, and can now breathe down governments’ necks, forcing them to make austerity programs that none of their voters want. This extortionate practice, causing widespread bankruptcies and job losses, is cynically termed a “bailout”. So if the people have no say any more, what is the point of democracy?

Big Capital is the baby of the “positive net worth individual” (PNWI). This means people who, by being dealt good cards and/or playing them right, are able to pay off their mortgages and put enough money aside to live by asset management alone, or without working at all if a good manager can be found. Big Capital consists of institutions owned and run by these PNWIs and its principal activity is that of getting even bigger. It used to do this by investing in promising industries, thus creating wealth and justifying its own existence. In recent years however, it is looking at less risky sources of revenue, such as rental property and the financing of welfare states. Yawning social service deficits in developed countries are attractive sources of interest for the lenders. Unemployment is becoming big business, and a safer bet than productive enterprise. It has the secondary advantage of slowing inflation, Big Capital’s big enemy (and friend of the NNWI – Negative Net Worth Individuals – did they but know it).

In political terms this encourages the emergence of a new electoral strategy called “centre” politics, in which the poor are given money borrowed – not taxed – by the government from the rich. The magic here is that the government wins the votes of the poor, who think that it is working in their interest, and at the same time earns campaign funds from the rich, who can watch their pile grow with all that low-risk interest. It is as if the rich are making the poor a loan which is paid back by the government. The victims of this arrangement, our children who will shoulder the debt, are too young to vote. On the property side, wealthy landlords can charge sky-high rents to tenants who happen to receive housing allowance from the government, paid for with more borrowed money, yielding more interest to the rich and prising the wealth gap ever wider. The obvious instability of such arrangements results in those “bailout” moments described above. By threatening to downgrade a country’s credit rating, Big Capital is simply saying: if you can’t afford to pay us we will charge you even higher interest. In this it is dealing with politicians who are all playing the “centre” electoral strategy and are easily cowed by threats of a walkout from their sponsor. Amongst other favours, centre politicians do everything within their power to maintain house prices, especially in the UK – one of the most indebted nations in the world – which only benefits holders of interest-bearing loans (the banks and building societies), a fact which may surprise house owners who are weak at mathematics.

By giving the appearance of existing for the benefit of borrowers, financial institutions serve as front organizations, or catspaws, for the real cash beneficiaries, the PNWIs. In fine, they package and opacify the greed of depositors and shareholders (“investors”), screening it from customers whose function is to provide revenue. They can use their privy knowledge of the arcana of macro-finance to pull the wool over the eyes of legislators. During panics and crises often precipitated by the better placed among them, their representatives are suddenly available to offer expert advice to governments, suggesting bailouts and warning against controls. If governments, instead of talking about tough negotiations with banks and funds, were to acknowledge that they are begging the rich for advice to get out of the mess, while also tapping them for loans, the public would be presented with a truer picture. Why are State governments, who supposedly have the power to set taxes, going cap in hand to rich lenders and offering them deals to make them still richer? If any sign were needed that Western governments can no longer lead a pig to market, this fits the bill.

OK now: having caricatured Big Capital’s takeover of real power from nation-states, it might seem paradoxical to go on to describe this all-powerful beast as the frog’s weak spot. What makes it so is its lack of what used to be called moral fibre. Lending institutions have a primary duty to make their shareholders and depositors richer. These shareholders and depositors may include people with strongly held moral principles, but since voting power is proportional to holdings, the richer and therefore more wealth-intoxicated generally hold the majority. It is these people who, through the institutions which manage their wealth, have voting power which trumps that of electorates of nation states. Yet this power is virtually incapable of serving any principle other than dull greed. Driven by a constant stream of new hungry depositors, Big Capital will never afford the pasha’s luxury of being so rich he can affect a reckless indifference to wealth. And this is where the frog is most vulnerable: in its inability to find useful things to do with its money other than make more of it. Unlike a Saudi prince, the rich man in the West is owned by his money.

Islam’s critique of the West relentlessly hits this very spot. The faithful are told that the world would be a fairer place if there were no more lending at interest, and if the rich were obliged to pay zakat to support the poor. And this is the very message that Western politicians should be delivering if they were really sincere in fighting on behalf of the majority of voters, most of whom are Negative Net Worth Individuals – at least in the debt-ridden UK and USA. But then who would pay for their TV ads at election time? More to the point, would the TV stations – owned by Big Capital – even run the ads? In any case, by refusing to tell voters the macroeconomic truth, Western Governments leave the door open for the truth to arrive from another quarter, dressed as religion this time.

When macroeconomic manoeuvrings - a “system” - produce manifest injustice, one can try to understand the mechanism in order to correct unwanted effects. But with Big Capital always several steps ahead of governments, and inventing ever more arcane plays to hornswoggle an ever dumber electorate, this will not happen. Instead, we will see violent reactions led by those who haven’t a clue what the enemy’s game is. This leaves few options. No internal force will ever stop Big Capital from gobbling up the entire world - if Islam doesn’t gobble it up first. Islam can win the hearts and minds of those who feel themselves victims of “the system”. But it is the frog who in the end is the biggest victim of its own system, snared by shareholders and depositors sunning themselves out of its reach.

To change the zoological metaphor, the West is a sitting duck. Islam is a bigger, tougher challenger than Communism was. And the West now has its arms tied in historically unprecedented ways. It waits in the grip of a triple paralysis: intolerant idealism or political correctness, the slo-mo legal labyrinth of supra-national legislation and treaties, and Big Capital’s full Nelson. Plus it may soon run out of credit.

Notes

¹

Reading the Koran in chronological order reveals constantly shifting positions on a number of topics. It seems unreasonable that a god who changed his mind so often during the 23 years of Mohammed’s “ministry” should be forbidden from doing so in the ensuing 1400 years.

²

人之初性本善

³

Koran 2:94. One of the meaner verses of the Koran. The phrase khaalisatan min duuni nnaasi – “especially to the exclusion of people” seems intended to make paradise all the more appealing when there are less tourists or if you don’t have to share those virgins with anyone else.

Is the Koran desirable?

Since I posted the piece entitled "Is the Koran actionable?" I have come to realise that the real problem of the Koran lies not in the isolated verses where it steps over the lines (lines which were drawn by mere mortals in the House of Commons committees which frame our laws), but in its pervading paranoid tribalist mindset. Geert Wilders's film Fitna also makes a verse-by-verse indictment, which though it pinpoints different verses as objectionable, fails to answer the broader question of whether we would want such a publication even with the offending verses removed? Threatening hellfire on unbelievers (fakirs), and those who pretend to believe (the muneffekhs) is not illegal because the punishment is posthumous and does not constitute assault under English law. Still, Geert is to be saluted for taking on the fight, albeit obliged to resort to legalistic nitpicking curiously reminiscent of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. The truth is, for dealing with fire breathers, England was never more in need of this gentleman:

Given the prickly sensibilities involved, the best I can do for the concerned reader is direct him to a page where he can download
St George screensavers. If you get an error message, copy the address from the address bar (Ctrl+C), say a little prayer to St George and then paste it back in in the same place (Ctrl+V). Don't ask why that works.

An Englishman's home

For too long the Englishman's home has been his financial instrument, and speculation has taken his mind off productive work. He has learnt to spend his time watching the changing size of his pile. His view of the Euro matches this mentality. He considers it his birthright to be able to leverage the strength of the pound to buy cheap property abroad and is sorely miffed when as an expat he can no longer live like a king on a sterling pension. But money is like the oil in a car's motor. If it isn't continuously pumped through the system the engine seizes up. The view of money as treasury which needs to be piled up is primitive and is equivalent to letting all the oil accumulate in the sump where it can do no good. For this reason alone, the euro, which has increased the ease with which money circulates over a large area of the world, has proved its worth, and for the Brits to stay out of the eurozone is to deny its potential for lubricating and feeding the real economies of both Europe and the UK.

Thomas Jefferson said "If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered".

Seems the same fate is befalling the mother country.

I dreamed a dream

Last night I dreamt we captured Osama bin Laden. Me and four other lads. It was me that spotted the clue. There was a row of large Victorian houses facing the common, all of them abandoned because of repossessions, but only number 30 was actually boarded up. The line of footsteps in the frost leading up to the door gave it away. His office was actually at number 10, and he would have had to slink across a road every day covered by his faithful lookouts and stenographers because there was an intersection in between.

Leading our captive by a rope across the common I was surprised to bump into Oliver, an old school friend whose surname escapes me, engaged in sloshing out a pig-sty cum water-buffalo-pen.

On reaching HQ I was not sure who I was supposed to hand our prisoner over to. The assembly hall was full of soldiers seated on the floor listening to a lecture, but their brown uniforms were no guide as to which side they were on. But I was soon reassured by the voice of the lecturer, who spoke English, and was warning the troops against dangerous heresies such as Gnosticism or Arianism. Looking for a room to hold the prisoner I was dismayed to discover that every door I opened revealed Shakespearean actors getting costumed. I ended up getting the prisoner a part in the Tempest. Later, wandering down the corridor alone, I saw a young lady in battle fatigues and a white muslim headscarf trying to contact her leader on her cellphone. "Obama! Obama! Obama!" she shouted with growing alarm, as it gradually dawned on her that he must have been renditioned. Her shouting woke me up.

Ditty for the missing Kitty

The weather has turned kind of funny,
It's suddenly raining subpoenas,
Since Bernie Madoff with our money,
And Dreier took us to the cleaners.

Well, their names were a bit of a giveaway...

Popinjay Art (3)

My favourite Catalan expression, used when talking about something so overpriced that no-one can afford it, or so pretentious that no-one can understand it, is "una gran tocada dels collons", which freely translated means "a great tickling of the balls". The present downturn in contemporary art prices exposes how some fancy people's balls have been tickled. To borrow the words of Meredith Whitney who (according to Michael Lewis, here) caused the market in financial stocks to crash. "If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale."
It may be premature for artists with something to sell apart from their signatures to cheer, but you are allowed to grin.

Popinjay Art (2)

If you think Damien Hirst is bad, I invite you to Clairac's International Art Salon coming up this month in Clairac (Lot et Garonne, France). Contemporary Art is sick enough when it is original, but in the hands of French provincial pastiche merchants it truly heralds the end of civilisation. The nude in the poster for the exhibit looks as if she has been hit by a TGV before being smeared onto the canvas with kitchen implements and preserved with some kind of industrial plasticiser. Her severed right arm has been saved for an arresting sculpture to be unveiled over the vin d'honneur after the speeches.

Fuel shortage hits swifts

Has anyone seen our swifts? They disappeared from our village in mid-May halfway through the breeding season and haven't been seen since. On the insect front, we have also only had seven flies, one potter wasp and a single humming bird hawk moth (macroglossum stellatarum) in the house all summer. The two facts may be related. Presumably swifts, which spend all their lives on the wing except when nesting, and (I have read somewhere) fly five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon in a lifetime, need a certain amount of fuel, measured, let us say, in grams of insects per kilometre. So when the density of airborne insect protein falls below the required threshold, what gives?

Swifts live up to their name and are born racers - until they crash. Once they fall to Earth they have trouble taking off again because their wings are too long. They can't feed and they lose morale fast. Anyone who has tried to restart a crashed swift or make it feed from the hand knows the problem.

Apart from their role in keeping down the mosquito population, swifts fulfil an essential function in livening up peaceful village evenings with their noisy rodeos. So are the treetops, hedgerows and ditches littered with swifts who just fell from the sky because of a shortage of insect protein? And are rustic eaves now full of the corpses of the chicks whose mothers never came back to feed them?