Thinking About: Consumerism

I came to the opinion some time ago that the idea of consumerism is one of, if not actually the definitively, stupidest ideas that humanity has ever come up with. Yes, it’s even more stupid than religion – and that’s saying something. The thought that a persons primary role in life is to consume the fruits of industrial capitalism, with everything else as garnish, honestly disgusts me. I feel like standing in the middle of a shopping centre and shouting “I am not a consumer, I am a free man!” The concept of consumerism is, I think, directly responsible for the deep shit the world finds itself in – both economically and environmentally. We are being constantly extolled to buy more stuff we don’t need with money we simply don’t have. The only way to finance this is to borrow money against the future in the hope that there will be enough money in the future to pay for it all. Well guess what – there isn’t, hence the problems, the unemployment and the deepening crisis we’re in. The whole system depends, so we are told, on ‘consumer confidence’. In other words, if you feel it’s OK to go out tomorrow and buy that new car then everything will be fine and we can go on as before until the end of time. What an incredibly stupid way to run a planets economy. Did someone, or groups of someone’s, really sit down and think up this idea and expect it to work in the real world? Our economies are based on the abilities of businesses and governments to convince us that everything is OK enough for us to keep spending with confidence. The moment that spell is broken, and we look around us and see the reality of the situation, the whole system is irretrievably fucked. Guess what sports fans? Apart from those with their heads in the sand (or elsewhere) and those with their fingers in their ears, singing “la, la, la, I’m not listening” ever louder every day, everyone else realises that the system is well and truly broken. The efforts – from quantitative easing and other equally bizarre sounding initiatives – to ‘stabilise the markets’ aren’t working because more and more people are waking up to the fact that capitalism (or whatever system we’re actually living with at the moment) is inherently designed in its very fabric to make the rich even richer and to work the rest of us to death to pay for it all. Some of the proposed measures to ‘save the system’ could hardly be more blatant – tax cuts for the rich (they are after all the job creators of society) and pay freezes or cuts for the rest of us (you know – the ones who actually work in their factories and their offices making the actual money). To save an already broken system they honestly propose making the divide between rich and poor even larger than it already is. At least they could offer to kiss us before we get repeatedly fucked. The world wide protests against the capitalist colossus should not have come as any surprise to commentators who have witnessed the growing desperation of an increasingly impoverished population. When backs are against the wall the only option – if you don’t want to just lay down and give in – is to fight back. What good it will do is hard to tell. These are early days and it’s very difficult to predict tomorrow’s headlines especially these days. We have already seen some of the so-called free nations responses to understandable frustration and anger at austerity measures aimed at them to pay for the mistakes of the banks and other institutions that are walking away from the disaster with bonuses intact. The cynical part of me knows that history shows that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The more optimistic part of me wonders if it must always be so.  

Cartoon Time.

NASA's Spitzer Spots Clump of Swirling Planetary Material

From NASA

Sept. 23, 2009

PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation.

Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust. Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. To the astronomers' surprise, the light varied in unexpected ways, and in as little time as one week. Planets take millions of years to form, so it's rare to see anything change on time scales we humans can perceive. One possible explanation is that a close companion to the star -- either a star or a developing planet -- could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star.

"We don't know if planets have formed, or will form, but we are gaining a better understanding of the properties and dynamics of the fine dust that could either become, or indirectly shape, a planet," said James Muzerolle of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. Muzerolle is first author of a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "This is a unique, real-time glimpse into the lengthy process of building planets."

One theory of planet formation suggests that planets start out as dusty grains swirling around a star in a disk. They slowly bulk up in size, collecting more and more mass like sticky snow. As the planets get bigger and bigger, they carve out gaps in the dust, until a so-called transitional disk takes shape with a large doughnut-like hole at its center. Over time, this disk fades and a new type of disk emerges, made up of debris from collisions between planets, asteroids and comets. Ultimately, a more settled, mature solar system like our own forms. Before Spitzer was launched in 2003, only a few transitional disks with gaps or holes were known. With Spitzer's improved infrared vision, dozens have now been found. The space telescope sensed the warm glow of the disks and indirectly mapped out their structures.

Muzerolle and his team set out to study a family of young stars, many with known transitional disks. The stars are about two to three million years old and about 1,000 light-years away, in the IC 348 star-forming region of the constellation Perseus. A few of the stars showed surprising hints of variations. The astronomers followed up on one, LRLL 31, studying the star over five months with all three of Spitzer's instruments. The observations showed that light from the inner region of the star's disk changes every few weeks, and, in one instance, in only one week. "Transition disks are rare enough, so to see one with this type of variability is really exciting," said co-author Kevin Flaherty of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Both the intensity and the wavelength of infrared light varied over time. For instance, when the amount of light seen at shorter wavelengths went up, the brightness at longer wavelengths went down, and vice versa. Muzerolle and his team say that a companion to the star, circling in a gap in the system's disk, could explain the data. "A companion in the gap of an almost edge-on disk would periodically change the height of the inner disk rim as it circles around the star: a higher rim would emit more light at shorter wavelengths because it is larger and hot, but at the same time, the high rim would shadow the cool material of the outer disk, causing a decrease in the longer-wavelength light. A low rim would do the opposite. This is exactly what we observe in our data," said Elise Furlan, a co-author from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The companion would have to be close in order to move the material around so fast -- about one-tenth the distance between Earth and the sun. The astronomers plan to follow up with ground-based telescopes to see if a companion is tugging on the star hard enough to be perceived. Spitzer will also observe the system again in its "warm" mission to see if the changes are periodic, as would be expected with an orbiting companion. Spitzer ran out of coolant in May of this year, and is now operating at a slightly warmer temperature with two infrared channels still functioning.

"For astronomers, watching anything in real-time is exciting," said Muzerolle. "It's like we're biologists getting to watch cells grow in a petri dish, only our specimen is light-years away."

Just Finished Reading: The History of Life – A Very Short Introduction by Michael J Benton

Even I’m thinking that I should be reading science based books other than from the, actually excellent, VSI Series. Anyway we are were we are [grin].

As the book covers the last 4 billion years of life on Earth in 166 pages you would be correct if you referred to it as a bit of a romp. Rather sensibly the author decided to hit the highlights, or rather the turning points, in evolution starting naturally with the origin of life itself. Of course we know very little about this – or at least there is little confirmed knowledge of the event (or more likely series of events) – so he’s forced to speculate. After that he moves onto the more understood origin of that most important aspect of life – sex. The sharing of genes and the subsequent explosion in variation greatly increased the speed of evolution and the diversification of all types of life. The next highlight was the origin of skeletons. An internal support structure allowed larger creatures to appear and laid the ground work (pun intended) for the next leap forward – the invasion of the land. The author then moved onto flight before exploring several of the mass extinctions that seem to periodically almost wipe the slate clean. They are deeply fascinating events and, if the figures hold up, we may in fact be living through another mass extinction event right now. The last two chapters covered the rise of modern ecosystems – in the form that most of us would recognise and, rather inevitably, ended with the origin of humans.

This was very much an introduction to a very large subject indeed and, because of the shortness of the book reduced to giving the reader flavours and hints of things to follow up in further, deeper, reading. Life on Earth is something you could quite easily study for the rest of your life so you really shouldn’t expect that this book would be enough to learn very much from – except maybe what a huge subject it is. If you are new to this area then use this book as an eye-opener. If you haven’t studied this subject use it as a refresher course. Those who already have significant knowledge of this area should use it as a pleasant way to spend a few hours rather like listening to a well know piece of music enjoying it for its familiarity as much as for anything else. Recommended.   

Cartoon Time.

Just Finished Reading: Classical Mythology – A Very Short Introduction by Helen Morales

I have been interested and often fascinated by Myth for as long as I can remember. I think I grew up hearing about and then reading about Norse and Greek myths before I knew exactly what they were or what they meant. I’m guessing that’s something else I can thank my father for.

This excellent little volume isn’t one of those that retells or catalogues the myths of the ancient world. There are certainly enough of those around and the already crowded market doesn’t need another. What this well written, thoughtful and sometimes surprising book does is look at where myth comes from, what it means to those who create it – and live inside it – and how it shaped both the ancient and the modern world. Starting with the Greek myth of Europa the author shows how the original Greek tale has been modified, reinterpreted and used by political movements (and others) as a metaphorical social glue to advance their idea of Europe – both to its inhabitants and to the rest of the world. Of course myths have always been pliable, able to be moulded to the needs of those who would seek to use them to influence others or simply to make money (from, for example, Hollywood blockbusters). Purists protest at this lack of ‘mythological correctness’ but variations on a theme has always played its part in classical mythology. After all they have come down to us literally by word of mouth and no one version can be viewed as ‘gospel’. Without giving a synopsis of the whole book I’d have to focus on several chapters I found particularly interesting. One was on heroes which are a particular interest of mine at the moment in which the author digs deep into what makes and, of equal importance, what does not make someone a hero. The other was on sex and sexuality in classical myth (quite a lot as anyone who has read Greek mythology will know) and how this has often been covered up – quite literally in the many mythic paintings adorning the walls of galleries around the world – and how the often sanitised versions presented today make much less sense compared to the original unexpurgated versions.

If you already have a passing knowledge of classical myth this is definitely the book for you. It will most certainly help you, as it helped me, to interpret things a little more clearly. If you are new to the world of myth it will definitely whet your appetite for a deeper knowledge of the subject. Recommended.       

Cartoon Time.

My Idea of Heaven......

V for Vendetta masks: Who's behind them?

From The BBC

20 October 2011

From New York, to London, to Sydney, to Cologne, to Bucharest, there has been a wave of protests against politicians, banks and financial institutions. Anybody watching coverage of the demonstrations may have been struck by a repeated motif - a strangely stylised mask of Guy Fawkes with a moustache and pointy beard. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrived at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest to make a speech wearing one of these masks. He took it off, reportedly at the insistence of the police. They were thought to have been used first by the notorious hacker-activist group Anonymous in 2008 during a protest against Scientology, but have since spread throughout the global protest movement.

The masks are from the 2006 film V for Vendetta where one is worn by an enigmatic lone anarchist who, in the graphic novel on which it is based, uses Fawkes as a role model in his quest to end the rule of a fictional fascist party in the UK. Early in the book V destroys the Houses of Parliament by blowing it up, something Fawkes had planned and failed to do in 1605. British graphic novel artist David Lloyd is the man who created the original image of the mask for a comic strip written by Alan Moore. Lloyd compares its use by protesters to the way Alberto Korda's famous photograph of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara became a fashionable symbol for young people across the world. "The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny - and I'm happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way," he says. A curious Lloyd visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York, to have a look at some of the people wearing his mask. "My feeling is the Anonymous group needed an all-purpose image to hide their identity and also symbolise that they stand for individualism - V for Vendetta is a story about one person against the system." The film of V for Vendetta ends with an image of a crowd of Londoners all wearing Guy Fawkes masks, unarmed and marching on parliament. It is that image of collective identification and simultaneous anonymity that is appealing to Anonymous and other groups, says Rich Johnston, a commentator on the world of comics. The widespread adoption of the masks was definitely a reaction to the film rather than the book, he argues. "The book is about one man bringing down the state but the film includes a scene of a huge crowd - making a statement against a faceless corporation."

"The masks were useful for the Scientology protests because it prevented individuals from being recognised," he adds. Lloyd said that when he and writer Moore created the character of V they had a basic idea of an urban guerrilla fighting a fascist dictatorship but wanted to inject more theatricality into the story. The mask is bought even in countries where Guy Fawkes is not such a well-known figure "We knew that V was going to be an escapee from a concentration camp where he had been subjected to medical experiments but then I had the idea that in his craziness he would decide to adopt the persona and mission of Guy Fawkes - our great historical revolutionary."

The masks were originally made by Warner Bros to promote the film and were handed out at screenings. Now they are being sold to everyone from activists to fancy dress enthusiasts. Rubies Costume Company, which makes the mask, sells around 100,000 a year worldwide, and 16,000 in the UK, according to spokesman Steve Kitt, who seems a little concerned that any association with activists might harm the company's image. Rubies is dismissive of the idea that Anonymous and other protesters have fuelled demand for the mask, saying it has been successful ever since the film was released. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been associated with the V imagery Lloyd says he has already heard anecdotes about police in the US searching for the masks in people's houses to be used as evidence of involvement with Anonymous hacker attacks, "which is scary but also ridiculous - you wouldn't prosecute someone for having a t-shirt with Che or CND on it".

Johnston is just back from the New York Comic Con and recalls one incident where a group of V for Vendetta fans, dressed as their hero, unwittingly wandered into the Occupy Wall Street protest and were mistaken for protesters by the police. Paul Staines, who blogs under the name of Guido Fawkes, said he finds it ironic that anti-capitalist, anti-corporation activists are inadvertently supporting Warner Bros - one of America's 100 biggest companies with profits last year of £1.6bn - by buying the masks. He thinks the widespread use of the mask "signifies a loss of trust in politics - Guy Fawkes is the most anti-political figure you can pick". One Anonymous member camping out in the shadow of London's St Paul's Cathedral said she was with a group of 15 people and planned to stay for "as long as necessary". She said that she and others had been wearing the masks, not only to protect their identity but also because it has become a symbol of the movement against corporate greed. "It's a visual thing, it sets us apart from the hippies and the socialists and gives us our own identity. We're about bypassing governments and starting from the bottom." Johnston sees the mask as fundamentally a violent image. "It's not a symbol of passive resistance but a symbol of active terrorism - it's about bringing down a government and a country and that could be quite scary and alienating to some people." The idea of the V mask being appropriated as a political symbol is inherently ridiculous, he suggests. "It's like assuming you can bring down a government using a light sabre or a He-Man sword."

Just Finished Reading: The Sword of Albion by Mark Chadbourn

Will Swyfte is a national hero. Stories are written about him in the penny dreadfuls that circulate on the streets and in the taverns all over England. People sleep safe in their beds knowing that he stands between England and her many enemies. But the propaganda hero is only half the story. If England knew of the other half there would be Hell to pay. Will is in the employ of England’s greatest Spymaster – Sir Francis Walshingham. Dedicated to protect England from enemies both foreign and domestic he uses whatever methods he has at his disposal to protect the country and the newly installed Queen Elizabeth. Things are looking grim when the Spanish plan to invade and conquer England is uncovered. Elizabeth’s treasury is empty of gold and most of Europe is dedicated to her downfall. But even greater dangers are abroad in the night. England faces an enemy far more dangerous than the might of the Spanish Armada – a vicious and unfeeling enemy who has prayed on humanity since the dawn of time and who have decided that the English must be expunged from the world forever: The Fey. When Walshingham learns of a new super-weapon that the Fey intend turning over to the Spanish he sets Will and the other spies privy to the secret war within a war to stop it falling into their enemies hands – but how do you fight supernatural beings with nothing more that wits and cold steel?

I actually bought this book by accident – well sort of. I thought – from the cover and a brief glance at the synopsis – that it was another historical novel set during the reign of Elizabeth I. But it was far more than that! It was, it turned out, a historical fantasy novel which delighted me from the first page to the last. I had hoped that it would last me most of the week I recently spent at my mother’s house. I actually raced through it in 4 days, which isn’t bad for a book of just over 600 pages. Swyfte is a superb character. He reminded me a great deal of James Bond – 1588 style. With little more than a sword, quick wits and a sparkling wit (with some great one liners) he carves his way through England’s enemies despite overwhelming odds. Of course he doesn’t get his own way. His apparent cavalier attitude hides a deep wound that drives him so hard against his enemies. There where times that I found this book painful, disturbing and creepy. At other times it was uplifting, funny and down right exciting and is probably the best, or at least one of the best, fantasy books I read this year or last year come to that. The sequel is already out in paperback and the third book is out in hardback. I will definitely be reading them both – avidly! Highly recommended for anyone with a hankering for a book they won’t want to put down.