The Future and the Past

Congratulations to the City desk at the Daily Mail for their sturdy defence of BAE’s independence.

In the teeth of an avalanche of murky pro-EU sentiment from the usual felons, they made the case with crisp authority and won the day — with a little help from Angela Merkel.

Alex Brummer and Associate City Editor, Ruth Sunderland were off the starting blocks before the rest of the press pack, who were probably waiting to see the way the wind was blowing. Between them they unearthed a pile of unsavoury details about the main proponents of the Franco-German takeover of Britain’s premier manufacturer and defence contractor.

For example, BAE’s Chief Executive allegedly stood to make £18m — plus a £4m pension pot already in the bag — if the deal had been completed. How is it possible that such perverse incentives can exist for diminishing the company they are employed to nurture?

The usual wolf pack of infernal lobbyists and former Labour bigwigs were also circling the beleaguered firm. Never mind the workers, eh?

I was surprised that David Cameron, almost unthinkingly as usual, gave it his blessing. George Osborne seemed to be all over it like a spray job. Shame on them.

There are times when Ed Miliband’s call against “predatory capitalism” in last year’s conference speech really bursts into life … but that’s as far as it goes.

Alex Brummer has form on this. He mounted a similar campaign against the Cadbury take-over by big beastly predator, Kraft. He was right. In the event, promises were broken, jobs moved to Poland and elsewhere, and the fragrant, once family-owned firm is now a shadow of its former self. So is the chocolate, I’m told.

The Germans know how to look after their mid-sized, family-owned businesses, which are the backbone of the industrial giant’s prosperity.

Think also of the outrageous takeover of our airports, including Heathrow, by an indebted Spanish building firm on the back of yet more indebtedness. That went well, didn’t it?

So let’s have a serious rethink on the sale of our iconic companies to overseas predators. The misleading veil of “Europe” should not be an obstacle. France once declared Danone, the yoghurt maker, a company of national cultural significance and economic importance, therefore immune from foreign takeover.

If they can do it for snack-pots, we can do it for vital defence interests.

Andrew Marr’s new TV series and book (they do come in that order these days) is really rather good, despite some less than enthusiastic reviews beforehand.

A History of the World concentrates on ideas that shaped our globe, and the people behind them. In the opening two episodes we were given the First Emperor of China, Confucius, the Buddha, Ashoka, Croesus, Socrates, Cleopatra, Jesus, St Paul, and … well, you get the drift.

There are six more episodes to come, so I suppose we’ll get Newton, Darwin, Einstein and the rest in due course.

I haven’t read the book yet. I’m waiting for someone to buy it for me for Christmas. I usually get several copies of the main intellectual blockbuster of the season, so I never buy it when it comes out.

I must say, if it fills in the details not covered on television, it will be a useful gift for bright teenagers who don’t seem to get much coverage of this aspect of history in state schools.

Trailing the femme du jour, Clare Balding, in the charts and scheduled against Downton Abbey on the telly, the author has not been dealt a good hand of cards.

I’m told by publisher friends that slow-burners are the best.

Poppycock Watch
MPs are back in Westminster today, primed for another scintillating season of governing a small part of the nation’s business.

The main topic of the moment is the Scottish Question. It seems only three people know what that is: one’s dead, one went mad, and I’ve forgotten.

Something to do with exhuming Rob Roy, I think, or pretending Edinburgh is the Athens of the North.

Come to think of it, it might well be after independence. Long lines of hungry people waiting for food parcels, fifty-percent unemployment, begging Angela Merkel for a bailout, and wondering how to turn the oil taps on.

Whatever turns you on.

Profundity of the Week
The future is inevitably the subject of speculation. Most readers of this diary will have been born in the last century, some as far back as the middle of it. All will have vivid memories of almost constant warfare around the globe.

Although the catastrophe of an all-out nuclear war was avoided, the experience of Japan in the 1940s leaves us in no doubt how devastating that would have been for everyone on earth. And yet, it was contemplated and prepared for by the world’s biggest powers. We survived it seems by the skin of our teeth.

Politics is too often a source of strife, even though democracy is designed for the resolution of conflicts through intense debate in a controlled environment. All these artificial constructs have their limits, which are frequently broken.

So when we think about the future it is hard to envisage anything different from the past, especially when the 20th century, following the relative peace of the Victorian era, was the most violent in human history.

Science, and its resultant technology, provides scant comfort. While much of science is benevolent — at least at first — other bits of it are capable of destroying the lot of us, whether by accident or design.

If we improve food production, living standards and the treatment of disease, as we have, the population balloons out of control in a deadly nexus of bounty and destruction.

At the Millennium there was hope for the future. How quickly that evaporated. A new Depression that originated in the American sub-prime housing market, and the collapse of the European polity and monetary system, were quickly upon us. These were human errors that could have been avoided.

Just as our recent past is dominated by war and financial hardship, will the future be the same? Will Progress save us?

Human life is lived as single lives, and each has a limit. Four score years and ten is rapidly becoming the standard, in the West at least. Since we can’t live other people’s lives, only ours determines the past and future for us. All others are unknowable.

So the question of whether the future will be better than the past comes down to: will old age be better than youth, will teaching be better than being taught, will death be better than birth?

Surprisingly, all the world’s greatest sages emphatically say: Yes!

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

How to Be a Mystic in the Modern World is coming soon.

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They make for rattling good yarns by writers such as Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code, and many another.

I confess I have something of a taste for these confections, although I read them more as comedies than thrillers. One attraction is that most modern novels are full of detailed research into the subject, subtly led astray by the writer’s imaginative interpretation and need for dramatic action.

But is there a scintilla of truth in the kernel of them? Do the Illuminati truly exist? Let’s start with some definitions from The New Oxford Dictionary of English:

Illuminati: People claiming to possess special enlightenment or knowledge of something: some mysterious standard known only to the illuminati of the organization.

Two examples are then given:

1. A sect of 16th-century Spanish heretics* who claimed special religious enlightenment. *Note: some genuine Spanish mystics of the period were infamously labelled “heretics” by the Inquisition. It’s a pity the OED follows that tradition.
2. A Bavarian secret society founded in 1776, organized like the Freemasons*. *Note: there is evidence that the Freemasons, especially those of the 33rd degree, did at some stage possess knowledge of the Great Death Contemplation that goes back to the Mystery Schools of antiquity and is identical with the “showing of the nature of reality” that I have written about extensively, for example: HERE.

One factor muddies the waters of our quest for the Illuminati. It is the presence of a large number of dandies eager to dress in colourful outfits and call themselves “Chevalier”, or some other term of personal inflatus. We can safely put them to one side.

Anyone who calls themself a magician or a magus is just playing around on the edges of psychic phenomena. They may indeed be sensitive to layers beyond physicality, but much of the information they uncover is so general and banal it’s better left alone.

Let’s start our quest with the obvious candidates: the clergy.

Could the priests, curates and vicars of our churches hide a secret cadre of true spiritual adepts? In my view, they are very thin on the ground … if they exist at all.

In Church circles, clergy are generally divided into Actives and Contemplatives. The Actives do the donkey work, while the Contemplatives (just a few in our times) lock themselves away in monasteries and other quiet places such as a handful of hermitages. They are worthy of our respect, but we must judge them on their merits.

In a recent edition of Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, the head of the Catholic Church in England, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, remarked that if anyone thought being an Archbishop brought them closer to God, it was news to him. He said it with a rueful laugh. I believed him.

But there is a more serious candidate, the late Pope John Paul II, now beatified with almost indecent haste — does the Church know more than we do?

What we do know is that this immensely popular priest was brought up in Poland and joined the Rosicrucians, a mystical sect that followed “the Rosy Cross.”

After a bad road crash in which he was seriously injured, the future Bishop of Rome had a profound spiritual experience that closely matched a description given by his Rosicrucian master. I suspect it was a showing of the nature of reality, a privileged view of one’s immortality.

Such spiritual masters undoubtedly exist but work in the shadows. I doubt they have pretensions of power in the outer world or would wish to be known.

There are pockets of activists within the Church, such as Opus Dei, that have mystical objectives at the very least. And any number of shadowy organisations such as the Priory of Sion, of Holy Blood, Holy Grail fame, that live on the claim of genetic descent from Jesus Christ.

My own view is that anyone who claims mystical powers from their physical bloodline, or DNA, is a fantasist or a scoundrel.

Each one of us has long routes back in time that theoretically can be traced to the “Creator of the Universe”. But, as Carl Jung put it, “The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual and this holds true throughout nature”.

We are left then with specific individuals, not bloodlines or groups.

Any organisation that uses physical means to obstruct or defend what it believes to be divine power, is corrupt and acts egoically.

It was said that China’s Mao Tse Tung and his deputy Chou Enlai used magical aspects of Taoism, including Yin and Yang techniques, to pave their way to political power. Given the chaos they inflicted on the people, especially the middle classes which they slaughtered by the million during the Cultural Revolution, this example does not fit any of our definitions, even if true.

So, in the absence of real evidence — and I would be grateful for information from any reader who knows better — I will narrow down our quest to one area: individual seekers after genuine mystical experience, of which there are many.

Any genuine mystic knows that illuminations are given rather than taken and after a suitable period of request and spiritual alignment. You can’t claim your place in the mystical hierarchy, you have to prove your fitness for it first.

The existence of genuine Illuminati in the sense of powerful secret societies is probably a myth created by the runaway human imagination. In other words, Old Nick himself: the ego.

John Evans

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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Winston Churchill defined history as “one damn thing after another”. This year so far has certainly borne that out.

Looking back on my Predictions for 2011, they are a bit like a warzone peppered by constant shellfire. The overarching theme, “A quiet year”, has been shot to pieces by the toppling of dictators, earthquakes, a monster tsunami, and just about any other disaster one can think of.

However, (thank God for howevers), my caveats (two of them) have both come true. One was “a firestorm in the Middle East” caused by Iran. Yes, there is a massive firestorm currently proceeding, and, yes, Iran is suspected of stirring up the Shia majority population against the Sunni rulers. Incidentally, did the U.S. know that it was doing Iran’s bidding by toppling the Sunni Saddam regime? They do now.

The second caveat was that Germany might walk out of the eurozone. Well, the European Central Bank (ECB) has signalled a rate rise in April, and almost certainly a series of rises over the months to come. This will aid the Germanic heart of Euroland, but knock the stuffing out of the bad boys on the periphery: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. But it’s not all good news for the Germans. It will mean their financial support for the “PIIGS” will have to rise accordingly. Is the ECB deliberately forcing the issue here? I believe it is.

So, my caveats have well and truly kiboshed my predictions. Caveat emptor (buyer beware).

The Japan earthquake/tsunami has been a hellfire and damnation catastrophe, leaving one lost for words adequate enough to describe the situation. On Andrew Marr’s programme this morning, the BBC’s World Editor, John Simpson, made a good shot at it when summarising what it feels like to be in an earthquake:

You are totally, terrifyingly helpless, he said. The ground beneath you and everything else is moving and shaking. No-one can help you. You can’t bribe someone or talk your way out of it. Your fate is in the hands of an implacable foe, apparently determined on your destruction.

That about sums it up. As George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, good and bad times will come whatever you do. By making yourself strong and calm mentally you will ride out the worst of what the world can throw at you, and enjoy the pleasant moments even more.

The plucky Japanese appear to have done just that. O that the mollycoddled British, so full of a state of entitlement, could summon up such stoicism and fortitude.

That really would be a Big Society.

I’m often scolded for attacking science and scientists on this website with “reckless abandon”. I’ve even been accused of “shamanism”. Perish the thought. I can assure you I’m not a long-haired Mongolian primitivist.

My aim has always been to warn all those materialist warriors, the Hawkings, the Dawkins and the … well, you know who I mean, that there are two substances in the universe, and one is distinctly superior to the other.

They are, first and foremost, Consciousness; then Form, which arises out of consciousness. Science is very good at all things material. It produces manufactured goods of an almost miraculous usability. Just look at the new iPad2.

Until fairly recently it stayed out of the universe and the big questions about life. Now it’s all over them like a pustule plague.

Where science goes wrong is in the field of consciousness, which it ignores — with honourable individual exceptions. Its dependence on mathematics — a shorthand way of describing motiveless processes — is frankly pathetic. Remind me, what happened to mathematically predetermined choices in economics? A worldwide meltdown of the global financial system, followed by economic chaos — which still has a long way to go.

By eliminating consciousness, the ground of everything, and which is not the same thing as thought, we are sold into slavery to blind chance and empty reasoning. Climate change can only be solved, we are told, by de-industrialising the West, hollowing out our manufacturing, and sending countless billions to the super-rich of Asia who continue our former practices unhindered by our prissy political “correctness”.

Manmade global warming is blamed for almost everything, while the tsunamis illustrate our helplessness in the face of Nature. The lesson is clear. We are a puny physical presence in the universe but big in terms of consciousness. Science is not as clever, or as powerful, as it thinks.

John Evans

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Dominic Lawson has written a solid piece in the Sunday Times on that very un-British bit of potential legislation, Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill. It really is as ghastly as it seems.

The reaction of Pope Benedict to parts of it — although he doesn’t mention it by name — is what caught my eye. The Pope is after all defending the age-old practice of his Church against a dying, destructive shambles of a government, which is more than can be said for the leaders of our Established Church.

Readers of my new book will know I’m exceedingly ambivalent about Roman Catholicism which is largely built on a misleading redaction of evidence in the early centuries AD. However, I have rather taken to the last two Popes.

Benedict, it seems to me, says what he thinks in no uncertain terms, even if he’s had to make a few grovelling retractions in the past, especially to prickly Muslims.

John Paul II started his career with the Rosicrucians, followers of the Rosy Cross, a supposedly occult organization teaching that all is mind (Idealism).

Why can’t we have such leaders in Anglicanism? Archbishop Ramsey was the last one who openly espoused mysticism, if I’m not mistaken.

Let us earnestly hope that David Cameron is more like the two Popes and less like the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

Gordon Brown and his wife are reported to blub freely in a forthcoming friendly Piers Morgan interview on ITV.

What does he mean by that, we are entitled to ask, given the crafty nature of the man? I suspect he may be trying to set a trend.

We know how party leaders determinedly follow each other so they are not left behind on the latest behavourial fashion — David Cameron spent years imitating Tony Blair, and the latter tried but failed to ape Maggie Thatcher.

Here’s the lowdown: Brown has cunningly spotted that the country wants a strong leader, and recognizes that, apart from his brutalist manner, he has signally failed to project a Churchillian persona to the public.

By gushing on TV he may hope to lure Cameron into doing the same. If DavCam is caught whipping out a Kleenex or two in public, Brown may think he will lose votes by the truckload.

It’s only a theory, but with Gordon Brown you can just about believe anything.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

Just down the road from me there’s a substantial building with an impressive sign over the door: Casting House.

Whenever I pass it, I conjure up a long line of wannabee hopefuls snaking down the road, waiting excitedly to do their party pieces before a panel of judges. Is that Cheryl Cole I see going in by the back door?

Imagine how they would feel if they ever got in only to find it’s an engineering works?

Too much imagination?

Yeah.

The fate of Greece is one of those “there but for the grace of …” situations in economics. Britain can’t be that far behind as we have a similar budget defict to the birthplace of European democracy.

The one element conferring protection on the UK is our monetary freedom outside the eurozone.

Arch Europhile Peter Mandelson is reported to have altered his language on the topic in recent days, praising our ability to set interest rates and allow the exchange rate to fall. You’d almost think he engineered it himself.

Gordon Brown is widely credited for having “kept the UK out of the euro”. At first glance his Five Tests required for entry certainly did the trick. It was his supreme triumph in office, the spinline goes.

But motive is all.

Was Brown as doughty a defender of the ancient pound as was Tory leader William Hague at the time? Or was he engaged in yet another spiteful battle for supremacy with Tony Blair?

I’d bet a house on the latter.

Ever reliable Christopher Booker has become something of a cult figure in the climate debate. The words Global Warming must be etched on his tonsils.

In today’s Sunday Telegraph he lists a catalogue of mysterious government payments to overseas lost causes, especially those caught up in the Weather-Wheeze bubble. He writes:

“… in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into a bewildering array of ‘climate-related’ projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why.”

Another scandal for this wretched administration to shrug off as “political decisions” and therefore not subject to public accountability.

Why?

Shouldn’t these half-baked Che Guevaras be held to account for every penny of our money they’ve squandered over the past calamitous 13 years?

An aspiration perhaps for the next Government?

Or will there not be time enough?

Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian economist “known as a critical thinking realist who, for instance, has highlighted how well intentioned policies (such as foreign aid to Africa) can often have unintended consequences which have detrimental effects on an economy.” (Wikipedia). She’s also said to be one of the world’s hundred most influential people.

She appeared on the Marr show this morning as a paper reviewer. I should have liked a full interview instead.

Her book Dead Aid argues that foreign aid has harmed Africa and that it should be phased out. Note, this is the exact opposite of Handout Brown’s interminable reflex to shove other people’s money into Africa. Dambisa Moyo has the advantage of first-hand knowledge of the continent, plus a first-class, Oxford-educated brain. Brown should listen.

Isn’t it time we applied real evidence and common sense to the whole industry of foreign aid?

Another can of worms for the Tories to sort out. You can’t help feeling sorry for them, can you?

John Evans

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Gordon Brown appeared on Andrew Marr’s programme this morning in a slightly new mode. He spoke in a slangy lowland Scots accent, replete with glottal stops and chummy vernacular. If this is his core-vote strategy, things must be much worse than we thought.

It may also serve the purpose of creating yet another dividing line between ordinary Gordon and the well-spoken Conservatives.

One aspect of his usual performance remained: his speak-by-numbers approach to answering questions. He often sounds as if he’s using a foreign-language phrase book, every clause and sentence lifted wholesale from the manual and awkwardly bolted together.

As a rough guess, I’d say there were at least a couple of dozen downright lies in the half-hour interview. Claim after questionable claim spewed out of his mocking, pudding-like face. He no longer cares that everyone believes he’s a liar — he’s known it for years.

Overall, he confirmed his place in the political ecosystem: as a lowly technical details man.

In the run-up to last year’s London G20 summit, he slipped into tech-mode during Prime Minister’s Questions, no doubt to confuse David Cameron. He listed various protocols and formulations of the kind used by the army of international “sherpas” to prepare the ground for their masters. It was a “neo-classical endogenous growth theory” moment.

Sherpas are second-tier civil servants specializing in some branch of governmental procedure. They are confined to the back-rooms so as not to steal the thunder of the bigwig politicians who arrive at summits just to wrap up the package for public consumption.

Gordon Brown is a sherpa and nothing more. He has been promoted several notches above his level of competence. It shows. It always has.

As so often happens in British politics now, few spoke up until he had blunderingly wrecked the country.

And the agony goes on until late spring.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

After our glorious “barbecue summer”, we are now one-third of the way through our “mild winter”, and entering “one of the warmest years on record”. At least according to the once-admired UK Met Office.

Are there no fine British institutions left that the Labour government has not destroyed? By forcing every decision into an ideological straitjacket, they have perverted the functioning of whole tiers of our national life.

Politics exists for “the resolution of conflict”, not for micromanaging voters’ behaviour. “Progressive” means dumbed-down Marxist equality by stealth or decree. Harriet Harman is its poster image.

When David Cameron says the Conservatives are a progressive party he should be aware he’s leading it down the road to perdition.

Another marketing ploy? Well, those who will not vote Tory don’t know what it means, while those that will are thoroughly sick of the word and its malign effect on their lives.

Do drop it, Dave.

Conrad Black, writing in The Spectator from a prison cell in Coleman, Florida, has this commentary on the financial and economic crises:

“The Americans borrowed trillions of dollars from China and Japan, to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan while officially requiring trillions more to be squandered in worthless mortgages. With the exception of a couple of obscure contrarian economists, no one saw it coming.”

Quite! Give that man a key.

The NHS has had its budget trebled in 10 years. As a result, more people have declared themselves sick, with no discernible increase in outcomes.

In fact, the NHS is a very sick institution itself. Anyone passing through its portals is in real danger of picking up a virulent disease, or dying of neglect or avoidable error.

Money has not cured the NHS of its death spiral for the simple reason that the elements at fault within it have multiplied several-fold thanks to the massive input of extra funding. The people running it believe in the very things that are killing it. They are blind to its potential strengths. More money is choking and squeezing its effectiveness.

On the fringes, government agencies run expensive ads telling people to go to their GP for minor complaints — just in case. Aren’t GP’s surgeries crowded enough with coughers and snifflers? As a means of spreading disease, they are ideal incubators.

Other “public-service” ads spread fear and trembling about a raft of serious conditions. The current one showing a woman having a stroke, with a burning hole in her head, is offensive and beyond negativity. My mother died of a series of strokes, as have many others, so this intrusion into our consciousness is cruel and unnecessary.

We know these ads are there just to burnish the reputation of ministers: “Look what we are doing for you!”. However, they almost certainly have the opposite effect. It’s known that folk who concentrate on an illness out of fear or expectation of getting it, are more likely to succumb than others who believe they are healthy.

The NHS is now in the business of creating illness, not ameliorating it. It’s become a fat, dirty, disease factory.

With spending cuts the order of the day, the NHS has more fat on its bones than is good for it. It should not be “protected” but slimmed down into a much more effective organization. Split up and offering a basic, no-frills service, it would have a chance of being really useful rather than a pain in the nation’s neck and a burden on its pocket.

The genuine cuttable fat in government lies in schools and hospitals and the quangos that circle them like vultures. If we spare them the knife, they will never regain health and competence.

And another government will have failed the country, the genuinely sick, and under-educated.

Edward Heath, it’s reported, almost went to the IMF for a loan in 1974, beating Labour’s Denis Healey to the thought by two years. The socialists have borne the approbrium of that humiliating act ever since.

Not surprisingly, Healey is crowing and telling the Tories to shut up about his involvement. While he’s at it, he could call on Brown and Balls to button it over a wide range of issues dishonestly megaphoned.

Heath ran a bizarre economic policy that swung from prudent to reckless in a couple of years — ring any bells? The result over the 1970s is what you get when the two main parties have the same economic policies.

If you can’t tell the difference between them, they’ll wreck the country in precisely the same way.

A bit more from Jason Calacanis, writing in Syntagma during 2006. This is mainly about bloggers’ pay:

Bloggers can do 2-4 posts an hour from what I’ve learned. If someone is an expert on the subject they can do more in fact.

So, if the number is $4/5 a post and folks do three posts an hour on average, you’re looking at $12-15 an hour. That’s $480 to $600 a week for a 40 hour week which is $25/30k a year. For part time work from home $12-15 an hour isn’t so bad, especially if you’re writing about something you love (most of our bloggers were writing their blogs for free before they joined WIN [Weblogs Inc]).

Now, our bloggers are making much more money than this right now, but we started in that same range.

The problem is that the journalists writing about blogging are established and living in NYC/SF/LA and making $50-80k a year. For them the idea of starting over again at $30k a year is horrible and bloggers are being taken advantage of. However, when I was running Silicon Alley Reporter people started at Conde Nast at $25-30k!

You don’t hear the bloggers complaining because for them they are getting paid to write about their hobby–their passion.

Getting paid to write about the movies if you’re a movie fan with a day job is amazing… getting paid to write about movies if you’re A.O. Scott at the NYT is what you expect.

I wonder how many bloggers are making even that kind of money at the start of 2010.

John Evans

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