Perfect Killer.

I remember seeing a TV programme, many years ago now, presented (and probably written) by my all-time favourite presenter: John Romer. It might have been his series TESTAMENT, but in any case, he was in Agya Sophia, the great, formerly Christian, cathedral of Istanbul. He was mulling over what it was that made Santa Sophia, to his mind, the 'best' great building 'in the world'. He homed in on the construction, and, in particular, pointed out the details of the carving round one of the doors ... it was a carved vine running round the door, and he pointed out that, though every leaf was nominally identical, because the work had been done by craftsmen, each leaf was slightly different from the next. In other words, he was saying that the greatness of Agya Sophia rested on ITS IMPERFECTIONS.


I totally understand what Romer was talking about and where it was coming from. I, too, have visited Santa Sophia, several times, and I can say I felt just as he did, though, at the time, I could not say why I liked the place so very much ... all I knew was that when I walked through those doors I got a buzz such as I have experienced nowhere else.


Now I understand WHY. The fact is that it is HUMAN, and VERY SOPHISTICATED to be imperfect. To copy imperfectly is to be creative ... this is how nature does it, and, talking of creative ideas ... would you not have liked to be the one to think up the idea of the 'wing', or the 'eye' .... I mean, starting from a lot of dust floating around in space, and to have the creativity to get from there to this planet with all its plants and animals and people .... well, all I can say is THAT IS WHAT I CALL CREATIVE!


So, poeple of the world unite: get rid of copyright laws and patents and all those other rules that serve only the interests of the wealthy, the merchants and the bankers, and that kill the natural creativity that is innate in every human being.

Impartiality, Science and the Devil

I have been writing many blogs on many websites, and I am very aware that these blogs contain many highly original ideas, and that these could be considered as MY intellectual property, and I could use them to make money. So, why don't I? The answer is because I am a human being, AND I NEED TO SHARE. This requires some explanation, and I will give it.


As a young scientist, working in research labs, I was known as 'someone who answers questions'; when I helped a colleague, lending him my experience and expertise to set up some experiments, and the work was successful and publishable, he came to me and asked if I would like to be named a co-author of the paper he was publishing. I declined, and accepted, instead, a reference in the acknowledgements ... (know, here, that a scientists reputation, and thus salary and employability rests on: 1) the number of papers he has authored, and 2) the number of times he has been referenced in other people's papers... so, declining an opportunity to be co-author would be considered very unwise, reputation-wise.)


I am making two points here: it is exceptional in the world of science to share knowledge/expertise, even among colleagues (competitors for promotion?); but, it was so instinctive and deeply ingrained in me to do so, that I behaved 'oddly', and to the possible detriment of my career.


But, the fact is that had I not done so, it would have been to the detriment of me as a human being, and I would not now have the fertile mind that is capable of coming up with all the original ideas that these blogs contain!


I have talked elsewhere of two fundamental aspects of the natural world: 1) it is fundamentally cooperative, rather than competitive, and 2) it is INTERACTIVE, so, at the most fundamental level, every action has a reaction, or, every action has consequences.


As to the first: scientists, and especially those who support the 'selfish gene' theory, (and ex-Thatcherites), would argue with this, but, the situation is very simple, and brooks no argument. IT IS THE DIFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF ANY SYSTEM THAT IF IT PRODUCES DIVERSITY IT IS COOPERATIVE, AND IF IT PRODUCES MONOCULTURE, OR SAME-NESS, IT IS COMPETITIVE. All you have to do is look out of your window at the scenery ... do you see diversity? yes? then you are looking at something that is based on cooperation.


Scientists, as I say, will argue. They will pull out of the hat, abstruse details about the behaviour of animals you have never heard of, or some such. In other words, they will nit-pick, and use their 'expertise', to intimidate, and divert you from the simple, in-your-face TRUTH.


You see, that is what expertise is about. It is about making perfectly simple things seem complicated and intimidating ... so that you will NEED the EXPERT.


And that brings me to THE DEVIL. Creation of the Devil is an old trick --- religions cottoned onto that one aeons ago, and have been trading on it for thousands of years!


I am old enough to remember when the film THE EXORCIST first came out, and I saw it, along with all the other horrors of the same ilk ... and I can well remember what I felt, what it MADE ME FEEL, at the time ... I was, at that time, an atheist, if I was anything, yet, watching all that stuff, I just thought, 'thank goodness for the church, and priests, people who can, and are prepared, to protect us from all that stuff if it really exists!' Oh, boy, did they get me! That is JUST WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL. The devil is quite possibly the churches most profitable invention!


Well, I have pointed out elsewhere that science is, at root, also a religion, and it, too, finds it most profitable to invent devils. Some of the more recent are: GLOBAL WARNING, assorted epidemics ... of course, that last is a REAL winner. Scare people about their health and set yourself up as the person with exclusive access to the answers and you are REALLY onto a winner. Look at how people flock in their thousands to Lourdes because they have heard there is a cure ... well, on the same basis, 'they have heard there is a cure', they flock in even greater numbers to health centres arround the country .... but the medical profession has gone one better: they promise that, if you let them jab you, and dose you, they can STOP IT FROM HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Now, is that a licence to produce (and sell) cures for manufactured diseases, or is that a licence to produce cures for manufactured diseases!


And now, just ask yourself, what do all those scare stories, all this worry about screening and preventative medicines do to me? Do they perhaps (apart from scaring me into the arms of the doctors and drugs companies), as I say, do they perhaps stress me out so that my IMMUNE system suffers, and I BECOME SUSCEPTIBLE TO DISEASE!


So, yes, science intimidates with manufactured details, and creates its own (non-religious, in the conventional sense) devils to scare you into its arms!


And then, look at science from the inside: if these are such wonderful people working for the good of us all, why is it that they will not share knowledge and expertise, EVEN WITH COLLEAGUES? And, then there is this: I worked in, what, at the time, was the biggest industrial reseach centre in the UK, and for the biggest industrial engineering companies in the UK, and what did I spend my time doing? I was involved in the early days of optical fibre technology. The Japanese were the first to find a way of manufacturing optical fibres of useful quality. But, of course, they patented the technique. Oh, dear, that means that any other company that uses that technique to make optical fibres will have to pay royalties to the Japanese! That will reduce profits! Can't have that. So, my company, and many others in this country, the USA, and others, were paying a lot of scientists a lot of money to find other ways of making optical fibres ... NOT A BETTER WAY, JUST A DIFFERENT WAY. The fact is, that optical fibres are EXTREMELY difficult to make, and the Japanese had, as so often is the case with FIRST inventions, come up with really the ONLY good, viable, easy, relatively inexpensive (note; relatively) way to do it. So, WHATEVER other technique all those scientists might come up with, it WAS GOING TO BE WORSE, and it was going to produce inferior, but more expensive, fibres! But that does not matter. The point is that the PROFITS would be going into the pockets of the directors of the lucky company. AND, the LUCKY company would not only be the one that came up with this different way of making optical fibres, but the one that also had the clout to ensure that it's product was the one that cornered the market!


So, science scares you into its arms with manufactured devils, and then sells you invalid, or at least, inferior products that will supposedly cure the problems science created in the first place ... what a merry-go-round!


This, then, is competition at work! It really is not viable. A world that tried to work that way would not get off the ground.


I do not deny that nature uses competition OCCASSIONALLY (refer to what I have said about 'there is no such thing as bad medicine' in other blogs), but, the root and heart of the natural world is, AND HAS TO BE, cooperation.


Under those circumstances, IT IS NATURAL, AND THEREFORE INSTINCTIVE, FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO BE COOPERATIVE. So, going back to my description of my cooperative behaviour as a young scientist, and my cooperative behaviour in these blogs: I AM BEHAVING INSTINCTIVELY; I AM ONLY DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY.


The converse of that is that, in inducing people to believe in competition, society is inducing them to behave against their own better natures. And this is not trivial matter. It kills us, or kills that in us which is really alive, and human ... having said which, you just have to look at what happens to animals when they are forced to behave in ways that are not natural to them: they go bonkers! They suffer, and get ill!


So, who was wanting to know the nature of EVIL, and where all the suffering and ills of this world come from?

PS: all ART is rubbish, but...

In the last post on this site, yesterday, I proved that ALL ART IS RUBBISH. This is utterly, completely and totally true, nevertheless, in the words of Dick Emery (BBC TV 1960's or 1970's):
"Oh, you are aweful, but I like you!"


I have been working on a project that required me to present personality profile of myself. I am not good with 'I am this', or 'I am that', so I chose instead to use a selection of my favourites quotes, ones that have had an influence on me for many years. Relevant to the above, is a Quote from Robert Browning, whom I discovered in my teens. MY LAST DUCHESS was always my favourite, and my favourite lines were:

"She had a heart, how shall I say,
Too soon made glad, too easily impressed.
She liked what'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere."

I was hugely impressed by the idea of being able to LIKE EVERYTHING, the more so because my mother had already prepared the ground with one of her favourite pearls of wisdom. From as early as I can remember, she was very much of the opinion that "the more you know, the richer your life will be."

So, as I say, Art may be rubbish, but that does not stop me LIKING it!.

And artists are no bettter.....

In an earlier blog or two I have had a go at science and those who practice it; I now feel it is time to balance things up by pointing out what a debased and inhuman thing this thing called ART has become!


Cards on the table right off: all this stuff we put into the hallowed halls of art galleries, concert halls, libraries and the like, IS COMPUTER-GENERATED ART! So, when scientists working in 'artificial intelligence' (the word 'artificial' IS significant) try to prove that computers are as intelligent as people by getting said computers to 'be creative' and, say, write great works of literature, or paint great works of art, all they are really doing is proving MY point: that is, that what our supposed 'great artists' are doing is debasing themselves to the level of machines in order to create those 'great' works. Time to marshal my evidence ....

Let us consider the origins of our GREAT ART. The ancient Greeks and people did get a look in, but, for the most part, the significant birth date is 'the Italian Renaissance'. And the significant names credited with energising this re-birth, are such as the Medicis, that is, MERCHANTS AND BANKERS! The next relevant question is: what best serves the interests of merchants and bankers? Answer: a unique, marketable product! --- and here we see the genisis of copyright, and patent legislation, all those things that put shackles on the creative imagination.

An experience I had yesterday is very telling. I was whiling away the time waiting for someone, so I spent it browsing around a shop selling ornaments, amongst other things. I like to do craft work myself, and I have a panchant for fairies, so when I spotted some ornamental fairies on a shelf, I homed in on them. They were pretty enough to induce me to consider buying, but when I checked the price, the thought that went through my head was: oh no, I could make a better one myself for a fraction of the price! QUITE!

Now, this is MOST DEFINITELY NOT the sort of reaction merchants and bankers want to induce in prospective customers. In fact, they want to produce EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE reaction ... this is why GREAT ART intimidates; this is why we mere mortals think we cannot do it; this is why there exist these mythical monsters called GENIUSES! So now the merchants and bankers have got us where they want us: parting with hard-earned cash for computer-generated rubbish!

So, why do I call it 'computer generated'? Because it is not created naturally, does not come FROM WITHIN the artist. It is created to fit a set of rules generated by said merchants and bankers. It reminds me of a scene from the film BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, made in the 1970's, if I remember, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. It is the scene where the pair are trying to 'go straight', and have asked a mine manager for a job. In order to assess their suitability for an opening as guards, he asks Sundance to display his marksmanship. Sundance prepares to shoot in his accustomed manner, but the manager interrupts and says, 'I don't want any fancy stuff, just stand there and shoot that tin can'. Forced to shoot standing still and aiming as though he was on a shooting range, Sundance fails abyssmally! The manager turns away in disgust, but Sundance says, 'can I move now?', then he dives to the ground, roles over, etc, all the while pumping the tin can full of holes! Well, that's the kind of difference I am talking about: computers do art standing still and obeying the rules; people do it for REAL!

And then there are the 'truths that lie too deep for taint', that I have refered to in earlier blogs ... these give the game away, of course, and one of my favourites is a short story by a German writer called Lisa Eichman (the surname is not accurate because I cannot remember precisely ... I am not a computer!). The story is titled: THE BOUND MAN. In summary: a man is attacked and robbed on the highway and left unconscious. When he wakes up his is tied about with ropes, bound, but with just enough freedom of movement that he is able to get to his feet and jump/hop his way across the fields till he comes upon a circus. There he gets a job (this is akin to 'magic realism') as a performer, showing what tricks the BOUND MAN can perform. One day, the BOUND MAN is taunted into entering a cage with a savage wolf that will kill him if he cannot kill it first. One of the spectators takes pity on the BOUND MAN, and when he is close to the bars of the cage, she slips a knife through and cuts his bonds. The ropes fall away, and the BOUND MAN is savaged by the wolf. He is pulled from the cage, and as he lies dying, he explains to the woman that she is, in fact, responsible for his death ... he had become so accustomed to his bonds, and so clever at working within them, that he could have killed the wolf is they had been left on! But he was no longer accustomed to free movement, and so, freed, he had no chance against the wolf.

That image of the BOUND MAN is a metaphor for the mind of the writer of the story. She is a literary writer, and she has had to learn to write within the the limits created by the 'ropes and bonds' imposed by the literary establishment. She has become so good at performing these CIRCUS TRICKS now that, if the bonds were removed, she would be unable to defend herself against the wolves! And yet, even under these circumstances, her humanity will out: she shows a remarkable ADAPTABILITY.

The world of commerce really is sucking us dry, robbing us of life, of our very humanity.

PEOPLE of the world unite

YOU ALONE know what is right.

The Ape-Man Cometh

Having just complained somewhere about suffering from something akin to 'writer's block', and then gone on to give meaning to the cosmological view of the future of the universe, I am inspired to turn my interpretive eye onto THE DESCENT OF MAN.


I talk here of the theory, first publicised by Darwin ( I make no mention here of a gentleman who went under the title of Lord Monbodo, and the name Alfred Russel Wallace skips my mind), as I was saying, I talk of the theory attributed to Darwin, known as EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION, which would have it that MAN is descended from the APE --- no quarrel there, but what does it mean?


Well, consider this: what do I mean when I say that I aped someone? Of course, I mean I copied them. And how does evolution work? By copying the parent, with a few variations thrown in, to create the offspring. So, then, MAN is, and ought always to be, a copyist. (I paraphrase Hume here: reason is, and ought always to be, the slave of passion. There is sense in that, for the same reason there is sense in man being a copyist) In being copyists, we are only, after all, copying natures methods of dealing with complexity, and creating diversity and richness etc etc, topics upon which I have dealt in other blogs ... so, we have it on the BEST authority.


Right, so that solves my problem with 'writer's block' .... I'm just away off to write LORD OF THE RINGS!

Carry on Science( and men); or, Never Say Die; or, It's a Rich Man's World

Having thoroughly vented my spleen on subjects such as the supremacy of science, and male values, and competitiveness and the like, it is now time to kiss-and-make-up! --- the title of this blog should go some way to mollifying anyone who might be feeling picked upon.

Well, the clue to the direction this blog is going to take, is to be found in all I have said about evolution, cooperation and DIVERSITY. ---- NEVER SAY DIE!

When Christian missionaries first went to India and tried to convert the Hindus, they told them all about God and Jesus Christ and heaven and the Devil, and the Hindus nodded and said, "yes, very interesting", and proceeded to add God and Jesus Christ and the Devil to the Hindu pantheon! Ah, well, that is not quite what the missionaries had in mind. They meant their religion to be exclusive .... and that is the heart of my quarrel. Christianity has all sorts of good things in it, and had accessed many deep truths, but so has Hinduism, and so has Science, and THERE ARE YET MANY OTHER DEEP TRUTHS THAT REQUIRE MEANS NOT YET INVENTED.

One of my mother's favourite pearls of wisdom was: all knowledge enriches life. And that is the point. We are talking about human being, and life, and what makes a good life, and a good life is a rich life, a life that is full of things you like, things you want to do, and so on. And this raises on human ability above all others ( and I take the opportunity here to thumb my nose at computers again!), and that is the ability to learn to like.

The MONA LISA has nothing innately beautiful in it, (ask a Chinese gentleman! or an alien, if you can find one) in fact, nothing at all in it. But Da Vinci, and all the rest of us who like the MONA LISA, have develped the ability to SEE it as beautiful.

There is a poem, I cannot remember by whom, but it may have been Keats, in which he decries science with the lines: (talking of rainbows) We know her woof, her texture now, She is given in the dull catalogue of ordinary things. That, of course, is Art competing with science, but they are COMPLEMENTARY. To look at rainbows with a poets eye is to appreciate them in one way, but to study them and understand where they come from is to appreciate them in another way, and the more ways you can find to appreciate rainbows, the better you like them --- and that is what makes life good.

So, anyone that tells me that you should look at the world in one way, and in one way only, impoverishes me, enslaves me, and, to all intents and purposes, condemns me to death.

So it behoves me, for my own sake, to find what is wonderful about science ( and men).

I have talked already about the beauty of theoretical physics, and that goes for other sciences, but experimental science? Experiment-time is play-time. There is so much I hardly know where to begin ... 'suffer the little children' encapsulates quite a lot, and what I have to say here, now that I think of it, applies to Art as well: you get to like and understand (much the same thing, really) it a whole lot better when you try it for yourself. Theoretical science, and art, is like admiring someone from a distance, while do-it-yourself is like getting up close and personal, getting to know all the little quirks and peculiarities, and getting deeper insights.

And, if you want a more intellectual version, experimental science teaches people how to observe the world around them (you'd be amazed how many people go around with their eyes closed!), how to spot patterns, draw conclusions, and such inestimable pearls as: actions have consequences ( you'd be surprised how many people make-it-up-as-they-go, as though making free with the truth will have no consequences! golly, if they only knew!!). So, science is of immense value, at all levels.

As to men ... I have spent much time extolling the female virtues, but the sad fact is that men (sigh!) are also necessary to the good life!

By and large, women 'do what they like'. That is, they are driven by feelings, and if they don't like it, they will have no truck with it. That leaves you in a world where any negative feelings block you from doing or liking things, and negative feelings are prone to appear like viruses. Thus the female is home-bound. The male can run on intellect, so negative feeling need not hinder, and, indeed, can be seen as a challenge, so the male is in an expanding world, and without the male, the world of the female would shrink away to nothing over time( hence the tradition of the male protector)

In interpretive terms, this relates to the physicists view of the universe, as an expanding space. However, the expansion of the universe will not necessarily go on forever. In physics terms, if the total mass of the universe is below a certian limit, then the universe will start to shrink after a time; if the total mass is over that limit, the universe will go on expanding, and will 'die of cold'; but if the total mass is just on that limit, the universe will be in balance and will cease to expand or shrink, and will go on existing forever. I would interpret this as: an excess of femininity will result in a shrinking of our universe, an excess of masculinity will result in an expansion, but with eventual freezing to death, but the male and female in correct balance and the universe can go on forever. This, by the way, applies to individuals. I am talking here of MY universe, YOUR universe ... the metaphor of universe. So, each of us requires a balance of male and female in our make-up --- which neatly relates to Yin and Yang!

So, in conclusion, I'm off to take up my maracas and chant "I'm a boy! I'm a boy!" (Jack Lemon --- Some Like it Hot?)

Misha's Bell

I have two blogs to do today, one based on a dream I had this morning (which shows what is going on when I am blogging, and how my blogging has developed since it started about a month ago) and which I will deal with later on joan-dreams.blogspot.com, and this one, which is inspired by a review, from the Radio Times, which 'spoke to me' during my morning perusal of said magazine. The review reads:

...the light-hearted tinkling if Misha the penguin's bell is welcome amid the dark happenings of Andrei Kurkov's post-soviet satire. ..... Viktor is a failing novelist who agrees to write a series of obituaries for a crooked newspaper editor. The twist is that the editor's chosen subjects are not dead .... so Viktor and Misha are plunged into the Ukraines mafia-terrorised underworld, with its cast of unwitting criminals, and less-than-innocent victims. The beauty .... lies in Viktor's deadpan narration and the tinkle that signals Misha's enigmatic thoughts. ..... the listener is left perplexed: is Misha-the-penguin the most human character after all?

Well, first off: one of the things I like most about South Africa is the TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION committee, and one of the things I like most about the Soviet Union is that, when a journalist asked a resident, not long released from the gulags, of a block of flats how he could bare to live next door to one of the ex-gulag guards who had kept him incarcerated, he got the reply: 'there but for the grace of God....'. There is a lot of tolerance and humanity in those two countries.

But, why that review spoke to me has more to do with why and how I am writing these blogs: I am a failed novelist! Quite honestly, if I could bury myself in a world of fiction and fantasy right now, I would do so and these blogs would not get written. But I can't. I have not been able to find it in my to write a novel, not by the conventional means, at any rate .... all that preparation and organisation and locking yourself away from the world ... can't keep it up!

So, instead, here I am, writing obituaries for subjects that are not yet dead .... and running scared of the mafia, the unwitting criminals, and the less-than-innocent victims! And what subjects might those be? Well, so far I have had a go at the likes of scientists, academics, the art establishment etc etc, but I have run scared of mentioning the BIG J, associated with the BIG H, ... in fact, it might be true to say that I have so far gone for the unwitting criminals, and avoided the less-than-innocent victims. There are a hell of a lot of people in this world who make a living out of being 'victims' .... and who are the bigest victims, who has suffered more than anyone else in the history of suffering?

I might profitably, at this stage, go off tangentially, and talk of the nature of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact is that people who are paranoid get picked on and that just seems to justify the paranoia, and so .....

The situation is best understood by refering to the natural world. In the natural world, prey animals get 'picked on' by hunters because they BEHAVE LIKE PREY ANIMALS. So deer, for example get hunted. But, SKUNKS and the like do not get hunted because they DO NOT EXPECT TO BE. You might think skunks escape because of the stink, but no animal needs to be attacked by a skunk in order to learn to avoid it. No, it is the skunks sublime unconcern that is its protection. ... so with people, if you believe people will attack you, you behave like a prey animal and YOU GET ATTACKED.

OK, so here goes ... THE BIG J ... you may have guessed already, but if you haven't, I refer to the Jews. I mean, is there any race of group of people that has been so picked on in the history of the world? I think not! And what do they do about it? There are whole organisations trying to protect the Jews from being picked on, there is a whole industry built on keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive so that it will never happen again. Well, sorry folks, but all that is just ensuring that IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

Having said which, I myself am an ex-schizophrenic, and there are now whole organisations devoted to protecting people with mental health problems --- in fact, we live in a world of 'protection rackets'! My response to being a lunatic is contained in another blog, titled: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE SCHIZOPHRENIA, and so, with my declared short attention span (I put it down to having suffered from schizophrenia!?), instead of wittering on about skunks, and how they teach us how not to need protecting, I refer readers to that blog which says the same thing, but at greater length and in more detail.
It is in: joan-well.blogspot.com