Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT)

CAAT is holding a National Gathering on Saturday 6 November at Conway Hall, London.  The blurb says “With our new government claiming there is no embarrassment in pushing arms exports, we want to join together and let them know we won't tolerate arms on our doorstep anymore.”

Guest speakers including Mark Thomas, workshops etc. 

£5 waged; £3 unwaged. Includes tea, coffee and a light lunch. Book via http://www.caat.org.uk/nationalgathering or tel 020 7281 0297.

The Big Think

Have discovered an interesting website (new? or new to me?) called theBigThink.com.  Haven't explored it yet but what I've already come across is Floyd Abrams, the attorney who defended the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 in which the paper published secret reports on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There's a 40-minute video conversation with him on the US constitution’s First Amendment. It was Jefferson who insisted on it. He had been in France at the time the Constitution was adopted, and in 1798 was appalled when Congress passed a Sedition Act making it a crime to speak ill, falsely, of the President.  When the First Amendment was adopted this Act was struck down.  There’s much more, including “Where Does Freedom of Speech End?” and “Is Wikileaks Like the Pentagon Papers?”.  .

Elsewhere on the site, Stephen Hawking bangs his colonising space drum again, see next.  It was this that led me to the site in the first place. I hope I won't regret advertising this site on my blog as I have a suspicion, having looked at the credentials of the “experts”, that it might have a slightly right-wing bias to it.  We'll see.

Hawking bangs his drum again

More from the theBigThink.com … Stephen Hawking banging the drum once more for the colonisation of space to preserve the human species.  This is something on which I have views, which I have already blogged about.

There’s a 2-minute audio clip of Hawking speaking, an article on his idea, and a long discussion board. Whilst some contributors dwell on the technical issues raised, others dwell on the ethical and political aspects, which are of more interest to me.

Mark Wulas says : “Why is it so important for us to survive? …. We don't miss dinosaurs that much and I don't think anybody will miss us that much either. It's normal for species to go extinct as they are replaced by new ones. That's how the universe works.”  

Michelle Phillips says that instead of moving to another planet, humanity should start to learn how to clean up its own mess. “We are problem solvers, we are explorers, we are always searching for new things, places and ways of doing. Let's … make this planet Earth into all it can be instead of moving on to another planet on which to wreak havoc.”  The wreaking havoc tendency, she points out, doesn’t suddenly stop when we blast off.

Dave Pullin essentially agrees with me so I won't bother repeating it.

John McNamara strays into the technical arena, science fiction at this stage really, but there's an insightful twist in his final sentence.  He says to leave this planet “we will have to discover how to digitally copy our individual minds … and transmit the signal to another advanced alien planet ... Our digital minds could then be downloaded into a blank cloned version of their lifeform. Our knowledge and history would go with us. Our alien partners would have to see the benefit of this merger for them to co-operate.”

The colour of capitalism? Green!

I should be interested to know what colour the handles of garden shears, secateurs etc used to be in the USSR, East Germany etc and maybe still are in those countries, and in Cuba (if they manufacture them there).  All my garden tools have green handles and it’s rare to find them in any other colour.  What's the worst possible colour for garden tools? Green! You can't find them when you drop them in the long grass. Of course in a capitalist economy, they’re not designed to be found in the long grass, or even used, they’re just designed to be sold.  Green handles have doubtless been discovered to give consumers a cosy, close to the soil, ecological sort of feeling, and put them in a parting with their money frame of mind.   

If I was king, oops commissar for garden tools, my edict would be that the handles should all be dayglow yellow.

Warfare by robot

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones, can be operated by a kid sitting at a computer with a joystick in an air force base in Gloucestershire or Arizona, who can kill people and then go to the canteen for lunch.

There's a day conference in London on September 18th on drone warfare. I quote from the blurb: “Armed drones are used by Britain, US and others at great human cost and often in breach of humanitarian law. Used in war and for targeted killings this technology is being used by the UK with little public debate.”

The conference will cover Britain's arms industry and drones, the use of surveillance drones in the UK, Israel's use of drones in Gaza and elsewhere, international law and drone war, the future of robotic weapons, local campaigning.

Date: Saturday 18th September 2010, 10am - 4pm Venue: University of London Union, Malet Street Cost: (includes buffet lunch) £10.00/£6.00 conc 

More information: http://www.for.org.uk/files/dw-flyer.pdf 

Prometheus and the art of storytelling

It turns out there's a lot more to the Prometheus story than I thought. In the first place Prometheus it seems was a friend to mankind, he didn’t bring fire just to pursue a personal vendetta as I've suggested. Also his story is tied up with Pandora’s box, which was how Zeus punished mankind for acquiring fire.  So there’ll be a substantial revision and addition in due course.

I'm wandering into a byway now and I'm puzzling over the art or storytelling, and the origin of the Greek myths.  Firstly, how do you identify the “official” version of each story, secondly how far can you legitimately stray in the retelling?  For Greek myths Homer and Hesiod are (I believe) normally regarded as the authoritative versions. For now, lets just say it was Hesiod. The question is where did he get the stories from? Round the fireside when he was a child I suppose.  It would be “tell us the one about Prometheus and the fire” and “tell us the one about Pandora’s box”. And each visiting storyteller would embellish the tale in their own way, depending on their skill, their mood, how they judged their audience on that particular night, and other factors. So by the time the adult Hesiod picked up a pen he would have heard a dozen versions of each story. And at some stage, Hesiod, or if not him then someone, decided to weave Prometheus and Pandora’s box into one story, even though the two stories were in their origin entirely distinct. Is that how it worked?

Is there a way to get back to the underlying oral tradition that preceded the stories being written down? Presumably not. So perhaps I can defend any departure from the official version by saying, well yes this may not be the way Hesiod told it (or the Bible, in the case of Adam and Eve) but I've given you a plausible hypothetical reconstruction of ONE of the many versions that Hesiod heard before he wrote down the definitive account of Prometheus.

This is just musings. There will for sure be some academic work on this subject that I need to check out. But I'll be surprised if my musings are far from the mark.

The crooked timber of humanity

Immanuel Kant (1784):  “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

The original German is : "Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden."

A word for word translation goes : “Out of timber so crooked, as that from which human beings are made, nothing entirely straight can be fashioned.”.  I don’t know German but I wish I did as it’s a wonderful language.