SAYING MORE WITH LESS

I have reprinted several things on this site that I think are fantastic be the factual or metaphorical but  I just realised  I have never posted this directly although it is in the ‘Things you should read”  section

Shooting an Elephant - George Orwell

(1936)

IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people–the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically–and secretly, of course–I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos–all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism–the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant–I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary–and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant–it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery–and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd–seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing–no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick–one never does when a shot goes home–but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open–I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

INFLAMMATORY BEHAVIOUR

“Every now and then I am impressed with the thinking of the non-Indian. I was in Cleveland last year and got to talking with a non-Indian about American history. He said that he was really sorry about what had happened to Indians, but that there was a good reason for it. The continent had to be developed and he felt that Indians had stood in the way, and thus had to be removed. “after all,” he remarked, “what did you do with the land when you had it?” I didn’t understand him until later when I discovered that the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland is inflammable. So many combustible pollutants are dumped into the river that the inhabitants have to take special precautions during the summer to avoid setting it on fire. After reviewing the argument of my non-Indian friend I decided that he was probably correct. Whites had made better use of the land. How many Indians could have thought of creating an inflammable river?”

from the Mohawk paper, Akwesane Notes

FREE SPEECH

I did like this cartoon from the cultural jet lag series. There are some good other ones there too..

TIM FLANNERY

This was a Democracy Now special with Tim Flannery.

Well worth the look. Parts 2-6 on the continuation…

BORDER DISPUTE

Well sort of.

Now without going into it too much the Scots in some ways robbed blind by the Union with England but get higher spending on public services because the Scottish parliament chose to do that.

Some of this is a misrepresenation of that. It is from the BBC…

TV poll backs Berwick border move

Residents in the Northumberland town of Berwick-upon-Tweed have “voted” in favour of becoming part of Scotland.

According to a poll by a TV company, 60% of those who responded wanted the town to be administered by Scotland.

Better financed public services, including free personal health care for the elderly, were the main reasons.

The referendum, for Monday’s ITV1 Tonight programme, saw 1,182 voters in favour of becoming part of Scotland and 775 in favour of staying in England.

Earlier this month politicians in the town vowed to block any move to take Berwick back into Scotland.

I’m not saying that the Scots should not get what they get, but that we should get the same Pro-England supporter Barbara Herdman

The hard-line stance came after Scottish National Party MSP Christine Grahame lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling for the town to “return to the fold”.

But the town’s Lib Dem MP and council leader warned it would be too complicated and cause major upheaval.

Organisers of the TV programme said the poll turnout of 1,957 votes compared to some 3,800 in the last local elections.

Former policeman Michael Ross, from Berwick, who headed the pro-Scotland campaign for votes, said: “Berwick is a very special place and I think it is largely forgotten within England.

“I believe we would be the jewel in the crown of Scotland, I believe our economy would be better understood and better looked after by the Edinburgh government than it is by Westminster.”

‘Grass is greener’

Former school teacher Barbara Herdman campaigned in the town for a pro-English vote and for a change in how public spending is allocated across the UK.

She said: “I think that Berwick should stay part of England because it’s so unfair what is happening at the moment.

“The Scots are getting more money than we are. I’m not saying that the Scots should not get what they get, but that we should get the same.”

Last week Isabel Hunter, leader of the borough council, said residents would like to enjoy the same benefits as people in Scotland, but added: “You can always say the grass is greener but I think it would just be too difficult.”

A similar poll carried out by the local newspaper revealed 79% of people in the area backed reunification with Scotland.

The town has changed hands between the two nations at least 13 times.

This is from the Herald

Myth 1: Scots get more public cash than anyone else.
The Truth: Public spending in Scotland is just £9631 per head, lower than the £10,271 for Northern Ireland and London’s average of £9748.

Myth 2: English taxes pay for Scotland’s high spending.
The Truth: Scotland brings in £9593 per head in tax - more than anywhere in the UK outside of London.  Latest estimates show the tax take from Scotland is £49bn compared with total spending of £49.2bn …[1]

Myth 3: Scots milk the welfare state
The Truth: Latest figures show people living in North-East England claim on average £3284 per head.  Northern Ireland £3256 and £3136 in Wales in state benefits.  Scotland’s pension and benefit cost is £3086 per head.

Myth 4: Scots enjoy better public services than the rest of the UK
The Truth: The Welsh, not the Scots, get free prescriptions, while NHS waiting times in Scotland are broadly in line with England …

Myth 5: State subsidy pays for Scots “big ticket” projects
The Truth: London’s Crossrail project is to cost £16bn - seven and a half times the annual Scottish transport budget.  The 2012 London Olympics means a loss of £9.3bn lottery funding for the rest of the UK.

There are some better social provisions as I said, but as you can see from the relative tax revenues that is done with Scottish money.

DON’T MENTION THE NON-WAR

Something nice for Valentine’s day I think…

It is so often said that war is natural part of human behaviour that many people just accept it. Conflict or disagreement certainly might be, but full-on war is a different matter.

Most people know about the 1914 Christmas Truce in WW1 when the British and German soldiers played football and exchanged gifts (note for some American readers - WW1 started in 1914, not 1917 and WW2 started in 1939, not 1941).

This is usually presented as a one-off - a freak occurrence, but that simply isn’t true. It also happened in 1915 with the Germans and the French and in 1916 there was a truce on the Eastern front.

When I was at school and computers were in their 64k stage we were given a programme to play around with in one history lesson. Extremely basic though it was, the idea was that you were the British General deciding what tactics you could use to defeat the Germans in World War 1 given the tactics and equipment of the time.

The trick was that although it was possible to win the game, it wasn’t possible to do it without a bloodbath on both sides. I think it in its own way, it was meant to be a little anti-war statement.

However, the game didn’t give you the option of simply not attacking and not attacking was the way that many people survived in World War One.

In the earlier stages of the war informal truces sprung up all over the place. Both sides would aim artillery far and wide, this was understood as an offering of peace and reciprocated. In many places it then became a kind of game. Snipers would aim to miss but in a showing-off ‘look what I can hit’ way. This was partly to pass the time and partly to warn that if the truce was broken then there was a capability of reprisal. Contrary to popular belief the conflict was very low-intensity in many places at different times. There are many eyewitness accounts of the soldiers apologising to each other for firing too near.

This changed of course when the officers - the ones far removed from the front line that is - heard about it. They were appalled by this sort of behaviour and devised new tactics like surprise raids and so on which destroyed the fragile trust that opposing soldiers had built up.

After the war of course it was the generals that had insisted on the continuation of mass random slaughter that were awarded medals and had statues of each other erected. Of the officers in the field who insisted on pressing on, well, many of them were shot in the back by their own side as they advanced toward the opposing army.

In many societies around the world in pre-industrial times the object of war was not the genocide of the opposing group but rather the humiliation. From some of the Native Americans to societies in Africa, actual fatalities were very unusual. Some sources even describe what is essentially a high-intensity game of tag (involving a smack with a stick). In other places a tit-for-tat, one of yours for one of ours kind of conflict often persisted over a long time but without an eruption into absolute warfare.

It may be that there is a part of our genetics that leads us toward conflict but it is certainly not the cause of the mass slaughters that have happened through history. Rome wanted to conquer, other groups wanted to live and let live. Genghis Khan would wipe out thousands, other groups at the time didn’t.

It is demonstrably untrue that the Romans and other groups throughout history that have and are conducting mass slaughter and conquest on the genocidal scale are genetically diverse enough from those living next to them to have a different set of genetic imperatives, so it must be societal conditions that lead to this kind of behaviour. And as we all know, societal conditions can change.

Why mention all this today?

Today is an anniversary. Not valentines day, but the anniversary of an atrocity carried out by British and American forces in World War 2 - the bombing of Dresden which occurred on the night of the 13th/14th February 1945 when the war was nearing its end. Dresden was not regarded as a strategically important city, which is why it hadn’t been bombed up until then. Russian troops were also closing in on the city.

The BBC, in their ‘On This Day‘ section are showing the report from 1945 and there is a little section which says..

The Dresden raid caused a public outcry. Even Winston Churchill, who had urged Bomber Command to attack east German cities, tried to dissociate himself from it.

However, they miss an important part out. They say that explosives and ‘incendiary bombs’ were dropped, which is true. What they don’t say is phosphorus was dropped - a chemical weapon. Eyewitnesses reported that the temperature was so hot in some places that in the wreckage of homes were found puddles of metal that had once been pots and pans.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote brilliantly about this in his book Slaughterhouse 5. He was a prisoner of war in Germany at the time.

Oh, and the BBC neglected to mention for a long time that white phosphorus was used recently in Fallujah. This was despite the fact many people were giving them evidence and urging them to. Even when they did mention it it was very brief.

MOOOOO

I was taken aback by this story on BBC news yesterday…

Campaigners are calling for a ban on a device that emits a high-pitched sound to disperse groups of teenagers, saying it is not a fair way to treat them.

I was partly stunned because I had no idea this was happening in the first place. Shops and businesses are using the things to make children move away from outside their shops. Read on a bit…

There are estimated to be 3,500 of the devices, known as the Mosquito, in use in England, many at shopping centres.

Their sound causes discomfort to young ears - but their frequency is above the normal hearing range of people over 25.

England’s children’s commissioner backs a ban but stores say the devices can be useful against anti-social youths.

…

The devices, which exploit the fact that a person’s ability to hear high frequencies generally declines once they reach their 20s, have proved popular with councils and police who aim to tackle anti-social behaviour by using them to disperse groups of youths.

So it seems English adults are so terrified of their own children that they employ electronic devices to move them along and effectively bar them from an area.

Not only that, but these devices are pre-emptive in the sense of any actual crime being committed and are indiscriminate. It is also a form of collective punishment.

This is a disgusting use of technology and one of the leaders of the campaign against these things, Sir Al Aynsley-Green put it correctly…

“These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving.

“The use of measures such as these are simply demonising children and young people, creating a dangerous and widening divide between the young and the old.”

Shami Chakrabarti from the campaign group Liberty said..

“What type of society uses a low-level sonic weapon on its children? Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids?”

No wonder the kids are angry. If you treat people like cattle you have to expect them to shit in the field that you have herded them into.

Song for the day..

Animals in the Zoo - The Kinks…

You’re just an animal in the zoo
Sittin’ round feeling persecuted and abused
You’re locked up and I’m on the loose
But I can’t quite tell who’s looking at who
’cause I’m an animal, too
But you’re locked up in a zoo
And you look at me and I look at you

God made the heaven and the deep blue sea
But man picked the flowers and he pulled up the trees
God mad the moon and the rain and the sun
But man made the money and the bombs and the guns

So we’re all animals, too
But you’re locked up in a zoo
And you look at me and I look at you

I’m a prisoner but I got no cage
I’m locked up but I got no chain
But the good guys lose and the bad guys win
That’s why you’re looking out and I’m looking in
But we’re all animals, too
But you’re locked up in a zoo
’cause you look at me and I look at you

HOLLOW

From decidedly un-’Celtic moods’ to ‘Peruvian Piss with pan-pipes’ to the rest of them I wish people would stop making synthesiser backed shite that denegrates local cultures in service of middle-of-the-road profiteering.

It’s like being offered a prime piece of fillet steak and opting for beef chewing gum instead. Or like going to the zoo instead of seeing animals in their natural habitat.

Tell you what, here is an idea – if you want to get a feel for the music of a country listen to the original music and not the snythesised muzac-ed version of it - then get some. We live in the day of the download - it isn’t difficult. Better yet, go to the places where you might find it and listen.

I quite like most kinds of music but if I feel like I want to listen to The Doors I just put on The Doors, I don’t watch pop-idol and wait for an adolescent fucktard to ruin it for me. If I want to listen to Verdi I don’t put on Joe Dolce. If I want to listen to Public Enemy I don’t listen to New Kids On The Block. If I want to listen to Bach I don’t put on Muzac and so on.

Why has it become acceptable to do so with more traditional forms of music?

Firstly, because the people who make these things are selling an idea rather than a piece of music.

Secondly, the idea they are selling is of a culture untainted and that untainted culture might be too far from those peoples ideal of a homogenized McCulture. Therefore they soften the blow for the audience (without asking them if they wanted it softened) by taking out any of the individualism and idiosyncracies in the music that might make it interesting.

When you listen to these albums (normally I am near to retching after a few seconds but for the purposes of this article I tried to listen to a few of them straight through) there is a formula - and it goes like this…

1. Start with a single (semi) acoustic instrument playing a melody that evokes hollywood style images of the place where the music in question is supposed to come from.
2. After around 30 seconds add another instrument.
3. Add a singer.
4. Gut out anything that might make the music genuinely belong to a particular time and place and replace with a mass produced machine making a pattern of notes vaguely similar to some of the traditional music of the area in question though not necessarily using the correct scale.
5. Over the next few minutes build up to a crescendo with a few instruments and a load of synthesiser stuff until any vestige of traditional music is gone.

There is nothing better than seeing the traditional music of a place performed in the right setting. It is also tremendous to see traditional music performed as it should be in a different setting. I used to share a flat with an African guy in Scotland and he had a band and quite often I would get woken up on Sunday mornings by them practising. It was wonderful to see and hear.

The traditional music of Scotland and Ireland are similar and I like both. Like the two nations, the two kinds of music have a similar heritage, history and starting point. It does annoy me a bit though when I search around youtube and look at the comments on Scottish music things and see them described as ‘brilliant Irish music’.

Yes, FYI - the Whitehouse is a stunning Canadian symbol.

I know that it is just another example of mass-produced saccharine culture but I even saw one called ‘Celtic panpipes’ once. Behave.

 

It is like seeing the Paris in Disneyland instead of seeing Paris. It is like sex with a partner of 50 years with 10 condoms on and 10 femdoms in. So safe and sanitised you are in absolutely no danger of actually feeling anything.

ADULTS OUT OF CONTROL

When I see kids in the street setting off fireworks or spraypainting something I really don’t think it is unusual at all, despite the handwringing and exortations that kids are ‘out of control’ that we see in the media.

If I was growing up now and looking at the world around I would see a world where violence is glorified and/or excused, not by children but by adults. I would also see a world where those older than me are and/or have been trashing the place and doing their best to forget about it or, for want of a better phrase ’sweep it under the carpet’.

All I would need to do to see that is turn on the TV and given that my parents would be out working longer hours for less money than before I would probably be doing a lot of TV watching, which in turn has been linked to many behavioural disorders.

Take this example from the Independent, which shows what we get from the neglect and willingness to trash the place of the older people in the community…

The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: “It moves around like a big animal without a leash.” When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic,” he added.

The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the “North Pacific gyre” – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. “Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by,” he said in an interview. “How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?”

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was “no reason to doubt” Algalita’s findings.

“After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems.”

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere,” said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. “You only see it from the bows of ships,” he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple,” said Dr Eriksen.

WHAT’S THE STORY?

I would have thought this would be emblazoned on the front page of everything in the world today and while it is getting some coverage it is not at the forefront where it should be.

The BBC, where this is from, currently has it tucked away in the science and nature section and not as one of the main headlines deemed less important than BP’s already obscene profits dropping…

Many of Earth’s climate systems will undergo a series of sudden shifts this century as a result of human-induced climate change, a study suggests.

A number of these shifts could occur this century, say the report’s authors.

They argue that society should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that climate change will be a gradual process.

The work by an international team appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

“Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under human-induced climate change,” said Professor Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia, the lead researcher on the study.

“The greatest threats are tipping of the Arctic sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and at least five other elements could surprise us by exhibiting a nearby tipping point.”

The bulk of climate scientists now believe that human induced global warming has begun to affect some aspects of our climate.

Risk assessment

But that change is the start of a series of more dramatic changes if global warming continues, according to a group of more than 50 scientists.

In a formal survey the researchers said that a number of systems that influence the Earth’s weather patterns could begin to collapse suddenly if there’s even a slight increase in global temperatures.

At greatest risk is Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet and the west Antarctic ice sheet.

The researchers have listed and ranked nine ecological systems that they say could be lost this century as a result of global warming. The nine tipping elements and the time it will take them to undergo a major transition are:

• Melting of Arctic sea-ice (about 10 years)
• Decay of the Greenland ice sheet (about 300 years)
• Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (about 300 years)
• Collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (about 100 years)
• Increase in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (about 100 years)
• Collapse of the Indian summer monsoon (about 1 year)
• Greening of the Sahara/Sahel and disruption of the West African monsoon (about 10 years)
• Dieback of the Amazon rainforest (about 50 years)
• Dieback of the Boreal Forest (about 50 years)

The paper also demonstrates how, in principle, early warning systems could be established using real-time monitoring and modelling to detect the proximity of certain tipping points.