This Story Needs a Title

My grandfather remembered the first moon landing. It wasn’t so long ago, you know. He died in a hospital bed, and my mother was with him. He didn’t know she was there, and it was only chance. It could have been any one of us. We took turns. The last one of us he knew was there was probably me. When my mother arrived he was already unconscious.

He never talked about the moon landing. Only a couple of times on New Year’s Eve when he’d been mixing his Guinness with my grandmother’s sherry. My mother said he used to talk about it a lot. When they thought it was a great moment in the history of the world. They thought the moon was the future. It wasn’t their fault. To them it was mysterious. And any mystery must be important. They thought you should die with your family around you. There used to be tribes that ate the bodies of their parents. They thought there was a reason for it.

Then we discovered what the moon was for. It’s hard. A part of you wants to say goodbye, and then, when it’s your turn, you don’t want to go. You cling to the old ways, the old ideas, the things our grandparents believed. It’s easy to understand why they believed them, but now we know they were wrong, and you have to accept it. It’s part of being a person of your time. We know what they didn’t. We know more about how things should be. To reject it is to belong to another time, to live with the dinosaurs. Oh, and to be wrong, of course.

The moon is dead. Geologically and biologically dead. No atmosphere, like a really bad party. It was obvious really. We just took a long time to realize. The Earth, on the contrary, is young. And the world belongs to the young. It’s obvious, really.

There are those who whisper that there’s been a misunderstanding, that the world belongs not to the young, but to the living. There was a time when it was like that, but as everyone knows, it was just a step on the way, a short period while the forces of reaction and sedition got used to the idea or were made to stop confusing the matter. Then it was the dying who were sent here as well as the dead. Then the old, over 80 they started with. But old age is a relative thing. A few people are still young at 90, some are old at 60. It was a matter of judgement. The people who did the judging were often criticised, so in the end they made it simpler. Over 60, because some are old at 60. Those who were still young at 60 had the chance to prove it, and it turned out that most of them were not as young as they thought. The world belongs to the young.

Some of those who came here were not even 60, but age is relative. When you have nothing to offer your family, and no friends to help you, and you’re more a hindrance than a help, and your company is boring, and you smell a bit and talk too much about the past, then you’re old, aren’t you, regardless of the years you’ve lived? And now it’s my turn.

I made it to 58 before they decided I had to go. Not bad really. I can’t complain. I had a good family, but my friends were sent off first, my wife never even made it here, and my children feel that I can’t make proper use of my property anymore, not as much as they could, so they asked the tribunal to review me. All fair and right, just as it should be. But it’s Hell here. Completely alone. The workers receive you, process you, then they put you in your cell and wait for the hunger and thirst to take you. They’re made of clear plastic, the cells, something incredibly strong and transparent. You can see the sky and the Earth. It makes you wish you were back there.

I didn’t know it was like that. On Earth we thought there must be some other way, quick and painless. It’s what they tell you, or what they let you believe, anyway. Now I think about it, I don’t know that I ever heard it mentioned. People don’t think about this place, and the people who come here. We don’t matter anymore, do we? The world isn’t like in my grandfather’s day, when they thought they could talk to the dead, and visit them, and ask them to watch over them. Now we know the truth. I’m not one of them anymore. I’m one of us.

But it’s hard when your time comes, it really is. You want to stay, you say that you’re still young, that you deserve to stay with the living. Old people are selfish, we used to say. And it’s true. Now I’m old I’m selfish myself. I’ll be gone soon. Dead. A few days more, and it will be over. I already feel weak, and tired, and my mouth is drier than I ever imagined it could be, and my head hurts terribly. Just a few days more.

The workers have a hard time here. Lonely and miserable, with no real comforts, and their families and friends, if they still have any, a quarter of a million miles away. They’re paid a pittance, but it doesn’t really matter as there’s nothing here they could spend it on. They can’t produce anything and what we send over from Earth is just the minimum required to keep them alive. They’re only allowed back occasionally, and briefly, under supervision, and permissions are often cancelled at the last minute. In fact hardly anyone on Earth has ever met a moon worker, not until they come here. It’s odd, in a way. At the time we discovered the purpose of the moon, we discovered the purpose of the Welsh.

If they knew I was writing this, they would make me lie here forever, instead of pushing me into space in the direction of Sirius. That’s what they promise to do, so that one day we’ll wake up on the ancestral home of man. You have to believe it, or you’d go mad. If you don’t believe it, if you don’t understand why it’s right, you don’t deserve to go to Sirius, and they just throw you out into the moondust. I can see a lot of bodies out there, there must be a lot of people who don’t believe. But I do. I know it’s right. It’s just a bit hard to take when it’s your turn. A few days more…

Tyrants and Witchcraft

Would be dictators know that if they can give their followers permission to kill the people they don’t like, revolution will follow by itself.

Witchhunts are always with us. They are the means by which those who secretly know they are worthless get to feel superior to the people around them who make them feel that way. Being a witch, keeping a cat, not going to church, going to the wrong church, getting out of bed with the wrong foot, smoking, condemning homosexuality, not condemning homosexuality, having eyes the wrong colour, calling a black person coloured or a disabled person crippled, not believing in global warming or whatever the orthodoxy is.

Finding reasons to declare others to belong to some category of non-person has a number of important functions. It allows those who have a deep sense of their own inadequacy and worthlessness to feel that someone else is worth less than they are. It provides a sense of identity, and divides in-groups from out-groups, which is essential to our psychology. Most people are made very anxious by not having a set of external identities to impose upon themselves.

This is why the orthodoxy that serves to separate, in their own minds, the good from the ungood, is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t have to respond to any logic, or be consonant with any underlying morality, or even be internally coherent. All it needs is to sound right at a particular moment, and then it can be used to dehumanise those we dislike. Aside from the arbitrariness of what is right and wrong, another important characteristic is that the manifestation (or suspicion) of unorthodoxy trumps any virtue or strength that the person might otherwise possess, however many and however great.

People who are not unintelligent and think themselves rational can (for example) condemn democracy/capitalism/freedom because democratic/capitalist/free societies are not perfect, while excusing the abject economic and social failure of their favourite totalitarians as minor blemishes. I don’t know where I read the story of Giuseppe the Cocksucker, but it serves as a parable:

Said Giuseppe, “I built a factory here when the mines closed. I’ve employed half the village for fifty years. I rebuilt the church and dedicated a shrine to the local Virgin. I built a high school, a library, a clinic, a sports hall. I sponsor the football club. I take out advertising on every hoarding that’s unsold, and in every edition of the town newspaper. I run a fund that pays for young people to go to university in the city. I give every couple a car and a down payment on a house when they marry. I have nurses to look after the old people when they retire. Once I sucked a cock. Ask them who I am, go on, ask them. They’ll tell you, he’s Giuseppe the cocksucker.”

So who defines the witches of the moment? The subset of those who want to have control of others by dividing them who are able to make their particular hatred popular.

It is not unusual to see pacifists display murderous fury when their ideas are challenged. And the recent fashion for the end of the world by global warming has produced a particular virulent strain of misanthropic Malthusian, be it the world government fanatics, the advocates of stone age living, or the totalitarians who would dictate every mouthful we are allowed to consume and every step we are permitted to take. Prominent politicians and journalists on national newspapers are making comparisons with paedophiles and Nazis because not everyone is convinced that we’re all going to die in the next five minutes. The UAF, with the excuse of opposing the crude and sometimes thuggish racism of the EDL and the more genteel racism of the BNP, resort to every kind of mindless brutality. They are ‘right’, so they have permission to kill and destroy. It is a very common mentality, though not always expressed in the same fashion..

I suspect that a peculiar set of circumstances make these things easier to do in England. I visit about once a year and I am always struck by new things which NORMAL DECENT PEOPLE have discovered that NORMAL DECENT PEOPLE DON’T DO.  A television programme or newspaper gives prominence to a particular point of view, or political initiative, is sufficient to start people spying reporting their neighbours, shouting at strangers in the street, and pinning medals on themselves, for something which no one would have bothered about a short while before. We (I am English in case anyone was wondering) seem to be particularly malleable, especially susceptible to taking at face value some random commentators division of people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and constructing new beliefs about ourselves and others, a new ‘them’ and ‘us’, as though they were truths cast in stone from the dawn of time.

The number of apparently unexceptionable opinions that people feel entitled to shout abuse at you, or attack you, for expressing, or just for being suspected of holding, is disturbing. The number of things it is impossible to discuss rationally appears to be growing. I wonder where it will end.

There is no Spirit of the Tax Law

'Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa', as they say over here.

It is an empty concept, not applicable to what is no more than a complex series of instructions about how to do paperwork.

Nick Clegg thinks we shouldn't be using accountants to help us organize our accounts and tax liabilities, because it's a bit much, apparently, to expect Parliament to make laws that actually say what they mean. Therefore we must do what they want us to do, not what the law says we can do. When he talks about avoiding our liabilities, of course, what he means is discovering whether liabilities are less than we thought. Since that is to our benefir, we pay people who know about these things to do it for us.

Tomorrow he will call for the abolition of the legal profession because they make it harder for him to put people in jail.

He might follow that by criticising those who use private medicine and private education, because we show up the incompetence and poor value of the schemes he runs, and we might gain an advantage over the poor souls who have to use state services. But, of course, that's already party policy and has been for years. Like Labour, they despise people who take responsibility for their own lives. Unlike Labour, they pretend that they're on our side, going so far as to call themselves Liberal and Democratic when they are nothing of the kind.

The Fight Against Knife Crime

We’re back and blogging. The haitus has been occasioned by a few days holiday in the north of Spain (San Vicente de la Barquera. Nice place, more about it later) and a further few days in England (about which also a bit later). Now we’re on the farm, but I almost didn’t get here…

I tend not to read blog entries where the blogger talks about himself in the manner of a self-obsessed newspaper columnist, so this is not really about me, though it uses an incident I was involved in to illustrate a point that is rather more important than I am.

I was stopped at Stansted airport by a security officer who had seen something he didn’t like on the scanner, and searching through my luggage he found, in a forgotten pocket of a bag I was using for some other purpose, and which was buried in a rucksack, a small penknife that I had not known was there. Oh damn, I thought, they’ll confiscate it.* And so they did, but then it got a lot more complicated.

The knife has a blade of about two and a half inches, and I use it in the country for cutting cured meats, slicing tomatoes, picking flowers, cutting string, and a hundred little things for which generations of people, and not just those who enjoy the country, have found it useful to carry a penknife. But not in modern Britain. The colleague of the security officer decided that the blade was lockable, a concept I still haven’t fully understood. All folding knives have some kind of mechanism to stop them closing while in use, and why mine was any different from a Swiss Army knife of the same size, which I was explicitly told was ok, I have no idea. But it seems that Parliament, in response to some thug knifing someone, and at the instigation, one would imagine, of someone who was never a boy scout and has his fruit pre-sliced by the staff, at some point made such things illegal, and they also took the highly illiberal step of removing any possible defence, as I discovered when the police were called.

I had, of course, done nothing wrong. I had neither hurt, nor threatened anybody with the penknife. I had not even known I had it on me and if I had no reason to suspect that such an unremarkable, useful, everyday object was illegal in the land of my birth, which used to be a beacon of freedom and commonsense in a depressingly benighted and totalitarian world. But this is not about me.

None of these facts was disputed by the police, but even so, it’s an ‘offence’. And none of those facts matters in the slightest. They clearly knew I had done nothing wrong; from the way they treated the matter it was quite obvious that to them it was no more than a bit of paperwork, and I was some idiot who’d got himself caught up in the machinery of asinine law. They were more interesting in making sure I didn’t miss the plane than in protecting the world from your humble blogger. They were charming and efficient about it, but they said that they were only letting me go because I didn’t live in the UK. Presumably that’s their letout, even though ignorance of the law isn not supposed to be a defence in this case.

Even though it was made clear that I had no defence, and that there was no point shouting about the despotic stupidity of the law as it stands, it did cross my mind to call a solicitor and see what he said. I could have tried to show that the knife wasn’t ‘lockable’, but in the absence of any clarity of definition, it didn’t look a good bet. I might have been on firmer ground in disputing that I had been in ‘possession’, but I had a plane to catch and a life to lead, so I accepted a caution,** the policeman bade me good-day and called the gate to hold the plane. All very civilized, but stupid and pointless. No purpose has been served by it, everyone involved was well aware of this, and I may yet find that it has consequences at some future time.

*About 15 years ago, on the way to Istanbul from either Gatwick or Heathrow, I forget which, my father had a similar experience, in that he had accidently left a penknife in his hand luggage. Those were more sensible times- it was packaged and checked, and given back to him on arrival.

**Being accused of having an offensive weapon by a man carrying a machine gun is a bit rich, too, but it brings up another point. His machine gun didn’t bother me in the slightest because he didn’t do anything threatening with it and he was clearly a competent and responsible person to be carrying it. As my knife was, in my hands, equally clearly harmless.

On Tax Competition

One of the most extraordinary concepts ever dreamed up by that large section of the population, which includes many of the politicians of the developed world, that totally fails to understand how the world works, and even fails to notice that in many places it is working extremely well, in terms of personal freedom, wealth unimaginable only a hundred years ago, and growing up not expecting to lose half your children before they’re five, or to have to go war, or to starve if you lose your job, or to die if you get ill, and who do not understand how all this has come about; those people who heap praise on tyrants and governments and political and religious systems that condemn entire nations to poverty and enslavement, yet point out every minor imperfection in the West as though it were damning proof of the final failure of what has, in fact, created all that is good about living here; those who constantly preach how some benighted and ill-conceived political theory must make such and such a place a paradise on Earth, though they have absolutely no intention of going to live there because they know that in practice they would, like the lucky citizens of those paradises, have none of the things which their own countries, which they criticise so much, have given them, and who want, for their own satisfaction, to make other people obey laws that they themselves don’t expect to be bound by; is the idea of unfair tax competition.

The belief that the purpose of tax is to create homogeneous conditions for commercial investment and activity, to stop some countries from being better places to run a business than others, effectively to discourage the practice of trade, enterprise, employment, innovation, wealth creation, work, and all those things which have made our countries such good places to live in, is an idea so utterly stupid and bizarre that it is not even socialism. It could only be conceived in the twisted minds of bureaucrats for whom real people have no value except as piggy banks that may be rifled repeatedly and without apology in order to keep them in paperwork. To imagine that there is any real meaning, let alone value, to such a concept requires you to treat a perverse kind of equality as an end in itself, the only end, before which everything else can be disregarded (for some reason Neil Kinnock’s obsession with the Eurobus comes to mind) and that the state, and not the person, is the basic unit of humanity, to be revered, and sanctified, and preserved whatever the cost. Fascists, in a word.

Not surprisingly, the cradle of this idea is Brussels, but I genuinely find it hard to believe that even there the phrase ‘unfair tax competition’ can be spoken with a straight face and taken seriously. And yet it is so.

Results Just in from Havana

Fidel Castro and his gang are going through that regular farce they call free and democratic elections. I don't suppose you've noticed, because it won't change anything whatever about the government of Cuba, and there won't be rioting on the streets. No one in Cuba cares except the propagandists, and no one outside Cuba cares because the media thinks it's far more fun to denounce as fraudulent eclections in certain other countries, where they might well be, or even when they are genuinely democratic but the wrong person wins.

Even a megalomaniac like Fidel can't control everything by himself, so there is a National Assembly made up of delegates from all the regions which notionally has both legislative and executive power. This is Fidel's democratic fig-leaf.*

The candidates are not all overtly Friends of Fidel, though the majority invariably are party members of proven loyalty. In any case, only the Communist Party is allowed to campaign, and any candidate who deviates from the basic message may find they have problems not only getting elected, but also getting work or housing, and is likely to find all kinds of social problems arising around them.

The government dosen't take chances, even after controlling very carefully the selection of all but a small minority of the delegates to the National Assembly. It still retains the power to ignore its decisions and rule directly by decree, which is how most things are done in practice.

We are informed by the electoral commision that over 8m people voted, representing 95% of the electorate, and that turnout was over 92% in every province. We can already begin to smell the rotting fish. These numbers already have the rotten smell of tractor stats.

In a few days another assembly will be formed and the long-suffering Cuban people will have the pleasure of knowing that, not only are they paying for this farse, but they will be told repeatedly that when the assembly rubber-stamps the decrees of the government, it is freely expressing the will of the people, and they will have to accept that that is their will or there will be trouble. Cubans who have escaped say the same as those who were finally released from tyranny in Western Europe used to say, that psychologically one of the worst things for normal people was having to pretend that every act of government repression, designed only to further its own ends and increase its domination, was in fact your will and in your best interests, and having to say this out loud to some apparatchik who knew it was cobblers and who knew that you knew it too.

Anyhow, there have been elections in Cuba, in accordance with its constitution, which we will have a closer look at some day.

*Although tentative comparisons can be made here with the EU Parliament, in the case of the EU the fig-leaf has a real function, in that waving it in the direction of the people really does serve to make the whole thng look a bit more democratic. In the case of Cuba, the rest of the world barely knows it exists, and doesn't care, and the people it is supposed to represent and defend know perfectly well that it is not on their side.

Found Poetry in the North Korean Constitution

Regular readers will know that I am a bit of a fan of the language of Constitutions. Here we have some great lines from the Constitution of North Korea (1998; there has been a change since then, replacing the last references to 'communism' with 'Juche*' the late eternal leader's own interpretation of Marx which emphasizes how they are alone against the world. It means self-reliance or some such thing, like Sinn Fein and similar groups of crazed obsessives who think they're the only ones going in the right direction up the motorway. Socialism still gets mentioned repeatedly, though; I don't know how Christopher Hitchens would explain that away). I am sure the enslaved and tyrannized people of that great paradise are delighted to know that their lives are governed by such deathless prose. Of course, most of it doesn't really mean anything, and much of the rest is not such as would make the heart of the simple citizen jump with joy. I wouldn't count on making it stand up in court, either. It's largely a hymn of praise to the great leader and eternal president, and is of no use whatsoever to the oppressed serf whose country and life has been stolen by these miserable scum.

*The concept of Juche is discussed here, with what precision I couldn't say, and, though it's not strictly relevant to the subject, Spanish speakers may find this bunch of nutters interesting.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a socialist fatherland of Juche which embodies the idea of and guidance by the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung.

Comrade Kim Il Sung founded the immortal Juche idea, organized and guided an anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle under its banner, created revolutionary tradition, attained the historical cause of the national liberation, and founded the DPRK, wisely guided the social revolution and construction at various levels, strengthened and developed the Republic into a people-centered socialist country and a socialist state of independence, self-sustenance, and self-defense.

Comrade Kim Il Sung clarified the fundamental principle of State building and activities, established the most superior state social system and political method, and social management system and method, and provided a firm basis for the prosperous and powerful socialist fatherland and the continuation of the task of completing the Juche revolutionary cause.

Comrade Kim Il Sung regarded "believing in the people as in heaven" as his motto, was always with the people, devoted his whole life to them, took care of and guided them with a noble politics of benevolence, and turned the whole society into one big and united family.

The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung is the sun of the nation and the lodestar of the reunification of the fatherland. Comrade Kim Il Sung set the reunification of the country as the nation 's supreme task, and devoted all his work and endeavors entirely to its realization.

Comrade Kim Il Sung, while turning the Republic into a mighty fortress for national reunification, indicated fundamental principles and methods for national reunification, developed the national reunification movement into a pan-national movement, and opened up a way for that cause, to be attained by the united strength of the entire nation.

Comrade Kim Il Sung was a genius ideological theoretician and a genius art leader, an ever-victorious, iron-willed brilliant commander, a great revolutionary and politician, and a great human being.

The DPRK and the entire Korean people will uphold the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung as the eternal President of the Republic, defend and carry forward his ideas and exploits and complete the Juche revolution under the leadership of the Workers ' Party of Korea.

...

Article 1

The Democratic People 's Republic of Korea is an independent socialist state representing the interests of all the Korean people.

Article 2

The DPRK is a revolutionary state which has inherited brilliant traditions formed during the glorious revolutionary struggle against the imperialist aggressors, in the struggle to achieve the liberation of the homeland and the freedom and well-being of the people.

...

Article 18

The law of the DPRK reflects the wishes and interests of the working people and is a basic instrument for State administration.

Respect for the law and its strict adherence and execution is the duty of all institutions, enterprises, organizations and citizens.

The State shall perfect the system of socialist law and promote the socialist law-abiding life.

...

Article 79

Citizens are guaranteed inviolability of the person and the home and privacy of correspondence.

No citizens can be placed under control or be arrested nor can their homes be searched without a legal warrant.

Article 156

The court has the duties to:

1. protect through judicial procedure the State power and the socialist system established in the DPRK, the property of the State and social, cooperative organizations, personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, and the lives and property of citizens,

2. ensure that all institutions, enterprises, organizations and citizens abide strictly by State laws and staunchly combat class enemies and all law-breakers

It goes on and on, and gets worse and worse. Quiet unrelated to any reality, and much less the reality of North Korea. Badly translated, aspirational stuff, ignored by the leaders, but fawned over by apologists and fellow travellers who point out that it guarantees (how? it's only a piece of paper, and the twisted midget who's in charge has a large army awaiting his whim) the rights of women, foreigners and the old, and guarantees free universal health care and education. Much like in Cuba, which has higher literacy and longevity than almost anywhere in the world, according to the figures that Fidel makes up and which too many people take at face value.

Follow the link and read the constitution in all its cynical, tawdry, semi-literate glory, and be thankful you live in a better place. If you can read this, at all you are at least not in that obscene communist hell-hole, forced to live out a script excreted by some demented troglodyte.

The Greatness of The Human Spirit

My prayers tonight will include the imprecation 'Dear Lord, please, please let this be real.'

Centuries of training young Englishmen to be terrified of women has paid off handsomely in the arts and the sciences, the military and politics, in exploration, adventure, fashion and sport. Now it pays off in a way that is rather hard to define, but is clearly what all the rest was leading up to, an activity which is far beyond anything covered by the term 'eccentricity'.

It is so magnificiently pointless, so sublime in its single-minded dedication of time, money, resources and creative energy to an end that is- though brilliant on its own terms, and without doubt jawdroppingly impressive- a towering monument to nothing, a staggeringly wonderful example of everything that is not meant by 'cool' that it gives me immense pleasure to know that I share a universe with these people.

And so I give you 'Extreme Shepherding'.