Singularity University

A fascinating feature article in The Observer 29/4/12 put together by a Carole Cadwalladr nearly gets us believing that in the very near future everything is going to be rosy on Planet Earth all thanks to an exponential growth in science and technology. To achieve this remarkable feat of human engineering, many of the top brains in computing and science plus a liberal sprinkling of forward thinking entrepreneurs and philanthropic billionaires have gathered together in a high powered, can-do think tank, enigmatically called the Singularity University, in order to brain storm all those stubborn earthly problems like poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation.

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Adbusters: The Big Ideas of 2012

I used to be given back-copies of Adbusters, the counter-culture magazine, which I think is Canadian based. Many of the articles drifted off into a new-age feel but there was, nevertheless, a distinct undercurrent of anti-capitalist sentiment. Even some of the more way-out articles had a link, however tenuous, to the real world. The general themes were about the alienating affect of capitalist advertising and commercial culture. Some of the graphics were truly challenging. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the read. Sometimes it’s useful to read stuff out of the box, or at least out of your own comfort zone. Read More…

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

Paul Mason’s blog turned book is definitely the read of the moment. It’s compelling reading and its explosive content is being updated and underlined by the minute. At the time of writing there is a forty eight hour general strike rolling out in Greece. Once again Athens is the scene of angry rioting and police attack. Syria is collapsing into civil war and Egypt shows no signs of quietly settling into a new military dictatorship. The Eurozone still hovers on the edge of implosion and the world economy shows little sign of dragging itself out of recession. The debt mountains grow ever higher and the government imposed austerity measures are imposing misery on those who can least afford it.

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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Christmas 2010 and Wolf Hall turns up as a stocking-filler. But the moment the word Tudor loomed up from the back cover, the hefty tome was promptly consigned to the bottom shelf. The BBC had well and truly destroyed any residual curiosity I may have had in that infamous Welsh clan. But this Christmas, with time on my hands and nothing looking to match or better Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, I opted for Wolf Hall, Mantel’s 2009 Booker prize winner. What a Christmas it turned out to be. From the opening sentence through to the very last some six hundred and fifty pages later I was mesmerised. Caught as they say, hook, line and sinker.

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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Fourteen years after the publication of Roy’s first and only novel, I found the time and space to give it a read. And, with job completed, I must say without the slightest hesitation, that all the accumulated superlatives that this book has attracted are fully merited. Very few novelists are cable of intertwining the particular, the historical and the universal with such ease and with such profound effect. How dare Ms Roy not devote her life to churning out more of the same. How dare she fritter her life away battling this injustice and that. But she dares, and now Arundhati Roy is as recognised as a champion of the downtrodden and oppressed as she is for her contribution to literature.

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The Best of Times, the Worst of Times (In memory of Christopher Hitchens)

That damn dialectic just keeps grinding on. Relentless would be a fitting adjective. From the humble atom with its feuding sub-atomic particles right through to the whole crazy mixed-up universe itself, forever expanding and contracting as it will, till the end of time and beyond. There’s just no way of escaping the ubiquitousness of the thing. Contradictory forces bound together in mutual rivalry, interpenetrating each others domain, pushing and shoving in a never-ending battle for supremacy; harmony and equilibrium only momentary, fleeting states. It seems it is only change that is permanent.

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Table Tennis Dreams

Ever since I can remember, through three successive administrative regimes, the English Table Tennis Association, the governing body for table tennis, has been dreaming and scheming about producing a world ping pong champion. As an interim and more realistic measure, they settle for dreams about how many players they can get into the world’s top one hundred.’ The result of all this dreaming and scheming has been very little. There are currently no English table tennis players, men or women, in the top one hundred and there has not been since the retirement of Matthew Syed who reached a respectable but hardly world shattering number 24 in the world rankings.

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Seven Billion Citizens

I’ve been looking for ways to mark the official UN declaration of the arrival of the seventh billion citizen on our dear planet when along comes an unsolicited email presentation beautifully presented and stunningly bleak in content. It asks us to imagine that the world has been reduced to a mere one hundred people all living in a single village but significantly in the exact same socio-economic proportions that the real world is today.

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School Wars by Melissa Benn

Here is a story long overdue for the telling. It is the story of the half hearted attempt to set up a comprehensive education system in Britain and the subsequent, never-ending endeavours to undermine and destabilise that which was achieved. The work by Melissa Benn is a meticulous but at the same time a very readable one, and she should be highly commended for her efforts. While we have all had our eyes and efforts focused on defending the National Health Service, our partially constructed national education service has been allowed to fall into disrepair. So bad have things become that one wonders whether it is already too late to save the half built crumbling ruin.

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Occupy Wall Street

Once again, Simon Jenkins has made a complete wally of himself. Not content to become an apologist for Imperial Britain, he now turns his bourgeois attention to belittling the anti-capitalist protesters springing up in over 900 cities across the globe. Jenkins may play a useful role in protecting endangered castles and aristocratic homes via his exalted position in the National Trust, but he really ought not to dabble in more contemporary matters. And by contemporary matters I refer to any of the political tussles between the two great competing socio-economic classes that have at once simmered and raged over the past five hundred years that historic struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the natural antithesis to that great class the global proletariat. Leave it alone Mr Jenkins because clearly you just don’t get it. Read More…

Palestinian Statehood

Some ten years ago, maybe more, an Israeli father and son table-tennis playing duo arrived at London Progress Table Tennis Club and proceeded to make a bit of a splash. They were both full of that notorious Israeli cockiness, bordering on outright arrogance, and both a little mad. But they were generally well liked and anyway, who would really notice two more, mad, cocky, ping pong players at the London Progress lunatic asylum. They could both handle themselves competently on the table: the father, I believed, was a former Israeli international and the son looked to be heading in the same direction. Read More…

Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore

Michael Moore, bet noir of right wing, Christian fundamentalist, quasi fascist, nutcase America, has a new book coming out. It’s called, ‘Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life’ and make no mistake, Michael Moore has had more than his fair share of troubles over the years. You don’t take on the National Rifle Association, the US Health Insurance Industry, the entire Bush Administration and the associated US military-industrial complex, Fox News and their religious fundamentalist lunatics constituency, to name but a few, without making a few enemies. It is a fair bet to suggest that Michael Moore has received more death threats than Fidel Castro. He must be doing something right.

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Jamie Oliver for World President

If we had an elected post of President of the World, Jamie Oliver wouldn’t be the worst candidate. In fact he would be quite high on my short list, if for no other reason than his tireless campaigning for decent food. This campaigning is now taking him directly to the UN, where there is to be a major medical debate on non-communicable diseases, with the world-wide obesity epidemic high on the agenda. Oliver has called for a global movement to make obesity a human rights issue, and he is attempting to generate a global debate on the subject. Read More…

Simon Jenkins; Bourgeois Historian

Simon Jenkins has entered the debate about exactly what should be taught in the teaching of history and his contribution is a contradictory one. On the one hand he argues, correctly in my view, against the hotchpotch approach to history teaching, whereby no discernible connection is made between each taught unit, so in the end students have no understanding as to how it all fits together and what actually is the driving motor of history. A dollop of Roman history followed by some marauding Vikings and some nasty Normans and lo and behold its time for the Tudors, who apparently had lots of wives. If that eclectic mish-mash hasn’t got our students sufficiently switched off, a predictable dose of twentieth century wars with jack-booted Nazis stomping around will soon be coming their way, but of course, any possible connections between all this historical blood and thunder is never made.

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Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

Eagleton does his magnificent little text a small disfavour by choosing a rather didactic sounding title. Something a little more open-ended might have been more appropriate, something along the lines of, why we should study Marx or Marx’s critical relevance for today. Maybe the author felt his title would catch the reader’s attention, which it does, but it also plays into the tradition of turning Marx, and the school of thought that followed, into something akin to a religion, the very opposite of what Marx would have wished for. In fact, so concerned was Marx that many of his adherents were treating his ideas dogmatically that he once reputed to have declared, whatever I am, I know I am not a marxist. Read More…

London’s Burning – Olympic Notes

The chickens have come home to roost. How I love that saying. It first lodged itself in my brain when Malcolm X controversially used it immediately after the assassination of JFK. He was pilloried by both middle-America and his own Nation of Islam for daring to state the obvious. Violent, aggressive, imperialist America was now turning on itself. It was the self same expression that first came to mind after the multiple 9/11 attacks. Yes they were truly horrific but not more so than America’s bloody foreign policies that had left countless millions dead and crippled in their wake. And more recently, I again turned to those succinct few words to sum up the News International hacking scandal and the web of high level criminality that surrounded it.

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The problem of modern globalised corporations: Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian

I’d not heard of Felicity Lawrence prior to catching her resoundingly sharp article in The Guardian last month. (A mere state can’t restrain a corporation like Murdoch’s). It transpires that she has already written two excellent books outlining the power and corruption of the international food corporations. (Not on the Label and Eat Your Heart Out) Although I have recently blogged on this topic, (see End of Over Eating by David Kessler) I am now tempted to start reading Lawrence’s work, based on her clear headed summation of the unregulated, unelected power of the transnational corporations. Here is a hard hitting example of Lawrence’s well constructed thesis a thesis that is becoming increasingly difficult to refute, even for the most ardent neo-liberal free-marketeers, as each new day passes. Read More…

Channel 4 Dispatches – How to buy a Football Club

A few months ago Matthew Syed was waxing lyrical in The Times about football being the ‘beautiful game’. I wasn’t convinced then and I’m even less convinced now having watched Channel 4’s Dispatches which outlined the shadowy world of shady businessmen buying and selling English football clubs in order to make a quick buck, often asset stripping the club in the process. One of the key protagonists in this sordid tale was a certain Mr Bryan Robson of Man United fame, who at least was honest enough to admit that football was no longer a game but purely a business. And what a dirty business at that.

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Everything You Know is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World.

I don’t think the book quite lives up to its grandiose title, but aspiring as it does, to be part of the genre of New York satire, I don’t suppose it ever intended to. It does however provide some useful ammunition to my half-baked thesis that it is ping pong and not football that has the real claim to be the peoples sport. By this I mean not simply that some 300 million citizens in the Peoples Republic of China are said to be registered players, a statistic I suspect is somewhat inflated. What I’be been hinting at is that in both East and West, North and South, while football has ingratiated itself, courtesy of News Corporation and other global media conglomerates, into the popular imagination, for countless millions, it is the humble game of ping, far more than football in all its varieties, that is likely to play an actual part in peoples weekly sporting and leisure routines.

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Fast Food Olympics – Olympic Notes No 9

It is as depressing as it is predictable. McDonalds have just announced that they are going to construct their largest ever restaurant in the Olympic village, one of four McDonalds outlets serving the Olympic Games underlining their official monopoly on the distribution of fast food at the London Olympics. It will be a two storey, three thousand square metre factory pumping out some 1.75 million burgers throughout the Games. Oh what joy. The subliminal message to the general populous – the obesity epidemic is all a left-wing myth, just stuff down another burger and chips and stop worrying. If you are feeling a tad unhealthy just watch all those super fit athletes and you will feel a whole lot better.

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George Monbiot: Hold Power to Account

Unsurprisingly the sharpest journalistic account so far of the unfolding Murdoch saga has come from George Monbiot writing in his weekly Guardian column 12/7/11. Precisely exposing the myth that the tabloid press somehow represents the voice of the much put upon working class, Monbiot reveals the real corporate interests that the News of the World, The Sun and other tabloids represent. Britain, like most countries has become little more than a play thing of global corporate interests and most of our press has a singular task to represent those corporate interests. In order to camouflage those corporate interests an elaborate charade is created whereby the language and concerns of the working class is used to cynically hide the real agenda. Read More…