the dark brown river

the conjuror of september 11th.

2007-03-19T16:12:00.000Z

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i am the conjuror of 11 september 2001.

i wanted to make a spectacular show.

as with all complex theatricals, the big ideas came first, and
the detail was fleshed out with the asistance of many others
as the plan developed.

the plan was to demolish the twin towers of the world trade
centre, on television. for this i needed two hi-jacked planes,
one to draw the television cameras to the scene. the other
to perform the second act live, when everyone was ready.

some of you have thought about the problems of putting on
such a show, but you are still some way from seeing how it
was done - and i am not going to reveal everything to you
at this stage, no, not even now.

when i asked for hi-jacked planes, they said 'no, too risky -
we are military men. we crave control. we hate reckless
and unpunctual amateurs, too scary, give us drones or
remote control or something we can practise and make
perfect. no arab amateurs, please.'

but i still needed planes. i needed planes to blame. the
hi-jackers and passengers must die, to cover our tracks
and to excite the fear and loathing of the people. i would
keep the passengers to a minimum, because i do not wish
unnecessary suffering. i am, however, immune to feeling
any remorse over necessary suffering . . . and some would
undoubtedly be necessary.

why start from boston ? maybe they had some connections
with security or at the airport in boston, but anyway they said
they would need half an hour at least to be sure of getting the
two planes in the air together, and to line up the shot. so it
made no difference starting from boston.

the planes had transponders. not all of the air traffic controllers,
naturally, were part of the show, some were 'in the audience' -
so we had to bluff them too. when you wanted to hide - you
turned the transponder off. when you wanted to leave a trail,
you left the transponder on - or got someone else to punch a
transponder with your number.

now there is no point in trying to follow a conjuror's every move.
he is trained and practised to dazzle you with speed and skill.
but there is a general rule for all shows - do not look where the
conjuror wants you to look.

- and where does the conjuror want you to look ? into a hole in
pennsylvania. i think that hole is empty.

who wanted to go to pennsylvania ? the hi-jackers ? that surely
was the way to get shot down, to be in the air for an unnecessary
hour after norad had awoken from its early morning exercises.
so what about the military ? if they were involved, they would
have the same objection - how would they explain an aircraft in
the air for an uninterrupted hour after the show had begun ? so
if it did not suit the hi-jackers and it did not suit the military, who
else is there to suit ?

there is the conjuror.

'flight 93' is no more than a hole in the ground in pennsylvania,
and a transponder track. easy. a hole in a disused coal mining
strip, a bang, and a transponder on a plane. what plane ?

you have had the idea sown in your minds, by a man in custody -
khalid sheikh mohammed - that flight 93 was en route to the
capitol. even that idea was hearsay. if the sheik was on the
television, i must have missed it . . . . so, did some torturer's
assistant repeat out loud what the sheik had said ?

so who flies west to hit a target in the city that they have just
departed from in the east ? no one.

if the conjuror says 'look west' - look east. even if that means
looking out to sea. out to sea where the fighter planes were
sent, by mistake . . .

suppose nothing much went west except the transponder code ?
suppose there is nothing in the hole in pennsylvania. suppose
a lot of stories about planes that land at cleveland and take off
again are more conjuring ? suppose delta 1989 flight that really
did land at cleveland is used as a smokescreen to make the
flight that does not go there seem more real ? suppose the 'slip
up' that the plane was shot down is more smokescreening. you
cannot 'trust' conjurors on any point. they are professional
deceivers, you cannot afford to take any point for granted.

crashed, or shot down ? landed or did not land ? the conjuror
happily lets you discuss a matter that cannot be resolved -
certainly not if the plane was never there in the first place.
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going liquid ?

2007-01-06T17:12:00.000Z

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going liquid ?

in view of the president's move to fire generals and hire admirals, i fear that the neo-cons are intending to go liquid. (note : 'homeland security' is to protect them, from you) -

the chinese leaders could use their stack of reserve dollars to buy farms in paraguay. after a limited nuclear war, southern hemisphere real estate could be where we see the next bubble. buy now - tasmania, tierra del fuego, wherever, before uncle samson pulls the house down . . .
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bill me.

2006-12-31T19:30:00.000Z

happy new year.

saddam hussein has paid his account to humanity.

george bush continues to live on extended credit.

asymmetrical peace.

2006-12-25T22:21:00.000Z

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have we hanged the wrong man ? - o fallujah !

this war is being waged in a far off country.

you may have marched against the war on 15 february 2003, but then the war went ahead anyway, and so what more could you do ?

the course of this war has shown you a scattered and ill equipped resistance able to frustrate the most powerful military machine in history. the insurgents cannot win - but neither can they be beaten. does that sound familiar ?

this is called asymmetrical warfare.

the world needs peace. you think that there is nothing more that you can do, because you imagine that where the peace is needed is a far off country, but if you think that, you are starting to fall into the way of thinking of the regular armies, who ship supplies across oceans and mass thousands of men and tonnes of equipment all in one place. scattered and anonymous individuals can frustrate this. the battlefield is nowhere, and everywhere.

you think that you cannot bring about that peace - but look -

if there is a closed door between you and the distant possibility of peace, it is only the door of your own house. open it.

there may be little you can do - do it.

do something to frustrate the smoothly running military machine and the many companies that profit from war. do something to contradict the endless idiotic propaganda, and those who support it by their silence. you are scattered and ill equipped. mobilise greater moral indignation. just resist. say something.

all you need, to be effective, is the concept of an asymmetrical peace.
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irish moiled cattle.

2006-12-05T13:49:00.002Z

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let us talk about irish moiled cattle.

what are irish moiled cattle ?

'moiled' means bald, or hornless, in the irish language - 'maol.' they are a rare breed of red and white cattle with a white stripe down their back. they may have been the cattle of the vikings. they are hardy and thrifty cattle, and pre-date the modern continental breeds which came to ireland with intensive modern farming systems. even the shorthorn came in with improved crop rotations and winter fodder. cattle have been in many parts of ireland longer than fields. moiled cattle browse as well as graze. 'browse' means eat leaves, 'graze' means eat grass. so they are easily kept. googling will find you a photo . . .

in a situation where normal systems such as electricity supply broke down, or became intermittent and unreliable, moiled cattle would do well. to keep a few robust pre industrial animals should be an insurance policy against unlikely but not impossible armageddon. and even when the whole of this country is levelled and drained and has intensive animal housing built upon it - there will be places among the hills and bogs where land improvement is unprofitable or just impossible.
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canute and katrina

2006-12-05T13:49:00.001Z

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there is an inevitability about the forces of nature, and about the forces of geopolitical reality.

we do that reality an injustice when we blame an individual for events that are on a catastrophic scale. hurricane katrina took such a toll because certain people reacted too slowly or too meanly ? o yeah ? i doubt it. rumsfeld lost asia ? no one is that powerful.

the much maligned king canute understood this. his famous foray to the beach was to demonstrate to fawning courtiers that there were limits to the power of royal command.
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flea media

2006-12-05T13:49:00.000Z

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i am always sniping at george bush. i am in danger of joining the flea media.

what are the flea media ?

the flea media are those columnists and bloggers on the radical left, who appear to be savagely biting the big dog - but actually go along with him in the long run.

i am going to say less about george bush. a lame duck with fleas is not a pretty sight. let us instead, turn away . . .
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quack, quack, quack.

2006-11-11T18:07:00.000Z

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my impression of the result of the mid-term election is that 'daddy's men' are back in the back seat drivers' seat.

george bush is now a lame duck,
donald rumsfeld is a dead duck,
and dick cheney is a sitting duck.

quack, quack, quack in the quagmire.
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a bad dream -

2006-11-06T08:29:00.000Z

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there is no snow falling this christmas. here the sky is clear and the stars are out, unlike in the northern hemisphere where the dirty skies are endlessly dulled by the nuclear winter.
a lone star seems to twinkle over a small wooden (temporary) ranch house, while giant construction cranes tower around the air base in the background. inside the ranch the clink of glass upon bottle and a drunken texan voice whooping and hollering. in the back bedroom the virgin condoleeza is delivered of a child, a boy. it is the longed for GEORGE WINSTON HITLER BUSH THE THIRD, cloned son of the last ever president of the united states, who is now the newly crowned commander-in-chief of paraguay.

it is the coming of the next boy-emperor of the world.
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was newgrange built by protestants ?

2006-11-01T14:12:00.000Z

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was newgrange built by protestants ?

no, seriously. was it ?

you think i must be joking, because the protestant reformation is not yet 500 years old, and newgrange and the other monuments of the boyne valley, are nearer to 5000 years old. but the catholic / protestant split was not arbitrary. it probably ocurred along a previously existing faultline, because that, i believe, is how splits most often occur.

how can we describe a split ? by the way, these ideas which i am putting forward are tentative, and open to revision. your contributions are welcome.

i suggest that a split can be a polarisation, along an axis where there was formerly a spectrum. when the split occurs, intermediate positions become less tenable - you are either 'for us' at one end of the spectrum, or 'against us' at the other.
so there have been splits between roundheads and cavaliers, between republicans and monarchists, between, perhaps, cistercians and benedictines, or between the early 'celtic' church and the ceili de.
note the common thread in these 'reformations' is that the reformers differ in the direction of being more austere, more disciplined, more puritanical - less decorative. more verbal - less visual. more prosaic and 'left hemisphere.'

in ireland we are used to the protestants being in the north, and the catholics being in the south. ask an irish person to explain this, and they will give a political answer - that the protestants were brought in as a deliberate policy of colonisation. that is not an answer, it does not explain the origins of the difference in the outer hebrides, where the political history is the same for all the islands, and yet the protestants are once again in the north, the catholics in the south.

here, the sects seem to follow the pattern of settlement in the islands by peoples of pictish descent (northern) and gaelic descent (southern). these two races or cultures also existed in ireland. when the gaelic irish saint columba went to scotland to meet the king of the picts, he took an irish pict, saint canice (later of kilkenny), as his interpreter.

if the protestant and catholic tendencies in the outer hebrides emerged on racial, or tribal lines, this might confirm modern research that religious leanings are partially hereditary. apparently, among separated (but identical) twins, there is an increased chance that if one sibling tends towards a religious mindset the other one will too.

in the case of islam the religion is not monolithic either. the muslims are divided into 'sunni' and 'shiite'. this is one of the significant divisions of our times, and we should all be better informed about the difference.

i am going to suggest that the sunnis are the protestants of islam, and the shiites the catholics. the sunni characteristics of puritanical and dutiful adherence to the law, look familiar, while the shiites are more into saints and holy persons as intermediaries in matters of healing, into visual imagery and charismatic rituals. the shiites also accord a slightly higher social status to women.

* if i am mistaken in any of these points, i would be happy to be corrected.

i also mention in passing, the disciples of john the baptist - and the disciples of jesus - as yet another example of this spectrum and these sectarian tensions within a religious spectrum.

so back to the original question - where does newgrange come in ?

the religious art of the 'catholic' end of the spectrum is representational, while puritans, protestants in general, and much of islam, are iconoclastic, that is to say - disapproving of visual representation in religious contexts.
many millennia after the cave paintings of lascaux show that a subtle and highly developed representational art has developed, there is not one animal or figure or face in the art of the boyne valley.

so the people of europe paint at an earlier stage, but revert to eschewing all representative art at a later stage. had there been one of those cultural mental flips that we call a 'reformation.' ?
i ask my question again. newgrange is artistically as austere as any sunni mosque or cistercian abbey. could it be that newgrange was built by protestants ?
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wake up pat kenny.

2006-10-24T14:14:00.000+01:00

an e mail to the pat kenny show -

pat kenny :

tom clonan ducked your unexpected question about WTC7,
the third tower which fell on 9/11.

the following facts may be relevant :

the tenants of the collapsed WTC7 included offices of the
SEC - securities and exchange commission - the people who
investigate dodgy share dealings, and the FBI - who
investigate dodgy people in general.

the occupants of the section of the pentagon that was
hit by an explosion - alleged to be of a hi-jacked airliner -
included a large number of budget analysts, people who
keep track of military spending. they had been recently
and temporarily moved to the section that was hit.

in photographs released of the explosion at the pentagon,
the colour of the initial fireball is different from the colour
of the explosion of aircraft fuel seen at the south tower of the
world trade centre. be that as it may, the flight 77 aircraft
is missing, and the passenger list included naval and
pentagon personnel. this passenger list also included yet
another pentagon budget analyst, bryan jack, 48.

on the 10th of september, donald rumsfeld made a
speech in which he revealed that 2.3 trillion dollars, that
is $2,300,000,000,000., of the pentagon budget could
not be accounted for. this news was buried in the media,
understandably, by the following day's events.

$100 dollar bank notes weigh very little. it takes $100 million
dollars in such bills to amount to a tonne of paper. for those
who have difficulty visualising large numbers - if you assembled
this total discrepancy in $100 bills the pentagon had misplaced
twenty three thousand tonnes of money in the relevant period.

if you still don't know how much money that is - if you put such
a sum on deposit at two and a half per cent, the interest alone
would be a tonne and a half of hundred dollar bills, not per
year, but per day.

there was one other thing missing on 9/11. a 1933 'double
eagle', a coin of great value to collectors because almost
all that were minted were melted down again. the last
example sold made $5.9 million. one specimen was kept
in the treasury vaults of WTC7. the one in WTC7 was
removed to fort knox in july 2001.

pure gold melts at 1063 degrees centigrade.

the path to war.

2006-10-22T18:14:00.000+01:00

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tony blair's path to war was simply in support of
president bush.

blair hoped for two (shallow) benefits in return for
this -

1. an electoral 'falklands effect' similar to that
achieved by margaret thatcher.

2. to follow john major into the carlyle group - with
which the bush family have influence - and to tour
america (where he is popular), with cherie, after leaving
office.

he also was cowed by the 9/11 events. it did not
take his experts long to work out, like the french
and germans and russians, that the official story of
9/11 was impossible. he baulked at the unpredictable
consequences of unmasking the perpetrators.

history will not be kind to mr blair. a bankrupt who
dithers about his legacy ? he has left his army up
the euphrates without a return ticket. bush and blair
took their foreign policy from karl rove and alistair
campbell. they didn't listen to the mutterings of their
own generals.

they should haul saddam hussein out of gaol, get
him a new uniform, dust him down, give him back
his medals, apologise, and ask him politely -

'how the hell do you run this country ?'
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swansong ?

2006-10-15T19:52:00.000+01:00

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bush, cock of the walk,
and blair, his sidekick/chickenhawk,
squawked the squawk -
but never walked the walk.

now, each a lame duck,
just stuck.
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either a conspiracy - or a conspiracy.

2006-10-07T22:10:00.000+01:00

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the events of 9/11 were obviously the result of a conspiracy.
the attacks were either a conspiracy - or a conspiracy. the
outcome was 'mission accomplished' - for somebody.

the idea of the attack may not have been dreamed up by
saddam hussein, as fantasised by some conspiracy theories -
it may not have been dreamed up by hani hanjour, and it may
not have been dreamed up by marvin bush, but it must have
been dreamed up by somebody, by more than one person.
it was a conspiracy. it was not a coincidence. it was not a
series of accidents.

certain things seem obvious, regardless of who planned it. for
one thing, the plan appears to have run late. for either kind of
conspirators, long attack times were undesirable. for friends of
hani hanjour, the big question would be, 'how long before the
fighter planes show up ?' for the friends of marvin bush the
question becomes - 'how long have we got before people get
suspicious about the absence of fighter planes ?'

unresponsive and off-course planes were in the sky for an hour
or more, so surely the plan ran late ? it may have simply been
the late take off of flight 93 - these things happen - but in that
case we are looking at a complex and interconnected plan, not
just four separate attacks. why else would flight 77, real or faked,
be late arriving over the pentagon ?

if the friends of hani hanjour staged the attacks, afterwards
they were going to be dead. if the friends of marvin bush staged
the attacks, afterwards they would have to be prepared for a
major cover up, and an enquiry. the best person to handle an
enquiry would be one of themselves. from their viewpoint it
would be obvious that the person in charge of the subsequent
enquiry would need to be a key conspirator. if that person were
not aware of all aspects of the conspiracy - how would he know
what information, and which characters, to protect ? the person
to control the enquiry would have to be selected and agreed on
beforehand.

in the event the enquiry was headed by thomas kean, of fiduciary
trust international. this company had offices in the south tower of
the world trade centre, just a few floors below where it was struck
by the second plane. (the second plane was the 'star' of the 9/11
show, and this was bound to be so, unless the attacks on the two
towers had been almost simultaneous. this would be the case
regardless of the identity of the conspirators. some of the cameras
trained on the first strike were bound to capture the second.)

anne tatlock, the c e o of fiduciary trust, was away in offut air
force base, omaha, nebraska, on september 11th. so was
warren buffet the investor. so, later in the day, was george bush.

warren buffet's investment portfolio went up, not down, after the
attacks. this does not indicate conspiracy, but neither does it
contradict the faint possibility of foreknowledge.

fiduciary trust was up and running again very quickly, having
backed up all of its data, and having a well prepared emergency
plan and procedures. as in the case of warren buffet, this does
not indicate being forewarned, but neither does it contradict the
possibility of foreknowledge.

similarly, after the 1993 attack on the world trade centre, fiduciary
trust was up and running again within one hour - even before the
cause of the power failure was known to be a bomb. that was pretty
impressive.

the 1993 attack was also a conspiracy - either way. from that point,
in 1993, it became possible for interested parties - government,
terrorists, owners, occupiers, insurers - to visualise the possibility :
'what would have happened if the tower had fallen ?' almost
certainly private meetings would have been held by some of these
interested parties to consider that question.

one of the people who responded to that attack was a jewish
academic, philip d zelikow, who wrote an article published in 1998
entitled - 'catastrophic terrorism, tackling the new danger.'

zelikow was later appointed executive director of the commission
of enquiry into 9/11 and may well have held the real power within
the commission, with kean as a front man. in effect, zelikow had
begun to write about the catastrophic attack upon the world trade
centre in 1998 before it happened. he had dared to imagine the
'transforming event' - the attack that would be the 'new pearl
harbour' for the neo conservatives.

also following on from the 1993 attack on the world trade centre
a further question would sooner rather than later have occurred
to the owners and insurers of the buildings -
'if the twin towers ever become obsolete or unprofitable, how
will they be demolished, and who will insure the demolition ?'
regardless of any conspiracy or attack, the eventual demolition
of the towers was going to be a headache.

in 2004 a block which was part of the world trade centre was
rebuilt. the old, demolished 'world trade centre 7' had 47 storeys
in 570 feet, or 12 feet per storey approximately. this reconstructed
'world trade centre 7' has 50 storeys in 750 feet, or 15 feet per
storey approximately - three feet in the difference. this is because
of modern underfloor computer wiring requirements. that is why
the twin towers were becoming obsolete, and would have become
impossible to maintain - or to demolish either, for that matter. they
was unsuited to modern concentrations of computers. as for a
demolition, who would insure it ? the hazards were unprecedented.

so we do not know who the conspirators were, but we do know
who were the interested parties. we can call them the friends
of hani hanjour and the friends of marvin bush, and we also have
to add to these interested parties a third group - we could call them
the friends of larry silverstein, for convenience. the property people.

there are also the interests of those who make the foreign policies
of the state of israel, in that any terrorist attack by muslim arabs
would be bound put the focus of american anger upon israel's rivals
for regional power in the middle east. we could call these the friends
of benjamin netanyahu.

finally there are the interests of the pentagon, and the military /
industrial complex that benefits from 'the enterprise' - the massive
flow of tax dollars into the whole range of defence projects and
military expenditure. call these the friends of 'the enterprise.'

n.b. all of the above are listed as interested parties, not guilty parties.

it is not necessary to hit one's head off the brick walls of the 'official
version' or the 'conspiracy theories.' certain things are fairly clear
either way. possible future attacks must have been under consideration
in the minds of certain of the above interested parties at least since the
previous attack in 1993.

long in preparation, the actual attacks probably ran over schedule on
the day. we are talking about a conspiracy - but the existence of that
conspiracy does not then exclude a malfunction, or a cock-up, a coup,
a counter-coup, insider dealing, an insurance scam, or even deliberate
removal of a 1933 double eagle coin from the vaults of world trade
centre 7 to the safety of fort knox.

the double collapse of the twin towers was going to be a 'world
spectacular' even if it had been a regular demolition job. everyone
would have had many years to consider the implications. it was
always going to be big. it was always going to be on television. the
obsolescent world trade towers had to come down one day. they
might even have decided to give mayor giuliani the privilege of
pressing the button.
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stupid questions.

2006-06-17T21:52:00.000+01:00

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i was reading the 500 questions about 9/11. i wanted to ask eleven more,
that are perhaps so stupid that they are hardly worth asking - but anyway -

1. who was expecting george bush to make a dash for air force one,
immediately ? who would be most put out when his team resolutely
stayed put when the news broke ?

2. against what eventuality were preparations made for a possible
introduction of martial law in the state of florida ?

3. who was the 'terrible pilot' and did the first attack hit the wrong tower ?

4. why would george bush be more concerned to have the baggage
searched before going on to air force one, than to protect himself against
the danger of coming under attack from further suicide planes from the air ?

5. whence came the threat or supposed threat to air force one ? how
and why did this story arise ? was there in-fighting going on ?

6. air force one is technically well equipped. is it capable of evading
its own fighter escort ? in what circumstances would it want to ?

7. who would gain, instantly, upon the demise of the president ?

8. what evidence or implications would arise from the existence of a
video recording monitoring the first attack, made from closed circuit
television in bush's car ? (if such a recording existed.) can television
feed be traced afterwards ? why hint at having seen the first attack ?

9. who failed to connect the president immediately to the centre of
operations, so that he could take charge ? if the president were out of
the loop for a vital hour, whose responsibility should it have been to
contact him ?

10. if the attack was made by nineteen muslims with boxcutters - what
is the relevance of flying to the offut air force base in nebraska ? if it
was for the purpose of sitting in the ultimate armageddon nintendo
nuclear video game seat - to impress whom ?

11. what kind of person would get so riled with pentagon bureaucracy
that they would announce 2.3 trillion dollars unaccounted for one day
and put a cruise missile into the accounts section the following day ?

these are not questions that expect answers, but questions meant to
stimulate other and further questions . . .
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i hardly knew ye . . .

2006-05-21T17:49:00.000+01:00

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i hardly knew ye, dark rosaleen.
you look so different, where have ye been ?
you got your hair done - that's what i mean,
your tresses have a flaxen, saxon, sheen . . .

o dark rosaleen, the poets' muse,
when i saw you, i nearly blew a fuse.
no more the raven headed irish maid,
more like leftovers from some viking raid.

so many died for freedom of our land,
but this is what i do not understand -
they died for the orange white and green -
but you dyed all the colours in between.

are ye the blondes the gentlemen prefer ?
blondes have more fun, and blondes create more stir.
to fight for ireland, dark haired girls are grand,
but it takes a blonde to make a one night stand.

so recently your mother gave you suck.
ye grew up happy as a pig in muck.
but ye no longer trust to irish luck,
ye seek the plastic surgeon's nip and tuck.

at first i wasn't sure if it was you,
but underneath your heart beats strong and true -
an irish heart beats strong within your breast,
while gossard's wonderbra pumps up your chest.

the girls that once were gaelic, dark, and red -
now wall to wall are flaxen blondes instead.
was it of this they dreamed - our patriot dead -
your bleached peroxide frizzed-up saxon head ?

i hardly knew ye, dark rosaleen,
my maid of erin, land of the green -
'tis to the old hairdresser ye have been.
now you're the fairest thing was ever seen.
- yes, you're the fairest thing was ever seen.
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the third battle of moytura. (2)

2006-02-18T16:09:00.000Z

( this is the second part - you may wish to read part one, below, first. )

the third battle of moytura -
part two
- an engagement with the feminine face of god.

bres, in the battle of moytura, was the son of elatha.

the canaanite goddess and consort of the high god el was elath. the greek goddess of childbirth was eleutheia. the arabian precursor of allah was a triple moon goddess allat. the island of malta was named after ma-lat or mother lat. an italian milky coffee is a latte. the roman milk giving goddess was lat or latona. the mother of the god apollo was leto.

elatha - eleutheia - allat - ma lat - lat - latte - latona - leto.

you can follow the local manifestations of the feminine and milk giving side of god through all of the indo european languages.

the danes built newgrange ? wrong ? no, right - because the de danaans, the danaan greeks, the danes, the children of danu, anu, and european river names from the don to the danube are all the same. another family of names.

europe itself is named after a goddess, europe, an epithet meaning 'broad faced.' europe is named after the moon. ireland is named after eire, another triple moon goddess. the boyne river is named after boann, another.

between the building of knowth and the building of newgrange, on the banks of the boyne, there may have been religious change. this is a big topic - but newgrange has a focus on the fixed solar feast of midwinter solstice - the neolithic christmas. while the older knowth has a focus on the moveable feast of easter, defined as the full moon after vernal equinox.

this gyreum has a solar orientation. an old fashioned masculine focus ! that is another topic. religious orientation runs like an underground river, unrecognised. few now notice the focus of the new year on the first of january, once denounced by the mediaeval church. it is the beginning of the lunar year. it is the day which is twelve lunar synodic months before the following winter solstice. it is eleven days shorter than the solar year.

there is a deeply rooted bias in western christendom against the residue of the lunar and the feminine. again, it is perfectly possible to profess a rational atheism, and still retain a wariness of the day friday, the number thirteen, or the colour green - all with lunar or feminine significance.
there is also a strong bias in favour of light, or consciousness, as against the nocturnal and unconscious, in western religion. the golden cock on the church weathervane is gold because that colour is symbolic of the sun. the church often faces east, the direction of the dawn. the cock is the bird which crows to salute the dawn, or the return of daylight consciousness.
the night time unconscious mind is not celebrated. nocturnal witches, the residual folk memory of the star gazing neolithic priestess, are represented as malevolent and ugly. their companions are owls, bats, cats - chosen because these are creatures of nocturnal habit.

there is likewise a widespread bias in western christendom in favour of the masculine, symbolised by the right hand.
i want to distinguish clearly here between the male and the masculine. the female and the feminine.
when i say i am a feminist, i sometimes provoke howls of laughter because i am male. but i am a champion of the feminine intuitive side, in both men and women. the other kind of feminist is a mere partisan on the side of women in the battle of the biological sexes. she is often in fact a promoter of the masculine side of women.

if the terms masculine and feminine are too emotionally loaded - we can talk in terms of right and left.
we use the right hand in blessing ourselves.
the catholic blessing is in origin the four fold blessing of jupiter.
we use the right hand for greeting with a handshake.
the muslim uses the right hand to eat with, and the left to clean himself.
chief guests are seated on the host's right hand.
the port gets passed around the guests to the left, but seen from the centre of the table, or above, this is to the right. it is sunwise, the same direction as the shadow of the sundial.
in fact most things go clockwise except a ballroom, where the dancers go anticlockwise or widdershins, with the woman leading but as they move backwards, the same direction as witches dancing in honour of the moon.

the two hemispheres of the brain and their different modes of operation are represented mythologically in the book of genesis and other mythology, by the two trees of paradise - the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. the tree of life is an apple, with venus's five pointed star in its centre if you cut it in half it horizontally. some of the celts called paradise 'avalon' or apple land. there are many versions of the garden of the hesperides and the apple paradise in the west.
the tree of knowledge on the other hand is a fig tree. when the mediaeval church represented the fruit which eve gave to adam, as an apple, they were changing the story. they were shifting the focus of the fall from self consciousness, on to sex.
the tree under which the buddha obtained enlightenment was the bo tree - a fig tree. the tree of knowledge, in the genesis story, is mythologically the same tree. the tree is not actually named, but adam and eve made themselves clothes from fig leaves - and fig leaves come from fig trees. so don't demonise the apple.

the only apple that ever caused enlightenment was the one which hit sir isaac newton a blow to the head in a lincolnshire orchard.

there is a long thread of suppression of both the feminine and the polytheistic in western religion.

the word used for god in the book of genesis is plural - elohim. the seven days of creation arise from a babylonian system of the gods of the heavens - the sun, moon, and five visible planets. the things created on the different days of the first week relate to the gods governing each day. we still use the terms sunday, monday (moon day), tuesday (mars' day) and so on. that is mythology that the jews learned in babylon.

as for the feminine - do you remember the sensation when bishop eamonn casey was revealed to be in a relationship with annie murphy ? now there is a film coming out, 'the da vinci code', to reveal that jesus was in a relationship with mary magdalene. i am not going to say anything about the 'da vinci code' except that i have read it, and nothing in it is new. as you may by now anticipate - i am not very bothered whether the historical jesus had a relationship with mary magdalene, because i do not have a lot of faith in the gospels as history. i am more interested in the mythological. i am intrigued to know why this story is resonating so strongly with people at this particular time. dan brown has struck a chord with the general public. he has sold 40 million copies. something is going on here.
theology is the driest of dry topics. welcome to wet theology.

if we are astonished that jesus may have been in a relationship, what are we to make of the consort of yahweh ? it is clear that at an early stage of development yahweh had a wife, or later as 'the shekinah', a feminine side. she also appears in the bible as sophia, the personification of wisdom. these have come down to later christians as the spirit of god, or holy spirit. the gifts of the spirit, or intuitive side of the mind of god, are traditionally healing, prophecy, and inspiration.
the spirit which is pneuma, the neuter gender breath of god, in greek - is in latin animus, the masculine gendered spirit. here we are skating over centuries of religious evolution in a few sentences, and each of them could be expanded into a talk or a book on its own, or if dan brown is working on a sequel - a hollywood blockbuster.
my point is to remind you that god has not only a dark side, but a feminine side.

so why stop at advocating women priests when you can go all the way and resurrect the divine feminine ?

how are we going to do that ?

some new age romantics dabble in reviving the goddesses of the past. there are plenty to chose from.
a catholic background with its emphasis on local saints and statues and the many manifestations of mary the mother, may make for an easier stepping stone to this approach than strict protestantism, judaism, or islam. but for most people the tendency is first to demolish the old structure, level it, and begin again on a new green field site.
the common characterisitc of those who get into shamanism, buddhism, druid revivalism, hare krishna and all the rest - is a total rejection of their own early religious upbringing. this gives a shallow quality to the newly adopted interest.
when christianity originally came to ireland, it did not act in this way. in the early celtic church there was an easy blending of the new with the older pagan culture. you can cut down a sacred tree or grove, but you cannot demolish wells and mountains and sacred sites, so you must somehow contrive to adapt them. many hilltop crosses are adaptations of pre christian sites - in fact, if you want a guide to the druidical sites of ireland, the best of all is the concrete hill top crosses, marking the powerful sites which could not be obliterated, so had to be taken over . . .

now we are entering a new period of transition.

i am not against new age romanticism, nor even against the traditional solar and masculine religious focus, but i sense that - in the third theological battle of moytura - the forces of light will have to acknowledge and respect the forces of darkness, and reintegrate them into the family of gods, and the feminine will need new expression.

we are in a time similar to the decline of the roman empire in the 300s a d. the old gods were fading. the oracles were falling silent. who would have thought then that the despised christian subversives would become the official imperial religion ? for the emperor constantine to convert the empire was as stunning and unlikely a move as if george bush were to solve all his problems by converting america, tomorrow, to islam. so what is going to happen may not be easily anticipated.

i am not advocating anything. i have no mission. i am not recruiting anybody. i have nothing to sell. there is no hair restorer in my travelling bag.

i am just a prophet on a day out. another prophet blathering in the wilderness, and this is what i prophesy -

the particular god of our time is economic growth. growth is like balor, a big ugly god with only one eye. the followers of the god protect their cult, as of old, by pretending that it is not a cult. yet growth is almighty, growth goes on forever, growth is invisible but everywhere all powerful, and creates all good things. growth will bring more riches for more people and in time create a paradise - even if this means consuming the whole earth.

this god is about to go into a decline. the masculine, sequential, competitive and acquisitive mental mindset is about to hit a brick wall. this growth god is a late manifestation and offshoot of monotheistic jehovah - just as once was allah, the god of the muslims.

this growth god will not disappear, but we will see him reduced in relative importance, just as gods of old shrank and in time became 'the little people.' people will still be born, married, waked, and buried. there will still be naming ceremonies and godparents. ritual, music, candles, flowers, processions - these will remain and may even become more important. take away all dogma from religion, and what do you still have left ? the community gathered under one roof. just as we are gathered here.
churches will not disappear - but the growth god and the growth mentality will end, because growth will end.

i am prophesying that something will arise to displace monotheism and hierarchy and authority. something that mimics the dispersed power of the internet, a fluid communal network, rather than a fossilised central authority. nothing shallow or romantic , or anything you can buy in a new age bookstore, but a flowering of some fundamental element of existing religion. an ethos rather than a dogma. something powerful, unlikely, and unexpected.

i will end by suggesting a range of possibilities. i predict that a stable, responsible, natural, nurturing feminine ethos will re-emerge. it will not be hierarchical and controlled. it will be dispersed and of great diversity, like nature herself. it will enfold, rather than compete with, what went before. she will emerge clothed in a personal mythology.

it could have the concept of gaia - the living earth - as the focus of worship. the concept of 'the environment' carries human centred implications. gaia would be a geocentric focus for religion, science, and philosophy.
it could be a return of eire, the goddess of sovereignty of the land of ireland. a goddess of the land and the earth, but with a more local, tribal focus than gaia.
it could be a new emphasis on the holy spirit as the feminine aspect of the trinity. the holy spirit that was present at the creation, and 'moved on the face of the waters' in the genesis account.
it could be 'the lady of all nations', an authorised veneration originating in visions seen by a dutch woman in the 1940s and 1950s.
it could be saint therese of lisieux.
who ?

i throw in saint therese of lisieux, often pronounced 'teresa of leesyoo', as an example of the unlikely.
this is the french saint theresa, the little flower. her cult is mysterious. it draws two million visitors a year to her birthplace in france. that must be far bigger than the french green party. her great strength seems to be in her youth and ordinariness - she was a nun. she died at twenty four. her statue can be found in irish cathedrals and churches and always with one or two small gifts of fresh roses.
rather than an offering of money, these roses come as an offering from the natural world - strangely, for a nun, because roses represent fertile motherhood. it is lilies which are traditionally symbolic of virginity.

nothing in the history of religion rules out saint teresa as the next great goddess who enfolds and contains the preceding theology. if you think that is an unlikely assessment - go back and remind yourself of the obscurity from which gods have emerged in the past.
if you are looking for the next religious development among the dissillusioned and disappointed adherents of the growth cult - don't look up expecting to see oak trees, look down among the grass, for acorns.

but it is not for you to go shopping for gods and goddesses. we are not talking about religion as a consumer option. the way to encounter a divinity is to simplify your life, to contemplate, to meditate, and to cultivate humility and she will come looking for you.

we are not the owners of the earth. we are not the inheritors of the earth from our parents. we are not even the caretakers of the earth - but she is our caretaker. she decides. she creates and recreates the balance. that is what should give us both fear and hope. the need to tune in to that balance will bring us back to a cult of life, powerful enough to enfold and absorb the masculine cult of dominance, victory, and death-dealing destruction. it is time to moderate the sky gods and thunderbolt throwers. to maintain a stable community of living beings, on this planet, we need to ground ourselves in a geocentric religion.

that is my attempt at prophesy. but the future is not bound by the present. a little humility is in order. forgive me if i sometimes pretend to know more than i do.

there follows an incantation to a goddess unborn. it was written some years ago, not for this but for a different context, but it will do -

goddess unborn
fanfare unblown
touchstone untouched
name unknown
haven unreached
sight unseen
chalice unfilled
uncrowned queen.

stone unturned
fire unburned
word unspoken
peace unbroken
flags unflown
harp unstrung,
mass unsaid
and hymns unsung.
funeral toll
of bell not rung.

beckoned by the echo of a voiceless call.
crushed, crushed, in the ungathered crowd.

take up a task
that you dare not ask.
view what lies
behind your eyes.
turn in the dark
turn in the dark
turn in the dark.

tell what you learned
at truant school.
promise to keep
the unmade rule.
meet at the place
where all roads part.
unspoken wish
in pulseless heart.

unlit dawn
unborn dead
unforlorn
tears unshed.
fossil
of a thing not yet.
bones unearthed
of hosts unmet.

silent scream
of the unafraid.
wings unfold
in egg unlaid.
tangled skein
of bald babe's hair.
hybrid spawn
of unmet pair.

now is the season
of the coming time,
metrical reason
of unfinished . . .

rhyme unspoken
ring unbroken
thought untaken
mind forsaken.
news untold,
earth grows cold.
plot untended
tale unended
faith unfounded
fox unhounded
gone to ground -
lost and found.

nearest, farthest,
unsown harvest,
virgin mother,
same is other.

ancient dream
of unborn race.
fleeting smile
on unformed face.

goddess unborn
goddess unborn.

00000000000000000000000000000000000000

gillies macbain.

based upon a talk given in the gyreum,
corlisheen, county sligo, 12 february, 2006.
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the third battle of moytura. (1)

2006-02-18T15:57:00.000Z

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the third battle of moytura.
(part 1)
- an engagement with the dark side of god.

i want you to imagine lisa bourke, the sky news weather girl.

this is not the typical or everyday sky news weather report. there has been a suicide bombing of a nuclear reactor in the north of england. there has been a massive explosion and a widespread escape of radioactive material. sky news is reporting the spread of the contamination. there is a deep depression over the north of england with winds circling anticlockwise. this is creatiing an effect similar to that of the chernobyl disaster, across most of ireland, back into south wales, and with intense radiactive fallout carried back towards london. the bombers have picked their day very cleverly.

now meet elena, the biker girl of chernobyl. she has a website of text and images at -
www.kiddofspeed.com

she rides her bike to deserted villages, and to a deserted city. she passes hundreds of abandoned fire engines and military vehicles, too contaminated ever to be used again. but nature is now resurgent. at either side of the road the forest is regenerating. there are red deer, wild boar, beavers, wolves, badgers, otters, moose, lynx and wild horses, all in unprecedented numbers. the only species in decline are the rats, the mice, and the pigeons, which are the companions of human settlement and agriculture. nature is always in balance. remove the human element and all of the other species readjust themselves to the new situation. bears occasionally take up residence in the shelter of abandoned farmhouses.
in ireland, i want you to imagine the crisis as it affects dublin zoo, with many animals having to be slaughtered as a total evacuation gets under way. others species are let loose - those who are able to survive independently in the wild at this temperate latitude.
in county sligo most people have left the country, but not all. as in the ukraine - a few elderly farmers stay, preferring to die rather than to leave their land. and in the course of the summer a bear takes up residence in this building, the gyreum.

the door is off its hinges but there is a knock on the window. the bear thinks the bear equivalent of 'uh-oh.' who can it be ? it is two jehovah's witnesses . . . they have come to tell the resident - in this case to their discomfort it will turn out to be a bear - that the world is a battleground between good and evil.

so this is our scene - the gyreum, a unique circular building in county sligo, on magh tuireadh, the plain of towers, site of the second battle of moytura.
and our characters - two jehovah's witnesses, and a bear.
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2. it is not my intention to pick on the jehovah's witnesses, i am probably about to offend adherents of all beliefs - and the atheists most of all.
most of you reading this will be catholic or protestant, lapsed catholic or protestant, or born again catholic or protestant. you may be a new age eclectic, a rational humanist, agnostic, or atheist. but i don't believe in atheism. i am a lapsed atheist.
in belfast in the nineteen thirties the royal ulster constabulary carried out the census in some more disaffected areas. one of the questions was 'what religion are you ?' if you answered the question 'atheist' - you were asked whether you were a catholic or protestant atheist . . .

all gods which are worshipped, exist. worship is their vital nourishment and they live for as long as they are worshipped. to deny this is so is to deny some of the major factors in global history. but if you do deny the existence of gods, that does not leave a vacuum - it tends to elevate reality to the position of a supreme being.
now, 'reality' definitely does not exist. it is an abstract noun and not a tangible object. reality is a theoretical concept. it does not meet its own criteria for deciding what is real. if you elevate reality to be the primary and self evident foundation of the world, you are promoting no more than a fundamentalist dogma. so there.

likewise, a disconnected christian, muslim, or jew, who lapses into atheism, does not live in a vacuum from then on. if you become entirely secular, you not only tend to elevate reality to the status of ultimate truth - you also risk elevating yourself and your personal opinions to be the sole authority in the universe. give us a break. gods are not subject to a supreme court of your personal opinions. who are you anyway? the same purely scientific criteria which fail to find evidence of the existence of gods, cannot prove your existence either. five minutes after a fatal heart attack a dead body is chemically much the same as a live one. so what is the scientific difference ? none.
the gods do not exist ? then nor do we. so that is that dealt with.

none of these arguments matter a damn to the bear, who was going fishing.

according to the jehovah's witnesses and other christian sects the bear has no soul. if there is one great distinction to draw between the christian and the pagan world view, this is it. to the pre-christian mind the world is full of gods and spirits. in the christian / pagan border country of the early celtic church, the world also had a soul. in latin - 'anima mundi'. this is sometimes referred to as the celtic 'world-soul.'
one of the first people to impersonalise nature was caesarius, the bishop of arles in provence, in the early 500s a. d.. early christianity came to gaul as an imperial and an urban centred religion. among other things paganus means a country person, the opposite of the urban sophisticate. caesarius was concerned to eradicate - or as a last resort, christianise - the surviving pagan culture in rural provence.
this was a slow process, never completed. in ireland the holy wells still exist in this christian / pagan no man's land.
all of the modern christian sects deny that the bear has a soul, so if there is a heaven for bears, it has to be here on earth and in the present - not a bad place for it to be.
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3. but our jehovah's witnesses press ahead with their case. the world is a battle ground between good and evil. the righteous, who are at present only a small percentage of the people, will inherit a new heaven on earth, while those who fail to mend their ways will be severely punished. evil is at work in the world and many will succumb. the end is at hand.
everything we hear about this battle suggests that the devil is no walkover. in fact the battle is not going well. jehovah's side are behind and the match is already well into injury time.
how do we respond to this jehovah ? 'jehovah' here stands for the god of israel, yahweh, el, adonai, el shaddai, or the elohim of the creation story in the book of genesis. jehovah is in origin a composite god, hence the many names.
he is also allah. allah the god of bin laden, who inspires al qaeda, is the same as the god of israel, who supposedly told george bush to go into iraq. if both men are telling the truth then this god is somewhat troubled, and in danger of cracking up.
the so called clash of civilisations is no more a war between different gods than is a belfast riot. it is what we would recognise here as sectarian conflict.
an american general has declared allah to be an idol - as against his own god, the true god of the fundamentalist christians. this is pure sectarian ignorance. both gods are originally the god of abraham. so also is the god of the jews - and note that george bush carefully credits 'god' for his inspiration - not either of the other persons of the christian trinity. he has to avoid any offence to israel, his most significant political ally.
one way for us to respond to god is to say simply 'you do not exist.' but hold on. you are in denial. a suicide bomber has just blasted your country, your farm and your family, and trashed everything you ever achieved and all your hopes for the future, in the name of allah. he did so in the expection of a martyr's welcome in paradise that very same evening - you have to take notice of a god who motivates a suicidal attack.
a god like allah does not show up on early warning radar, nor under the microscope. where do you find him? we have to conclude that gods are somehow part of the software - not part of the hardware. the philosopher bertrand russell was one who said god does not exist. so who laughs last ? god could now point out that bertrand russell does not exist.

suppose we approach the god of israel and the allah of the suicide bombers from the evidence of what their followers are doing ? both sides seem to be prepared to do bad and cruel things in pursuit of what they assert are noble objectives. after an attack there would be those on our own island who would pray to jesus and the u.s.a.f. to hit back at someone, anyone. smite them on our behalf, the bastards. - and show us the bits afterwards on sky news. nuke them for the sake of lasting peace.

george bush says clearly - 'you are for us or against us.' what is he quoting ? matthew 12 v. 30. 'he that is not with me is against me.'
karl rove is on the ball there. this plays well with their fundamentalist republican constituency. i only use bush as a highly visible and extreme example of a very widespread mentality.
jehovah like america is the sole superpower. jehovah, like president bush, is commander in chief, and with a not dissimilar pro-israeli bias. he is all powerful. he is however benign, and he is merciful, - but all monarchs would say that, wouldn't they ?
but he does not tolerate dissidents. like george bush, jehovah has a system of rendition to underground torture camps, from which there is no appeal. it is called hell. there are no visiting times, and the relatives who put flowers on your grave do not even get to know where you are.

jehovah, in the beginning, was a jealous god. so jehovah, in the beginning, was not a monotheist, just as jesus was not a christian.

i believe that there is a great crisis brewing for monotheism. i do not say a crisis for religion. i mean a crisis for monarchy, hierarchy and centered authoritarianism. the way in which we think is changing.
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4. i believe that the second battle of moytura, here on the plain of towers, was essentially a theological battle. robert graves, in 'the white goddess', describes a battle of the trees, which he thinks was about sacred alphabets. similarly, i believe that the account of the battle of moytura, in which the participants are gods, is a druidical tale of theological conflict.
when danaans invaded the peninsula we now call greece - their masculine god of the thunderbolt, zeus, 'married' the local goddess, hera. gods can marry in a theological sense. but in the primitive mind marriage also implies subordination. thus a virgin goddess does not mean virgin in the sense of 'never had any sex' it means 'not subordinate to another divinity' - or autonomous. gods can also merge. witness the many original different names for god in the old testament. they can also speciate or divide, as did the god of abraham when he became both allah and yahweh. gods can also simply displace other gods, by vanquishing their theological rivals.
in early irish mythology boann, and brigid, and eire, and the hag of beara all have triple moon goddess elements. lugh, and balor, and diarmuid, and the daghda all have solar elements.
there is no easy way to sort these irish gods out. i think that nuada, a de danaan moon god, is displaced by balor, a fomorian sun god, who is in turn displaced by lugh, a later sun god. but i am open to persuasion if any folklorist has a different interpretation.
one thing we do know is that the fomorians were ugly and violent. all of you who went to irish national schools know that. but hold on, says who ? the peace loving tuatha de danaan ? who beat up who ? remember history is always written, or sung, by the victors. when i was at school in the england of the nineteen fifties it was the germans who were known to be ugly and violent. the paperback books that we read about the war, and the films that we watched, all confirmed this fact - they were an arrogant and ruthless and ugly and violent race. i grew out of that belief, but it took a long time. so maybe the fomorians too were not all that bad looking ?
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5. there is one god whom the christians, jews, and islamic fundamentalists have in common. it is satan, or the devil, who is acknowledged by all - and herein lies an old contradiction : god is good. god created all. so how to explain the devil ? because the devil in hell is apparently just as immortal. hell is clearly also a monarchy.
like laura bush with fallujah, god is not held responsible for this terrible evil - but is not doing much to prevent it either. just as the white house is whiter than white, but guantanamo bay is its dirty underside - could it be that the courts of heaven are constructed over the basements of hell ?

i hope i have said enough to show you where i am coming from. mythologies develop and proliferate and have real consequences. i have no patience with those who are in denial about their very existence. i do not have a lot in common either with those who still take them as literally as you were expected to when you were seven years old.

i want to bring you up the mountain to the god of mecca, jerusalem, and waco, texas, and say - 'just who the hell are you ?'

our resident bear has visitors who wish to communicate, in effect, that the world is a battle between a good god and an evil god. the bear might note that both divine contestants are mythologically male - i say mythologically male because it is not clear how or why a divinity would have a biological sex, not having a material body.
each contestant is monarch in their respective sphere. ( satan is brilliant, satan is an administrative genius. and that is a direct quote from a catholic online website.) but only one of the contestants is credited with designing and creating the whole universal scenario, which the other inhabits.
could it be that there is no separate power in hell ? could it be that the devil is no more than the god of israel's own dark side ? who after all blasted sodom and gomorrah ? who sent plagues and other afflictions into egypt ? who ordered the ethnic cleansing of canaanite cities ? who inspired the sack of constantinople ? how do these massacres differ from the destruction of fallujah ? are george bush and benjamin netanyahu in this sense the true followers of jehovah ?

we separate our morality into compartments. things that get you a medal in basra, would get you twenty years if you tried to do them in kensington high street. but the same is true of religion. we humans are capable of moral partition - evil is tolerable just as long as it is kept separate. but whether we are created in the image of god, or whether we create gods as a reflection of ourselves - evil and good are not separate. many everyday acts have both good and dire consequences. the pure evil that the churches project on to the devil, should be acknowledged as god's own darker side. this practice of projecting has immediate consequences for us. projecting evil intentions on to your opponent makes responsible and constructive engagement with them very difficult.

i want you to come to terms with this concept. gods are part of the communal software. if you reject the tenets of the religion in which you were brought up as a child - you are then weaned from literal belief. but you have to be weaned on to something in its place. if that something is to enthrone your personal opinions and consumer preferences as your supreme authority, and if there is nothing in your whole world bigger than yourself, then you are in big trouble. you are a self appointed god and your professed atheism is something of a self delusion. you have taken on a role that you cannot possibly fulfill.

typically the individual who becomes disconnected from their religion retains the original mental patterns formed by that religion. thus there are green john the baptists among us who have reconstructed the whole 'end of the world' scenario - the good becomes sustainability. evil becomes the pollution of the planet. paradise becomes some green consumer paradise that the elect are striving to achieve. sin becomes burning plastic bottles. each individual is urged to practise self denial or they will not attain this paradise.
in any case the idea of the individual is a romantic fantasy. when n.a.s.a. looks for life on other planets they will find either an inter-dependent community of living beings, or they will find nothing but dead dust and rock. what they will not find is a solitary individual. in nature there can be no such thing.

6. now theology is a complex subject. i am talking about the dark side of god, and i am going to propose that like the poor fomorians, the devil - or call him the fallen angel, lucifer, if you like - is a straw man who has been set up, demonised and dumped upon. he serves to distract us from the dark side of god.

in the christian tradition - unlike that of the jews, muslims, or unitarians - god consists of three equal persons in one being. the others being the holy spirit and jesus.
many books have been written trying to disentangle the historical jesus from later accretions. but i am not primarily interested in the historical jesus. i am more interested in the mythological jesus, the spiritual force. you cannot easily reconstruct the historical figure, because the gospel accounts were not written as history. the gospel does not attempt to file a report or take a photograph. it is an icon, it is a collage in many glittering layers built up by many hands. to attempt to analyse the gospels as literal historical accounts is a crude misunderstanding.

or suppose that we treat jesus as a painting that has been overpainted. we undertake to clean the picture. we take off several layers of church applied varnish, and a few early attempts to revise the composition. some figures have been painted out. we are getting closer to the original. then a point comes when it is no longer getting clearer and simpler - but less clear and more confusing . . .

we come down to a layer in which jesus is greek - or at least a citizen of a partially hellenised galilee. the very name jesus is greek, iesous. the jewish equivalent is joshua. the arabic is issa and the gaelic is iosa. my name is gillies which is giolla iosa.
they tell us that under the greek of the new testament lies an aramaic original. but 'it ain't necessarily so.' instead of an aramaic original it may just be that the authors are bilingual expatriots, writing in greek but thinking in aramaic. just as you have hiberno-english, where the speaker uses english but with the thinking habits of gaelic speech showing through. it does not have to mean that it is a translation.
you want to hear jesus speak ?

'ameen lego humin hoti oudeis propheetees dektos estin en tee patridi autou.'

( an approximate transliteration from greek letters.)

'truly i say unto you that no prophet is honoured in his own country.'

jesus was an educated hellenised jew, probably of royal descent, and cosmopolitan outlook. john the baptist - who may have been a cousin - was by comparison a backwoods conservative.
the reason why jesus is such a complex seeming personality, is because somebody, in the confusion after the fall of jerusalem in 66 a d, took the words of jesus, and the words of john the baptist, and interleaved them into one single book of sayings. thus the character whom you take for the historical jesus, is a literary compilation. this then became a source document for the gospel writers luke and matthew.

likewise with the picture of 'the father' - you have to clean the old testament picture all the way down to a time when yahweh himself was still evolving. dig too deep and you come to a period of early history when yahweh, and el, and the elohim, and the other local deities had not yet fused into one high god.
at an early stage in their religious development, the children of israel lived among canaanites and other tribes. we know the trading canaanites of the sea coast as the phoenicians. yahweh then had a consort known as the asherah, and other names.
although heavily overpainted, the religion of the canaanites is a part of our christian religious inheritance, just as is the religion of the children of israel.

the irish king bres, at moytura, who was half fomorian, half de danaan, was the son of elatha. elath was another of the names of the canaanite great goddess, consort of el, the high god. that may be no more than coincidence, but then again . . .

7. we have now made life difficult for our jehovah's witnesses. we are going to refuse to accept the political domination of the universe by one elderly male divinity. we are going to refuse to declare either for jehovah or against him. protest is a form of homage. we also decline to lock ourselves into a sterile atheism, which can be as dogmatic and restricting as any catechism.
so we offer to act as advocates for the bear and say -
'hey, what about this bear ?'
we do not need to commit ourselves as to whether the bear has a soul or no soul. we just make this point. our bear represents all of the natural world. if you picture the living world and its wonders as simply a useful convenience store without life or soul or meaning - then brother you are in big big trouble. you are going to continue to consume your world, to mine it, to burn it, to dump on it and destroy it.
what are you then going to create ? a new heaven and a new earth ? or an exploited wasteland, a new hell upon earth ?

how you choose to visualise the bear, affects how you treat the bear. all of nature likewise. the witnesses build meeting halls and call them sacred places, failing to see that the whole world is full of sacred places. the patterns of nature are sacred. in the course of western christendom's long struggle to eradicate the last vestiges of the pagan mindset, that intuition has been almost stamped out. if we could get people to refer to all of nature not as 'it' but as 'she' - nothing in nature would be different , but our attitude and behaviour towards the natural world might begin to change.

what is our attitude ? do we own the natural world, or does nature own us? did god create the world ? or does mankind create gods ?
gods and the human mind are in a chicken and egg relationship. human culture gives rise to gods, but gods are powerful actors in human history, transcending the lives of mere individuals.
we construct the language of theology, but that language shapes who we are.

every person - theist, polytheist or atheist - has a religion. just as every voice has an accent - even if your own is hard to detect. and every mind has a style and a basic operating system, and it is this which mythologies attempt to influence. our theology relates to the software of our minds. if you have lost contact with your own mental theological software, that does not mean that it is not there. if you discard the childish mythology of sleigh bells and red nosed reindeer, that does not mean that christmas does not exist.
the atheist says there is no such thing as gods. that is itself a religious dogma. the impotent man says there is no such thing as sex. the four year old child says that whiskey tastes horrible. we hear what they are all saying, and we cannot argue with them, we can only pity them.

worshippers of all kinds understand that their particular god is immortal. 'trans-generational' would be a better word. the egyptians reckoned the life of a god at about 4000 years. over that period the god will evolve, as the worshippers themselves evolve and hopefully, achieve spiritual growth. the tribal gods of hebrews wandering in the bronze age desert, gave rise to mediaeval christianity, even though the long evolutionary process made the outcome almost unrecognisable. likewise the modern culture which you could call 'christian materialism' is a smooth development over time from the same origins, and the cultural patterns continue. the ex-believer cannot help but employ the pirated software of the past. you will hear of sectarian riots between catholic and protestant, between sunni and shia, and between muslim and hindu - but not many between monotheists and rational consumer materialists. that is because there is no clear line between them.

so our question to the atheist and to the jehovah's witnesses would be much the same -

- with or without a soul, this bear is alive. she is the end product of four billion years of evolution. who brought her safely this far ? and how old is your god? 4000 years ? if your god had any hand in creation, why would he stand aside while it is degraded and destroyed ? if you say the bear has no soul, is there then no exploitation, no level of cruelty, that would cause your god to cry out in her defence? one by one the amazing diversity of species that nature gives rise to are being driven into extinction. so when did your sole superpower of a god take over ? or for the atheist, when did your solitary personal opinion take over ? who woke you up this morning ? to whom did you entrust your conscious mind, last night ? and for both of you - how is the divine plan working out ? and if it is not working out, what are you going to do, who are you going to blame ?

but are we, the friends of a bear caught squatting in a gyreum, now going up the mountain to confront a god who seems, at first sight, to be failing ?

is there a danger that we fall into the same arrogance of personal opinion that i have been complaining about ?

will we deal with jehovah, now, by demonisation ? that is one of the very things we are trying to get away from. george bush demonises the muslim fanatics who are the mirror image of himself. in turn radical and alternative thinkers demonise george bush. we all do it. bush - or whoever succeeds him - is cast as the bad guy, or the multinationals, or the government, or the politicians, or the international bankers. we and our friends by implication get walk on parts as the good guys.
we are guilty of recreational moralising.
like the jehovah's witness, we create a punch and judy show, with the entire world as a theatre of war between good and evil. it is much the same play - but we cast different people in the key roles. it is dead end, manichaean, confrontational thinking.

i am hinting that the way forward now, is by 'enfolding' the current religion of the community - rather than by rejecting it.

this would be something like the adoption of the pre christian sacred places and practices accomplished by the early christians. there were no martyrs in the early irish church. there was a peaceful enfolding of the earlier tradition. the new alternative absorbed the older mainstream. if we are to avoid a shallow consumerism among religious options, we have to take this road.
those of us who are confident enough, may have to go back into the mainstream community, back into communal ritual and music, back into our cultural origins to engage with the dark side of god.
in our era of advanced military technology, bio warfare, and cyber attack - the confrontational alternatives are too dangerous. we have to own our own problems and face them. to project them onto our opponents is the high road to the hell of the wasteland.
.
.
( we have taken the theology apart. in a second part we will consider the feminine face of god, and try to take a more constructive tack.)
.

geopolitics for dummies

2005-11-26T22:23:00.000Z

.
we really need a text book - 'geopolitics for dummies.'

there are simple. if unwritten rules, in geopolitics -

in britain and america, and presumably in all democratically
organised countries, the first rule is that the levers of power
are largely the same for both outgoing government, and the
opposition, who are potentially the incoming government.
major potential political donors are also, to a large extent,
the same for both parties. bribes are only sure fire effective
for corporations who control both parties.

the second rule is that the crucial decisions for either group
of potential rulers should not be made prime issues in an
election, where they would be open to being resolved by the
masses, instead of by the informed elite.

thus, unless history develops a momentum of its own - (which
can happen) - you can take it that the 'issues' in an election
or the 'reasons' given for a war, are not the actual issues which
occupy the minds of the informed elite at that present moment,
or the reasons for which they are starting a war.

thirdly, the political mind does not do one thing for one reason -
the possible moves on the political or geopolitical chessboard
are each considered in the context of the whole game - not
for one reason, but, if possible, for all reasons. political questions
are open ended questions, not just narrow or academic questions.
political questions rarely have one narrow motive, or one answer.

to the political mind power is the ultimate currency. so the middle
east is not just crucial because oil makes internal combustion
engines work. it is crucial because oil's use, and the denial of its
use to others, is a lever of power. power is the gold standard of
the political classes, against which all actions are measured.

look at opium poppy cultivation. . .

heroin is bad.

the 'war on drugs' is good.

but if you are thinking geo-politically, afghanistan is central to the
asian landmass, heroin (opium poppy) cultivation is crucial to the
afghan 'warlords', thus heroin, like oil, is a lever of power in that
region. a lever that must be taken under control.

think morally - and poppy fields are bad.

think geopolitically - and you will begin to see why a gutless
little poodle like blair will go along with a revival of the heroin
trade. power is the only currency he values. power is the
only thing he respects. therefore poppy fields - good.

referring back to the second rule - do not expect to be asked
in a general election if you approve / disapprove of heroin.
you will almost certainly give the 'wrong' answer. as for the
attitude of the opposition - see the first rule, above.

if it is important, you will not be told. you will not be asked.

so, although you may not know the reasons for a particualr
war, by applying the geopolitical rules (above) you will know
that it is -
(a) all reasons.
(b) - other than the actual reason advertised.

got that ?

the players in the geopolitical game are seven, as follows.

1 supergangster. ( e g cheney, putin, kissinger, benedict 16.)
2 supergangstersidekick. ( e g libby, rove, card.)
3 wannabe gangster. ( e g blair, jose maria aznar, kerry.)
4 plain sidekick or kitchen cabinet. ( e g laura bush, alastair campbell,)
5 pathetic wannabe sidekicks, and patsies. ( eg oswald, geldof, bono.)
6 sucker victims. ( e g much of africa.)

7 irrelevent sidelined suckers - not in the game.

(you belong to category seven.) this also includes powerless
idealists, recreational moralists, and each nation's hairdressers
and taxi drivers - reputedly the only people who really know how
to run a country. (or one might assume, to hear them talking.)

sometimes the idealists become powerful and relevant. fine.
they then join one of the other six groups. . .

on the whole, group 7 contains some decent people. they like
to assume that their masters are similarly well motivated. thus
it is quite easy to sell them simple stories, for example that -

- oswald shot kennedy.
- pearl harbour was a surprise.
- the gulf of tonkin incident was another.
- two helicopters collided accidentally in the iranian desert on their
way to get carter the hostages (and thus the election.)
- a mad guy shot reagan.
- henry kissinger is a nobel peace prize winner.
- moderate fires can collapse steel framed skyscrapers.
- nineteen muslims, (at least six of whom later turned out to be
still alive ) planned and put into effect the 9/11 attacks.
- civilian aeroplane nosecones are strong enough to penetrate
three rings of buildings, concrete and specially reinforced.

but enough. you are beginning to get embarrassed, like the
decent person you are.

knowing that you find the crude realities of the geopolitical
and global financial games upsetting, the informed elite has
arranged, (by means of media manipulation, business
confidentiality, and national security classification), that
certain of the most glaring facts will be kept out of sight.
don't worry - far from being brutal - swiss and carribbean
bankers, bush sidekicks, and pentagon budget analysts, are
acutely sensitve to your finer feelings. they will do everything
they can to put you at your ease, even to the extent of telling
the occasional white lie.

oh, and i am only joking about the heroin. the war on drugs
will continue - do not fear - for 'as long as it takes.'

that will be just as soon as 30 percent of the afghans learn to
grow the barley for brewing 'miller genuine draft.'
.

armageddon flu scam.

2005-11-19T16:22:00.000Z

.
this must be nearly the perfect scam -

1 make a speech vowing to defend the nation against
natural or man made epidemics.

2 divert millions of dollars into research into (a) creating
a lethal flu, whether a novel or pre existing strain, and (b)
creating an effective antidote to the same.

3 buy shares in the companies likely to benefit from this.

4 now release the flu in an 'axis of evil' or rogue state.

5 now demand total united nations backed quarantine
of that state, effectively bankrupting it, more or less
instantaneously.

6 make another speech announcing that intelligence
sources have intercepted a plan for 'suicide flu bombers'
to infiltrate the nation or one of her foreign allies.

7 offer the flu antidote to this nation (these nations) -

8 - at a price.

9 now release the flu yourself, having cleaned up on
the pharmaceutical share price. decimate those who
refuse to pay the price of protection. all those who have
either cooperated or received free vaccination are saved.
all enemies of the nation are wiped off the map.

10 repeat the dose, as required.
.

exxon-mobil to the rescue.

2005-11-19T11:29:00.000Z

.
i am declaring infavour of record oil company profits.

what ?! follow this -

restricted refining capacity -
(a) raises the price of gasoline and refined products.

(b) thus encouraging conservation by the customer, and
possibly even lowering the rate of exhaustion of finite fossil
fuels.

(c) also making alternative energy closer to economic viability,
and thus making more research into alternatives worthwhile.

(d) while the increased flow of money spent on oil, and
oil products, is recycled, and is not lost to the global
economy.

(e) finally, some of these enhanced oil refiners' profits
are at last being channelled into raising awareness
of the finite nature of fossil fuels. (and incidentally, thus
making the consumer more tolerant of high prices.)

sounds like a win-win-win to me.
.

neo-christian, neo-pagan.

2005-11-19T10:57:00.000Z

.
i guess most readers like this thought -

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
- Wendell Berry

- but many thoughts and slogans carry implied, as well as explicit messages. here, the word 'responsibility' can be a substitute word for 'power.' ever heard a politician modestly accepting a new appointment ? he never says 'new power and authority' but he often makes a little speech about 'challenging new responsibilities'. for all wendell berry's image, his quote is about power, and contrasts with the one below -

"We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." - Aldo Leopold

this guy sounds like wendell berry, but look a little closer and he is from a different political/religious/ecophilosophical tendency. whereas 'responsibility' is neo-christian - (we are separate from and in power over creation), 'respect' is neo-pagan, (nature is in power over us, because we are an integral part of nature).

i go with leopold. any other opinions ?

autumn raspberries.

2005-11-17T22:18:00.000Z

.
i don't work every day - today i was at home on the
farm.

cattle. i breed shorthorns crossed with irish moiled
cattle. the irish moiled (maol = bald ) has no horns
but is naturally polled. this save the vet's diesel and
the cost of cutting them off, as cattle with horns are
banned in irish cattle marts. the reason for keeping
these breeds is because the cattle here get only grass,
hay, and water, and are left out all winter. to bring cattle
in accumulates slurry, and this requires machinery ( i do
not have any) to spread back on the land. to quote the
late john seymour - this takes a solution and divides it
into two problems. operating a pre-industrial farming
system, i keep pre-industrial cattle. modern irish cattle
are fed, in part, from the american great plains, and if
these are destined to be turned over to biodiesel crops,
food grain importers will need to do some hard thinking.

lunch. i had a salad of grated turnip, carrot, chinese
cabbage, with potatoes - all from the garden - and dollops
of hellman's mayonnaise from tesco. ( i am not a saint )

to follow, the last of the autumn raspberries, plus sugar
(imported) and milk ( made with american soya and machine
made silage).

fuel. slightly damp turf contributes to global warming more
than to mine. you need sticks to get the fire going. logs are
a luxury - factor in the wages and the chainsaw maintenance
and your own timber is not an economical fuel. but i am only
gathering dead sticks for kindling. an hour or less gathers
a wheelbarrow load that lasts a week.

washing. my clothes drier is a long line in the garage. the
garage contains turf - no car. i would not mind only using
the washing machine on the days the wind blew, if that meant
we all survived on wind powered electricity. the three local
windmills are at templederry twelve miles away.

bicycle. the garage also houses my bicycle. it is a butcher's
delivery bike with basket. ( thurles c. 1950 ).

newspapers. daily newspapers cost about 6 x 1.50 = 9 euro
per week or about 80 euro every couple of months. i can get
two months' internet for 60 euro ( a couple of hours a night.) and
i still have the telly in the hotels and bars, often two tellies at a time.
the most consistently intelligent newspaper - for my interests, which
tend to be global, economic, geopolitical, historical - is the asia
times online.

but you cannot light the fire with the internet. i buy a sunday paper.
since my habits were revolutionised by the internet, i buy a
different newspaper every time. sunday telegraph - new york
herald tribune - irish independent - hello magazine - whatever.

my cat 'smudge' is semi self-sufficient. i have not told him the
news about american soya yet. perhaps we will have to milk one
of our own cows.

. . . all of this chat brought to you as a break from the usual gloom
of global politics and economics . . . .
.

opium poppy day ?

2005-11-17T22:03:00.000Z

.
i see a lot of people on television wearing poppies in
their buttonholes. i presume this is to indicate support
for the afghan opium trade, which constitutes over 50%
of the country's g d p and, after a serious decline under
the taliban, is now thriving again ? the opium poppy farmer
were rescued by british and american subsidies and
encouragement to the many afghan farm families involved
in the business (30 percent of families ?). they now seek
ways to legalise the trade, making excuses that seem pretty
thin . . .

basically the drug business is big in afghanistan and big
in the world of money laundering and offshore banking,
and geopolitics was always a dirty business . . .
.

high noon at the helipad.

2005-11-01T23:19:00.000Z

.
both of the basic 9/11 theories are defective - look at them.

1 bush did not know -

the video of the reading lesson in sarasota school makes
this hard to swallow. bush would have shown a stronger
reaction, and at the very least been anxious to conclude
the event and get out of the room. he dawdled as if he was
establishing an alibi.

2 bush knew -

this is also unsatisfactory. if bush knew he would have
rehearsed a reaction. even if he had decided to pretend
to fail to take in the significance of the first strike - he would
surely have been able to put on a more 'presidential'
reaction to the second strike.

so both basic theories have flaws.

3 the line of thinking that i have suggested pursuing, in a
couple of former blog entries, is that something went wrong
or ran late on the day. for example - both muslim conspirators
or pentagon conspirators would have wanted the strikes
to come in rapid succession. the muslims would fear an
intervention by F16s. for the pentagon, the longer that the
failure to intercept went on, the more they would have to
face the embarrassing question later of 'where were the F16s ?'

in the sarasota video bush looks exactly like a man at an
airport when the monitor displays the 'flight delayed sign.'

4 a fourth line of approach is possible -

suppose that 9/11 is a pentagon conspiracy with bush left
partially outside of the loop ? not enough notice is taken of
possible threats to bush on 9/11. . .

(a) the pentagon strike was only yards from the helipad that
bush was scheduled to land at on 9/11 at noon.

(b) bush seemed unafraid to remain at the sarasota school.
if anything, reluctant to get out and on board his plane.

(c) in spite of this laid back attitude, a serious search was
made of all luggage before air force one took off. this delayed
the take off. thus bush was more suspicious of internal betrayal
than of being ambushed by fanatical muslim attackers.

(d) no fighters came to protect air force one - so either the
orders which stood down the F16s in new york and washington
affected the whole country . . . this could point to bush himself
(if in control), or cheney if bush was not in control . . . either that,
or bush was afraid of internal betrayal and did not even trust the
fighter escorts available to him.

so there are elements of the 9/11 situation that suggest that
- even if the events stemmed from a pentagon, or some other
internal, conspiracy - bush was in a difficult situation in respect
of other figures in his administration.

what else points to this ?

bush twice claims to have seen the first plane hit the north tower.
suppose that he did ? suppose for example that he got a 'feed'
of a camera relaying pictures of the first hit, from the cheney
or rumsfeld bunker ?

there would have been no point in repeating a statement that
made nonsense to the public, unless it was some kind of veiled
threat in a power confrontation with a conspirator. suppose that
bush retained a video recording of a small plane hitting the north
tower. its existence would prove that someone with access to the
president had set up such a cameras and sent the 'feed'.

likewise the clearly false story of a threat to air force one from
someone with knowledge of official codes. this too comes across
as a shot across the bows to some other conspirator. there was
a threat, not from hi-jackers, but from within the system. why
put out / let out this, when so much else was 'blank-walled' ?

this line of thinking goes further - but a hint will be sufficient
to people who have a knowledge of 9/11. think it through.

somewhere in the background of what happened on 9/11 there
are indications of an intense power struggle, coup, or averted
coup. this may have been the tension known to exist between
the pentagon and the state department, or something similar,
or connected. this tension is internal to the united states
administration, and so intense that at some points george
bush and his father, george bush senior, have been on different
sides of the argument.

* * * * *

george bush hung around on 9/11 - apparently unafraid of
further attacks from muslim extremists - but also apparently
not fully within the loop with regard to any internal conspiracy,
if the other line is followed.

his indecision is marked - and this indecision does not fit the
theory of an 'attack on america.' but nor does it look like a well
rehearsed conspiracy moving to plan.

either the morning of 9/11 produced a serious glitch in a complex
plan, or there was some confrontation or negotiation between the
insiders on that day.

a review of the targets on 9/11 is instructive. the helipad at which
bush was to land, later. a 'feint' towards the white house by the
plane / missile which hit the pentagon. the building WTC 7 in
which the CIA, FBI, and SEC, had offices.

if 9/11 had elements of an internal coup, several groups of people
got to look down the barrel of the gun. there was even a media
rumour of a car bomb at the state department. quite a few people
must have been unsure for a time, on that day, just who the target
list included.
.

peak oil psychology.

2005-09-27T21:47:00.000+01:00

.
the peak oil scenario theorists might consider this one -

right at the moment o p e c has no takers for the extra crude
oil they have put on the market. so the ceiling on supply
is not in crude oil but in refined oil products. so peak petrol
(if you like) is a ceiling lower and tighter than peak (crude,
saudi) oil.

this is a further aspect of my repeated thesis that the
consumer does not experience 'peak oil' but only peak
petrol/diesel price at the pumps - plus the inflation caused
by other people factoring in higher transport costs to the
prices of their products. . .

now i want to go a step further.

markets are highly psychological. there can be a further
ceiling, and it is the perception of peak oil. that ceiling can
be lower again than the ceiling created by the actual supply
of refined products.

i suspect that the graphic scenes of southern u s
infrastructure, including oil facilities, getting destroyed, and
an administration powerless to do anything about it - is
capable of turning the tide of perception.

petrol/diesel supplies may now recover a little, oil prices
may fall a little - while at the same time the perception of
shortage continues to take hold.

where will it show ? i suggest in the weakening of the
price of second homes. whether for weekends by car, or
bi-annual trips by air, second homes as investments are
travel dependent and thus fuel price dependent.

secondly in the gas guzzler s u v market, where the
purchaser of a new vehicle has to look about four years
ahead, depending on how often they trade in their
vehicle. psychology plays a part there.

a further psychological downer is this - the perception
that invading weaker countries to grab oil (however you
wrap it up in rhetoric about freedom) does not actually
add to the flow of oil, but badly impedes it. the game is
up there also.

if peak oil psychology takes hold - oil can go back to
$40 dollars/barrel, and people will not be comforted,
'knowing' that this is only temporary.

these things can happen.

watch and see.
.

the bombshell on flight 77

2005-07-28T00:22:00.000+01:00

From: cranagh@eircom.net
Subject: the bombshell on 77.
Date: 27 July 2005 12:02:23 IST

.
an invitation to collaborate on a film script.

this is a general invitation to contribute your ideas to
a film script. both the script itself, and what to do with
the script if and when it reaches completion, are open
to suggestions from the contributors. if you read on you
will begin to see the general direction in which the story
is headed. needless to say that no ending has been,
nor can be, scripted at this stage.

the bombshell on flight 77.
(or alternative title.)

1. barbie doll, an investigative television reporter, thinks
that she has landed one of the big stories of all time when
she investigates the democratic white house. barbie is a
blonde bombshell with looks as well as brains. she thinks
that she has identified the channel whereby department
of defense funds, 'unaccounted for' at the pentagon, are
transferred to offshore locations, to be used as a slush fund.
this fund then being deployed to ensure that money allocated
to defense budgets continues at its already high level.

2. the matter is so sensitive that she waits until the return
of the republican party to the presidency before raising a
matter likely to sink the democrats, politically, for a long time
to come. her informants will be reluctant to risk their careers
by going public, and certainly not before then.

3. unknown to barbie doll and her husband ken, the big
revelation which she expects to make their political and
journalistic fortunes is both unwelcome and dangerous - the
republican party is, if anything, more deeply involved in the
offshore 'gravy train' than their democratic opponents, and as
well as that, are busy investing it abroad to 'short' the dollar,
which their policies are designed to sink.

4. meanwhile in new york a reissued report on the 1993 world
trade centre bombings raises questions in the minds of everyone
who reads it. (a) who really carried them out ? (b) what would
have happened if the bomb had succeeded in toppling the
towers ? (c) what is going to happen when the towers have to
be demolished at the end of their useful life ? and will manhattan
be buried in dust from the demolition charges ? and (d) who
will pay to clean up, or who will pay to have the towers taken
down floor by floor, if the insurers insist that it is to be done that
way ?

5. these questions become more urgent when computerisation
of office work means that all buildings which are lacking space
between floors in which to route wiring and connections, are
potentially obsolete. the bill to retro-fix the towers looks like being
some $800 million - rising further, if the work is put off for a few
years.

6. the film will have background sub plots drawn from middle
eastern politics and arab hi-jackings, of the kind without which
any contemporary drama would be incomplete. ( these sub-plots
are not part of the cooperatively produced script, as any fool
could come up with a number of these.)

7. the action opens with the swearing in of one of the greatest
and most brilliant and effective of united states presidents in a
generation. (audiences will appreciate that they are being drawn
in to a fictional scenario.)

8. in the fictional tale, they are given to understand that all is not
well between barbie and ken, in spite of outward appearances.

9. ken insists that the story will have to be buried, as there is no
chance of taking on both political parties at once. in fact he now
realises that there was little chance of taking on even one political
party, as the republicans would be happy enough with a narrow
defeat of the democrats in an election, but by burying them totally
they would risk reprisals against their own past illegalities. it is
always reasonable to assume that a party has past sins to uncover,
( this sad fact being in no way unique to america.)

10. but barbie is stubborn. ken is dismayed to find that he has
discovered a fundamental incompatibility between them, for
while both of them are ambitious for themselves and for america,
barbie genuinely, when the chips are down, puts america first.

11. ken now sees a new danger - he appreciates better than barbie
how many people stand to lose from barbie's story coming out. in
the first climax of the film a blazing and bitter row is scripted, in
which he accuses his wife of risking all that they have worked for,
for the sake of a damn fool story that takes on the combined
might of the political parties, the defense contractors, the pentagon,
and the president. barbie leaves in tears.

12. barbie bravely goes to confront her informants, which include
whistleblowers deep inside the pentagon, to tell them that the
launch of the story is on hold, indefinitely.

cut to ken's office where he is seen lifting a secure telephone . . .

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

this is the point at which the script is thrown open to the contributors.

it is a film script, so it has to walk a line between what is dramatic
and what is believeable. the following hypothetical script is included
as an example of the kind of thing audiences will refuse point blank
to accept as being remotely possible, and which would thus be more
or less unmarketable -

hypothetical script -

13. in the belief that the story is about to break, the people whom ken
has approached activate a plan, the outline of which has been around
for several years for this very eventuality. they offer ken the choice of
cooperating in his wife's disappearance, or disappearing with her. he
knows how easily their 'double suicide' could be arranged. he asks
what he has to do to save himself and his career. . .

14. meanwhile, to ensure that the potential (as yet unidentified)
pentagon whistleblowers are eliminated, plans to assassinate them
individually have been rejected in favour of blowing them up, all in
one go, together.

15. the day before this is to be accomplished, the news is released
to the media that an enormous sum of money is 'unaccounted for'
in the pentagon budget. this news gets buried in the next day's
dramatic events, as the conspirators have anticipated.

16. on the morning of the coup, the accounts section of the pentagon
in washington explodes in a ball of flame, and on the very same day
the new york offices of the c i a, the f b i, and the s e c, all collapse in
a controlled demolition, the immediate area having been previously
cleared of firemen and other potential witnesses. most pentagon
whistleblowers are wiped out by the explosions, while any that
survive are understandably intimidated. no one is killed in new
york, but files are irretrievably lost in both locations.

17. these events escape media attention because of a 'special
effects' sub plot of a diversionary nature - the twin towers of the
world trade centre are demolished after apparent suicide attacks,
while thousands of new york office workers are still inside. this
daylight spectacular is on live television, but is replayed endlessly
for anyone who happens to miss it. battered by real life drama
that they cannot understand, the viewers are ready to swallow
whatever explanations the media have ready to hand. smoke
machines are used to add smoke of various unlikely colours
to the scene.

18. the film ends with ken ringing the television station with the
news that barbie was a passenger on the plane - the very plane
which has exploded in the pentagon accounts department, and
which has disintegrated into unrecognisable fragments in the heat
of the fire that follows the crash.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

(contributors to the script are free to use their own imagination, but
will be expected to come up with something better than this . . . the
middle eastern angle has potential and could be developed further.)

good luck.
.

a lazy day in september 01.

2005-07-19T20:55:00.000+01:00

.
unidentified voice - 'mohammed, will we do it now, or after the coffee ?'

(no answer).

(air traffic control continues to monitor the flight flying westwards for another fifteen minutes.). . .

same day - sarasota elementary school.

andrew card, presidental aide - 'your coffee's going cold.' (later amended by white house spin doctors to 'america is under attack.')

(the president looks irritated but makes no reply.)

ari fleischer next holds up a card on which is written - 'don't say anything yet. i can make a fresh pot. it's no trouble. honest.'

same day - secure location on u s a f base, not far from washington d. c.

'they're on again sir. another one hi-jacked. that must be the third or fourth.'

(reply indistinct.)

'they sound quite excited, sir.'

'o.k. tell 'em we'll get back to 'em.'

'sir.'

"oh major -'

'sir ?'

'is that goddam kettle boiled yet ?'
.

free advice to china ?

2005-07-16T18:56:00.000+01:00

.
there is a lot of talk about whether the markets have failed to understand the significance of 'peak oil.'

when this discussion is over - who will adjudicate the winners ? who will deliver the verdict ? or will we all go our separate ways a little wiser but still holding diverse views ?

no, the market is always right.

the market is made possible by people holding slightly differing views. ( a market in which everyone holds the same view is called a panic.) if the market is 'wrong' - then place your correct bet and make your fortune. there will be slight movement in your chosen direction and the market will be right once again. if you insist that the market is still 'wrong' - bet again tomorrow.

keep teaching the market a lesson about peak oil, and get incredibly rich. if there is a flaw in the peak oil theory somewhere - then the market will teach you a lesson.

so you will either get a fortune or an education. it looks like a win-win situation to me.

if you own oil, pump it, sell it, and use the money to bet on the oil futures market. that is a lot less risky than leaving the oil in the ground, or even in storage tanks above ground. o yes, and as you buy oil futures you will be stimulating the market price of the oil that you are about to sell next.

some people i know would actually prefer the supply of oil to be a bit more secure. they have 1,300,000,000 people, massive dollar reserves, and nuclear weapons. someone send me the address of their website and e mail and i will let them know how it can be done.

except that without the insecurity the futures price would soar. so it seems that you get an education in this business whichever way you turn . . . .
.

the lusitania lecture.

2005-07-06T01:02:00.000+01:00

.
it may be that i am one of those who have an internet
personality that is at odds with their everyday demeanor.

so this irritable, confrontational and hectoring lecturing
persona exists mostly in cyberspace, and would be
unrecognisable to the grannies in wheelchairs whom i
deal with in the course of the day -

i hope -

nevertheless -

this lecturing persona has something to say to you. we
live in extraordinary times in which things are happening
unlike anything that happened before. well almost unlike -

in 1915 the sinking of the lusitania off ireland had a major
effect upon the decision of america to join in the first world
war.

the attack on pearl harbour had an even more direct effect
upon american public opinion and the decision to go into the
second world war.

and 9/11 has supplied the catalyst for the united states to
enter the third world war - or to those who number the cold
war and the collapse of the soviet system as the third one -
the fourth world war.

and to this sorry list we have to add a bogus event in the
rise to power of one of the neo conservatives' secret heroes -
the role of the bogus reichstag fire in the rise of adolf hitler.

when history is written, these events appear as political and
military events. other people write economic histories, about
keynes, the gold standard, and the 1929 great crash. but in
the unfolding of real history the economic and the political do
not divide as neatly into separate chapters as they seem to
in the text books written decades later.

i have for some time been troubled by the tendency to suggest
what amounts to overall global economic reform, as though this
could somehow take place in a political, military, and historical
vacuum - and without reference to the people now in power.

to avoid getting sidetracked by the personality of the front man -
( the man whom i personally believe is not actually formulating
policy but merely articulating, or inarticulating, modern style
propaganda known as 'spin') - we could just talk about 'power'
itself, or 'vested interests.' or we could adopt an acronym
for these - vested interests, currently entrenched - 'v i c e.'

to make any worthwhile contribution you have first to come to
terms with the utter ruthlessness of powermongers, and also with
a phenomenon known as 'the banality of evil.' you have to see
that if hitler were alive today, just as he was in the late1930s, but
armed with an overwhelming arsenal of nuclear weapons, and
with access to modern television and communications, - he
would most probably be coming across as quite a reasonable
sort of guy doing his best in difficult circumstances.

if you are buying the spin, the spin that 'v i c e' is on your side,
patriotic, god fearing, compassionate, visionary . . . then i despair
of you. if you have spent the weekend watching a line up of
white middle aged millionaires using the distressed condition
of africa as a way to sell more pink floyd albums and further
increase their own celebrity value, and swallowed that story whole -
. . . then i despair of you. if you believe that organic farming puts
food on the table without the expenditure of oil . . . then i despair
of you. and if you believe that steel-framed skyscrapers collapse
neatly as a result of intense large fires caused by aviation fuel, . . .
then i despair of you. if you believe that steel-framed skyscrapers
also collapse neatly as a result of small fires and totally unassisted
by aviation fuel, then i believe that you are either pulling my leg, or
are already in the pay of the agents of 'v i c e.'

perhaps your mind is beginning to form the words 'conspiracy theory'
to itself. if so, then use your computer to surf the current conspiracy
theories. is barbara olsen really still alive and in the south of
france,
transformed by plastic surgery ? i despair of all that stuff too.

the conspiracy theories all point to the criminal guilt of the vested
interests currently entrenched. none that i have seen have any clue
as to where we should go from here. they are in some way as negative
and malevolent as the vested interests which form the subject of their
attacks.

so we have the hard ruthlessness of the vested interests, ( and the
'american century' neo conservative think tanks form the peak of
that pyramid ) - and we have the good intentions of the gullible
people of the 'new age', harmlessly dissipated by the distraction of
a concert or two - and our hazardous path lies somewhere between.

i believe that the 'new age' is over, and i hope that the 'new world
order' will never succeed in its unfolding plan for a privately owned
global government.

this is july 2005. clap your hands to the tune of the middle aged
knights and millionaires on the one side, serenading the lying
mass murderers on the other. between these extremes, we
have to find another path, before history finds one for us.
.

the druid (1993)

2005-06-24T12:19:00.001+01:00

.
i had never met a druid, nor ever expected to meet one, but all of a sudden in the summer of last year (1992) i met three. the first came in the form of a letter that was ‘ channelled,‘ a modern version of conjouring up the spirit of a dead person. the letter was in response to an article i had written in the irish ‘ common ground ‘ magazine and began : ‘ dear friend, this is a very difficult letter for me to write, as i have been prompted to write it by someone who died in a d 710 and who at present is involved in guiding me . . .’ this was not a road that i particularly wanted to go down.
the second was more substantial, a chance meeting with an actual member of o b o d - the british order of bards, ovates, and druids. like most people i had been vaguely aware of pictures of white robed figures at stonehenge celebrating the summer solstice, but i had never met a member of any such order. this druid was young, and wore jeans, and drank lager out of the can. he was a normal human being, in other words, and perfectly sane and pleasant to talk to - but what else would you expect ?
the encounter with the third druid was completely unexpected. we were living in the old house - this was some two years before the fire - and i simply got word that there was someone to see me down in the old basement kitchen. the man was an elderly bachelor farmer from the far side of the village and he had come to see me because of an item that had appeared in the tipperary star, the local weekly newspaper. this article had somehow given him the impression that there were people in this house sympathetic towards the unusual, or at least, not instantly dismissive.
the conversation was tentative at first, and went around in circles. i realised afterwards that he was being very cautious in case i ridiculed his story. i, in my turn, was wary in case someone was having an elaborate leg pull, or trying something on. it was like a conversation between two psychiatrists, each of whom had been warned in advance that the other one might be a complete lunatic!
slowly, bit by bit, mutual confidence was established. he produced a crumpled photocopied page of an obscure book. when i was able, without getting out of my chair in the corner of the kitchen, to reach down the same book from the shelf beside me, he was astonished that i had not only read it but owned it.

over the course of this, and a subsequent evening, his story unfolded.

his own father had handed down to him a blessing. ( at this stage of the conversation the word ‘ druid ‘ was not mentioned.) he was now himself of advanced years and in uncertain health. his nearest relation was a nephew who had emigrated to england and qualified as an engineer, and had no interest whatsoever in ‘ pishogues and superstiton.’ he now felt that if he did not hand his knowledge on, there was a danger that one day quite soon it would die with him.
i listened carefully and critically to what he had to say. he seemed to have read a little about druidry and pre christian religion, but i belonged to the same library and could almost pick out in my mind the books that were the sources of his information. this i disregarded. what fascinated me was the knowledge that seemed to have come down to him through the direct male line of his family, once the mac giollapadraigs, lords of lower ossory. i had assumed that if there were a surviving druidic tradition in ireland, then it would have been uncovered by nineteenth or twentieth century folklorists, and i would thus have come across it in the course of my reading. but my informant claimed that ‘ the folklore ‘- as he called the folklore commission surveys made in his own time - was censored. not censored by officialdom, but instinctively censored by the sources themselves, to eliminate anything that might prove unwelcome or unpalatable to the priests in their particular parishes. this may be so. even if the collectors themselves were scholars of the highest integrity, one can imagine certain bits of information being held back by their wary informants.
my druid himself was like a partridge in a ploughed field, hard enough to spot when you were looking straight at him, and impossible for anyone who did not suspect he was there.

by the time that the question of the survival of the blessing was mentioned, i already knew that we would agree to it, if offered.

this is what happened.

on the eve of saint patrick’s day, my new friend drove over with a hazel stick, about twenty four inches in length and cut precisely at sunset ( as defined by the current irish edition of ‘ old moore’s almanac.) this was to be left overnight placed across a saucepan of water in which were two, already prepared, hard boiled brown eggs. we did this out in the tower, which at this time was bare and unlived in. he commented in passing that originally and ideally the eggs should have been ‘ red ‘ in colour. he also seemed to think that the original date of the ritual was not saint patrick’s eve but some other. i myself suspected the vernal equinox, or a saint patrick’s day that was decided by the phase of the moon, not just by a calendar date. i took it for granted that saint patrick’s day, and also the saint’s favourite shamrock trefoil symbol, were centuries older than the time of the saint himself.
my friend, having established at what time i, and he, would go to mass the following morning, went home satisfied. no one - man, woman, child or animal, - was on any account to disturb the position of the hazel wand in the meantime.

the next morning, all the members of the household who were at home at the time, gathered around the still glowing turf fire, and all who wished to participate were blessed as follows -
the left arm was bared by rolling up the sleeve almost to the shoulder, and a blessing was made in the name of the triune god. the blessing was performed with the hazel rod, first heated in the embers of the open fire - which was glowing red, as he had instructed, but not in flames - then quenched in the water which contained the two ‘ red ‘ eggs. a cross was marked in three places, in a triangle as it were, on the upper arm. the blessing was in the name of the father god, the mother goddess, and the son god. as i write i can still hear his voice, self deprecating, apologetic almost, and yet full of conviction and dignity.
the gods were named as, first, the father god, lugh ( the son god ), and then brigante. ( brigid, the goddess.) even so there was a hesitation in his voice as it pronounced the names, as if to say in parenthesis - ‘the son god ( whom some call lugh.) and the mother spirit ( whom some call brigante.)’
as one who knew the theological pedigree and antecedents of the holy spirit, i felt in no way uncomfortable with this arrangement.
the blessing went on to repeat the formula, but this time the thin black charcoal lines went around the wrist. the hazel wand, repeatedly heated in the embers of the fire and plunged into the pan of water, left three black rings. the first for the father, clockwise, the last, for the son, also clockwise, and the middle one, anti clockwise this time, for the goddess.
the whole process was repeated for each of three adults present, and for two children who wished to be ‘ done ‘ while two others did not.
at this point one of the adults present took our friend by the hand and gave him, in gratitude, a kiss. he stepped back in some agitation and said ‘ you must not kiss the druid ! ‘ at no point up until then had he used this word and most definitely not in relation to himself.
what seemed perfectly natural about this saint patrick’s day morning was that he and i then went our separate ways, but each to mass. how did i feel ? i cannot speak for the others, but i felt blessed. how do you feel after a blessing ?
- and what would the catholic church think about it ? not much. but the beliefs of the pre christian druids did not at first clash, but blended smoothly with the incoming christian beliefs, when they came together to form the early and unofficial ‘ celtic church.’
- and what was the significance of this fragmentary ritual handed down by the mac giollapadraigs ? his father’s incantation that went with it might have told us, but that, whether in irish or english, had unfortunately been lost. he could remember nothing of it.

to the modern romantic and revivalist druids, such men are known as ‘ druids of location.’

i very much doubt if i had the extreme good fortune to encounter the last, - the penultimate ? - of the kind. somewhere out there among the trees and bogs, stones and wells, of ireland, there are surely more.
.

a call for an end to dollar hegemony.

2005-06-19T00:22:00.000+01:00

.
i am of the opinion that the deficits will last as long as the kissinger
deal that underpinned o p e c and set up the system whereby oil is
bought for dollars. oil bought only for euros - if that ever came about -
would cause exactly the same problem for europe.

i am making a call for the ending of dollar hegemony, and an
end to the threat posed by united states policy to free markets
and the capitalist system. . .

bernanke - a possible successor to greenspan as the united
states federal reserve bank chairman - speaks of a 'global
savings glut'. this is relevant to all, because it has by most
accounts resulted in a global property bubble. everyone
anywhere who has a loan or a mortgage should pay attention
to this -

in the wake of the first oil crisis in 1974 henry kissinger fixed
up a deal that was of historic importance - submission to the
o p e c oil cartel, on condition that the oil was sold in dollars.

this 'dollar hegemony' came to mean that the united states fed
could print - or cause to come into existence - dollars, and buy
real goods in return for these from the rest of the world, who
might not like it but nevertheless had to obtain dollars for oil
purchase.

thus there is much grumbling on irish sites about the free ride that
america gets on the backs of the rest of the world's trading nations.

but money flows are circular, not linear. those dollars get spent
again. the free ride generated by issuing fiat dollars for real
goods has to result in there being more dollars in the world than
would otherwise be the case, in a regime of fully free markets. (the
o p e c cartel, and the kissinger deal making america an accessory
to that cartel, are essentially anti-capitalist in that they interfere with
free markets.) the excess dollars have to be spent abroad to get
any value out of them. so excess goods are imported, and excess
reserves are accumulated by the exporting countries.

thus the free ride has an inevitable side effect, it is - excess dollars
in the global economy.

this in turn has further implications. either the dollar must gently and
progressively decline in value against other currencies, or those
currencies' central banks will print their own stuff to keep pace, and
thus even further multiply the excess currency in the global system.

so the free ride is not free.

the incidental cost is the presence of the excess currency in the
global system, whether hoarded as reserves ( central banks of
japan, china, south korea, norway etc. etc.) or returned to the
global commodity or real property markets, to cause ' bubbles.'
the counterpart of those surpluses is united states deficits - so these
are also an inevitable result of the 'free' ride.

in fact, where reserves are reinvested in u s bonds - they do both
of these things, by driving down the general cost of borrowing in
the u s, and causing asset inflation. savings are sucked into property
investment, which is smarter - at least to begin with - than cash.

by pegging to the dollar - the chinese authorities, (accused of unfair
practice), - are in fact trying to counterbalance the u s free ride and
the excess dollar printing. but if they somehow managed to shut out
the dollar flood - liquidity levels would simply start to rise elsewhere.
in fact the fuss about china smokescreens the trading deficits with
canada, which is neither a developing country, nor a geopolitical
rival, nor pegged to the united states dollar.

if the o p e c producers underwent some kind of revolutionary policy
change, and only sold oil for euros - the glut of liquidity would simply
be released in euros, and flood the global economy from there. the
problem would be shifted, not solved.

it is the very fact of an oil cartel which is the first link of the chain of
events which leads to excess prices for oil, and then excess dollars in
the global financial system. the united states federal reserve, and the
oil companies who at times have greater influence on the administration
than the pentagon itself, have not wished to tackle the high oil price
scenario which has benefitted them all so well.

so the 'global savings glut' - which is largely an asian immune system
reaction to counteract the excess printing of dollars that is enabled by
the 1974 kissinger/ o p e c deal - lies at the door of 'dollar hegemony.'

as long as dollar hegemony is maintained - the problems will not
be solved, however much they mutate from one region to another,
from one investment bubble to the next.

and lowering the federal reserve interest rate only stimulates borrowing,
the majority of which goes into mortgage borrowing to purchase property.

so the time has come to face up to this -

the 'global savings glut' is the other side of the coin to the extra
purchasing power of the dollars printed as the ultimate result of
the dollar's monopoly of the oil market . . .

and monopoly - although the dream of many a market operator -
is anti-capitalist. a perversion and a frustration of free market
capitalism.

kissinger and greenspan are smart enough to know that they
have perverted the smooth operation of capitalist market systems.
there is an inevitable price to pay for a 'free ride'. they and others
like them at the heart of american policy making would do well to
wake up to this before the markets wake up to it -

this is a call for the ending of 'dollar hegemony' on the grounds
that it is a threat to capitalist free markets, a greater one than ever
posed by the communists of the soviet union at the height of the
cold war, let alone the current anti-market exchange rate manipulation
by the peoples' bank of china.
.

back room boys at the peoples' bank of china.

2005-06-12T19:22:00.000+01:00

.
scene - the back room at the peoples' bank of china.

dramatis personae in order of appearance -

gung ho - radical whizz-kid chinese economic policy wonk.
han gon - conservative senior chinese economic policy wonk.
no tyet - impoverished north vietnamese exchange student.

gung ho -
how much dollar ?
han gon -
tomorrow one trillion computer say.
gung ho -
what yankees say now ?
han gon -
yankees say, no sweat. i o u one trillion only small piece paper.
gung ho - (nearly losing inscrutability)
bush paper tiger ! bush play poker ! time say to bush - 'see you'.
no tyet -
not yet.
han gon -
confucius say, who rides tiger, fears dismount.
gung ho -
time go tiger shoot.
no tyet -
not yet.
gung ho -
float yuan ?
no tyet -
not yet.
han gon -
maybe revalue five per cent.
gung ho -
maybe means five per cent every full moon ?
han gon -
me many shanghai flats in wife's name.
gung ho -
mistress' name ?
han gon - many those, also.
gung ho -
sell flats.
no tyet -
not yet.
gung ho - revalue five per cent, lose face.
han gon -
only five per cent face.
no tyet -
. . .every full moon.
gung ho -
eureka !
han gon -
???
gung ho -
link basket !
han gon - (contemptuously )
link basket ? markets freak. banks fall down. party bosses angry. wonks sent to gobi for retraining.
no tyet - (agreeing )
not yet. me no shanghai flats yet.
gung ho -
f *** sh*nghai flats. (untranslatable expression of dismissal)
han gon -
now me eureka !
gung ho and no tyet -
???????????????
han gon -
leak statement. say 'maybe link basket. . .' watch markets freak. monitor freak. print out numbers and show party boss. hedge risks.
no tyet - (full of admiration )
han gon teach great wisdom, now han gon teach greenspan inscrutable mandarin speak ?
gung ho - (aside )
teach granny suck eggs . . .
han gon -
now teach greenspan eat same fudge-speak greenspan teach middle kingdom.
gung ho - (getting carried away )
tally ho ! tiger shoot with blanks ! speak fudge ! freak markets ! geronimo ! ( flies out of the door brandishing shiny new mobile phone)

(a pause)

han gon -
no tyet my friend. you like rent shanghai flat reasonable ? discount for cash. spare mistress you housekeeper ?
no tyet -
rent dollars or linked basket ?
han gon - ( after considering.)
linked basket.
no tyet -
thanks but, not yet.

(exeunt omnes )
.

a letter on food and energy

2005-06-08T22:37:00.000+01:00

.
this is adapted from a letter to the 'feasta'' dublin conference on food and energy.

feasta has two difficult tasks at its conference and likewise at the recent mont clare hotel seminar -

1 to come up with the right answers -
2 to convey these to the right audience.

- of these, the second is by far the more difficult.

on the question of a possible oil peak and its implications for food supplies - i have already made a couple of basic observations. if the debates are based upon fundamental assumptions that are mistaken, and go unchallenged, the subsequent discussions are a waste of valuable effort.

these observations are -

- that oil production will not peak, but will arrive at a plateau and then enter a long and irreversible contraction. (i am making no claim about the timing of this plateau)

- that oil reserves are not experienced directly by the consumer, who is only aware of them through the medium of retail prices, which are subject to the open or covert operations of cartels, and subject to geopolitical events, wars, taxation and speculation. thus the oil 'peaks' actually occur in the form of oil price spikes, and do not relate directly to current reserves, or current potential production. a ceiling on potential production, however, provides an underlying support without which this manipulation would not be quite so easy or so profitable.

- that the current deflationary global financial situation may mean that we are not going to get another oil peak as high as the 1979 record price for oil. (real price, adjusted for inflation, of about $100 in today's money.)

- that, in the absence of a war, an oil crisis might not mean high oil prices, but could result in lower oil prices in a context of a severely depressed economic environment. i e there would be cheaper oil - with many unable to afford it, and many businesses lacking the confidence to borrow - which creates money and stimulates economic activity.

- that the united states' fed has been overprotective, a recession is overdue, and badly needed, like rain in a drought - even if the tourists and the airlines don't relish it.

- that with respect to energy and food, though the statistics are yet to be backed up, it seems that domestic cooking and refrigeration use more energy than farming. both would be hit by reduced energy availability - and this means that the problem can no longer be shifted 'out there.' it is literally brought home to the consumer.

- that in discussing these things, it is vital to maintain credibility and avoid geldofism. (by 'geldofism' is meant posing in front of the problem - while personally still going for the full three courses plus coffee, brandy, and cigars.) as always, the menu tells more than the agenda.
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oil and the conundrum.

2005-05-27T12:28:00.000+01:00

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imagine the interest rate as a tide. the recent 1% rate
was the high tide of liquidity, and the tide is now going
out again bit by bit as greenspan raises the rates.

now imagine smaller fluctuations in day to day shares
and other investments as waves, over and above the
underlying ebb or flow of interest rates.

now imagine the hedge funds, offshore investment, oil
money and foreign central bank purchases as a huge
tsunami on top of both, which when moving in one
direction can go against the tide or even appear to
reverse it.

that is the conundrum.

the tsunami is no longer responding to alan greenspan.

it responds to the fed interest rate only in relation to
what is happening elsewhere. it lives in an ocean of
globalised investment opportunity, and massive liquidity.
most of all it responds to what it, itself, is doing. this is
not the world of waves and tides - but tsunami and bubbles.
the computers that help to drive it have neither allegiance
nor conscience.

if this analysis is correct, what will be the impact of the
tsunami ? the loose or hot money that flowed in so freely
can flow out again. the second toll of devastation is as
the tsunami rolls out. this time it may be running with the
tide - but again, the tide is temporarily drowned out into
insignificance.

so the end of the conundrum can be tsunami and tide now
moving together - rapidly rising real interest rates to stop
money leaving, but collapsing bond prices in step with this.

cash deposits and the dollar are strong, but all sectors that
rely upon borrowing, particularly the two thirds of money
creation related to mortgage lending, are weakened.

with the dollar strong, and a threatened global slump, the
oil price which is denominated in dollars, falls.

sea calm. tide out. mud flats reappear.

the oil plateau does not mean peak food.

2005-05-22T19:20:00.000+01:00

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the oil plateau doesn't mean peak food. let me explain.

putting aside massive global disasters - asteroid impacts and all out nuclear war - oil production has reached a plateau from which it can only decline gradually, perhaps at 2 or 3 per cent per year. we don't know. oil supplies a portion of global energy use but a much higher proportion of transport fuel.

the ordinary person imagining a future short of oil pictures queuing at the pumps for highly priced petrol or diesel. this may not necessarily be so. what they are picturing is a sharp oil crisis, brought on by a war or an embargo. oil pervades many industrial and economic processes directly, but it also enters most activities indirectly, as a transport component. have you ever thought how much petrol is consumed by one irish hurling match held at a neutral venue ? so the consumer not only faces a rise in the price of oil, but a rise in the price of all of the other things which have an oil component. thus income is attacked at both ends. less disposable income with which to chase higher priced oil.

a generally depressed global economy would not be a surprising result. so the price of oil might then decline again, as commodities tend to do - in depressions. the average citizen might experience the oil plateau not as a high price for oil at all, but as a reduced price for oil which he, or she, nevertheless could no longer easily afford.

oil will be cheap - but you won't be able to afford it.

oil is also a component of food production. but so is labour. as convenience food prices rose as a result of the oil component of packaging, processing and distributing, - the relative price of locally produced food would look more attractive. moreover, in a depressed or at least contracting economy, many would be unemployed or underemployed. the labour component would become cheaper and more available. this might also be in the form of family labour, as in the past.

so food production might shift its ground, rather than decline. quality might rise. obesity and food related ill health might decline. price, not principle, might shift meat eaters towards bread and cereals. the scattered suburbs might suffer horrendous hikes in commuting costs, but suppose that out of four families, three or four wage earners shared a car, while a fifth and sixth, underemployed and home bound, took to part time basic horticulture. those in city flats might suffer more.

and those unemployed ? they will come from the airlines, tourism, car salesmen, restauranteurs - but in particular those who, or whose employers, have borrowed heavily in anticipation of future growth that we may not see again in our lifetimes.
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taxing scarcity

2005-05-19T18:06:00.000+01:00

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one of the favourite dodges of ministers of finance, when the newly married are complaining of the cost of buying a house - is to make a grant for first time buyers.

when the property market is roaring ahead, this is the equivalent of putting petrol in the fire extinguisher. the supply of houses remains the same, the desire of the first timers to own one is not in the slightest diminished, and they each have x thousand more to spend. the boom roars on. the estate agents quietly rub their hands and buy dinner for their political friends . . .

so the paradoxical way to help the first time buyers would be by a stiff tax on house purchase. they and their mortgage lenders would have to do new calculations on the maximum that they could afford to bid, and the price of houses would fall, probably by more than the tax take.

scarcity is experienced in the oil market, as in the housing market, as a price rise at local level. the average citizen does not bid for barrels of crude, but for litres of petrol or diesel at the pumps. taxing the supply of fossil fuels would first be experienced by the consumer as a price hike at the garage or for the central heating oil delivery. such a tax would drive the consumer in the direction of personal choices and household economies that the contracting global supply of oil would drive him or her in due course, anyway. it would do the same for businesses and public utilities.

such a tax would also reduce the demand for oil upon o p e c and oil producing countries, and thus the price. one effect of the tax, if generally adopted, would be to transfer revenue from o p e c to consuming countries.

a tax on fossil fuels would act as a subsidy to alternative energy, but unlike the subsidies, it would allow the market itself to decide what alternative directions to take, or whether simply to make do without.

in the event of a price spike in oil or gas, the economy of the country that taxed fossil fuels would already be part of the way towards a lean energy configuration. there would also be the option of suspending the tax for the duration of the crisis, to alleviate the worst of the damage.

countries that choose to tax oil and gas, will force their economy to face the conditions of the future, while those which subsidise them, will only allow their economy to languish in the habits of the past.

peak oil is history.

2005-05-18T12:01:00.000+01:00

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peak oil is badly named.

there is a levelling off in total oil production - plateau oil.
- and there have been price spikes in the market for oil - oil price spikes.

we, the end consumers of the oil, do not buy what is buried in the ground off the north coast of alaska.
- nor do we buy the oil in production in oil fields or refineries.
- nor do we buy oil in transit in pipelines or tankers at sea.
- we buy petrol and diesel at the pump.

the end consumer does not experience the availability of oil as global oil produced - but as local oil bought after political manipulation, taxation, commercial competition, and futures market speculation. we experience only the retail price at the pump.

'twenty euros diesel,please.'

the underlying global production is not at a peak - but a plateau. if it has begun a gradual decline, it is still too early to know that yet. if global production is on a gradual, if uneven, sloping plateau - something else is the cause of sharp spikes or dips in the price of crude. for economists 'peak oil' - if we are to use that term - is already history. it occurred 25 years ago in the second oil shock, in 1979, when the real price of oil peaked at what would be $100 dollars / barrel in today's money (2005). peak oil is history.

but will there be future price spikes ? the manipulations, negotiations, wars, and speculations underlying spikes in the real price are hard to quantify and almost impossible to predict. anyone who knows what is going to happen, has more to learn - and by the time everyone is agreed where the market is going to go - the market has already completed its move. so the best that anyone can say now is that the global economy must and will enter a period of sustained long term contraction, in step with the contraction of the more convenient forms of fossil fuel energy. radical steps towards fuel economy and personal austerity will only serve to hasten this slowdown. the same fuel energy sources that inflated global growth over the last 150 years will deflate it.

if you do not buy in to this paradigm of economic contraction, or evade the prospect with some notional 'sustainable growth' projection, then you are still, sadly, living in the 'growth illusion.'

long term economic contraction is sustainable. once this is accepted (whatever way the politicians 'spin' the scenario) we may still see a series of 'spikes' in the oil price, but each one, in real terms, lower than the last.

so what causes oil price surges ? the oil price, like a tsunami running into shallow water, grows taller, peaks, then crashes. the bigger the wave peaks are, the harder they fall. the o p e c nations know from experience that when the oil price squeezes the global economy too hard, it chokes off economic activity, which chokes off demand, and once more deflates the price of oil. so that is why a spike is formed. it is the growth momentum built up by cheap oil ( it still costs less than bottled spring water ) that causes a surge when the global economy runs into a bottleneck.

this is a paradox of natural balance - very cheap oil causes sudden rises, and very dear oil causes sudden falls. we will learn to avoid both.

yes, peak oil is history.
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9/11 : the day that nearly ended in disaster.

2005-03-25T20:31:00.000Z

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i don't know if you are the same, but the moment i smell 'conspiraacy theory' i switch off. so let us set aside the far fetched theories about 9/11, that it was a conspiracy carried out from the pentagon, or from the caves on the afghan frontier. forget all that.

for the purposes of clarity - divide your headspace into four. number these four quarters - 0 false / 1. true / 2. true but we don't know that. / and 3. false but we don't know that. now the sections zero and one are out in the daylight, but sections two and three are concealed in the darkness so they look like one section. we know nothing of what is in there -- or do we ?

if all of that is not clear, let us take an example from 9/11 itself.

george bush is in a school in florida. one conspiracy theory says that he was in the know about the attacks on the world trade centre - another conspiracy theory says that he was not. what is the evidence from the school ? he was, after all, on camera. if george bush was surprised by the second attack ( one, after all, may prove to be an accident ) he would have jumped up and excused himself from the reading class. if he was in the know before 11 september, he would have rehearsed a reaction for this, the most important moment, knowing that he was bound to be photographed or video'd on such an occasion. so which did he do ? he did neither. he hung around like a man meeting someone at an airport when the arrivals board says ' flight delayed.'

so where were the arab hi-jackers ? if they were aboard flight 77 on their way to the pentagon, they were late. they were late because you cannot hang around for an hour in united states air space in a hi-jacked plane without meeting some suspicion, and almost certainly some active resistance to what you are trying to do. anyone would know that. so we do not have to chose between the theories. boxes 2 and 3 give off the same strong smell. we do not need to see inside. the plane was late.

the united states air force are not obliged to discuss counter terrorist operations with you, with me, or with anybody outside the loop. it would be foolish to expect that. so we can only look on and admire the heroes travelling towards the most historic day for the u s a f in american air space - at less than half speed. so they did not want to be early. after all, the plane they were meeting was late.

on flight 77's path across america it made a strange semi circular deviation and then resumed course. again we do not need to decide who was piloting the plane, or even whether it was a human or automatic pilot. boxes 2 and 3 say the same thing. if the plane had made a full turn at that point, it would have got back to washington earlier. so that may well be the point at which a delay became inevitable. someone, person or programme, failed to turn the plane 180 degrees, and instead turned 90 degrees to the right followed by 90 degrees to the left. some kind of human or mechanical dyslexic error.

that's all i have to tell. i hate hanging around at airports and i am sure you do too.

of course the guys solved it as the smart guys always do. when they got to the pentagon they did not attempt a 90 degree turn to get to the terminal they were booked into. they went around the other way and completed 270 degrees instead. phew.

9/11. the day that so nearly ended in disaster.
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the great bear raid on america

2005-03-17T18:05:00.000Z

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history unfolds from day to day, and people are led into wars and invasions and ethnic cleansings bit by bit. no german of the inter war period would have voted for the second world war horrors of carpet bombing, concentration camps, mass starvation, or the devastation of nations, if presented in advance with the whole picture of what was to come. such things are only possible because they unfold bit by bit, and each new step, from the sudentenland to hiroshima and nagasaki, follows on in a logical seeming progression from the previous step.

as the second world war began, in whose plan of campaign did these terrible things lie? they were probably unforeseen and unforseeable, but if they existed anywhere it must have been in the ruthless ambition and aggression of those who launched the war. much of the drive to power originates at subconscious level. if new horrors lie in wait for us in our turn, this is where they would now be - at a subconscious level in the minds of the presently ruthless and powerful.

i have been ruminating upon the conspiracy theories of those who say that the neo conservative cabal in power in america planned or permitted the events of 9/11. i have come to an unexpected conclusion. either the events came out of the blue to the neo conservatives, in which case it is a waste of time to rake over the ashes of ground zero yet again, or they were planned or permitted to happen, and we are in the grip of one of the most ruthless administrations of all time - so much so that to uncover this truth and prove it beyond doubt, would be even more disruptive to social and political life in america than to remain in denial.

our paranoia - and paranoia can be useful too - would be better employed trying to read the purpose of the current actions of the administration, not in analysing its past actions, and definitely not in giving any attention to its advertised objectives, which are largely in the nature of a smokescreen behind which to make covert moves in other directions.

all of the current actions of this administration are consistent with the conscious or unconscious perpetration of a great bear raid upon america. the relentless running of the economy into debt, the relentless insistence that over consumption - accumulating personal and national indebtedness - is a good and patriotic thing, amounts to a deliberate programme. borrowing money to get out of debt is always an illusory project. are those who regulate the united states' economy helpless in the face of their current problems, like men speeding on ice, going ever faster out of a fear of what would happen if they touched the brakes? - it is either that or that they are deliberately crashing the economy. if it is the latter, it can only be because there are things that they value even more than the national economy or the national currency, the dollar, which also happens to be the world's present reserve currency.

so here is a theory for connoiseurs of conspiracy theory. a great gulf has opened up between those who have their all invested in america, and those, such as the captains of multinational companies and international finance, who have risen above mere national boundaries. no one expects a bear raid upon america, because in most peoples' minds america, and the dollar, are the solid mainland of the global economy. they are the homeland, the place you return to after a speculative raid upon some distant island of investment opportunity, elsewhere.

but a class of players have now emerged on the global stage, to whom 'nationalism' is an irrelevance. for them it is a word that evokes a response no better than the word 'protectionism.' national boundaries and local loyalties are constraints upon the free ranging growth that they crave for their corporations. they need an act of demolition, to clear the playing field for the construction of a new world order run by companies, rather than national electorates. it is not that they do not want a reserve currency - but they want one which is much more free of any merely national electoral process. and they want one which is a 'fiat' currency, not tied to gold or some other natural, real world, balancing mechanism.

before george soros and others brought down the pound sterling, no one had imagined a bear raid against the currency of a major country. now we are in the same situation with regard to the global reserve currency, the dollar. if the dollar were brought all the way to collapse - what would succeed it? perhaps some basket of major currencies regulated by some new form of a committee of international bankers? some annual meeting of a G7, a G8, or a G22, with an american appointed chairperson? paul wolfowitz perhaps?

a bear raid against the dollar would also be a bear raid against american shares, bonds, and property. those with the insider information would be out already waiting on the sidelines, and would then come back in to buy all before them at 30 cents to the dollar, and lay the foundations of the new multinational elite of the new world order.

the attempt to base an ever growing global economy upon finite, or diminishing supplies of oil and gas, is doomed anyway to end in a financial crisis that would occur in anticipation of an imminent energy crisis. the neo conservative scenario proposes a crisis now, and a controlled crash, while geopolitical and global economic matters are still to a large extent within their control.

is there no easier way out? the crash i s the easy way out.

and how do i know all this? my paranoia tells me so. i am making a gift of today's blog to conspiracy theorists everywhere. i believe that the more extreme conspiracy theorists actually desire there to be conspiracies. this is their personal psychological reaction to fear of events of a violent, random and chaotic nature. if things appear frighteningly out of control - the conspiracy theorist feels compelled to fantasise that the unsettling events are secretly controlled, even if it has to be by a group of ruthless, malicious, powerful and self interested people.

this is how i have come to identify and name 'the great bear raid upon america.' the alternative, that we are in the grip of unplanned and uncontrolled events, facing a violent and chaotic future under leaders who are clueless, short sighted, spineless and adrift, - is more than my psyche can bear.
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bush versus america

2005-03-14T14:06:00.000Z

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if you want to understand george bush, the first thing to do is to stop listening to what he is saying. the politician, like a conjuror, makes a lot of dramatic gestures. if you are curious as to how the tricks are done, always watch the other hand.

once you stop listening to what they are saying, the way is clear to see what they are doing. you then see that the policies pursued are largely self-reinforcing. they are positive feedback loops - and the feed in the feedback is rewards for campaign contributions. if you ask a shopkeeper why he stocks certain items, the answer is -' because that is what they are buying.' that is a fair guide to present policies. why does the administration market a certain policy? same story - because that is what the corporate customers are buying.

america inc. is being run by businessmen, big businessmen, and on business lines. right at the moment it looks increasingly like one of those companies that makes a whacking loss, but still manages to pay off the c e o and executives with share options, which they cash in, just in time, with benefit of inside information . . .

so if you now want to know where policies are leading, the answer may be to eventual bankruptcy, and in the meantime, more of the same.

the multinational companies which can afford to pay campaign contributions are interested in having a global field to play in. it is therefore logical to expect the administration to be in favour of globalisation. thus if you wish to know whether china is to be the future business partner of the united states, or to be encircled and contained as a potential rival superpower, the answer is - both, because nationalism, militarism, and america-is-number-one-ism are alive and well. but when it comes to the crunch - and crunches come - the multinationals will do all they can to avoid a descent into nationalism, war, and a retreat from trading relationships. they will not order any war that disrupts trade on a global scale.

the wars that they can tolerate, are those against minor enemies, like iraq. these also hold out the promise of contracts for reconstruction and newly cleared fields for expansion. iraq makes more sense as a takeover, business style, than as an invasion or a liberation. it may not be working, but that is the best explanation of how it was meant to work. a generals' war followed by a businessmens' occupation.

promoting the opening up of china to economic development has a similar rationale. the multinational companies see enormous markets, enormous opportunities for outsourcing basic production, and possibly, in a country not yet democratic, enormous potential for bribes and sweeteners to leaders not subject to media probing or democratic accountability.

the winners are the multinational corporations and their shareholders. the losers are the employees and ex employees of america's own manufacturing industries. how long before these workers, with real wages static for twenty years, start getting behind nationalist and protectionist politicians?

we live in a strange world, where trade has become globalised, but politics remains within national borders. at the top, the multinationals and the footloose capital that makes its home in offshore havens, are growing out of being dependent upon any one country. strange times, when the chinese and the japanese intervene massively to support the dollar and thus the health of the global economy, while the buffets and the gates have their money in other currencies, and wealthy americans buy dozens of shanghai flats and hope that the dollar takes a dive. the great bear raid on america?

in the end the clash between globalisation and nationalism will become apparent. more than communism v. capitalism, or islam v. the christian west, this is the division of our times. globalisation also implies global economic growth, and growth without new sources of oil will pose its own problems.

if you want to understand george bush, you need to appreciate that he is not in the same class as a napoleon or a hitler. when america was last at war in the far east - bush did not go. this was in the tradition of his family, who made money during, if not out of, the second world war. bush may act the patriot, but that is part of the conjuring show. to understand george bush, follow the trail of the campaign contributions. the biggest contributions come from the biggest corporations. the biggest corporations are multinational. the multinationals are committed supporters of globalisation. if and when the crunch comes between nationalists and globalisers, bush and his cabal will be found on the side of the globalisers, and however heavily dressed up in fatigues and the flag - against america.

and if you think that is bad news, there is worse. america is deliberately being driven into a debt crisis after which drastic measures will be needed. this may be intended as the cue and the opportunity for a further consolidation of the power of the cabal. some new military diversion might conveniently take place at the same time. the great strength of the neo conservatives is the refusal of the liberal side to believe that all of this is really happening. so no champion comes forward to defend the people against the purchase of politicians by corporations, the root of the problem.

that is the bad news - the worse news is that when the showdown does come between bush and america - bush may well win.
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and the edible irish house.

2005-02-13T15:15:00.001Z

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this is of course a fairy story, and owes more than a little to the gingerbread house of an earlier fairytale . . . but please accept that the world would be a better place if all houses were edible.

so how do you eat a house ? - how does a mouse eat an elephant ? a little at a time. we are allowed to put aside stone, because a builder never throws away a good stone. there is always a place for one, and there are many irish buildings to testify to the fact that a good stone is never wasted.

the rest is timber, thatch, wattle, clay, lime, plaster. much of this rots in the irish climate, and often while you are still living in the house. there is no reason to consign the remains of a house to skips and landfill. most of this - if dumped in or close to your own garden - will rot down slowly into the soil and blend with other compostible materials. the time scale for this is one generation. not a generation of people, but the time required to regenerate the timber and other biodegradable materials that will go towards the building of your house's successor, or the refurbishment of the present structure. within the lifetime of your present house it should be possible to biodegrade its predecessor - less anything that has been recycled. the materials rot into a compost and are incorporated into the soil. if you are a true freeborn irish person - and not just a weekly paying tenant of the tesco estate - then you will bit by bit consume the produce of this soil until you have eaten your house.

any upset to the digestion will immediately lead you to suspect that alien materials were used in the construction. so always take your materials, and your cue, from the natural forest - where everything that dies, degrades into the soil, because nothing that was not digestible to the soil was taken up from the soil by the growing tree in the first place.

so beware of the indigestible house, and when you are choosing an architect, always go for one with taste.

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an edible ireland

2005-02-12T15:10:00.000Z

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this is about a concept of ethical eating. it may develop later into an article or an entertaining rant.

a society - large or small - needs a group morality. this is a structure, a hard skeleton of rules, stated or unstated, that keep you out of the way of too much conflict with other citizens, players, or gang members.

when ireland was a british colony, the government army, and police all belonged to someone else - so there was a certain amount of lawlessness - but the society that was outside of the colonial law and felt that it owed it no loyalty, still needed structure, so a greater emphasis emerged on religious loyalty, the observance of funeral customs, and the observing of sexual morality, and the like.

likewise after the famine, the division of land was seen as potentially disastrous, so sexual morality played a part in holding population to within what could be sustained by the land. you did not bring a wife into the cottage/ farm while your mother was still alive, for example. you waited.

but sexual morality/ inhibition has been swamped by other imperatives of the consumer culture. the media, pornography, magazines in general, films and entertainment - all now have a massive financial stake in the general liberal sexual climate. none of them can afford to go back . . .

so the way lies open, for another of the great moral supports of society - food morality, food taboos, or ethical eating - to take centre stage again in structuring our society.

the irish smoking ban - ingestion morality if you like - is the forerunner.

healthy food lengthens life, enhances personal appearance, banishes obesity, - thus promotes sex appeal, and reduces exposure to carcinogenic chemicals.

motherhood and apple pie ? ethical eating is an alternative to obesity, ugliness, sexlessness, loneliness, cancer and early death. half a dozen conditions that will find few apologists. that is a good bunch of demons to run against.

the current buzz concept of 'sustainability' is already starting to look tired. the word is misused and overused.

the concept of ' edibility' could be its replacement.

did you know -( the gravediggers do )- that bodies are these days lasting longer in the ground. - pickled in the stuff that they are putting in food to prolong shelf life. . .

here are the first principles of the ethic of edibility -

you are what you eat - so,

the menu tells more than the agenda.

the menu tells more than the syllabus.

if a conference, meeting, course syllabus or other agenda supports local, decentralised, organic, or rural development initiatives - ignore what they are saying, and check what they are eating. beware the speaker who endorses sustainable practice, but eats a la tesco in the lunch interval. the menu speaks much louder than the agenda. if the two conflict - believe the menu. for if a speaker does not believe his or her own prescription - why should we believe them or be impressed with anything that they say ?

neither ethical eating nor casual hypocrisy is new -

' thou believest that there is one god - thou doest well. the devils also believe, and tremble. but wilt thou know, o vain man, that faith without works is dead ?' ( letter of james - written around 100 a.d. )

so this is fair warning to all organisers of sustainable food conferences not to include me on the invitation list, unless your menu is as carefully chosen as your speakers and your agenda.

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the contraction paradigm

2005-01-18T19:47:00.001Z

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in the year 1972 a booklet was published by the club of rome with the title ' the limits to growth ' - and the phrase later came into general use.

the idea that there were ' limits to growth ' was a powerful one whose time had come. it was further stimulated by the oil crises of the 1970s and it consisted of a recognition of this general truth :

- that exponential growth, within a finite system such as the earth, was not indefinitely sustainable.

in the years that followed considerable strides were made, for example, in the area of vehicle fuel economy. economic growth resumed. the fossil fuel energy component of each unit of production was progressively reduced. thus those who predicted ever rising energy prices got a lesson in basic economics, and a second lesson in the technical ingenuity which capitalist man can come up with when put under pressure.

but the fuel economies that we learned to make, cannot hide the fact that the availability of the fossil fuel energy on which our industrial civilisation has been built, has now finally arrived at a plateau. from here there is nowhere to go but steadily down the reverse slope. civilisations rise and fall with their energy supplies - slaves, grain, timber, coal, oil, gas, or whatever. and money is no substitute for energy.

forty per cent of our energy comes in the form of oil, but oil comprises more like ninety per cent of fuel for transport - upon which trade, and thus the prosperity of the globalised economy, is built. oil, and to a lesser extent gas, is a convenience energy. the alternative and renewable sources of energy that green thinkers now advocate, are, in the main, ways of producing electricity, not of fuelling internal combustion engines.

thus we may face a future in which transport becomes very expensive, even while domestic electricity from renewable resources becomes more freely available.

three other major factors also face us in the immediate future -

first, the population of the world is still in a period of explosive growth, even while most resources are in decline. thus wages in general are likely to fall against commodities. thus it will take more hours to earn a gallon of fuel, than it has done for many years past.

secondly, there is an explosion of knowledge, and countries who take up the low wage manufacture of basic goods cannot be expected to remain stuck with those products, but will progress rapidly to be rival producers of more sophisticated items.

thirdly, as capacity increases and wages decline, there is likely to be a general decline in prices - a steady deflation. if this were to develop into general overcapacity and stagnation, it would quickly become apparent that the present consumption of goods in the world includes a higher proportion than ever before of luxury and consumer items. in other words the proportion of consumption that a prosperous family can forego - in the event of e g the breadwinner or one of the breadwinners becoming unemployed - is greater than at any time in history. there is thus unprecedented potential for retrenchment and for further contraction.

during the period of expansion over the last century or more, which has proceeded with only brief interruptions, an expanding money supply appropriately reflected the expanding economic activity. on the whole, anyone who borrowed over these years found repayment easy. a gradual inflation was the appropriate financial vehicle for this general global economic expansion.

equally, if we have now in fact reached the brink of contraction, gradual deflation and a gradual shrinking of the money supply would be the appropriate new environment. but if attempts to expand the money supply were to continue at a time when economic activity was contracting, the condition known as ' stagflation ' is all that would result.

also, just as the accumulation of capital by borrowing was the wise course under inflation - so the accumulation of capital by saving is appropriate as prices and wages begin to contract and as asset prices, such as property values, fall. between the former age of the borrower, and the coming age of the saver, falls a hiatus. a window of opportunity for financial upset and financial famine.

the ' contraction paradigm ' is just that - a paradigm, not a prophecy or forecast. it is a piece of contingency planning whose time will come - whether or not contraction is imminent right now. it is a template upon which to bolt appropriate plans for living in a deflationary and contracting economic environment.

the ' contraction paradigm ' is a rival and a criticism of the ' sustainable development ' paradigm - which in effect tries to say that economic growth and population growth can continue, provided that certain alternative technologies and a general wealth redistribution are undertaken immediately. the ' sustainable development ' paradigm purports not to value economic growth - and yet seems to regard the ending of economic growth as a threat to be avoided by the making of certain monetary arrangements and urgent technical changes. it promises to spread prosperity more widely and thinly, even as prosperity is inevitably contracting.

such promises usually amount to ' geldofism ' - that is to say posing in front of the starving and advocating greater global sharing, while becoming mysteriously more affluent oneself. this is a branch of show business, not of economics or politics. such people are 'princess dianas ' or establishment tarts. the bold bono of u2 is another example.

* * *

the vision of the ' sustainable growth ' paradigm stops short at the financial precipice that it sees opening up beneath its feet.

the ' contraction paradigm ' on the other hand, passes over this peak and offers a clear view of the landscape on the other side.

unlike growth, contraction is sustainable. contraction in population means that although overall resources decline - per capita resources can continue to hold steady, if not actually increase.

advocates of sustainable growth may enquire how the decline in population will be engineered - but it is for them to explain how explosive population growth can be continued in the absence of the necessary corresponding growth in not just oil and gas, but also topsoil, groundwater, climate stability, biodiversity, and all of the other staples of life upon earth.

the truth or falsity of this vision is not the question. the contraction paradigm is a useful tool for thinking about a possible future. it does not fudge the issues. it has a firm basis in the concept that -

' nature is the mother of all economies.'

and another in the concept that - ' nature is always in balance.'

thirdly it is based in the concept that fantasies of centralised global economic control, ignoring the diverse realities of life in a spherical and cyclical biosphere, are just that - fantasies.

although the recognition of the plateau or the peaking of oil production is the immediate stimulus for the formulation of the contraction paradigm - there are several other potential ' limits to growth ' which could equally come into play. these would apply even if, for example, relatively limitless reserves of oil and gas were suddenly found under the antarctic ice, or in some other unexpected location.

the manner of the creation of money is not here considered particularly important.

money in capitalist systems is lent into existence by banks. it can equally be said to be borrowed into existence. capital is created by an agreement to repay. money is also created by circulation, as well as by the sheer volume of it in existence. if consumers do not spend, lenders cannot lend. we are told that the issuers of fiat currency get a free ride at the world's expense, but money is not just spent once - we do not hear much about the many subsequent rides. in the days of dowries, it was said that ' the same £1000 married off every farmer's daughter in kerry.' ( i e each recipient groom used it to marry off one of his sisters ).

ideally money is a measure, not a commodity. if the control of ' fiat' currency is exercised irresponsibly, advantages accrue to the issuers of the currency and equal and opposite disadvantages accrue to everybody else. this is the classic scenario of currency debasement. if a currency begins to fail as a measure of economic effort then people turn to other measures and ' bad money drives out good.' people seek whatever is to hand that they feel can be relied upon to hold its value.

currency debasement carries within it the seeds of its own cure.

it does not matter much who is currently exercising the ' fiat ' or who aspires to take their place. money is a lubricant in an economy, and to consider it as a commodity or a privelege is the beginning of loss of trust, and of every kind of social and economic trouble.

the coming of contraction amounts to a major turning point in economic and industrial history. the road may turn back to expansion again - that we cannot now predict - but many who have come to take the broad road of expansion for granted, will be braking late and violently as their personal financial vehicles enter the narrow boreen of economic contraction.

at that point they will all have suddenly adopted ' the contraction paradigm' and this paradigm, like the growth paradigm before it, will begin to generate self reinforcing effects.

.

song of the county.

2004-12-26T18:17:00.000Z

.

i did not intend
to take part -
but will not take long.
always the last to be asked
to sing my song.

i did not intend
to take part.
- never expected
to give you my heart,
that first bright day.
i just did not know
the way
things were going to go.

i had not intended
to stay,
just hang around for a while,
and be on my way.
i did not expect to commit to a place,
or a voice,
or a smile,
or a walk,
or a face.

much of a muchness
and more of the same -
my life did not vary.
i had not foreseen myself
deeply involved
with the town,
or the county -
parked, poor fool,
on a high wooden stool,
alone, like the christmas fairy.
right there,
at a pitch pine counter,
in liberty square,
in north tipperary.

no one foretold this day
except for the words of the song -
' it's a long way.'

it's a long way to where ?
- was it the road to you,
dark eyes,
and dark hair ?

o black cup of coffee
and cream
my waking up dream,
you are the best in the bar,
hot, sweet, and strong.
you are my favourite by far,
my cup of life,
my destiny, fate,
my song.

i was not invited,
and will not stay long.
no one asked me to sing,
no one asked me to play,
and i was not pressed to take part.
i am on my way.
i depart.

i take only the words of a song,

- and i leave you my heart.
.

DARING TOKYO BANK RAID

2004-12-26T18:01:00.000Z

.

DARING TOKYO BANK RAID.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

breaking news.
a daring daylight robbery in downtown tokyo is set to break all records for global crimes of this nature. a small cabal believed to be elected neo conmen arrived at high noon at the tokyo central bank, in a red taxi, which they claimed was loaded with several suitcase-sized tactical nuclear weapons.

the gang, wearing rubber masks in the likeness of top american political figures, were only on the premises for two or three minutes. shouting slogans - ' we are the superpower ' and ' down with everyone else ' and ' anyone not in the taxi in the next three minutes is a terrorist ' - the raiders left, taking with them the guts of the entire japanese national production effort of the last forty years - a crumpled handwritten i.o.u. note for 800 billion dollars.

while the heavy gold bars in the bank's vaults remained untouched, a search is now underway for the note. . .

tokyo police believe that at least one of the gang may have been a woman, possibly even of afro-american or mixed race. as the gang left the building they audaciously left a receipt. it read simply ' thanks suckers ' and was signed with the one word ' rumsfeld.' the signature was later found to be made with a type of rubber stamp commonly used for mass producing sympathy notes to dead soldiers' mothers - and thus of little value. ( hundreds of these are still being issued. )

the authorities now await the gang's next move. the i.o.u. note is too big to cash and the fear is that the neo conmen may simply threaten to tear it up, thus plunging all of western civilisation into darkness.

of course they could also threaten to detonate their suitcase bombs - which would have much the same effect.

returning from his ' zen and the art of golf club membership ' midwinter weekend retreat, the governor of the bank of japan smiled enigmatically at the assembled press, refused to answer promptings about ritual suicide, and went back to work in his office.

since then there have been no further developments. a large number of used ' greenbacks ' have been seen littering the streets of the financial district. environmental groups have complained. children have been advised not to pick them up.

every effort is being made to play down the crisis and to carry on business as usual. the yen rose slightly in after hours trading. the central bank is expected to open as normal on monday morning.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

a small notice in english and japanese in the front window of the bank ( of a kind familiar in seedy back street geisha bars in the financial district ) says simply -

' please do not ask for credit - as a refusal may offend.'
.

goddesss unborn.

2004-10-26T22:46:00.000+01:00

a previously unpublished incantation.

8888888888888888888888888888888888888

goddess unborn
trumpet unblown
touchstone untouched
name unknown
haven unreached
face unseen
chalice unfilled
uncrowned queen.

stone unturned
fire unburned
word unspoken
peace unbroken
flags unflown
harp unstrung
masses unsaid
praise unsung.
- heed to the toll
of bell not rung.

beckoned by the echo of a voiceless call -
crushed, crushed, in the ungathered crowd.

take up a task
that you dare not ask.
view what lies
behind your eyes.

turn in the dark
turn in the dark
turn in the dark.

tell what you learned
at truant school.
promise to keep
the unmade rule.
meet at the place
where all ways part.
pulseless wish
of unmade heart.

unforlorn,
tears unshed.
unlit dawn
of unborn dead.
bones unearthed
of hosts unmet.
fossil
of a thing not yet.

silent scream
of the unafraid.
wings unfold
in egg unlaid.
tangled skein
of bald babe's hair.
hybrid spawn
of unmet pair.

now is the season
of the coming time
metrical reason
of unfinished. . .

rhyme unspoken
ring unbroken
thought untaken
mind forsaken
faith unfounded
fox unhounded
gone to ground
lost, and found.
plot untended
tale unended.

nearest farthest
same is other.
unsown harvest
virgin mother.

earth grows old
with tales untold.

age-old dream
of unborn race.
fleeting smile
on unformed face.

goddess unborn
goddess unborn.

.
.
.

after green politics - dark brown religion ?

2004-09-30T21:55:00.000+01:00

september 2004

the first generation of all those who ever lived in ireland were the blow-ins. if you think about it the natives were only the second generation.

the first arrivals named the rivers at the point where where they encountered them, at their estuaries, and only in later generations were they mapped all the way to their sources. so the names of rivers travel against the flow, upstream. the source on the map is only one among a thousand sources, on the land, beneath the land, and in the clouds above.

the shannon river is said to be twenty million years old, but an ancient greek observed that you cannot step into the same river twice. in fact the shannon river does not exist. we could send someone from the back of the hall to get a bucket of water, and many of you would consider this last statement disproved. scientifically, the contents could be shown to be water, but would remain only a bucket of water. the shannon river, that old lady of twenty million years, does not exist in any scientific sense. her character and personality, integrity and unity and history, are part of the world of our culture and imagination.

and yet if you want to take a hired cruiser from portumna to carrick - the idea of the shannon river is a useful one, an essential one, even.

in a similar fashion, gods do not exist, in that they do not have a material existence. the bucket of water does not prove the existence of the river, or the existence of the river goddess, nor does the stream of people leaving a cathedral on an easter morning prove the existence of any god. neverthless there are journeys that you cannot easily make without the idea of a god, or gods, even if you employ some well camouflaged substitute.

our predecessors in this land evolved powerful ideas of who they were and where they belonged, and the old shannon river goddess was part of the picture.

now the test of the idea, i propose, is not 'does the goddess exist, or does the goddess not exist?' the test of the idea is - 'will this help to get us from portumna to carrick ?'

the messianic manifesto.

our society is said to be becoming increasingly secular, and yet we are all the time falling for what i want to call 'the messianic manifesto.'
the messianic manifesto has five parts. faced with any written or spoken presentation, if you can check off all five of these, you can be fairly certain that this is what you are dealing with.
they are as follows-

1 the danger that confronts us.

2 the way forward that is open to us.

3 the safe haven that awaits us.

4 the man who can lead us.

- and more often than not :

5 and now a word from our treasurer.

the manifesto is in fact a deal - and the deal is usually this : give me the power now, and i will lead you to the promised land, later on.

the messianic manifesto is sold to us time and time again, because we badly want to believe it, or believe in something, and we seldom cast aside a belief without taking up another in its place. that is not to say that the new belief will not have positive benefits - but often, when the promised land fails to materialise, those who made the promises blame some rival or enemy for frustrating us, and this leads to trouble.

the manifesto seeks to gather up power. power, like the shannon river, is best understood by picturing it not as the politicians, but as a personality in its own right. power learns to harness its allies and scapegoat its rivals. more than that, power quickly learns to pretend to be solving problems that it is in fact creating.

george bush takes a baseball bat to a hornets nest. when we all get stung, he says he is the only one resolute enough to defend us and we all club together to buy him a new bat. it is too easy. we are suckers for trusting in something.

these tricks generate a self perpetuating cycle. you need me, to protect you, from the enemies that i am creating by acting out moves to defend you.

religious methodone.

my own interest is in the religious characteristics of the worldview that are still retained when we cease to be hooked on the conventional dogma of church teaching. if you are one of those who have managed to retain the 'simple faith ' of your childhood, then i apologise, but even then there are whole areas of contemporary civilisation that you live in, that were built without reference to that background.

the religious nature of a worldview that claims to be agnostic, or just pragmatically neutral, is difficult to spot - especially in the case of your own. it is like the effort to hear and detect your own accent. your own is always the default setting. the reference point. the hardest one to detect.
it is easier to see the religious mindset of others, for example the dutiful soviets filing past lenin's tomb. surely these visitors are as devout as any mediaeval pilgrimage to a saint's relics ? religion is the opium of the people says karl marx - busily helping to found another one.

communism, socialism, and consumer capitalism - each lead to their respective promised land or utopia. each have their implied messianic manifesto, and sometimes the more understated this manifesto is - the more powerful is its pull.

my thesis is that the green movement also has its manifesto - which goes a step beyond the worldview of consumer capitalism - and that this is the next form that the religious worldview is going to take - but not the final one.

the green movement.

now what is green politics ? i want to take a cool look at the implied promises of green politics and the green movement - because i do not consider myself 'green.'
very crudely and briefly we can place green political aspirations on a
spectrum :

dictators and despots want to be masters of the world. so, in the privacy of their bedrooms, do many elected leaders and election candidates.

capitalists work to become the owners of the world.

socialists and communists and voluntary community activists may aspire to be members of committees that guide the world, in a rational and egalitarian manner.

green politicians see themselves as caretakers and stewards of the earth.

i would label myself as dark brown, further out on this spectrum than the greens. i do not aspire to be a steward of nature, but i see nature herself as our caretaker, and caretaker of the community of all species.

nature is always in balance. nature is always in charge. industrial civilisation is like a series of battles in a great war upon nature - but nature remains unbeaten. we cannot destroy nature because we are an integral part of nature. the biosphere is a lottery which nature wins, because she holds all of the tickets, all of the time.

this personalises ' nature.' it brings us back to the idea of personalising the river as a goddess. am i serious when i refer to nature as ' she ' ? i put the question back to you. are you serious when you refer to a bucket of dirty water as 'pollution of the natural environment'? does 'the environment' exist ? the choice of personal or impersonal language is not a statement about the water quality, or about the so called real world - it is a subjective statement about the way we relate to the bucket, the water, the river, the river goddess, or the earth.

poor james lovelock had to back off hastily when so many people gave an almost religious response to his naming of the biosphere 'gaia', that his scientific reputation was compromised. but he was wrong to do so. gaia is no less real than the so called 'environment', and the environment no more 'exists' than the goddess. but the language we choose clearly indicates the way thay we relate to nature - personally, as we might relate to our own natural mother, or impersonally - with measurement, legislation and bureaucracy. the more we take nature apart and picture her as just a convenience store of resources - the more exploitive and damaging will be our treatment of her.

so as a 'dark brown' i am advocating first of all that you do not refer to the earth as ' the environment ' and ' it ' - but refer to her as 'nature ' and 'she.'
that helps you to remember that she is complex and capricious and unforgiving, and always has the last word.

if green politics across the world began to wield real power, it is my fear that issues of the environment could become the new focus for political centralisation, regulation, and control. there would be unimaginable reams of legislation. there could be wheelie bins with embedded microchips that could radio penalty points and on the spot fines direct to your bank account in town.

environmental issues could become the medium of political control, similar to the role that sexual issues played in the heyday of the power of the catholic church.

this in turn would inevitably generate resistance and evasion.

compare the last corrupt days of the old soviet union. in theory first world capitalists operated free markets, while the soviet system had a centralised command economy, for the benefit of all. but the opposite to a free market in anything is not a controlled market. the opposite of a free market is a centrally controlled market - plus a black market.

we do well to remember that it was they - the soviets - who were the idealists in the world's last great round of punch and judy politics. as with a controlled economy, so with a controlled global environment. you would have controlled consumption and controlled emissions, plus an inevitable outlaw fringe that was beyond all control.

it may seem incredibly dated to be talking about the soviet union, but that is our most recent example of overall political control for the benefit of the people.

i can imagine a political climate in which freedom freaks like me became the subversives and rebels, burning plastic milk bottles in their back gardens by night, to escape the government waste disposal police.

the debate on the future centres on the coming exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves. we are coming to an oil peak, or at the very least an oil production plateau. we may turn out to have been in a production plateau for thirty years, that will last twenty more. how will we live without oil ? the reaction of many is to console themselves with the thought that ' something will turn up.'

right at this moment the local political waters are relatively calm. the ship of industrial growth sails on serenely, and it is human nature not to abandon a ship that is not sinking. come to think of it, it is human nature not to abandon a ship that i s sinking, if the alternative is to throw yourself into deep water. so we wait - to see what will turn up.

in the meantime we devise little economies with fuel. petrol and diesel engines are designed to be more economical. windmills replace oil fired electricity generation -

- or actually, they don't.

how many power stations closed, so far ?

what actually happens, is that the wind power takes a little of the pressure off the oil market and thus off the oil price, and this allows oil usage to expand slightly, elsewhere in the system. so we still hang in the end. the rope is a little longer that's all.

if we develop a vehicle that does eighty miles to the gallon, the affluent consumer goes out and gratefully buys a second one for the wife. if the right to a second vehicle is then withdrawn, the consumer punishes the government at the polls next time around. so we commit ourselves to accelerating towards the brick wall of some future crisis where we finally slam on the brakes, because we get scared of the alternatives.

accompanying this race to fossil fuel exhaustion is a tendency towards token green gestures. to caricature this - the wife now goes to the supermarket five miles away, in the family's second best s.u.v, taking a reusable green canvas shopping bag. she buys a large bottle of tipperary spring water - contents free, because they are constantly replenished by the spring, and very healthy. at least that is sustainable. - is it ?

so why is the water dearer than the diesel ?

like the windpower, it may be free at source, but the bottling, sampling, testing, labelling, advertising, distribution and retailing all depend upon a network of other systems that are in turn fossil fuel dependent - from the well water pump right down to the tesco check-out girl's spanish holiday. 'free at source' is not a solution. even crude oil is free at source, while stocks last.

in many ways the debate on the environment is over. it is the optimist who thinks that the american conservatives have yet to get the message about fossil fuel exhaustion. the pessimist suspects that they have got the message all too clearly, and are now embarking upon their own long term programme, consisting of bare faced confiscation, and a strengthening of the gap between the fuel rich of the world and the fuel poor. most of this they do without our approval, but ultimately on our behalf. don't excuse yourself because you don't own a car - even without a personal vehicle you are still living in a society that is built around fossil fuel transport.

we also burn oil in our stomachs. david pimentel, an expert on food and energy at cornell university in america, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the united states eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil fuel reserves in just over seven years. that is the extent to which we eat oil. some people accuse him of being out in his calculations by as much as 30 percent. so what ? that would extend it to ten years.

on the political left the prospect of shortages prompts renewed calls for a more even distribution. but in the mindset of the far right, threat of shortages gives rise to a compelling desire for greater security of their own supply.

that is the psychology of the rich little housewife in the big four by four. in the back of her mind she knows that oil is increasingly valuable, so she asserts her social status by burning more of it.

when serious austerities are no longer avoidable, the social and political waters will be no longer calm. many of us are in denial about this. how many sustainable house designs incorporate security features - steel doors, multiple bolts, bullet proof glass, narrow windows ? how many architects begin by blithely assuming the sustainability of the local social conditions, and take a future peaceful society for granted ? it is the same blind spot as used to affect the designers of family nuclear fall out shelters in 1950s america. the drinking water, the biscuits, the ventilation, - all material needs were catered for. but no shelter salesman ever explained what sort of society lay waiting, outside, when the priveleged families emerged.

the turn in the road has to come. there is simply not enough oil in the world to complete the industrialisation of china.

an unchecked global population committed to unchecked consumption of finite fossil resources spells first austerity, then poverty, then famine. war is optional.

so perhaps we have failed to imagine what a fully sustainable society would be like ? we have allowed ourselves to imagine a changeover without any loss of momentum - like converting your car to run on solar power en route to the saturday night disco, without arriving late for the party. greens call this 'sustainable growth.' the phrase is a political promise with implications of ongoing material prosperity. it is as though we had tried to imagine, in advance, iraq under the regime of the u.n. sanctions that lasted through most of the nineteen nineties. well ? was there an increase in composting, windmills, and self sufficiency ? or just an increase in power cuts, profiteering and banditry ?

the precise nature of a future crisis is not foreseeable, but when we do face up to the prospect of a sustained contraction, there will be intense social conflict over who is to bear the pain. we will dispute how much austerity is necessary, how soon, and for whom.

there will be rainbow wars between political and social factions of various hues. several different shades of green, for a start. it may be the less affluent people of the left, with less room for cutbacks in personal consumption, who then grow loudest in their demands that growth and pollution be allowed to continue for just a little longer. . .

green politics will then have begun to migrate on a well trodden path, that traverses the political stage in diagonal fashion, from radical lower left to conservative upper right.

perpetual motion.

the green movement's search for ' sustainable development ' is a diluted version of the mediaeval quest for a perpetual motion machine.

since as early as the 13th century people have come forward with claims to have invented a mechanical device that delivers more useful energy than you put into it.
there is no such thing.

a typical proposal was for a water mill which also turns a screw within a conduit. this screw acts to raise water from downstream of the mill back up into the mill pond - from where it is available to turn the mill wheel again !

the whole concept of perpetual motion has been a graveyard of hopes, disappointing the inventors, bankrupting the backers, and exasperating patents officials.

in the end the only lasting result of the search was the formulation in 1847 of the first law of thermodynamics: this states in effect that any mechanical process is like a bank account - you will not get out more energy than you put in.

in years to come, the notion of sustainable development by means of renewable resources - meaning machines running free of any non renewable resource expenditure - will be as discredited as the notion of perpetual motion is now. the energy source may be endlessly renewable but, as we have seen, the means of capturing and applying the energy, including the disposal of the associated waste products, will never be. free diesel is no use without a free vehicle.

there are no sustainable mechanical systems. we have to look elsewhere.

since the time of descartes and of newton we have tended to see ourselves in the context of a universe regulated by mechanical laws. the apple falling from the tree - and, ultimately, everything else - was to be explained by laws of mass, gravity, energy, and motion. since the emergence of that paradigm we have tended to ignore the far greater mystery : what brings the apples up the tree in the first place?

- the answer of course is life : counter-entropic life.

a stable earth community.

i am rubbishing certain current ideas of sustainable development, and sustainable growth.
in a finite and spherical world exponential growth in anything, living or mechanical, cannot last for ever. even if you can manage to halve the rate of resource use, it does not postpone the downturn for much longer.

personal austerity - making prudent and inventive personal economies in fossil fuel consumption - is praiseworthy and beneficial, as long as you do not overstate what you are achieving.
we are still locked into a lunatic enterprise of competing to expand consumption, while simultaneously maximising the global population. how do we proceed to a stable earth community and a stable global economy?

i do not know.

i can only give the kerryman's answer -

' i wouldn't start from here.'

technological advances make us able to live longer, and consume more. so how much more is there to consume? from the point of view of stability these advances are evils, not benefits. we practise seriously dishonest accounting.

we double output at bord na mona and we call it an increase in turf production. but it is only a doubling of consumption. the bog that would have lasted thirty years will now last fifteen.

the expansion of the human race amounts to human racism. the assumption that we are by right the dominant species, with an unquestioned right to any living space that we can manage to take over, and with the right to ethnic cleanse other species off the face of the earth. that's racism.

perhaps all civilisations in the galaxy fall into two categories - those that get this far and turn back, and those that leave it too late, and fall over the edge. perhaps fossil fuelled civilisations are only a detour, and a diversion. perhaps we are only an adolescent civilisation blowing a legacy before settling down to getting a real job . . .

the nature of a stable earth community.

these are the maxims of a stable earth community. they are not a prescription for green politics - but, if you like, the foundations of a dark brown religion. you are not obliged to accept them in this form, but if not, you, or your children after you, will have to devise a version of your own. they are neither true nor false - but attitudes that will serve to get us from portumna to carrick, from here to there.

1 nature is always in balance.

people fear that mankind might upset the balance of nature. the dark brown insight is that nature is always in dynamic balance.
the towns and farms pollute lough derg with sewage. nature multiplies the zebra mussel, a mollusc which feeds by filtering water. the lake gets cleaner. the sewage pipes become blocked with mussel colonies. the county councils are upset, but balance is restored. but if you attempt to define where exactly the proper balance lies, you are forced to the conclusion that nature was in a dynamic balance throughout.

wisdom about the earth is not a text - it is an endless series of equations. the essence of a stable earth community of all species, is balance - and the essence of conscious design within that community will be balance. every assembly manual will come with a companion guide to dismantling.

2 waste is the only inexhaustible resource.

picture the forest. none of the rotting material of the trunks, branches, or leaves is destined for landfill. why ? because by definition it is all recyclable. nothing but recycleable material was taken up by the trees in their growing in the first place. the wastes are the resources and the resources are the wastes.

3 soil is the only medium of renewal.

soil is the medium of renewal for living things. we are still picturing the growth of the primaeval wood. whereas there is a green tendency to want to economise on the use of resources, the dark brown ideal is the maximisation of resource use and throughput. it is the ecologist's concept of an ecological climax state. - maximising the take-up of recyclable resources, and equally, maximising the waste products of the same circular process. you should never break the circle. never sweep up and remove the leaves from the park.

does the renewal of nature cost money ? it does not have to. where will you find regenerating woodland? in the national parks? you will find it in the region of chernobyl, and in the north korea / south korea demilitarised zone - places where people do not go.

4 death is nature's cure.

this is perhaps the darkest of the dark brown maxims. if this was the last generation to inhabit the earth, all out fossil fuel consumption would be understandable. so do we want to be the last generation? a stable earth community has to last for more than one generation, and the death of the individual is fundamental to the life of the tribe. a future scientist who overcame ageing, cancer, heart disease, and all the rest, would earn the gratitude of individuals, but bring disaster to the species, bankrupt the pension funds, and bring evolution grinding to a halt.

5 poverty is a surplus of people, not a shortfall of resources.

this is in similar vein. just as individuals can become unhealthily obese - so the entire human race is currently obese. what is a healthy size for the global population ? before the industrial revolution took off there were about half a billion people on earth. that was all. five hundred million - until we began to eat fossil fuel resources.

oil is the potatoes of the next great famine.

wherever oil has been the means of expanding population, there will the population decline be when the oil harvest fails.

after the oil has gone, a global population of a half billion would again be enough. that would correspond to an ireland of five hundred thousand people. after the great famine population control was effected by not marrying until you inherited the farm - a purely cultural constraint - but it worked.

6 earth is our only stable home.

we are adapted to the earth upon which we have evolved. the concept of colonising mars is a delusion. it does not enclose any new productive land - it places a further burden on land here on earth currently in production. the further we stray from our natural habitat - if only to the polar regions, out to sea, or in the sahara desert - the more we become dependent upon supply lines of life supporting products from the fertile areas of the earth. the drive to maximise our tribal numbers is a hangover from violent territorial competition among early agricultural societies, when farmers began to control land. a hunter gatherer does not own land. he sees the land as owning him.

7 life is the only sustainable system.

this is the core understanding of a dark brown world view. the word 'sustainability ' has begun to convey an implied promise of ongoing security, comfort and prosperity. we need to strip that out. we should use 'sustainability' to mean simply 'potential for survival'.

it is the pattern of life itself, rather than the individual lives, which holds the potential for survival. our culture places too great emphasis upon the individual, and thus upon survival of the individual. as selfish consumers we have sacrificed the long term stability of our tribe for a short term binge of change and excess. we have devised mechanical systems - meaning non living technologies which consume fossil capital - to feed our needs, and to invent new needs and new products, all destined to be the landfill of the future.

industrial civilisation is no more than a three hundred year hiccup in the four billion year history of life on earth.

nature herself will teach us, the hard way if we insist, that the systems which survive are cyclical living systems. the next best systems will be those which are designed to mimic living systems ever more closely, in their thriftiness, in their diversity, in their biodegradability, in their reuse of all their wastes and by-products, in their harmony with nature's own ecological patterns.

new forms of computer programmes will be algorithms of living systems, and evolve their answers, rather than calculate them. systems are now being envisaged which will be self improving, self repairing, and self replicating. - in some respects they will resemble the worms and viruses of today.

we cannot predict the future. we cannot live in the future, we have to live in today. but we can cultivate a vision of a stable earth community. a vision the earth as mother and caretaker - rather than the conceit of ourselves as masters of the world, or stewards issuing rations from a monster storehouse of global resources.

green politics is busy making compromises with the industrial system. green politics will prolong industrial growth by gently modifying the worst side effects of industrial growth.

change has to come, not just at a technical level, but at a deeply religious level.

after green politics - dark brown religion.

life - is the only sustainable system.

adolph bush and sir anthony blair

2004-09-30T21:38:00.000+01:00

march 2003
-
adolph bush and sir anthony blair,
baghdad, stalingrad, fox's lair,
more war, jack straw, general franks,
hearts and minds and yanks in tanks,
belfast, beirut, sarajevo,
white flags, body bags, off to the grave-o.
putin, saladin, and freedom fries,
spin, propaganda, and downright lies.
don't ever ask for the war to end,
dominate, liberate, bomb your friend.
don't ever ask what the war is for,
spasm and gasm and shock and awe.
sunnis and shias and hardline jews,
patriots, cruise, and b 52s,
non stop battle. rattle tattle. sky news.
oil wells, bloody hells, finest hour -
full spectrum dominance -
when that turns sour,
some say peace is the sole superpower.

global sectarian war

2004-09-30T00:04:00.000+01:00

Friday, March 7, 2003.

it is a wet friday morning in ireland. the rain has driven me in from trying to paint a facia board for putting up new gutters, and i am writing to some fifty friends and family, and three hundred and fifty
individual journalists on the washington post newspaper, about the dangers of global sectarian war. the last paragaph of the letter reads :

'much of the fear and distrust between islam and christianity originates among people who are ignorant of both. for example, how many would know who said this ?

> i have come to give you wisdom, and to make plain to you some of the things you differ about < ?

yes it was jesus.

but the reference is : the koran : sura 43 verse 62. - that's the sting.'

asymmetric cyberwar.

2004-09-29T23:45:00.000+01:00

march 2003
-
there is an age old instinct, for men in particular, to challenge the alpha male on his home patch. this is not the most effective tactic in an age of netwar and loose networks of cyberwarriors. the task of the cyberwarrior is not to challenge the alpha males - government ministers, high court judges, editors of newspapers or controllers of television programmes - but to find ways around them. in the virtual world of the internet, the space is theoretically limitless. there is no need to challenge for physical territory, because there is none. the centre is nowhere, and everywhere. there are no strongpoints, citadels, hubs, bottlenecks or bunkers. the true internet guerrilla travels by the back lanes, and is never seen queueing up at the toll plaza on the motorway. he leaves the massed charge to the regulars of dad's army. the guerrilla moves independently but cooperatively in a virtual landscape where there are no authorities, no leaders, except those who inspire others. the true guerilla is as happy on another's website as on their own - and holds no permanent territory - thus she can never be dislodged.