Booming Back

Intermission

2010-01-29T09:50:00.000Z

I'm going to be taking a short break from blogging for a while, I have come to the conclusion that I have too much else on at the moment and need to focus on that for a few days. Booming Back will return on February 15th for its 4th birthday.

Huzzah!

Here come the knives

2010-01-28T10:29:00.001Z

Waterford ensemble Fighting Spiders have emerged from the studio with an album of rather tasty tracks. While 'Tarantism' should be released later this year, the first single 'here come the knives' has already been used by the RTE Storyland horror series 'Maraia' as its theme music.

I've seen 'Fighting Spiders' a few times live now, and their energy on stage never fails to impress. I also got a sneak preview of the album late last year and they certainly have a wealth of stand out tracks to choose from come singles time; 'here come the knives' is an excellent debut choice and a great introduction to their sound.

Its available for download from the 29th January for the princely sum of 99 cents at downloadmusic.ie.

The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles

2010-01-23T13:33:00.014Z

I am now about 20 hours into a 48 hour visit to my family home, which will possibly be the longest continuous period spent in my house since I was twenty. So far I have not killed anyone, which is a good thing. Still, 28 hours to go and the night, as they say, is still young.

Normally when I am here it is because I am looking after one or other of my grandparents in shifts with other family members; I will do the day shift and someone else does the night shift, and thus I get to return home to the warmth and comfort of my own bed each night. Now however it is just me for the weekend and the creepy factor of being in your childhood home that has had no trace of your own presence for eighteen years since your sister decided she wanted your room after you moved out, threw out everything in it and repainted its amazing burgundy walls because they scared her, is really starting to kick in.

But I'm not bitter.

The other weirdness involves watching television with my grandparents. As I have mentioned before my Grandfather has a predilection for watching programs that will annoy him, just to raise his blood pressure and give the rest of us a wee shock. Thus when he announced his intention to spend the evening watching "that hateful, spiteful appalling little man" I braced myself for a night of either Ryan Tubridy or Glenn Beck. Unfortunately for me he was referring to both.

The Late Late Show (the Irish one, not to be confused with any American equivalent that actually has a host with some semblance of charisma, guests that have evolved beyond the intellectual level of bread mold, and an audience whose recent ancestors did not include farm animals*) is an institution that, like anarcho-capitalism, Hanna Montana or Kazakhstan, I am aware of in that I know it exists, but could not actually identify it in a police line-up. It is an experience like tripe, tongue or kidneys that others seem very partial to but when I encounter it sitting on my plate I can't help but retch. I am thankful, rather surprisingly, for last night's experience, for I did not think it possible that any RTE presenter could annoy me more than Pat Kenny, in fact, I did not think it possible that there was anyone more smug, condescending and annoying than Pat Kenny, but I was wrong. Ryan Tubridy is the Black Swan of RTE's 'I can't believe that he has no personality' personalities, and he has changed my understanding of just how awful a presenter can be, forever.

But he is still light years away in awfulness from the other "hateful, spiteful appalling little man", as my Grandfather so eloquently labels him. In the five minutes of watching Glenn Beck during the ad breaks of "The Late Late Show" I learned the following things:

a) Hitler and Stalin were best buds
b) Hitler was actually a far-left liberal, which is why Stalin loved him so much
c) George Bernaaaaaarhd Shaw (said in a pirate accent) was English
d) George Bernaaaaaarhd Shaw won a Nobel Prize because, like all Nobel Prize winners, he was evil
e) Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from George Bernaaaaaarhd Shaw
f) Obama will create death camps and kill millions of Americans because he is a Nazi and a Socialist and a Nobel Prize winner.

While there was no word on whether any of Obama's works will inspire a Broadway musical and movie starring Rex Harrison, I can certainly see Julie Andrews rocking out "Yes We Can" in a Cockney accent.

Sometimes I think that I live in a parallel universe to the rest of the folks around me, and after a night watching spiteful hateful little men I'm glad that I do. My world might not be as day-glow or hexaped-filled as that of the Na'vi, but its still a pretty nice place to live, with nice friendly people (you know, real Pandorans) and in my world right is right and left is left and we've absolutely, positively, really and truly always been at war with Eastasia.

Always.

* In the interest of full disclosure it must be pointed out that once upon a time I too was a member of The Late Late Show audience. The year was 1994 and a group of us in college went in an ironic way. And by ironic I mean there was drink and/or the prospect of drink involved. Gay Byrne was still host and the guests included The Kelly Family. More than once during the three hour long ordeal I too wished I was an angel.

The Value of Nothing

2010-01-22T11:18:00.006Z

I'm currently reading "The Value of Nothing" by Raj Patel, and although I'm only half way through I thought I would give it and its writer a little plug this morning.

2007's "Stuffed and Starved" was one of my top reads of the year, and a perfect compliment to Michael Pollan's "Omnivores Dilemma", in that while Pollan concentrated on an Amero-centric examination of the origins of the food he himself ate, Patel's work delved into the multinational food industry and global food trade and the consequences of cheap western food for marginalized food producers in the majority world. It was a very well researched alter-globalisation take on the real cost of food, and I loved it.

"Value of Nothing" goes beyond the food industry and places consumer culture and capitalism itself under the microscope, and rather than just energetic polemic he attempts to provide workable, albeit radical, alternatives.

Beyond these books Patel has embraced digital culture, originally shortly after college through joint editorship of the online journal 'Voice of the Turtle', then through Stuffedandstarved.org, launched to promote his book, and now more recently at rajpatel.org, where he casts a much wider net and is a feed definitely worth subscribing to.

Although Oxford and LSE educated he clearly feels as comfortable marching shoulder to shoulder with his Compañeros in the Global South as he does delivering key note lectures at academic conferences, and his extensive experience in post-Apartheid South Africa and Zimbabwe has given him a unique world-view and a writing voice that I find compelling.

While "The Value of Nothing" is definitely aimed at a mass-market audience rather than an academic one and is a lighter read than his earlier work, it is engaging and ire-provoking enough that it gets a solid two-thumbs up from Unkie Dave.

On Hope and Change

2010-01-20T19:03:00.012Z

Three years ago this week on the occasion of my 34th birthday I made my first ever political donation to the exploratory committee of a young Senator from Illinois. Though the country of my blood is not always the country of my heart, the man I watched stood as the antithesis of everything that had occurred over the last six years, and I was moved to action. I dared to think that the world might actually change.

Two years ago today I sat and watched the son of a Kenyan immigrant in the church of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. declare that if the people stood together the walls of oppression would be shaken down to the ground. I could feel that the world was about to change.

One year ago today I stood on the frozen grass of the National Mall with a million other people and watched the world change.

Only it didn't.

It didn't.

Nothing more really needs to be said than that.

Again? Seriously? Didn't we do this last year?

2010-01-18T11:57:00.007Z

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I bought all the childish things I could not afford as a child." - 1 Corinthians 13:11(a)

hmmmmnnnnn.

Thirty-seven.

Not really sure about this whole "late thirties" thing.

Mathematically speaking I am now in my prime, something I haven't been for six years, but given my inability to effectively use the word "sick" in a non-ironic way in a sentence, the derision with which I greet the sight of young male haircuts and the increasing frequency with which I draw pop-culture references from continental philosophers rather than the D-list talking heads on "The Top 100 'Top 100 Shows' of All Time" shows, I must now accept the undeniable fact that I am getting old.

While American television and film is populated almost exclusively by 30-somethings playing the talented denizens of assorted High Schools and Colleges, only on a very, very good day could I hope to pass for an 18-year old. With progeria. In bad lighting. As viewed by a blind person. Who is also deaf. And has never actually encountered a real 18-year old.

Which is just as well, as 18-year olds are quite possibly the most useless thing on earth, good only for serving as cannon fodder in the overseas conflicts of fading empires. Unless they are a whiskey.

But no bitterness there, honestly.

Happy Birthday me.

Yay!

en fraternité

2010-01-13T15:45:00.007Z

"When, echoing the French Revolution, the black slaves in Haiti revolted in the name of the same principles of freedom, equality and fraternity, this was "the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the bourgeois reading public knew it"... In Haiti, the unthinkable (for the European Enlightenment) took place: the Haitian Revolution "entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened". The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom - but only for rational "mature" subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality...). This led to sublime "communist" moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion that occurred and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side."
- Slavoj Žižek, "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce", pp111-112

You can donate here to Oxfam Ireland who have a presence on the ground in Haiti , as do Concern who also have an emergency appeal, or to the agency of your choice in your home country.

Nous sommes tous les enfants de Toussaint l'Ouverture.

Tragedy, Farce and Vegetarians

2010-01-12T12:47:00.015Z

Politics and Religion, if ever there were two greater topics certain to spark up a healthy banter* with random strangers** in a pub, taxi, queue for the ATM or website comments section then they surely must have existed outside the English language, for I have yet to find them.

I've just finished Slavoj Žižek's "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce", his clarion call for a resurgent Left in the wake of the post 9/11 surge in neo-liberalism and the resultant global economic collapse, and have progressed on to Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell", his argument for the scientific examination of Religion as a purely natural phenomenon.

Both are best described as 'light reads', in that Žižek's reads more like an extended lecture based around a few talking points rather than fixed notes, and Dennett, writing for an overly-religious American audience is apologetic in the extreme for the offense he is about to cause them by ripping their belief-system to shreds before their very eyes, he is become death, the destroyer of spiritual worlds, but will offer you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit while he does so***. Žižek makes no such offering of a light tiffin, and is all the more enjoyable for his rambling and deliberately provocative style, sounding at times like nothing so much as the Jeremy Clarkson of the radical Left.

What unites them both in my mind despite the gulf of their philosophical and writing styles is the fervour they both display for specific political belief systems. For Žižek a return to the Communism of Marx is the only salvation for the Left. He rejects both liberal socialism and the current inheritors of the Marxist mantel that have evolved from extant Communist traditions and calls for a return to first principles and a new progression from there, quoting Beckett when he says "Try again. Fail again. Fail better". Despite all the evolution of leftist thought over the 160 years since the birth of Communism he sees nothing better suited to the ills of mankind than a return to this nineteenth century ideology in its purist form.

For Dennett it is Democracy, placing it on the same pillars of inalienable absolutes that he labels his 'sacred values' as justice, life, love and truth, and he goes so far as to lay the groundwork for his demolition of religious beliefs in terms his target audience will understand by comparing it to the "obscenely costly mistake" that was the adoption of Communism by otherwise well-meaning people as the answer to their woes.

For two avowed skeptics the dogmatic manner with which they approach a specific political system is at times indistinguishable from religious belief. If religion is the opium of the people then perhaps politics is the opium of the atheist. Indeed it could be argued that politics is a stronger belief than religion as it attracts both the religious and irreligious with equal ferocity, yet rarely is true religious belief entirely apolitical.

Or perhaps religion is the ultimate expression of politics, as politics exists to define one's superiority over the Other with rational argument, and when rational argument can no longer be used one turns to the existence of elements outside the rational that cannot be proved or disproved to justify one's superiority. Thus politics may indeed be the last resort of a scoundrel but religion is then the last resort for a political scoundrel.

In either event organised political and religious beliefs may just be scratching the same mental itch we all carry around inside our heads, the need to feel smugly superior to those around us.

And this is why I refuse to define myself in terms of adherence to any specific ethical, religious or political affiliations. I'm a vegetarian, but not just for the traditional 'meat is murder' reasons, I'm trying to overcome my base programing. I don't believe in god or gods, but it is a lazy, couldn't-really-be-bothered, Dawkins-really-just-tries-too-hard, form of agnosticism as opposed to any card-carrying militant atheism. I believe in social justice, but am not a socialist, communist, anarchist, communalist, progressive or liberal, I do not subscribe to any one narrow set of political beliefs****.

This does not mean that I do not have any passionately held beliefs, quite the opposite in fact. Rather it simply means that while the writings of Dawkins, Žižek, Dennet and Badiou all strongly resonate with me, I have no desire to reject one rigid organised belief system and replace it with another, regardless of its nomenclature.

All of which leads nicely into Žižek's short prognosis on vegetarianism.

* if by 'healthy banter' one means 'rabidly offensive and bile filled diatribe'

** if by 'random strangers' one means 'illiterate trolls'

*** He'd make a perfect Anglican

**** The more astute of you will no doubt be pointing out that I used to be a card carrying member of the Green Party. This is true, but I viewed the Greens as a loose collection of activists banded together in an attempt to use collective strength to drive forward their own disparate environmental and social justice agendas, like the Shell to Sea campaign, the Tara bypass, opposition to Shannon Rendition flights and the Poolbeg incinerator. I was wrong. The Greens are in fact a loose collection of folks banded together for the sake of banding together. Social justice and activism seem nowhere on the agenda, the party's sole drive is to stay in existence, an apolitical Oroborus endlessly devouring itself in an orgy of self-preservation through self-consumption. My mistake, I've moved on, and to reference Žižek quoting Beckett, I must fail better next time.

There's no business like snow business

2010-01-11T12:35:00.019Z

Although we woke up this morning to find (at least in Dublin) the snowy blanket of joy that had enveloped our fair city for the last few days as washed away into the gutter and all-but-forgotten as last year's X-Factor winner, the good news is that our Minister for Transport cut short his holiday in Malta where he sat out the worst of the nasty weather working up a rather nice tan, and arrived back in Ireland on Saturday night. He would have been back earlier on Saturday, but he had to reroute through Bristol as his direct flight was canceled, because, you know, the weather conditions were so bad that our nation's transportation systems had all but collapsed.

But still, its not as if his presence here would have made any difference to the situation, as he said himself "Ministers for Transport don’t actually go out and grit the roads", which is a good thing really given how embarrassed he would have looked standing out on the M50 and realizing that there was no actual grit left in the country.

On the 4th of January after much intense media speculation Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan confirmed that he had been diagnosed with cancer and was to begin immediate chemo and radiotherapy, but in line with the advice of his doctors would continue to perform his duties as Minister albeit with a reduced public speaking engagement. While he rejected the notion that this decision would lead him to be a "part-time Minister", he did suggest that he expected no further budgetary work to be necessary until December, so basically in the midst of the worst financial crises our nation has faced there's not a lot of impact for better or worse that he can make as a Minister between now and then.

In a previous life I worked for a large multinational internet company that had a sales office in Paris. Being the civilized nation that it is, most of France shuts down entirely during August for Les Vacances, and our Parisian office with its 100+ staff was no exception. Funny story though, during the month of August the company's French revenue actually rose by up to 20%, meaning that the business did better when none of the employees were actually there. My (unaccepted) sales plan for the following year involved shutting down the Paris office entirely. I'm not a huge fan of sales people.

The reaction of two of our Ministers in the face of both personal and national tragedies is telling. If their actual presence has little impact on the running of their department and its ability to react to national emergencies, why bother having Ministers at all? I'm sure the €150,000 salary plus pension each get paid could be much better spent hiring a few more folks who actually know anything about transportation or the economy.

In fact, what exactly is it that Ministers do to justify their large salary? In February of last year I looked at the rationale for the high salaries of corporate executives:

"The economist Tim Harford devoted a chapter in "The Logic of Life" to trying to understand why Executive pay is so high, and specifically if there is any contribution an individual could make to the success of a company that would justify today's astronomical salaries and bonuses. His conclusion, rather simply, is "No". Executive salaries have nothing to do with the abilities of the individual, and everything to do with their role as a motivational tool for those on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder to work hard and deliver strong results in the hope of moving up and one day reaching the executive level."

However this example doesn't translate well into the Ministerial world, where the Minister's subordinates are, by and large, civil servants with a hierarchy unconnected to the Minister's position.

A justification often offered in the corporate world is that a high salary is necessary to attract the best and brightest to a specific position, and yet clearly that is not the case with Ministers who usually have no previous relevant experience for the portfolio they are assigned. Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey was briefly a career guidance teacher but has been a professional politician since 1977. Brian Lenihan was a barrister and law lecturer, and inherited his Dail seat upon the death of his father. Neither of these Ministers have any relevant expertise for their portfolio beyond being professional politicians, or being born into a ruling national dynasty, and in the last seven days both have made public statements to the effect that by and large they are irrelevant to the day-to-day running of their department and that their physical presence isn't actually necessary in a crisis.

And don't even think of suggesting that a high salary is necessary to prevent a Minister from giving in to temptation and accepting a few backhanders. If this is the case we are obviously not paying our Taoisigh enough, let alone our overworked Ministers.

It is also worth noting that a UK Cabinet Minister currently earns £144,520 (€160,765), a US Cabinet Secretary earns on average $193,400 (€133,350), so while our worthy Ministers earn (before allowances and pensions) fractionally less than their UK counterparts who are responsible for the affairs of a country with almost 14 times the population of Ireland, they earn substantially more than their US counterparts, who watch over the affairs of a nation with a mere 68 times the population. With that in mind no doubt our Ministers are 68 times more competent than their US counterparts, or at the very least 14 times more competent than their UK counterparts? Unfortunately according to the Financial Times the UK's Alistair Darling ranks joint 7th in the 2009 list of EU Finance Ministers, our own Brian Lenihan comes in at 19th. Out of 19.

Value for money if ever I saw it.

So if we as taxpayers are not paying for a Minister's skills and expertise, or their motivational abilities either as leader or financial incentive, what exactly are we paying them for?

As Edwin Starr might have warbled, "Ministers. Huh. Yeah. What are they good for? Absolutely nothing."

While you ponder this somewhat rhetorical question I leave you with a link to some more photos of the winter wonderland that was our capital city this weekend. Please note the lack of passable roads, but remember that its not the Minister's fault, sure he doesn't control the weather now, does he?

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2010-01-08T12:47:00.002Z

After yesterday's mid-afternoon foray into the polar conditions outside I was motivated to venture forth at night with a slightly better camera. Luckily I had outfitted for an excursion to the Arctic Circle last year so I felt slightly more prepared for the shock and awe that Mother Nature had awaiting me beyond the comfort of my sheep's-wool insulated walls.

Late in the afternoon as dusk fell a freezing fog crept in and blanketed much of the city, depositing a fine layer of snow over an already icy tableau. While the canal might not have been frozen solid enough for a Frost Fair, it was still rather nice.

More photos can be found here.

whiter than the snows of Hoth

2010-01-07T17:51:00.005Z

How cold is it in Dublin right now? Well, the thermometer says -4C and the Grand Canal is frozen solid in large stretches, so I'd say pretty damn cold.

More photos here, many thanks to the Very Understanding Girlfriend for the use of her camera.

On God, Mao and Pooh

2010-01-07T12:49:00.014Z

I recently spent some time shopping for a children's book on religion. As a) the only theologian most of my friends, or their friends, or their friends' friends have ever encountered and b) an unrepentant atheist, I seem to be considered a safe bet to ask any and all questions on matters of deities, spirituality and the inner mysteries of the Priory of Sion without fear of encouraging hordes of neatly dressed and well manicured young men from Utah to descend upon one's doorstep in search of glasses of water, a nice chat and one's immortal soul.

At a recent winter solstice party I was asked by two friends if I could recommend a book that would explain how Judaism, Christianity and Islam arose, the differences between them, and why people believe in one religion or god over another, all suitable for their five year old. Of course I instantly recommended Mircea Eliade's three volume work "A History of Religious Ideas", which despite Eliade's pre-War engagement in far-right Romanian politics and later view of the positive triumphalism of Christianity, is still an excellent place to start for an overview of Comparative Religion.

As you can see my grasp of the abilities of the average five year old is somewhat tenuous, but I take some solace in the fact that I did not also proffer my second choice of Hans Küng's slightly more dense tomes "Judaism", "Christianity" and the more recent and rather unexpectedly titled final volume, "Islam", a mere 2,456 combined pages of reading-on-the-bus Teutonic-y goodness.

Still, better than the time I tried to explain the concept of 'commuting' and 'work/life balance' to their child through the medium of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Taking their blank stares and forced smiles to heart I resolved to find something more suitable, and was somewhat surprised by the difficulty of this task. While there are many, many books on religion for children, they all seem to be on the subject of the right religion for children, as in "Mommy, why are our neighbours going to hell?", "Will Patches be taken in the Rapture too?", "What's the problem with Unitarians?" and so forth. Finding something from a purely academic, non-judgmental, non-proselytizing background that simply answered a child's questions on what religion was, why people believed in stuff and what stuff did they believe in, without labeling any of it as "wrong", "misguided" or "deviant" proved problematic, and for a while Küng was starting to edge back into the frame.

After far too much time immersed in the murky world of true-believers I finally found "The Story of Religion". An out-of-print book by the husband and wife writer/illustrator team of Betsy and Giulio Maestro, the creators of a series of children's books on such diverse subjects as 'how apples grow' and 'the moral justification of the use of violence as a political tool in the overthrowing of British colonial oppressors', this seemed much more up my street. I ordered the book and took a good look through to check the suitability of its content before presenting it last night to my somewhat incredulous friend, who accepted it with good grace and pleasure that almost masked his feelings of terror and "seriously dude I was just making polite conversation with you, you're creeping me out with the amount of time you've spent on this".

Job done.

Children's books are a tricky thing, balancing the authour's and/or parents' desire to educate with the ability of the child to grasp complex ideas, though apparently anthropomorphic animals and the occasional reference to poo help considerably. While engendering a positive and non-discriminatory worldview toward religions would not be the highest item on the list in my own Reeducation Camps (because, as Dawkins the Dog says, "all religions are wrong and stupid", isn't that right Billy?), the idea of imparting an ethic of sustainability and anti-consumerism in a child at an early age through reading, or at least attempting to combat the materialistic messaging that bombards them from all angles, is appealing.

While my friends are increasingly unlikely to allow me to continue to experiment with their child's intellectual development, I do have a similarly aged cousin who is probably due a Christmas/birthday/who-the-hell-are-you-and-why-are-you-sending-me-books present from their favourite Unkie (yes, even my cousins call me Unkie Dave, I'm sooooo old) and thus I will spend some time over the coming days investigating progressive, unashamedly anarcho-syndicalist or even just solid radical left/green children's literature, and if it does not exist I might just have a go at making my own.

In the mean time I leave you with an excerpt from The Mao of Pooh, a series of short children's tales encapsulating the wisdom of the little Red Book as experienced by a certain honey-loving bear and his revolutionary peasant friends, as written some years ago by Raj Patel and chums as part of their now-defunct post-Oxbridge online socialist journal, 'Voice of the Turtle':

Chapter 1 - "All reactionaries are paper tigers"

In which Pooh discovers the dual nature of his best friend Tigger

One day, Pooh Bear was wandering through One Hundred Acre Wood, when he came across his best friend Tigger.

"Let one hundred flowers bloom in One Hundred Acre Wood", Pooh said.

"My, what a lot of flowers that would be", said Tigger.

Scratching his tummy, Pooh felt that it was time for a little something.

"You wouldn't", Pooh asked in full throated solidarity, "have a little something for elevensies, would you Tigger?"

"But of course", replied Tigger. "I have -- and don't tell that Kanga, or Roo, or especially Eeyore -- a pot or two of Munny".

"Munny?" asked Pooh, a little confused by the idea of promisory notes.

"Yes! Pots of munny!"

"Um, is money sweet?"

"Sweeter than honey!", exclaimed Tigger, licking his lips in a predatory way.

"Goodness!" said Pooh, excited in a bear-discovers-something-sweeter-than-honey sort of way.

And so they set off for Tigger's house.

Imagine Pooh's surprise when Tigger proudly displayed his pots of money.

"Well, they're not quite pots," explained Tigger hastily. "They're futures on pots. And although they smell like paper at the moment, they'll smell much sweeter soon. Next month, the price of pots doing what they are, I'll have more pots than sense".

"How many pots will you have?" asked Pooh, discounting the future somewhat.

"Three", said Tigger.

And so it was that Pooh discovered that his friend Tigger was merely the representative of a reactionary class, and needed to be overthrown.

The lesson of the story was that from a long-term point of view, all reactionaries are paper tigers. It is not Tigger but Pooh as the embodiment of the will of the people who is really powerful.

Dances With Smurfs

2010-01-06T13:23:00.009Z

I finally went to see 'Dances With Smurfs' yesterday in the second biggest 3D cinema in Dublin. The weather was pretty bad, so I chose a Luas ride to Dundrum over a walk to O'Connell Street, and my frozen ears told me I made the right choice. I did, however, forget that schools are not back until next week, and the 16:40 showing that I went to ended up being an extend exercise in childminding.

I had a big discussion later last night with Tadhg and The Very Understanding Girlfriend (neither of whom chose to accompany me to the film) on state restriction of activity based on age vs parental responsibility, and despite many salient points raised by both I still believe that if a film is classified "Under twelves accompanied" there should be a maximum ratio of under-twelves to adults, as in the eighteen ten year-old girls sitting in the row in front of me really should have had more than one adult with them, not because of the content of the film, more because of that adult's inability to control them much to the determent of my initial viewing pleasure. Herding cats comes to mind.

Despite that initial hiccup however, 'Dance With Smurfs' managed to hold the attention of almost every child in the audience for almost the entire three hour duration, probably because of all the pretty colours, explosions and the 3D, which I have to admit blew me away. I haven't seen a 3D film in the cinema since Jaws 3D in 1983, aged ten, which, with regards to the subject of state imposed age restrictions, I definitely think was too young an age to be exposed to such horrendous film-making; its sheer awfulness permanently scarred my cinematic critical faculties, and no doubt contributed to my ability to stomach (but not enjoy) the oeuvre of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay.

For a pretty decent review, with spoilers, check out Mr Tim's post on Inessentials, but a few thoughts did occur to me. The first is that James Cameron has bought fairly heavily into James Lovelock's Gaia theory, so no doubt we can look forward to the Na'vi fully embracing nuclear power as their only credible source of future energy in the sequel, "Revenge of Pandora". The second is whether or not there is a direct correlation between the portrayal of environmental themes in over-the-top escapist fantasy blockbusters (Day After Tomorrow etc) and the decrease in the acceptance of Climate Change as either a) real or b) man-made in the general US population.

In 2007 77% of Americans believed in climate change. Today only 57% believe that climate change is real, and staggeringly only 36% believe that human activity is responsible. Rarely has one nation been so out of step with the rest of the world. Has the frequent mining of climate change as the subject for apocalyptic science fiction indelibly labeled it as "science fiction" in the minds of the US masses?

Given Cameron's twee assimilation of New Age spiritualism, Native-American-with-a-single-tear-rolling-down-their-cheek environmentalism and an anti-militarism message delivered with a blunt instrument into what is essentially a day-glow Pocahontas cartoon, will the ideas of genuine pacifism and sustainability be also further moved into the realms of day-glow cartoonism in the minds of the American public?

Despite all this, I really did enjoy the film. The plot is laughable, the acting (particularity Sam Worthington) execrably weak, the music is offensive in a way only achievable by having an X-Factor winner warble the theme music from Survivor in the style of Celine Dion while being accompanied by someone playing 'panpipes' on a Casio keyboard, and at times the pacing is a tad slow. None of this matters however, as long as you see it in 3D on the largest screen you can. Don't think of it as a film, and don't judge it on the same criteria you would a normal movie, think of it as a ride in an amusement park, and go for the sheer experience. Simply amazing.

Its even better than Jaws 3D.

An uncompleted project of political modernity

2010-01-05T14:07:00.010Z

I have spent the first few days of the New Year reading Fintan O'Toole's 'Ship of Fools', his account of the arrogance, stupidity and corruption that created our current economic crises, and judging by the book's place in the top three of the Irish bestsellers' list over the last few weeks I am not the only one to be doing so.

While our government and their pet economists may try and portray our woes as being part of the wider global economic downturn, it is clear that successive years of corrupt and suspect practices on the part of the Irish financial and property sectors encouraged and supported by successive corrupt and suspect Fianna Fail governments are largely to blame for our unique downfall. O'Toole examines the culture, relationships and social attitudes that created this perfect storm of criminal ignorance, which he summarizes neatly in his conclusion:

"A primitive, pre-modern land hunger created the new feudalism in which the elite puffed up the price of land and inflated a fatal property boom. The political system, embodied most thoroughly in Fianna Fail, remained rooted in the Tammany Hall politics of the nineteenth-century Irish-American Democratic Party machines. Its interest in power and patronage to the virtual exclusion of all else meant that politics, when they needed to be imbued with ideas and ambition, were still defined by what 'one of the most senior figures in [Bertie] Ahern's administration' told the political journalist Pat Leahy: 'Politics is keeping enough people happy at the right time and taking shit for the rest of the time.' A system of patronage and personal connection continued to operate, from the constituent being 'looked after' by the TD to the donor being 'looked after' by the minister.

In business and especially in banking, there remained an anarchic attitude to law and morality, rooted both in a colonial habit of playing games with authority and in a religious culture that saw sex, rather than money, as the currency of sin. The bourgeoisie continued with its nineteenth-century attitude of valuing the professions above all, and certainly above science, maths and technology. And the heroic powers of denial, the ability to know and not know at the same time, that had been formed by the peculiar circumstances of Irish history, remained remarkably intact. Together these five forces created a crazed property boom, a reckless banking system, a lack of interest in the technologies that had created the boom, and a political and public mentality in which none of these realities could be grasped." - Fintan O'Toole, 'Ship of Fools', pp 214-215

Over the Christmas break my attention was drawn by Ms Léan (she of the String Revolution) to a video of Fintan O'Toole at this Autumn's TASC conference. I was supposed to attend the conference myself but unfortunately there was the little matter of the simultaneous Green Convention on the revised Program for Government; given the way that worked out (both personally and for the Nation as a whole) in hindsight my time would probably have been better spent at the TASC event.

Still, the good people at TASC saw fit to record the event and upload each of the speakers' sections to the tubes of the interweb, and that of O'Toole is essentially a summary of his conclusions in 'Ship of Fools', specifically his thesis that at its heart Ireland remains rooted in the nineteenth-century. In the lecture he argues that:

"There is a sense in which Ireland went from being pre-modern to post modern with nothing in between… we went from an uncompleted political modernity, in terms of the construction of a national democracy, we didn't get it, without the ideas of human rights, for example, without ideas of a moral community, all of those notions that had to be constructed by other Western societies as a result of the disasters of the Second World War, the Welfare State, ideas of social responsibility, ideas of rooting democracy in society, those things didn't happen to us because we were outside of the frame of the 1950s reconstruction of Europe. So we had an uncompleted project of modernity and as a result there were factors within Irish political culture and Irish social culture which remained rooted in the 19th century and remained unreconstructed."

This is a very interesting argument, that because as a nation (as opposed to a very small group of individuals) we have never had to fight for our current democracy, or reconstruct our economic, social and political systems from the ashes of their destruction, we have never matured beyond the socio-economic norms and aspirations that we inherited from our colonial past upon independence. The lack of any real left/right dichotomy in contemporary or historical Irish politics and the sense of 'absolute impunity' that accompanies those in power (either politically or economically) also contribute strongly to what he perceives as a landscape of neo-feudalism.

Written as a "polemical, rather than a historical or academic work", 'Ship of Fools' draws from publicly available material, the findings of tribunals and the works of other journalists, so while some accusations of "well why didn't you say so at the time" have been leveled at this and other similar works by Shane Ross and Matt Cooper, in truth O'Toole has been arguing against the excesses of Fianna Fail's neo-liberal failings for many years and has highlighted these findings and reports on numerous occasions, usually to deaf ears. In fact he draws attention to the seemingly unique Irish political tradition of candidates for office consistently gaining more votes after they have been found guilty of corruption than before their skulduggery was disclosed:

"Civic morality is not absent in Ireland, but it is marginal and fragile. The political system is tribal, local and clientelist - there is a strong impulse to vote, not for a decent person or a national leader, but for someone who will successfully manipulate the system on behalf of both constituents individually and the constituency as a whole. If morality comes into the equation it is often through the vague but powerful feeling that a lack of it might make for a more effective local champion." - Fintan O'Toole, 'Ship of Fools', p 33

Thus we cannot simply assign the blame for our woes on the coat-hooks of our political and economic feudal lords, there is a very strong sense that our own internal corruption has enabled their behavior.

The outcome of all this is O'Toole's call for a movement of national renewal, embodied by the birth of a Second Republic, encompassing a change in "public morality, in the sense of sustainability" (best summarized as "people knowing when to stop"), a "sweeping reform of the institutions of government" including the transfer of real power to local government, a reduction in size of the Dail and "a realignment of the political party system" away from the traditional centre-right/centre-right non-choice of Irish political populism, and finally "the articulation of a social vision" to replace the Me Fein, get-rich-quick amorality of the Celtic Tiger years. All stirring stuff really that echoes calls made here and elsewhere in recent months.

One hopes that the prominence this book enjoys in the bestsellers' list of late is an indication of the number of angry people across the nation who, like me, are nodding their heads in agreement with O'Toole and, occasionally like me, might be motivated to get up out of their seats and do something about it.

The fact that it has consistently been pipped to the top spot by the autobiography of a fictional man-potato that graces the front of a crisp packet is somewhat less heartening.

Watch the TASC video below and read the book, it really is worth a few hours of your time.

Urbi et Orbi nos transporto insumptuosus

2010-01-04T14:37:00.008Z

Yes, that is the Pope advertising his new CD on the back of an Amazon box, just delivered to my door this morning.

If Super Saver Shipping is the new Indulgences, I have surely earned my own "Get-out-of-Purgatory-Free" card by now. I might even have a spare one to share, for a nominal price of course.

If the Pope can monetize my Wish List, so can I.

Amen.

2009 in Television

2010-01-04T12:45:00.009Z

I don't have a television. When we moved into our house a number of years ago we took the decision not to bring the television; we had been using an old Dell monitor that had a TV tuner which subsequently sat in a box unloved and untouched in a corner of our office for many months until we finally gave it away to some friends. We thought that it would be nice when arranging our furniture in the blank canvas of our front room not to have a television as the focal point, and it is.

We do, however, have a projector, and about six feet of blank white wall to serve as a screen. This works well, as unless it is switched on you never notice it. Unfortunately once you do switch it on the air of smug superiority that has been conferred upon you by house-guests marveling at your ability to function in this modern word without a television evaporates in the warm white glow that bathes the room reflected, as it is, off of six feet of blank white wall.

Still, the point of all this is that although technically we do have the ability to watch television programs, this ability is strongly curtailed by the level of ambient light in the room, for it is not a very powerful projector. Any amount of daylight creeping round the curtains reduces the viewing experience to one akin to watching a zebra race on a snowy day on a black and white TV with glaucoma, while wearing sun glasses. Thus in summer months the maximum viewing time available is normally no more than an hour or two on any given day, and despite a significant increase in the hours of darkness during winter we still seem to be able to tolerate no more than an hour or so of viewing on any given day.

Given these restricted hours and the fact that we tend to record programs for later viewing rather than watching anything live, you would imagine that my viewing choices would be a veritable cavalcade of documentaries, political exposés, hard-hitting journalistic investigations and other such worthy items. Sadly though, my television viewing tends to be pure escapism, for in truth I get enough righteous angst, wrath and ire from my reading, writing, breathing, talking, walking, fist-shaking, out-the-window-at-the-kids-in-the-street-shouting and other daily mundane actives ending in -ing. I like my sci-fi and I am happy to, as the Very Understanding Girlfriend says, reclaim the shame.

All of this is a rather roundabout way of prepping the scene to mention two rather good series that I watched this year, 'Being Human' on BBC3 and 'Misfits' on E4.

'Being Human' was a six-part series charting the relationships between a vampire, werewolf and ghost that all share a flat in Bristol. The vampire and werewolf just want to try and live normal lives and face a constant battle to overcome their inner natures, and the ghost tries to come to terms with her death and separation from her fiancee, who to add to her torment owns the flat they all live in and frequently pops round with his new girlfriend. Its not glamorous, its all a bit dingy and grotty, and does a far more believable job of portraying supernatural characters trying to preserve their humanity in the face of an existential and physical crises than comparable US dramas (True Blood being the most obvious comparison). It is also genuinely funny, but without the campy playing-to-the-fourth-wall of Buffy.

If 'Being Human' is the anti-'True Blood', then 'Misfits' is the anti-'Heroes'. Another six-parter, the series follows five juvenile delinquents coming to terms with having super-powers while working through court-ordered community service. The power each gains is a manifestation of their own base personality, the shy guy that nobody likes can turn invisible, the insecure girl can hear other people's thoughts etc, and the show is more about the development of their relationships with each other, and finding a new level of respect for themselves (oh, and hiding the bodies of a couple folks they murder). Shot in a style reminiscent of Charlie Brooker's excellent zombie/Big Brother mashup "Dead Set" its dark, graphic and very, very funny.

Apart from the strong writing, gritty realism and deft execution of intriguing ideas, what these two shows have in common are great performances from a number of talented Irish actors. Dublin-born Aidan Turner plays the vampire 'Mitchell' in 'Being Human', in which fellow Dubliner Sinead Keenan (most recently seen in the last two David Tennant episodes of 'Doctor Who') also has a recurring part, and arguably the central character in 'Misfits', the distinctly annoying Nathan, is brilliantly played by Portlaoise-born Robert Sheehan, the bastard offspring of Cillian Murphy and Tommy Tiernan.

In recent years much has been made of the British invasion of US TV shows, with British actors taking lead roles in everything from 'House' to "The Wire', but in almost all these cases they are forced to sublimate their national identity and adopt at times ridiculous Mid-Atlantic and other faux-American accents. In contrast Turner and Sheehan manage to revel in their Irishness, without it ever being used as a plot hook on which to hang a coat of Oirishness. This is a testament to both the strength of the writers and their own ability as actors.

The new series of 'Being Human' starts on January 10th on BBC Three, series one is available on DVD. Misfits is also available on DVD, a second series has been greenlit, but as of yet no air date has been released.

Ah, to think of how grumpy I would be without such escapist fantasy to sooth my troubled soul. I think the survivors would envy the dead.

As an aside if you are interested in television and other "cultural" imports from across the water, you really should check out Mr Tim's rather excellent pop culture blog, Inessentials. There may be a little too much 'Glee' for the average person's taste (as in, any 'Glee' is a little too much), but the writing is really spot on.

Links
'Being Human' official website
'Misfits' official website

Don't bring a gun to a snowball fight

2010-01-02T15:32:00.007Z

Ah, the air is thick with a pungent fresh aroma that can only be classified as New Year Smell, a blanket of slush partially obscures all the sins and filth of the previous decade and we march boldly forward into what for this grumpy curmudgeon is indelibly labeled "the Future".

New Year's Eve was a more social event than in many recent years, with both food and good company at multiple remote locations, culminating in an impressive snowball fight that began with scarcely fifteen minutes left on the 2009 clock and ended with but seconds to spare before the future became the present and the present became the past.

Thus far our shiny new decade is still looking remarkably like our tarnished old decade, the skies yet undarkened by flying cars, our bleached white skulls relatively uncrushed under the feet of our robotic overlords, and nothing wonderful has happened as of yet in the frozen oceans of Europa.

Still, 9 years 363 days to go to we hit the cyberpunk years of the 2020s, and a lot can happen in that time.

I'm Unkie Dave, and I'm a newsaholic

2009-12-28T18:26:00.011Z

On Stephen's Day TV3 reported that Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan had been diagnosed with cancer. This report was picked up and commented upon by a number of political blogs, including Irish Election. In a subsequent post on Irish Election a number of commentators speculated upon possible courses of action should the report prove to be true, would the Minister resign, when would he resign, and who would be most likely to take over from him, all while both the Minister and his department refused to comment on the matter to mainstream media.

Surprisingly (or rather, surprising to me) there was considerable backlash in the comments section on the appropriateness of such speculation in the face of what is a personal tragedy, especially at Christmas, and consequently the speculative post was deleted.

This casts an interesting light into the murky area of what is and is not newsworthy, what levels of privacy public representatives are entitled to expect and what exactly are the boundaries of the public's right to information concerning elected officials, especially in our current era of instant access and real-time news.

I have no comment to make on the Minister or the appropriateness of either the original news reports or subsequent speculation. On the public reaction to the timing of these reports and speculation however I will say that those reporting are neither to be blamed or praised, for all they are doing is feeding our unquenchable thirst for immediacy. The same hand that we grasp tight for live-blogging Cop15 or leaking the holder of the Christmas Number 1 an hour before the official results are reported cannot then be slapped away for running with a story on the health of the man in charge of our economy, it is only doing what we have demanded of it.

In his book 'Flat Earth News' Nick Davies documents the pressure the mainstream media is under to report the news first before any of their rivals, with quality and fact-checking frequently sacrificed in the interests of speed. He calls this worship of speed within the media 'churnalism':

"You can see the clash of traditional journalism and the new high-speed churnalism in the official BBC guide which is given to all staff on News Interactive. On the one hand, it urges: 'Your story MUST be accurate, impartial, balanced and uphold the values of BBC News... NEVER publish anything that you do not understand, that is speculation or inadequately sourced.' And then, as if there were no contradiction at all: 'Get the story up as fast as you can... We encourage a sense of urgency - we want to be first.' It then goes on to recite the five-minute target for breaking news."
- 'Flat Earth News', Nick Davies, p70-71

We live in an age where we are information consumers; information is a commodity that is traded, exchanged, bartered, horded and stolen, and our appetite for consumption is insatiable. We demand the instant and immediate, and our suppliers are only too happy to accede to our demands.

But in recent weeks I have been reflecting on the worth, if any, of real-time information; if the information I consume has no direct bearing on my own situation at that exact moment, or if I have no ability to positively affect the situation with which the information is concerned, what value is the immediacy of that information to me? Of what use to me is the instant knowledge of a failed bombing on a plane a thousand miles away? Of what value is the immediate reporting of the death of an actress in California or unresearched speculation on China's role in the failure of Cop15? Why in any of these situations is fast better than slow, when I have no ability to affect these events directly or indirectly, nor do they have any immediate effect on me?

In 1991 at the dawn of the first Gulf War, before embedded reporters and the death of print media sacrificed on the altars of 24-hr rolling news stock, before Twitter and the indexing of real-time results from social-network status updates, before the birth of Google or even the widespread adoption or awareness of the internet itself, Paul Virilio said in interview:

"Immediacy, ubiquity, omnivoyance are the elements of the politics of tomorrow. For the present, nobody controls real time. Nobody seriously poses the questions of its effects... All distances are reduced to zero. This global reduction will have fateful consequences for the social being, for morality. It is time to found an ecology of the media.

...The threat is that of fusion and confusion. No politics is possible at the scale of the speed of light. Politics depends upon having time for reflection. Today, we no longer have time to reflect, the things that we see have already happened. And it is necessary to react immediately. Is a real time democracy possible? An authoritarian politics, yes. But what defines democracy is the sharing of power. When there is not time to share, what will be shared? Emotions.

A change in our relationship to time has recently taken place. Before, we had the past, the present and the future. Today, the choice is nothing more than that between deferred time and real time. Humanity no longer lives in the present, but rather in the tele-presence of the world. On the level of morality, of aesthetics, of ethics, major political questions immediately arise."
- 'Desert Screen', Paul Virilio, p32-33

Beyond the Public Sphere and on a purely personal level, why do I need to know that my friend in New Haven is having a coffee right now, or my sister's cat in London is asleep on the chair? Real-time remarks on Facebook and Twitter give the illusion of intimacy but in reality are a barrier to true dialogue; lulled as I am by the false sense of communication that comes from passively consuming status updates I invariably fail to reach out and have direct and genuine contact with family and friends.

But as Charlton Heston might have said, "Tweets don't kill communication, people kill communication". It is the way in which we use these technologies to feed our information consumption that is destroying true social interaction, eroding cognitive analysis and disrupting the deliberative decision making process. On any given morning before I have even got out of bed I have skimmed through 200-odd posts from RSS feeds and checked Facebook, Twitter and a forum or two that I belong to, all on my iPhone. I am seemingly addicted to information consumption, and judging by the pervasive demand for real-time information from all areas of our society, I am not alone.

Thanks to the combination of the seemingly infinite availability of information and our own inability to self-regulate our individual consumption, we are rapidly approaching what I call 'Peak News', where the level of information that we consume on a daily basis surpasses our ability to process that information to any meaningful degree.

I have been debating how best to stave off this Peak on a personal level, starting with a cull in the new year of my online addictions. First on the chopping block are my feeds, if something is worth knowing about it will still be worth knowing about an hour, a day or a week later. Next up are my anti-social networks, Twitter first, then Facebook, they serve no purpose other than as a prop to my delusional belief that I remain in close contact with those outside the 3km radius in which my life revolves. I have yet to decide on the forums, for at least there some semblance of actual dialogue occurs, even if the actual value of that dialogue is somewhat questionable. I've also taken out a number of subscriptions to offline, real-world, dead-tree, peer-reviewed journals, looking for a quality and depth of information rather than quantity and speed.

I have no interest in cutting myself off completely from the flow of global information and live hermit-like on the Skelligs of blissful ignorance, rather I want to move away from my current paradoxical situation of reactionary passivity, where I rage at the immediate and yet do nothing about it, and progress to a measured position of knowledge-based activity and proper communication.

I'll still be pretty grumpy though.

2009 in Music

2009-12-27T13:46:00.025Z

Well, since everyone else seems to be doing it maybe its time for me to take a moment and reflect on the year in music.

Music release of the year:

The Warp20 Boxset. No longer available but still acquirable in part as three separate CDs (Chosen, Unheard, Recreated), I have waxed lyrical about it already; the most stunning box set I have ever seen.

Find of the Year

Plaid - Tekkonkinkreet, a 2006 Japanese only release, the soundtrack to a manga film and my favourite Plaid album since 2001's 'Double Figure'. Also well worth checking out is Plaid's 2008 Japanese soundtrack, also for Michael Arias for his live-action, non-Manga, Heaven's Door.

Albums of the Year

The xx - xx, dismissed by my sister after she saw them live as "a bunch of moody teenagers", nonetheless I can't seem to stop listening to the album. I may get sick of this soon though as a) it seems to be on everybody's top 10 list and b) I feel slightly dirty listening to music made by kids born in the nineties.

Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue. While most folks think of Clark, Grizzly Bear or Battles when they talk about contemporary Warp sounds, Bibio and Hudson Mohawke are what get me excited. Also check out Vignetting the Compost, Bibio's earlier release this year on Mush.

Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport, much more musical than last year's 'Street Horrsing', and by musical I mean 'not as much of a root canal for your brain performed with the Black and Decker drill you just got for Christmas'. Like a more commercial 'Matmos' in parts, but in a good way, full of loverly rich sounding ten-minute tracks.

The Duckworth Lewis Method - The Duckworth Lewis Method, its an album about cricket, by two Irish guys. One of my proudest musical moments is getting Neil Hannon to sing 'My Lovely Horse' in Toad's Place in New Haven. This album is just like that, a guilty pleasure. Did I mention its about cricket?

Tosca - No Hassle. See, I like the downtempo Vienna sound, have done since the subliminal 'K&D Sessions' and this dreamy and slightly sleepy release, while not ground breaking, occupies a happy niche in my listening this year, if admittedly as mostly background music.

Honourable mentions go to Nosaj Thing with 'Drift' and Tim Hecker's 'An Imaginary Country', and my favourite Irish release of the year is Love Rhino's Tumatakuru on Alphabet Set, well worth checking out live around Dublin in the new year.

Interestingly enough according to my aggregated last.fm Scrobbles and iTunes playcounts for 2009 what I listened to most over the year is not necessarily what I consider to be the best releases of the year. Tosca's 'No Hassle' occupied a lot of my time at the start of the year, even though its not the most exciting release in recent years from the Viennese duo. The appearance of Royskopp's 'Junior' on my 'most played' chart surprised me because its really not that good, and I had forgotten all about it until today, and Fuck Buttons and Hudson Mowhawke don't even make it into the top 20!

The most played newbies on Unkie Dave's Jukebox:

1 - Tosca - No Hassle
2 - Plaid - Heaven's Door
3 - Plaid - Tekkonkinkreet
4 - Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue
5 - Various - Warp20 Unheard
6 - The xx - xx
7 - Squarepusher - Solo Electric Base
8 - Royskopp - Junior
9 - The Duckworth Lewis Method - The Duckworth Lewis Method
10 - Love Rhino – Tumatakuru

and to all a good night

2009-12-24T12:12:00.004Z

The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, as is the norm this time of year. Although I am retired/self-employed/chronically-underemployed/a-bit-of-a-grumpy-waster I still seem to be invited to a lot of Christmas parties, despite my lack of a) a company that I work for to sponsor such festivities or b) friends that still find my overwhelming absence of optimism and good cheer about current national political and economic events endearing.

Within the last two days alone I have been to three separate get-togethers which is just about at the limit of my current social skills. All three events surprisingly were a mixture of good friends I see regularly, friends I haven't seen for a while, folks I used to work with and complete strangers that I fear will mistake my unique display of Christmas cheer and goodwill to all humbugs as a plaintive cry for help and attempt to hug me while simultaneously calling social services. These parties make for interesting Venn diagrams.

There also comes the dreaded and inevitable ice-breaking question of "so, what do you do/are you doing/have you been doing for a living?". In the past I have said that I am retired (but not in the replicant sense of the word), taking a career break, working on some exciting new projects that are really just about to take off and my favourite, 5-to-10 for aggravated assault at a Christmas party with a cheese log. You can almost hear the touchtones as they speed-dial social services, can't you?

This year I gave up and just went with, "I'm standing on Grafton Street with a giant foam leprechaun head on, waving at tourists. The hours are rough, but I'm my own boss and the pay is all in cash". Again with the speed-dialing. But still easier than the real answer which is "attempting to incite social revolution, albeit somewhat haphazardly".

So, with my real mission in mind I set about planting the seeds of change in the minds of those around me, a process best conducted before you all hit Eddie Rockets at 4am when your elevator pitching skills will be somewhat less than then optimal. Conversations ranged from my cunning plan to revitalize the Irish Sugar Beet industry with a board member of a major agribusiness group (partial success, he nodded at the right moments, asked interesting follow-up questions and will no doubt steal my idea and then claim never to have met me*) to a proposal to establish a crowd-sourced social entrepreneurial fund (mixed success, regional head of US Internet Giant A loved it, we're meeting to discuss it in the new year; regional head of US Internet Giant B couldn't understand why anyone would just give money away, he will be meeting with three ghosts later on this evening). Not bad for a guy who spends his days wearing a foam leprechaun head**.

While none of these ideas are as radical or as potentially effective as sharpening a few sticks on both ends outside the Dail, you need to tailor your message to suit your audience.

Now with my tolerance for dealing with the Other at dangerously low levels, and my communicative and other associated verbal interaction skills operating solely on impulse engines, I am off to spend the next thirty or so hours in the company of my family. While this may seem idyllic to some of you, it must be pointed out that my good grace, enthusiasm for festive cheer and social cohesion abilities are all genetic traits in my family, and dominant ones at that.

Happy Christmas everyone!

* technically this is in fact the Very Understanding Girlfriend's cunning plan, but then again, I have never met this woman before in my life your honour.

** At no time has Unkie Dave ever worn a foam leprechaun head for a living. It is purely an occasional hobby.

Its a two party system, whatcha gonna do?

2009-12-20T13:19:00.016Z

According to Alain Badiou, philosophy is "first and foremost this: the invention of new problems". When asked why philosophers in general do not comment on contemporary political situations, he replied:

"...in standard parliamentarianism, in its usual functioning, the majority and the opposition are commensurable. There is obviously a common measure between the majority and the opposition, which means you do not have a relation that is not a relation, you do not have the paradoxical relation. You have differences, naturally, but these differences do not amount to a paradoxical relationship; on the contrary, they constitute a law-governed relationship. This is easily grasped: since sooner or later (this is what is referred to as 'democratic alternation') the opposition will replace the majority, or take its place, it is indeed necessary for there to be a common measure between the two. If you don't have a common measure, you will not be able to substitute the one with the other. So the terms are commensurable, and to the extent that they are commensurable you do not have a situation or radical expectation. What's more, you do not have a truly radical choice: the decision is a decision between nuances, between small differences - as you know. Elections are generally decided by the small group of the hesitant, those who do not possess a stable pre-formed opinion. People who have a genuine commitment constitute fixed blocks; then there is a small group of people in what is called the centre, who sometimes go one way, sometimes the other. And you can see why a decision taken by people whose principle characteristic is hesitation is a very particular decision; it is not a decision taken by decisive people, it is a decision of the undecided, or of those who have not decided and who will decide for reasons of opportunity, or last-minute reasons. So the function of choice in its true breadth is absent. There is proximity, rather than distance. The election does not create a gap, it is the rule, it creates the realization of the rule. Finally you do not have the hypothesis of a veritable event, you do not have the feeling of exception, because you are instead in the presence of the feeling of the institution, of the regular functioning of institutions. So the question of elections for the philosopher is a typical matter of opinion, which is to say that it doesn't have to do with the incommensurable, with radical choice, distance or exception. As a phenomenon of opinion, it does not constitute a sign for the creation for problems." - 'Philosophy in the Present', p17-19

which is possibly the most long-winded and convoluted way of saying "meh!" that I have come across in some time. Badiou, incidentally, has not voted since 1968.

à propos de la, I give you this little gem from the ever apt xkcd:

Free, as in beer

2009-12-18T18:20:00.018Z

In these somewhat gloomy and depressed times, commentators from An Taoiseach down have urged the good citizenry of this country to stop all the complaining and moaning and for once try and focus on the positive and good in our humble society. It is thus rather heartening to be able to report that one plucky young upstart of an Irish company has managed to break through the cycle of begrudgery, doom-mongering and outright cynicism that dogs our fair nation and come up with a solution to the dual global crises of peak oil and climate change, while incidentally violating the fundamental law of conservation of energy.

I am of course referring to Dublin based Steorn, who in 2006 announced to the world that they had identified a process to produce free energy with no emissions, using magnets. Unfortunately their public demonstration failed because, um, the heat produced by lights illuminating the demonstration interfered with Steorn's equipment, and then an independent panel of experts invited by Steorn to examine the process failed to validate their claims. These little hiccups let loose a barrage of abuse from the mainstream scientific community, who poured scorn on the efforts of Steorn to usher in a new era of limitless green power.

Undaunted by all this negative karma, the lads are back, having tweaked the process a bit and now with a new panel of experts to examine their claims, and what's more the whole thing is being livestreamed. Even better, if you are in Dublin and have some time on your hands you can pop along and watch the whole thing in person.

Well coincidentally enough I live in Dublin, and I have an awful lot of time on my hands, so you can probably guess what happened next.

At the instigation of the inquisitive Mr Rhino, I journeyed down to the Waterways Interpretive Centre on the Grand Canal Basin to join him this very afternoon and as they say, put their manifesto to the testo.

What greets you inside is a perspex stand with three of Steorn's Orbo machines arranged at differing levels, with a number of web cams pointing at them. Each machine consists of a rechargable battery powering a series of electro-magnets. The electro-magnets are situated around a rotating wheel embedded with magnets, the rotation of which is caused by the interaction of the electromagnets and the embedded magnets. Now, here comes the science, for the rotation of the wheel produces electrical power which is then fed back into the rechargable battery, recharging it. So far, so good, but what Steorn then claim is that through their process, which is never fully explained, more energy is produced from the spinning wheel than is used to power the electro-magnets that cause it to spin, so in effect the rechargable battery will never significantly discharge and the wheel will remain in motion, um, perpetually.

We had a chat with some of the Steorn staff, who were in the process of setting up an area for rigorous testing and measuring of effects, all due to start this evening and screened live on their website. CEO Sean McCarthy was pottering about in the background but we didn't get a chance to talk with him directly, however we did get free Steorn t-shirts, which was nice. The demonstration is part of their public launch which opens up their technology to third parties wishing to license it.

While they wouldn't let us into their engineering room, the folks we talked with were keen to push their new Knowledge Development Base, a snip at only €325 for a developer license that will let you find out exactly what the Orbo technology is, and how to use it. Pretty damn cheap for unlimited free zero-emission energy if you ask me.

Now I'm not a physicist, in fact the extent of my understanding of physics allows me to reject the notion that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy us all while simultaneously finding it plausible that the Higgs Boson is reaching back in time and sabotaging the LHC to prevent its own creation. Not bad for an atheist theologian, I say. However when confronted by three spindizzies that purportedly violate a number of laws of thermodynamics created by a company that was previously a webdesign firm and creator of e-commerce sites, you can forgive me for being a little skeptical and calling shenanigans on the whole thing.

The little boy in me really wants Steorn to be something real, that we can bolt on a few of their Orbo machines around the city and lift the whole thing off into space and go exploring the stars, or, equally plausibly, sort out all the planet's energy and environmental problems. Sadly though I'm a 36 year old grown-up and the whole thing smacks of a giant viral marketing campaign for some sort of online business.

Which of course I'm feeding into by posting about this.

Click on the above photos for much larger and higher resolution images. Additional photos galore can be found here. Tinfoil hats are extra.

On TASC and taxes

2009-12-16T16:35:00.016Z

Continuing with the theme of democracy and debate within Ireland's Public Sphere, I received an interesting email this afternoon from TASC, the progressive think-tank, on their analysis of the budget.

TASC is a fascinating group that definitely is at the forefront of the Irish Public Sphere, bringing together academics, politicians, trade unionists, journalists, activists and even writers such as Colm Tobin, and has been responsible for some of the best publications in recent years on the state of democracy and equality in contemporary Ireland.

In the email and on the subject of the budget they write:

"TASC notes that, in 2010, the savings made by cutting Social Welfare will be almost exactly the same as the spend on tax breaks for landlords (SW saving = €809 million in a full year, landlords tax breaks = €782 million in a full year)"

and that:

"Tax breaks for landlords cannot be justified either on economic efficiency grounds (since Ireland has a surplus of empty housing units, and the rental sector is not a job-creating sector) or on equality grounds (since they disproportionately benefit higher earners).”

This follows on from an excellent piece in yesterday's Irish Times from Fintain O'Toole, who chairs the TASC advisory board. He writes that:

"...if tax breaks on personal income and corporation tax were reduced to average EU levels, their cost to the exchequer would fall from €7.4 billion to €2.2 billion – a saving of €5.2 billion (We are spending three times as much on tax breaks on personal income and seven times as much on corporate income as the EU average.)"

He then counters the Government argument that the top earners in the country are paying the highest rate of tax:

"According to accountants KPMG, the current effective tax rate (including PRSI) for someone earning the equivalent of $100,000 in Ireland is just 34 per cent and for someone on $300,000 it is 44 per cent. The constant citation of rates of 54 or even 57 per cent is simple (but highly effective) propaganda"

Depressing as this analysis is, historically this is just the tip of the tax-avoidance iceberg. Back in August the Revenue Commissioners reported on the results of the 2006 and 2007 Finance Act that removed some of the tax reliefs introduced by successive Fianna Fail governments since 1997, and according to the Irish Times:

"Studies by the Revenue Commissioners in successive years showed that a significant number of the country’s highest 400 earners had used the reliefs to minimise their tax payments to below 10 per cent of the income.

The 2006 and 2007 Finance Act introduced measures which were designed to ensure that all those with an income over €500,00 would pay an effective rate of 20 per cent in tax.

The department analysis shows that the 214 high-income individuals with an income of €500,000 or more who availed of tax reliefs paid an average effective tax rate of 20.8 per cent in 2007.

As a result of the measures, the Exchequer received an additional €34 million in revenue, representing a 129 per cent increase on the tax paid by this cohort.

Some 20 of these people would not have paid any tax at all in 2007 if the new restrictions had not been introduced. The majority of these would have been artists, writers or composers.

For a further 225 people with incomes of between €250,000 and €500,000, the increases in tax-take was tiered up to 20 per cent as the income increased. Their effective tax rate almost doubled from 7.2 per cent of income to 13.6 per cent, resulting in an additional €5.8 million in revenue for the Exchequer."

The simple fact of the matter is that the tax legislation in this country is one of the most unequal in Europe, and if the wealthiest 1% paid their fair share of tax, or even paid tax at the same rate as those on the average industrial wage, then the level of cuts in the current budget would be completely unnecessary. While I am a strong proponent of the introduction of a third tax bracket of at least 48% for income of above €100K, there is simply no point in fighting for this proposal until the entire tax system itself is reformed to remove the cornucopia of exemptions and reliefs that would render this higher tax rate mere window dressing.

The above graph compares the value of existing tax breaks with welfare cuts introduced in the most recent budget, and comes from TASC's Post Budget analysis that can be downloaded from here. It's also well worth checking out their website and regularly updated blog.

Its always good to have some actual verifiable data and the occasional bit of peer reviewed analysis to back up one's wrath and ire-filled rants.

More thoughts on Ireland's Public Sphere

2009-12-16T12:38:00.005Z

Got a really nice book from the Very Understanding Girlfriend yesterday, "Philosophy in the Present", a dialogue between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek on the tricky little question of whether or not philosophy (and philosophers) should intervene in current affairs and contemporary world events. I'm looking forward to reading it in the coming days not least because both philosophers are ones whose work I have only familiarity with through secondary sources.

Although based on a series of discussions at the Institut Français in Vienna, the concept of philosophers and other intellectuals engaging in the Public Sphere is one that has a long tradition in French society, and in his preface the editor, Peter Engelemann, makes reference to François Mitterrand and his habit of inviting philosophers to meet with him and discuss the events of the day during his extensive Presidency. Regardless of how much an influence these discussions had on Mitterand's policies, they fact that they took place at all signify something very much out of step with contemporary politics.

"The times when what philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault or Jean-François Lyotard had to say about contemporary events, or the suggestions they would make for the improvement of things, were regarded as important, belonging to the past. Today, even the impersonators of philosophers who displaced philosophers in the 1970s have themselves been replaced by entertainers and models, by footballers and boxers." 'Philosophy in the Present', p viii

The thought of Biffo extending regular invitations to a group of philosophers and writers and drawing upon their ideas and arguments as he shapes public policy is so implausible as to not even merit an attempt at satire, but sadly he is not alone in his anti-intellectualism.

I read with some alarm yesterday of Tory Leader David Cameron's praise for Simon Cowell, saying "There probably is something we can learn in politics [from him]", and the subsequent reports of Cowell's plan for an X-Factor style televised Vox Pop wherein political issues of the day would be discussed and voted on by the British Public, with a hot-line to Number 10 so that the Prime Minister could phone in live on air and explain why he shouldn't be voted off that week.

Not exactly Badiou and Žižek really, is it?

One of the main problems with Irish politics is its dynastic nature, seats are handed down from father to son and husband to wife. An Taoiseach Brian Cowen inherited his father's seat upon his death, the young Biffo was only 24 at the time. An Tánaiste Mary Coughlan inherited her seat from her father upon his death when she was only 22. Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan inherited his seat from his father upon his father's death, and the list goes on. In fact for a sizable portion of our political establishment the only skill they seem to have brought with them to political life was how to be the child of a politician. Very few have any experience or understanding of life outside the political bubble.

Given this dearth of real world experience one would imagine that our political masters would on occasion feel the need to consult with those outside the bubble. Barring Brian Lenihan's disastrously messaged GarlicGate meetings with economist-to-the-people David McWilliams, such reality checks are conspicuous by their absence.

With a Public Sphere that rarely rises above commenting on the hairstyles of asynchronous warbling twins on UK talent shows, a private sphere of oligarchs that systematically destroyed the economy of a nation and yet remain seemingly irreproachable and a sphere of Public Authority so inbred that televised Dail debates are often indistinguishable from the closing page of Animal Farm, as one looks from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again and it is impossible to say which is which, it is little wonder that our country is in the state it is in.

At this stage even following the advice of entertainers and models, footballers and boxers could hardly be more detrimental than the course we are on.

Good news for the Sunday Indo then.

Copenhagen week one

2009-12-12T12:14:00.009Z

While following the coverage of the Copenhagen Summit this week a few things have annoyed me and a few things have inspired me.

From the "you're not helping" file comes the green aliens photo op used to accompany most mainstream media reports on the Conference's first few days. Media ops like this are a staple of any large conference, essentially the global media keep to themselves in a private media-only room segregated from the rest of the conference with easy access to broadband, coffee, food and beer and where all stories are written and filed. The press do not like to venture forth from this bubble, and so activists normally bring the story to them by staging photo-friendly actions at the entrance to the media room itself. The press dutifully trot out in a scrum, film the protest, then return 60 seconds later to their safe and secure bubble to file their story before hitting the bar. Job done. Its just a pity that the first of the actions is so cringworthy and further propagates the myth that all activists are a slice shy of a full loaf.

It has also been somewhat saddening that so much time has been given to the voices of Opec nations such as Saudi Arabia who are using the recent hacked climategate emails to pour doubt on the necessity for the conference itself. While the media is happy to cover these concerns none seem to feel it worth mentioning that they are being raised by oil producing countries who, you know, might have a vested interest in preventing any further control of greenhouse emissions.

On the other end of the spectrum in the "wow, that gives me some hope" category, comes the actions of the delegation from Tuvalu. As you probably already know Tuvalu is a tiny Pacific island nation with less than 12,000 inhabitants. No part of the country is more than 4.5 meters above sea level, and already the effects of rising sea levels have rendered parts of the country uninhabitable. I saw an interview with the Prime Minister recently who described his sadness at being the only leader in history whose role is to actively prepare for the destruction of his country and the complete resettlement of its people. A significant portion of the population has already emigrated to New Zealand, and like the Maldives the government is actively negotiating with other countries to buy land on foreign soil and migrate their entire country out of harm's way. For Tuvalu climate change is a harsh reality, not a future fear.

With the very existence of their country at threat they have taken a stand in Copenhagen, actively disrupting two days worth of meetings when it looked as if no binding resolutions would result, and countries such as India and China would be completely exempt from any carbon restrictions due to their questionable status under Kyoto as "emerging nations" despite having two of the world's largest industrial economies. With the support of other small island nations also at risk of complete annihilation and a number of African countries, Tuvalu showed that they were desperately serious about the need for actual firm and binding outcomes from Copenhagen, and stood up to the large powers of India and China who normally seek to speak for the developing world, but have radically different agendas from those on whose behalf they claim to speak. A great account of Tuvalu's actions from Ben Jervey can be found at Onearth, well worth reading.

The conference bubble is the reason why we have seen pictures of green aliens on TV and in the mainstream press, but the Tuvalu story has only been covered by bloggers, because the Tuvalu story is occurring inside the conference sessions themselves, and no journalist ever goes in there. That's where the people are, and you have to queue for the food, and you can't bring your beer in, and where's the fun in that?

I know I am slightly biased here because I've blogged from international conferences, but thus far the mainstream media seem to all be churning out the same identikit stories on Copenhagen that could easily have been written without ever stepping foot in the conference itself, while the bloggers all seem to be delivering more of an insight into the events taking place. This is probably because the bloggers are not necessarily neutral in all of this, and have more of a passion for the work taking place, whereas for the mainstream press it is just another story to be covered before moving on to the next job. Today Copenhagen and Climate Change, tomorrow South Africa and the World Cup, its all just so much spectacle and expensed lunches for them.

And as I write this while #cop15 is trending on Twitter, it is five places lower than Tiger Woods. Which explains everything you need to know about why mainstream media covers what it does.