I feel I may need to go away for a while… dream it all up again

is Donald Rumsfeld’s famous Iraq gobbledygook in fact eternal wisdom?.. or just a load of old guff?

There are known knowns,

There are known unknowns

and there are unknown unknowns

The tax system needs overhauled, in two areas at least. I have no power to make this happen, just a vote and a blog so here goes.

TV license: should be scraped. I should make a FOI request to see how much the admin and enforcement costs. I haven’t as yet, so I’m gonna go ahead and use hyperbole like ‘Astronomical’ I’m not arguing that the BBC shouldn’t be financed from the exchequer and should tout for advertisers, im just saying that the way the money is collected is out dated.

Way back then most people didn’t have TVs so it was unfair to charge everyone for it, but now days every one has, and in fact those that don’t can watching on their mobile phones or computers anyway. We should scrap it and just pay the BBC from the Culture budget.

Car Tax: Should be scraped. We should follow the Australian model - people must buy a yearly registration which includes 3rd party insurance. Then we should up the taxation levy on fuel.

Bound to happen isn’t it… I blog therefore I am.

Never start watching something on tellie, at eleven o’clock, which lasts two hours, telling yourself you’ll just watch the first ten mins to see if it’s interesting.

The cycle to work this morning hurt!

I never realized how much I thought I knew about the Qur’an and islam, and actually how little I do know.

Channel 4’s documentary Qur’an, was a mammoth affair by Antony Thomas. I’d watched some of his stuff before and really liked it, this is why I give a potentially very dry topic ‘ten minutes’ to rope me in… and that it did

What I learned that I didn’t know:

The Islamic structure and dogma is more diverse than i imagined. There is of course the Sunni/Shia spilt… the Shia being quite like the Christian Catholics in terms of praying to dead Imams (saints), many rituals and sacraments, the need to pray to god through intermediaries (priests/imams). The Sunni are more like protestants in that they don’t think its necessary to go to god through the Imam, they set great stall by the personal relationship with a loving god whom they can commune with at any time and gain guidance and insight. (Sunni are approx 80%)

Each side thinks that the other is obviously wrong. The Sunni (like the prods) have fractured in to denominations with widely diverse ideas regarding the scriptures. Whirling Dervishes in Turkey are seen as an abomination in Egypt, whereas the Muslim women in Indonesia think it’s crazy that Saudi women agree to wear the Niqab. The Saudi women of course are very proud to wear it and feel it is god honoring them. Strangely it seems the younger generation is keener to wear veils than their mothers (who quite passionately spoke against it).

In any case, at the end of the program I surprisingly found myself feeling a lot more respect for Islam, most of the ‘non bonkers’ Imams were very much about a progressive Islam, Mohammad commanding them to go out into the world and learn from others, live a full life and help the needy.

The common thread is of course that the Qur’an was written in Mecca by Mohammad in around 500ad after regular visits from the angel Gabriel who revealed god’s one and only message to humanity. Clever and leaned professors of divinity gave complex and ‘convincing’ apologetics to why this is so obviously reliable. The Sufi mulsims spoke passionately with tears in their eyes about how much Allah means to them and had helped and guided them and deserv’ed of worship. Bonkers of course, but each to his own - and i much confess a certain beauty in their art and culture.

Defiantly, the key to getting a successful religion up and running, is keep the scriptures a bit vague and even a little contradictory and open to cultural interpretations.  My lingering admiration surprised me though, I must admit. I guess my opinion of Islam had only one direction it could go in.

A regularly peddled evangelistic tool, other than the simple ‘repent or burn in hell’ approach, is CS Lewis’s so called Trilemma. It goes something like this… It’s not enough to say that Jesus was a great teacher or a prophet, he doesn’t allow you that… he says he’s god. So either he was the son of god or he was crazy or he was the devil.

It gets some traction because it’s cleverness is this… Christianity is very much ingrained in our culture, we’re a Christian country, a Christian hemisphere. No mater what rebel rousers like Hitchens say we see Christianity in general as a force for moral good. There can’t be many in the UK who don’t know about the Jesus stories and no one would honestly say they thought he was a ‘bad’ person based on what they’ve read. Similarly the bible is considered to contain some wisdom, and wise sayings are attributed to Jesus - he’s not regarded as ‘mad’.

So he’s God, right?

The logic of course is horribly flawed because it assumes the complete reliability of the New Testament. In the last few months I’ve had this one wheeled out to me by a couple of friends - one who’s a church minister and the other who’s lets say, a very progressive Christian. In both cases I was taken aback that they still used it. I’d already answered it before and they must have forgotten. I’ve no conceit that id managed to change their minds re: god but i was disappointed i hadn’t convinced them that it was an invalid logical trick.  It’s the tactics of brainwashing - however benignly they may see it.

The answer to the question is, ‘what the heck do I know?… obviously I assume people aren’t god until really really convinced otherwise but i’m not going to condemn someone ive never met of being mad or bad based on ancient compromised writings’.  The only way it works if you assume that Jesus is god before you start (circular logic) - and maybe that’s why Christians think it makes so much sense.

If you believe that Jesus is god then you believe that god would have made sure the New Testament was reliable and complete, so it’s more than enough data to make our judgments.

Therein lays the problem… if we make the assumption that a man called Jesus lived and died in Jerusalem around that time, we’ve no idea exactly what he said. We have the reports and quotes written decades later, no one would say that we know EVERY WORD he said. Even if we stretch credibility and say that the words reported are largely in line (truly a miracle of factual short-hand journalism)… then how do we know that he didn’t take Peter a side one day and say… ‘hey, you do know that I’m talking metaphorically here about the whole messiah stuff?’ (Peter’s gospel of course didn’t make the cannon!) Or over breakfast one Tuesday before the Last Supper turn to Mary and say ‘…I think I should stop all this teaching, people are starting to get the wrong idea about me…’.

THAT’S the problem with the Trilemma, it only works on those who accept that the bible is a completely reliable account of what happened to Jesus. And if you believe that the bible is a reliable account of what happened to Jesus - then frankly you’re a Christian already.. or you’re mad… or bad.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-shameless-scam-of-restaurant-tips-842807.html

Saturday was the 12th of July… to non Norn Iron people its just the day after the 11th, but to ‘us’ it’s The Twelfth. Not only one day but it’s The Twelfth Fortnight. This year a strange thing happened, and im not sure how I feel about it. Since I’ve lived in England (5 years or so) its been weird that on the 12th of July people just get about their business, no bank holiday, no marches on the streets, no bunting, no general sectarian tension and shivery feeling that a riot could break out at any moment. But THIS year, I forgot all about it… until the evening when I read something about it on my phone, as I was checking the cricket score. (my grandfather was a district grandmaster!)

Maybe I’m like the frog slowly boiling in the English pot.

The best part of the Twelfth was always the Eleventh night though, I can remember my first ‘Eleventh’… the bonfires didn’t really get going till around 11.30, so I had to go to bed at 8 (my bed time) then dad came and woke me up and we all drove around the fires (me still in my jammies)… really exciting.

When I was old enough my mates and I would do the tour ourselves, trying to look like we fitted in, but frankly looking quite middle class I think. One time Grumpy Man was driving us past the Anadale fire in his 1969 VW Beetle when the damn thing went and conked out right in front of the inferno - to hoots of derision we all had to jump out in our chinos to push it.

I’m not sure if it was the same year, but we were standing around the fire at Sandy Row listening to the DJ pump out the most shocking tat, mainly Orange rebel songs put to Scooter beats… when from nowhere popped 5-6 masked men all in black, armed with pistols. We all ‘shit them’, its fair to say. They formed an ‘honor guard’ in front of the fire, one of them shouted the orders and they fired a couple of volleys over the fire (more than likely aimed a the effigy)… then one of the ‘commanders’ ordered them to leave… ‘get da guns of the street boys, ders kids about’ … one of them brushed past me as he matched away. I acted all nonchalant whilst feeling 1,690 miles out of my depth.

They don’t go in for that kinda thing in the SW England ya know… it’s all cheese rolling and balloon festivals!

Liked this Charlie Brooker rant in the Guardian, so thought i’d just post it in here….

I’ve got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.

If your waking life is mundane, it’ll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they’re all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you’ll spend each night dreaming you’re the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.

All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you’re the Emperor of Pluto after you’ve woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you’re in trouble.

I mention this because recently I’ve found myself bumping into people - intelligent, level-headed people - who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the “controlled demolition” of WTC 7 (oft referred to as “the third tower”), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I’m the Emperor of Pluto?

The glaring problem - and it’s glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.

Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you’re talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there’s one thing we know about humans, it’s that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.

It’s hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for goodness sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.

That’s just one broad objection to all the bullshit theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they’ll pull a face and say, “Yeah, but … ” and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that “makes you think” (when it doesn’t) or “contradicts the official story” (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of “evidence” and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.

And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you’ve sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun “findings” before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.

Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there’s a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he’s wrong, do I?

Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find “proof” that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 - or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It’d certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone’s account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the “evidence” was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.

Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You’ve seen through the matrix! At last you’re alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!

Except - ahem - you’re only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the “system” is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality - that “the man” is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn’t give a toss about you anyway - is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that’s no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?

Ed: for conspiracy theories… read religion too… in my humble opinion…. eg  not allowed to say its nonsense until youve read every word of chesterton or barth or stott whoever whoever. Embrace a conspiracy theory/faith and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense.

I’m a big fan of The Observer columnist Will Hutton, my mate bought me his new book for chistmas and if just gotten round to unwrapping it. The book’s called - The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century.

I’ve no doubt that he gets round to critising a lot the actions of the chinese government but im intially struck some of the opening chapter, specifilly this stat.  From 1980-2000 china has managed to bring 400 million people out of poverty. 400 MILLION! , thats more than the population of the expanded EU.

I’m as concerned about human rights and free press as the next lilly livered liberal, but i wonder how many olympic tourch protesters were fully up to speed on the history of china in the 20th century. Principles of direct elections, free press and judicial independence are all well and good (not a sentance i ever thought i’d follow with a ‘but’), but, when watching the governance of an ancient county/culture of 1.3 billion maybe we should acknoldge achivement, and  be willing to learn as well as teach.

It’s a horrible rainy day today, i got soaked on the way to work. I’m in a mood. The wee-un is getting his MMR today, which i guess will mean a lack of joy when i get home. I need some cheering.

This is a picture from the Palia de Siena which appeared in the newspaper today. I was in Siena/Tuscany on my honeyoon a couple of years ago, and had some nice relaxed happy (warm) moments sitting in this piazza taking in the Tuscan sun. Put me in a better mood - thats all. I’m transporting myself here… join me.