Alexis Book by Alexis Taylor

Timendi causa est nescire

Dedicated to Angela, Denise, Nicola and Pearl

© 2011 Alexis Taylor All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. The author and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book. Written and designed by Alexis Taylor unless specifically stated.

A BOOKLET OF MUSINGS, ANNOTATIONS AND ESSAYS PERTAINING TO

M O D E R N DAY A N X I E T I E S , PA N I C S A N D D E L U S I O N S

WRITTEN & COMPILED BY A L E X I S TAY LO R

6 NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND 2011

READER INFORMATION

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK This book looks at the modern day panics, anxieties and delusions that worr y us each day: the economy (including the banking crisis, recession and economic meltdown), control (conspiracies, New World Order and hidden evils), terror (the ' war on' and threat levels), the happiness index (why we should all be happy and measure it), health (epidemics, pandemics, death and getting too fat), crime (law and order and stupidity), the Big Society (Cameron's big idea to get us all working together), technology (safety, explosions and and the need for more), alien invasion (the truth could be nearer than you think), the planet (declining resources, hot weather and species extinction), Hollywood (fear, calamity, blood, disaster, and zombies), and finally the environment (featuring some really bad snow).

Alongside my musings on the hot topics of today, you will find interesting factoids for your information, along with other suppor ting comments, some from real life scientists. Following each topic you will find a series of comments, hand picked from the news-blogs of the day (taken word for word, typos and all) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this is for balance. It is reassuring to know that I am not alone in my quest for the truth. You, the anonymous general public are just as anxious about future as I am. If nothing else these blog-posts go to show that sometimes the best angle on the stories that frighten us each morning come not from politicians, journalists, exper ts or psychologists but from you: the people on the street. They also prove that when the powers that be lose their sense of humour, you never do. And please, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; t have nightmares

T HE

C O N T E N T S

F O R WA R D

01. THE ECONOMY

02. CONTROL : THE BIG CONSPIRACY

0 3 . T E R RO R : I T ’ S A L L A RO U N D YO U

04. THE HAPPINESS INDEX

0 5 . H E A LT H

06. CRIME

0 7. T H E B I G S O C I E T Y

0 8 . T E C H N O LO G Y

0 9. A L I E N I N VA S I O N

10. THE PLANET

11.

H O L LY W O O D : A R E C I P E F O R D I S A S T E R

12. THE ENVIRONMENT

104 114

YO U R S E L F H E L P G U I D E

1 24

E P I LO G U E

132

f o rwa r d

FORWARD A l e x i s Tay l o r | J a n u a r y 2 0 1 1

The future is no longer a place of hope, it is a place of fear. Western civilization is run on fear...we fear that someone out there that we’ve never met wants to kill us! We fear being critical of our Government, or fear that we are going to lose our jobs, or that we are going to leave university and perhaps not be employed. There is so much fear out there that we are not taking risks; we are not prepared to tear up the plans. We are afraid to offend people. We fear that we will not have a pension, or that our homes will have slid into negative equity. We fear for the cuts to our front-line services. We fear that we will not be granted the credit to buy the life we are told we should lead. We buy technology to improve our lives but live in fear of it’s obsolescence. We fear that technology is harming our children, that evil lurks ‘on-line’ yet we fear not being able to communicate. We fear isolation. We welcome the ease at which we can open up to the global community, yet we fear our identity being stolen. We fear that we are eating to much salt, too much fat or that we are not taking enough exercise, yet we are afraid to walk home after dark. We are afraid of global pandemics, yet don’t blink an eye when we see an empty hand gel dispenser. 6 Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Marie Curie

Wise words Marie, wise words. There is much fear around. Part of the reason that you are reading this is because I am constantly terrified. No really. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration, but I am quite fearful, or at least I think I am, which when you think about it, is probably worse than being genuinely frightened. I live in fear of the future! That which comes after; the road ahead, tomorrow and next year. When you sit and think about it, the future is a bloody scary place. It’s full of dangers, pitfalls, wrong turns and calamity. The future is doubt and anxiety incarnate. The mobile phone company with the motto ‘the future’s bright, the future’s Orange’ got it nearly right. What they really meant to say was ‘the future’s bright, the future’s a big scary blend of swine flu, depression, recession, terror, bombs and dole queues’. Run for the hills, the future is coming and it’s far from orange; unless orange is the colour your skin will go when the sun explodes. You see we are bombarded with fear. It comes at us from every media orifice we are exposed to, and you have to admit, these days we are exposed to one hell of a lot of orifices. Take the newspapers. Once upon a time in, I dunno the 1980s, The Daily Mail was the only serious peddler of fear, now they are all at it. The Guardian, the lefty paper of truth and reason is today a heavyweight doom merchant, seeing pain and suffering in just about every part of our daily lives. If the salt in your bagel doesn’t kill you, a student with a fire extinguisher will. Ah ha! Got you, you can’t escape, worry, worry more and worry again for good measure. It’s hard not to get sucked in. Every newspaper is crammed with stories to get your 11

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

blood pressure racing. The simple answer then would be to not read the papers. Just turn a blind eye. Ignore them, like when your mum tells you that if you don’t pay attention to the bullies taunts, they’ll give up eventually and pick on someone else. OK fine, no newspapers, how about a spot of telly. Uh oh, plague, famine and war on that too, and this is just Eastenders. Even worse if you watch the news, and watching BBC News 24 is a big fat mistake. A whole channel whose mission it is to hit you in the face with ‘the fear’ and then keep hitting you at ten minute intervals, with a different camera angle and new flashy graphic of the projected death tolls. Of course you could switch to Jeremy Kyle, and then you really would want to do yourself in. Mind you hearing about things that want to cause you harm is nothing new. In 1841 Charles Mackay published the book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds cataloguing such public anxieties as witchcraft, economic bubbles, alchemy and people in a dither over tulips. Perhaps the most sensational revelations of mankind’s enduring fascination with panic, appear in Mackay’s exposition of modern prophecies. He writes: “During seasons of great pestilence, men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come.” Even the great Defoe offered that during the great plague of London in 1665 “...the people were more addicted to prophecies and astronomical conjuration’s, dreams and old-wives’ tales than ever before or since. Almanacs, and their predictions, frightened them terribly.” So even in a time of actual plague they would rather 12

have listened to someone telling them how bad it was rather than look out of the window, see the bodies piling up, and judge for themselves. You see human beings love a good story, and we especially love a good panic be it 1665 or 2005: we lap it up. Whether it’s the economic meltdown, H1N1, Islamic extremists or extraterrestrial annihilation, you can log on to the internet, pick up a paper or turn on the television and be scared witless by today’s digital almanacs; but is the fear justified or is it just absurd story telling? What do you, the reader, really think about the new doom revolution? With the help of current news stories, and the public reaction to them on the blogs and forums I help to chart modern angst, and perhaps illustrate that it really isn’t that bad a world after all. So turn off your iPads, make a (low-fat) latte, relax and enjoy my journey into the scary world of the fear industry: be afraid, be very afraid... n

f o rwa r d

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom : Bertrand Russell

Fear | The Economy

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin : Charles Darwin

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

The Economy When it comes to measuring success, don’t count money, count happpiness. On the morning of the 26th January 2010 I was in the unfortunate position to be glancing at the Daily Mail when instantly ‘the fear’ gripped me. The headline read: We’ve never had it so bad! Bank of England chief warns of biggest squeeze on families since the 1920s

As if the global economic meltdown couldn’t get any worse, we were no longer on a course towards future recovery, but on a retrograde step back to ‘Depression’ misery. Hang on though, hold on, go back a stage, am I reading these headlines right? The 1920s? Are they seriously suggesting we have just looped back ninety years? Surely not! Now let us put this into some kind of perspective. In 1925 John Logie Baird invented the first working mechanical television system. In 1928 he invented and demonstrated the first colour television. Today we virtually have full colour televisions in our phones. Nearly everyone I know owns an iphone (and some of them are unemployed) and some of the people with iphones are women, and they couldn’t even vote during the Twenties. Oh my God, I can’t believe my income is going to be squeezed like back in the Twenties! This is serious, I mean how will I afford my morning Starbucks? Hell, they didn’t even have Starbucks in the 1920s. Hold on, worse than that, didn’t they pay for their coffee’s with shillings or groats or something? Is my take-home pay going to be measured in shillings? Bugger, this is bad. The 1920s? Will I be wearing spats again? Hold on, weren’t the Twenties called the golden twenties back in the err...Twenties? So how is...

does...what if…I’m confused. This kind of faintly bizarre sensationalism was surely not the point of the speech, have you seen the governor of the Bank of England? He is a sober bloke.1 The point Mervyn King was making was that the last time wages fell so consistently year on year was in the 1920s. The gist of it was that wages in 2011 will be no higher than in 2005 (the average salary rose just 7.6% since 2007) and the cost of everyday living is more than certainly going to keep rising. So now the association makes sense, but if you were to glance at most of the headlines the day after the speech you would have been fooled into thinking that our daily lives were actually going back ninety years! You see this is another example of (and here is a topical expression for this section) hyper-inflation by the media. It’s pretty much fantasy wrapped up in serious hyperbole. Gets our attention though doesn’t it? Headlines like this have to grab us, because on an otherwise ‘no news day’ the governor of the Bank of England’s speech was as close to sensation as we could get. Trouble was that the speech itself was a pretty dry affair. It was dour statistical doom from the start. Mervyn King did attempt to soften the blow by opening, quite bizarrely, with a quote from one of Britain’s most celebrated (alleged) tax evaders Ken Dodd2: “When it comes to measuring success, don’t count money, count happiness.” Was that supposed to be funny? We’re in the doo doo even though we are told we are in the recovery, but hey listen, don’t worry be happy (to be sung like Bobby McFerrin naturally). Ultimately we are still feeling the shock waves of the banks going all Gordon Gecko on our arses and selling us down the river by investing badly. Not forgetting that they also gave us ‘loadsa money’ that we were all happy to spend but couldn’t pay back, so we didn’t and we haven’t, and so it all went to pot. Ultimately we are over a barrel and there is very little we can do about it. The banks were reckless with our dosh and the last government spent too much of our dosh on, well…rubbish quite frankly. To make matters worse, at the beginning of February 2010 we discover that the UK economy shrank by a

Points of reference • Elizabeth Seltzer (2008) Journal of Urban Affairs, Volume 30, Number 3, pages 347–354 • Twelve tips to beat the recession. The Telegraph online. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/5022043/12-ways-tobeat-the-recession.html • We’ve never had it so bad! Bank of England chief warns of biggest income squeeze on families since the 1920s. Daily Mail online. http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-1350557/Bank-Englands-Mervyn • Speech by the Governor, Mervyn King. Given at the Civic Centre, Newcastle on 25 January 2011

• George Osborne blames snow for double-dip threat. The Telegraph. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8280664/George-Osborne-blamessnow-for-double-dip-threat.html

t he ec o n o my

shocking 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010 as our recovery from recession faltered. Here we go again! Economists warned that the first estimate of GDP for the last quarter was much worse than expected, and means that Britain could now suffer a double-dip recession. What was to blame for this unexpected turn of events? You guessed it: the British winter! I realise it’s a shocker but right here in Britain we got some snow this December, and in the snow no one spends money or goes to work3 - even at Christmas. Bah humbug! In a fit of pure stupidity during a BBC interview George Osborne mentioned the bad weather 24 times as he tried to explain away our reversal of fortunes. It left us all with egg on our faces though as the US economy grew by 3.2% over the last three months despite one of their most severe winters in living memory, validating President Barack Obama’s strategy of maintaining high levels of government spending. In-fact it was their best economic result for five years. Way to go Obama - and just as the world was starting to think you were useless too! n

The Independent Commission on Banking released a report on 10th April 2011 outlining measures to prevent further collapses in the banking system. It is now up for consultation. The following is taken from their executive summary:

“How to make the system safer for the future? An important part of the answer is better macroeconomic – including ‘macro-prudential’ – policy so that there are fewer and smaller shocks to the system. Work by others internationally and in the UK aims to address this. But these shocks cannot be eliminated, and the UK will always be subject to global events. Making the banking system safer requires a combined approach that: makes banks better able to absorb losses; makes it easier and less costly to sort out banks that still get into trouble; and curbs incentives for excessive risk taking.”

Points of interest footnotes 1

Mervyn King said in October 2010: “The next

famous for his teeth, frizzy hair, feather duster

More recently Nick Mercer, commercial director

decade will not be nice... History suggests that

(or “tickling stick”), and his tickling-related

of Eurostar said, ‘It seems to be a strange

after a financial crisis the hangover lasts for a

catchphrases. In 1989 Dodd was charged with

combination of factors. It was the amount of

while. So the next decade is likely to be a sober

tax evasion. The Diddy Men, who had appeared

snow, which was higher than we experienced

decade – a decade of Savings, Orderly Budgets,

in his stage act, were often played by local

before, it was lighter than normal, fluffier,

and Equitable Rebalancing. Our prospects

children from stage schools, and were revealed

and the temperature inside the tunnel and the

remain closely linked to developments in the

never to have been paid. The trial lasted three

humidity was higher than normal’. The term

rest of the world. But we can influence the

weeks: Dodd was acquitted. Some of his current

is often now used euphemistically to describe

outcome, with monetary policy still a potent

material mocks the trial and tax in general. For

ridiculous statements or lame excuses.

weapon to ensure that the amount of money in

a while he introduced his act with the words,

the economy is growing neither too slowly, as in

“Good evening, my name is Kenneth Arthur

the recent past, nor too quickly so as to reignite

Dodd; singer, photographic playboy and failed

Of the headlines printed in the major broadsheet

inflation…. I am sure of one thing. A sober

accountant!”

papers on 21st October 2010, the day after the

decade may not be fun but it is necessary for our economic health.” 2

spending review, the following words appeared 3

Kenneth Arthur Dodd OBE (born Liverpool, 8

November 1927) is a British comedian and singer,

On the 11th February 1991 Terry Worrall, the

at least five times per newspaper.

British Rail Director of Operations cited ‘the

Cut, hit, lose, suffer, fears, worst,

wrong type of snow’ as the reason for below parr

vulnerable, risk, threat.

performance of trains during the winter period.

Ve n d i d i t

h i c

a u r o

p a t r i a m

G O R D O N B R OW N , J a n ua ry, 2 0 1 1 : “ To be honest, if we have only deficit reduc tion, then that ’s the policy of the 1930s ” A L I S TA I R DA R L I N G , J a n ua r y, 2 0 1 1 : “Let ’s not kid ourselves, when we had snow, a lot of Europe and Nor th America was stuck as well ...”

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) patriot1 721 01/26/2011 10:13 AM Recommended by 1 person You vote comedians out, you vote more comedians in, that ’s why you get the jokes. JOKES, that ’s PC for LIES!

brianr 01/25/2011 11:08 PM Recommended by 2 people The worr ying thing is that I don’ t think that Osbourne is lying, I’m sure he really belie ves this bovine muck. Either that, or he is the most convincing liar e ver 18

to enter parliament and, when you remember people like Clegg and Cable, that is saying something.

jesterx 02/01/2011 10:51 AM I have bank troubles already. I walked in today, and they kept asking why I need to take out 5k...what a Joke. I am getting ner vous that this collapse is going to come quickly.

Joe Soap 25/1/2011 14:21 PM Wife tells me my dip is shrinking more than most.

(...)

t he ec o n o my

(...) anadianant 01/27/2011 04:14 AM Recommended by 3 people Sadly, I think this is the chickens coming home to the proverbial roost. Paying the piper. Re version to the mean. The UK has been at the helm of “globalization” for the past few centuries. Your “Queen”...ugh!... anyways, it ’s good to know your own histor y and present well. The City of London....anyone ask why it ’s there? All special and secluded? It would take a huge (maybe too huge) a shift of collec tive point of view to turn the ship around and it ’s not going to happen. Just turn inwards and learn, like most of the rest of world, to do with less and think about the sins of your fore -fathers and mothers that gave you this false reality of a centur y or so of false prosperity on the backs of the world!

standudley 25/1/2011 13:10 PM I have just watched the BBC news at 1pm, 2 seconds of Osborne and a full Labour rant from Balls. It is nice to see the BBC is continuing its impar tial repor ting, NOT! Of course there will be a small double dip, any fool can see that, but the new shadow chancellor will make hay whilst the sun shines, totally forgetting that he was the instrument into why this countr y is in bankrupty in the first place.

(...) 19

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) VivaLaRevolution 20/10/2010 07:51 PM Recommended by 2 people “Britain faces a sober decade ” Does that mean we cannot go down the pub and drown our sorrows because beer prices will be too high or because all the pubs will be closed down.

grahammilne 20/10/2010 04:54 PM Recommended by 13 people ‘UK facing ‘Sober ’ decade, warns Bank of England Governor Mer vyn King’ Thanks for that Mr. King. None of us had realised. I am glad we pay you such a huge salar y. What is your job title again? Oh yes! ‘Chief shutter of the stable door after the horse has bolted’.

donquixballs 20/10/2010 01:57 PM Recommended by 25 people I thought that we were told to spend all our savings to help the economy, now this jerk is telling us we have to save more. What a lot of a-holes.

zygote 20/10/2010 11:27 AM Recommended by 4 people Tulip bulbs were once thought to be a wonder ful investment too...

(...) 20

t he ec o n o my

(...) paulypaul 20/01/2010 09:26 AM Recommended by 28 people I think he means... “Now we ’ve transferred all your wealth over to us, shut up, behave and be good ser fs whilst we spend it. And if you’re lucky we might spend some on you.”

pragmatickev 25/01/2010 11:57 AM So it was the snow. It must be true, Vince said so. Isn’ t that eerily similar to ‘leaves on the tracks ’? Bearing in mind that any growth in the economy to the end of September must be credited to the pre vious government, it makes you wonder. And worr y. But don’ t panic, with Vince as Corporal Jones and George as Private Pike, they ’ll have it covered. Just don’ t tell them your name.

bob bobwell 25/01/2010 12:18 PM Surely the salt and anti-freeze industries must have bolstered the UK economy during this quar ter. And Millets.

(...) 21

Fear | Control

In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t such a great idea after all : Strobe Talbot, President Clintonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Deputy Secretary of State, Time Magazine, July 20th, l992

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Control: The Big Conspiracy just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you. Conspiracy theories are nothing new. Some are real, others are imagined. Plots to kill Caesar and overthrow Rome abounded at the time. Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand was shot by a Serbian secret society called Black Hand and Nixon famously had his Watergate. Elvis hiding away on Christmas Island with John Lennon is probably just in my head. However, it is seldom that concrete clues to such plots come to light, or are generally known, and such is the fun of conspiracy theories. Like modern day fairy stories, conspiracies are everywhere, from 9/11 to the Leaders of Zion, we can all have fun reading about them, watching YouTube documentaries (or should that be Shock-UMentallies?) or just discussing them down the pub. People who come up with conspiracy theories are usually branded ‘freaks’ with too much time on their hands (probably without girlfriends and still living at home with mum) yet there is always that nagging doubt that maybe, just maybe, they could be right. In August 2004, a poll by Zogby International showed that 49 percent of New York City residents, with a margin of error of 3.5 percent, believed that officials of the U.S. government “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.” According to an article in the Journal of Political Philosophy, in China, a best selling book attributes various events (the rise of Hitler, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, and environmental destruction in the developing world) to the machinations of the evil Rothschild banking dynasty; the analysis has been read and debated at high levels of business and government, and it even appears to have had an effect on Chinese currency policies. So what causes such theories to spring up and spread? Are they important or threatening, or merely

trivial and even amusing? Let us consider these juicy ones: the view that the CIA was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; that scientists purposefully manufactured the AIDS virus; that the 1996 crash of TWA flight 800 was caused by a U.S. missile; that the theory of global warming is a deliberate confection; that the Bilderberg Group is responsible for important movements in the international economy; that Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by FBI agents; that the moon landing was staged in the Mojave desert and never actually occurred; that the Rothschilds are responsible for the deaths of presidents and for economic instability in Asian nations; and that an alien craft really did crash land in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Now some conspiracy theories have proven to be true (obviously they are now considered to be fact-theories) The Watergate hotel room used by the Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the CIA did administer LSD and related psychotropic drugs under Project MKULTRA (Mind-Kontrol-Ultra), in order to investigate the possibility of ‘mind control.’ Cool eh? Well, maybe not so – at least one person died as a result. Even some false conspiracy theories do not merely undermine democratic debate, they create serious risks and in extreme cases, they fuel violence. Just take the Oklahoma City bombing, whose perpetrators, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, shared a complex of conspiratorial beliefs about the US federal government. Generally, conspiracy theories do little to calm the nerves of most people. Except for the light hearted Santa Claus conspiracy – mercilessly spun out by parents on the most vulnerable in our society – most are sinister and all they do is remind people that someone else just might be controlling their destinies. The loss of control over ones life is a very frightening thought indeed. Our Western world is founded upon the principles of freedom and liberty. Our democratic systems are the envy of

Points of reference • J Bartlett and C Miller (2010) The Power of Unreason. Deimos • The Politics of John Salvi’s Conspiracy Theories pt. 1, Chip Berlet, • http://www.publiceye.org/body_politic/mag/back/art/0605pg22.htm • http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1240634/As-British-Muslim-Imappalled-callous-attempt-insult-brave-troops.html#ixzz0l07vJgpW. • Michael Barkun. (2003) A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, University of California Press. • C Sunstien and A Vermeule. (2008) Conspiracy Theories, Public Law and Legal Research Paper Series, No. 199, 2008 http://ssrn.com/ abstract=1084585.

• Lev Grossman. Why the Conspiracy Theories Won’t Go Away, Time Magazine, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1531304,00. html. • Zogby International Poll http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews. cfm?ID=855. • Conspiracy fever: as rumours swell that the government staged 7/7, victim’s relatives call for proper enquiry, Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-1197419/Conspiracy-fever-As-rumours-swell- governmentstaged-7-7-victims-relatives-proper-inquiry.html

c o ntro l : t he big c o nspi r acy

countries the world over. Just look at what is unfolding in Northeast Africa at the moment. People would risk their lives for freedom. However, most conspiracies deal with the idea that although we think we are free, we are being manipulated by unseen forces that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, and believe me, the Orwellian paradigm has nothing on some of these babies! The most sinister one I have come across lately is the ‘Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars’ conspiracy: seriously this is really, really weird, and frightening if it is real. With its strange claim to have been found in a surplus photocopier sold at auction in 1986 by a Boeing Aircraft employee, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars takes its place among those dubious ‘elite blueprints’ for control of the planet, second only to the well known (in conspiracy circles) tome ‘The Protocols of Zion’. Dated May 1979, Silent Weapons called for a ‘quiet revolution’ through economic engineering, using such methods as economic shock testing, paper inductance/inflation (exchanging true value for inflated currency), and balancing the system by killing off the true creditors of this exchange (the public) in constant wars. Sound a bit familiar? Silent Weapons was first published for mass consumption by the late William Cooper in his 1991 underground sensation, Behold a Pale Horse. A few versions of this document also appeared later on the internet along with remarks to the effect that the paranoid manifesto was probably penned by Cooper himself. Cooper, a former naval intelligence officer with a purported 38-level abovetop secret clearance, claimed to have read this report in a Naval Intelligence Majority Twelve file, and that it was authored by the secretive Bilderberg Group, a group whose current members include Labour Peer Lord Mandleson and current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. It takes a vaguely scientific stance, drawing allegories between social systems and electrical circuits (odd). It generally slags off the human race, well the human race that is composed of everyday folk (the peasants

not the ‘elite’ stock) and paints a picture of control that veers between being bone-chillingly evil, to being highly reminiscent of today’s culture – in fact some of the parallels with today’s current world structure appear unnervingly similar. It offers two main ways to control the population: Let the populace bludgeon each other to death in war, which will only result in a total destruction of the living earth (not preferable to anybody I wouldn’t have thought) or... Take control of the world by the use of economic “silent weapons” in a form of “quiet warfare” and reduce the economic inductance of the world to a safe level by a process of benevolent slavery and genocide (it says that the latter option is the obviously better option). Benevolent slavery and genocide? Blimey! So how, I hear you ask, will this control be achieved? Well, apparently by use of these four control measures: Media: Keep the adult public attention diverted away from the real social issues, and captivated by matters of no real importance. (Have you seen the One Show?) Schools: Keep the young public ignorant of real mathematics, real economics, real law, and real history (so all that fuss about Paul and Satpal sharing apples in my Scottish Primary Maths book was sinister after all – knew it). Entertainment: Keep the public entertainment below a sixth-grade level (Hollyoaks anyone?) Work: Keep the public busy, busy, busy, with no

Points of reference • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/ The-30-greatest-conspiracy-theories-part-1.html • Knight, P. Outrageous conspiracy theories: popular and official responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United States. New German Critique, 103, vol 35, no. 1, p. 170. • Scott Sommers. (2011) Who Still Believes in 9/11 Conspiracies? An Empirical Study on Poiitical Affiliation and Conspiratorial Thinking. Volume 16 number 2 2011. www.skeptics.com • Cass R. Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule. (2009) Symposium on Conspiracy Theories Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures. The Journal of Political

Philosophy: Volume 17, Number 2, 2009, pp. 202–227 • http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/ hardtruthsilentweaponsforquietwars.htm • http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/silent_weapons_quiet_wars.htm • http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/silentweapons.html • http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread305679/pg1 • http://www.richplanet.net/ • http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=855, posted Aug. 30, 2004.

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

time to think; back on the farm with the other animals (this doesn’t need explaining). Oh my God, I thought, this conspiracy explains everything that is going on in the world. It describes my life, what I am forced to watch on telly, how the school system was rubbish and how we are all tied into debt. All there in that document, and all planned by some secret cabal. Now, if this pamphlet is real (and that is a big ‘if ’) and it is to be believed as a blueprint for a new order, then it is truly frightening. That these ‘powers that be’ have so small a moral compass that they are willing to treat the average citizen as nothing more than a stagnant, mindless commodity to be manipulated and controlled is abhorrent. However, like all evidence for conspiracies, it perhaps should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. To be perfectly honest, it all seems a little too good to be true. I mean, pretty much every conspiratorial detail is so clearly illustrated it may as well have colour pictures for the kiddies. It is just way too neat, and then you have to consider the ‘why’ of this document. I mean is the average guy in the street really worth all this control and bother? What would be the motivation for someone to go to such Machiavellian lengths to control every aspect of our daily lives, right down to Dancing on Ice, just to keep us in a constant state of downtrodden fear? Surely Saturday night telly is crap because television companies are looking for instant ratings and instant cash and the fact we are in debt is because we are addicted to living beyond our means. The inimitable Charlie Brooker writing in the Guardian debunks the notion of Conspiracy theories with one word: paperwork. “Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy...” He has a point, imagine the steely, cold-hearted nerve of the civil servants prepared to watch as thousands of people are affected by some of these plans. Not to mention the fact that people usually can’t keep their mouth shut. Most people would relish the chance to have their fifteen

c r e d o

q u i a

minutes of fame, no doubt for a tabloid fee. Perhaps we need conspiracies? Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American of patternicity (the tendency to find patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). The coconspirators look for patterns in events then try to connect the dots to make sense of them. This invariably leads to agencies as the route cause. They then attempt to find confirmatory evidence for what they already believe and add a dash of hindsight to explain what they know to have happened. Sometimes the most trivial of details are weaved into the mix as fact and the whole confection is whipped up across the internet, until it resembles something tightly ‘explainable’ as a conspiracy. We just have to make sense of everything, it’s in our nature and even the skeptics (I am one) would take that as an evolutionary axiom. But is all this just our paranoia? Probably, but does this lessen our fascination with conspiratorial horror stories? Not a jot! Next time you see a conspiracy, don’t let it scare you, often the ‘facts’ are far more sinister. Don’t believe all you read, sometimes a chair really is just a chair. Mind you, remember what Kurt Cobain once said: “ just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” n

i m p o s s i b l e

e s t

DAVID ICKE: 1994 THE ROBOTS’ REBELLION | The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance “ Why and how this knowledge has been kept from the mass of the people and what has led humanity along such a dark and destruc tive path is the stor y we will now tell”.

c o ntro l : t he big c o nspi r acy

Excerpts taken from Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Descriptive Introduction of the Silent Weapon Everything that is expected from an ordinary weapon is

and therefore cannot believe that they are being attacked

expected from a silent weapon by its creators, but only

and subdued by a weapon. The public might instinctively

in its own manner of functioning. It shoots situations,

feel that something is wrong, but that is because of the

instead of bullets; propelled by data processing, instead of

technical nature of the silent weapon, they cannot express

chemical reaction (explosion); originating from bits of data,

their feeling in a rational way, or handle the problem with

instead of grains of gunpowder; from a computer, instead

intelligence. Therefore, they do not know how to cry for

of a gun; operated by a computer programmer, instead of a

help, and do not know how to associate with others to

marksman; under the orders of a banking magnate, instead

defend themselves against it. When a silent weapon is

of a military general.

applied gradually, the public adjusts/adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until

It makes no obvious explosive noises, causes no obvious

the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too

physical or mental injuries, and does not obviously interfere

great and they crack up. Therefore, the silent weapon is a

with anyone’s daily social life. Yet it makes an unmistakable

type of biological warfare. It attacks the vitality, options,

“noise,” causes unmistakable physical and mental damage,

and mobility of the individuals of a society by knowing,

and unmistakably interferes with the daily social life, i.e.,

understanding, manipulating, and attacking their sources

unmistakable to a trained observer, one who knows what

of natural and social energy, and their physical, mental, and

to look for. The public cannot comprehend this weapon,

emotional strengths and weaknesses.

Short List of Outputs Outputs - create controlled situations - manipulation of the economy, hence society - control by control of compensation and income. Sequence: 1. allocates opportunities. 2. destroys opportunities. 3. controls the economic environment. 4. controls the availability of raw materials. 5. controls capital. 6. controls bank rates. 7. controls the inflation of the currency.

8. controls the possession of property. 9. controls industrial capacity. 10. controls manufacturing. 11. controls the availability of goods (commodities). 12. controls the prices of commodities. 13. controls services, the labor force, etc. 14. controls payments to government officials. 15. controls the legal functions. 16. controls the personal data files uncorrectable by the party slandered. 17. controls advertising. 18. controls media contact. 19. controls material available for T.V.

20. disengages attention from real issues. 21. engages emotions. 22. creates disorder, chaos, and insanity. 23. controls design of more probing tax forms. 24. controls surveillance. 25. controls the storage of information. 26. develops psychological analyses and profiles of individuals. 27. controls legal functions [repeat of 15] 28. controls sociological factors. 29. controls health options. 30. preys on weakness. 31. cripples strengths. 32. leaches wealth and substance.

Summary The people hire the politicians so that the people can:

Politicians hold many quasi-military jobs, the lowest being the police

• obtain security without managing it.

which are soldiers, the attorneys and C.P.A.s next who are spies and

• obtain action without thinking about it.

saboteurs (licensed), and the judges who shout orders and run the closed

• inflict theft, injury, and death upon others without having to

union military shop for whatever the market will bear. The generals are

contemplate either life or death.

industrialists. The “presidential” level of commander-in-chief is shared by

• avoid responsibility for their own intentions.

the international bankers. The people know that they have created this

• obtain the benefits of reality and science without exerting themselves

farce and financed it with their own taxes (consent), but they would rather

in the discipline of facing or learning either of these.

knuckle under than be the hypocrite. Thus, a nation becomes divided into two very distinct parts, a docile sub-nation [great silent majority] and

They give politicians the power to create and manage a war machine to:

a political sub-nation. The political sub-nation remains attached to the

• provide for the survival of the nation/womb.

docile sub-nation, tolerates it, and leaches its substance until it grows

• prevent encroachment of anything upon the nation/womb.

strong enough to detach itself and then devour its parent.

• destroy the enemy who threatens the nation/womb. • destroy those citizens of their own country who do not • conform for the sake of stability of the nation/womb.

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) breadlord 14/05/2008 12:53 AM 911’s old news - If you want a real conspiracy then look to the renaming of household brands, only for them to get changed back again when the message is picked up by that guy in the overcoat on the tube and sent back to Minsk along with the blueprints to the new toaster you’ve bought. Starburst is a Bulgarian missile defence system. Honest.

closelobster 14/05/2008 1:02 AM Forget paper work...If I was involved, I would have told someone by now...Human nature, init.

RogerINtheUSA 14/05/2008 2:37 AM Throughout my twenties I earnestly belie ved Oliver Stone ’s account of the JFK assassination. Par tly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selec tive) way the “e vidence ” was blended with fic tion in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to belie ve it. Belie ving it made me feel impor tant.

(...)

c o ntro l : t he big c o nspi r acy

(...) ohn Holland 11/27/2008 04:54 PM Recommended by 3 people I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; t belie ve there are still some comments here from people who belie ve Bin Laden carried out 9/11. You poor blind people. Do you really belie ve nineteen men from a cave with box cutters got past the worlds most effec tive trillion dollar security system, which just happened to fail 4 times in one day? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve extensively studied both sides of the stor y, one uses science and physics, the other uses government

owned

mainstream

media

and

neuro linguistic brainwashing and propaganda techniques to fool you into belie ving you know what really happened. Do the research with an open mind, and you will be free.

clint 11/26/2008 12:09 AM Recommended by 1 person I

belie ve

there

some

truth

some

these theories. The ones that point out that governments can do terrible things to achie ve goals are cer tainly credible. Not convinced about Paul is dead or the Elvis one though :)

(...) 29

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) jay64 11/24/2008 03:57 PM Recommended by 2 people Here ’s another conspiracy: take what the media says with a grain of salt. 70% of what they repor t are lies and disinfo, they want to keep the public dumbed down and enter tained so no one notices what ’s really going on.

Eel 11/21/2008 02:49 PM Global warming, it ’s effing freezing!!!!! Also, New World Order? Er, this phrase is mentioned pretty much on a daily basis, mostly by Gordon Brown.

al 11/20/2008 03:21 PM Why do we have to pay to live on this planet?

JAS 11/20/2008 07:39 AM People feel powerless in the modern world - a conspiracy theor y somehow makes them feel that they understand what ’s going on a bit better. e.g. Global Warming. People simply do not know what to do about this phenomenon, so they pretend it doesn’ t ac tually exist. As Prof Chomsky said: you don’ t need conspiracy theories, because the reality is weird enough.

(...) 30

c o ntro l : t he big c o nspi r acy

(...) ManicMinerUK 31/05/2008 10:26 AM Conspiracy theorists, eh, lets all hit them with sticks! The suspicious idiots, doubting the honesty of governments. I’m getting curious as to exac tly what le vel of skepticism is acceptable in society then? I’m allowed to belie ve that MacDonalds regularly mislead the public as to the content of their food, and its alright to belie ve that the UK and US governments somehow conspired to force us into a phony war in Iraq, that ’s ac tually just flimsy justification for grabbing oil reser ves but questioning 9/11 or the moon landing is crazy land, and the domain of idiots and nutters only.

StefanThe2nd 31/05/2008 11:21 AM Alright so far we ’ve covered the Twin Towers conspiracy and Area 51, the later containing some truth. But now let ’s have a look at the Nazi Fanta connec tion, I don’ t belie ve Nazi’s made Fanta (though it does tickle me a little to imagine a group of Nazi scientists working on some top secret chemical war fare agent, only to accidentally discover Fanta). Howe ver it has been said that Coca Cola did not want it ’s world famous and proudly American Brand name to be associated with Nazi Germany, Fanta was born and thus a major American company did not have to lose out on a lot of profit. Please feel free to correc t me, but only if you’re right.

(...) 31

F e a r | Te r ro r

Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts : Thomas Jefferson

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Terror: It ’s all around you When did we take the ‘ist’ out of terrorist

1980s and I was fortunate enough to be blessed with being bought up in an unconventional but very loving home in Yorkshire. My father died before I was born, and so I was raised by my mother, my aunt and my grandma. We were not ‘well off ’ by any stretch, but I never wanted for anything; my tummy was never empty and I was never alone. My childhood was happy and fulfilled, and like most boys I lived for summer holidays filled with sunshine, Transformers, the A-Team, and Cresta pop. Fear never really darkened my door, unless it manifested itself by way of an earwig or the dark (I have never been that fond of the dark). I certainly wasn’t frightened by terrorists, and although I had a rudimentary understanding of the IRA (or as I generally thought: Irish men in balaclavas) and was aware that from time to time planes would get hijacked in hot countries, it certainly wasn’t something that would keep me awake at night. Not so the children growing up in the 2000s. In a study conducted by the Australian Childhood Foundation in 2007 of 600 children aged 0-14, it found that:

was a child during the

“A substantial proportion are concerned about the escalating tension in world affairs. Almost a third of children (31%) are worried that they will have to fight in a war when they get much older. More than a third (36%) are apprehensive about terrorism. A quarter of children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older.” Now it’s easy to look back on ones childhood with a certain fondness (that’s why we love nostalgia so much) but I can honestly say that it didn’t cross my mind that the world would ever end, let alone in my lifetime. For that matter, I couldn’t even conceive of a time where one of my family would no longer be around me, which is why at the age of 23 I think I found it so hard to come to terms with the passing of my dear Grandmother. So it really is a

sad state of affairs we are in when under 14s are worrying themselves about things like global terrorism. What have we done to our kids? The doom industry has succeeded in imprinting its own sense of fear onto the next generation. It is a sickening indictment of out times that much is certain. Now it is easy to point the finger at the events of 9/11 and claim that modern terrorism started there and that the destruction of the World Trade Centre sowed the seeds of fear in the worlds young. Where 9/11 is concerned the internet is filled with conspiracies of false flag events staged by the New World Order or the CIA or shenanigans played out by Mossad, and to be honest all of them or none of them could have credence, but ultimately whatever led to those events, the world changed on that September day forever. 9/11 is one of those events that will stick in your mind. People will always remember where they were when it happened, and most people can vividly recount how they heard about it. For my part I was walking around Brighton with a hangover and a smirk on my face, as I had ended up successfully copping off with a girl the night before. My world on that September morning was going very well indeed, (apart from the four alarm headache I was nursing) and the only thing that bothered me was if I’d find a new pair of trousers to buy in The Lanes. Life was ticking by nicely until I got a garbled message from my house mate in London that a plane had crashed into the Empire State building, and that I had better get on my train to the capital quick as they said they would be shutting down the railways. Talk about Earth with a thud! I found the nearest branch of Dixons and stared at the flickering news reports on the screens and at that moment thought to myself: that this was one of the best things I had ever seen in my life! It was like a real-life Hollywood flick, playing out live. I remember thinking it looked a little bit like Die Hard. It was fascinating, and they just kept replaying the plane flying in. I stood there for a minute watching it, and the funniest thing was that no one else walking past the window seemed that bothered. How they didn’t know THIS was

Points of reference • http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/05/ print/20030501-15.html • Carl Conetta. (2002) Strange Victory: A critical appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war. http://www.comw.org/ pda/0201strangevic.html • http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1240634/As-British-Muslim-Imappalled-callous-attempt-insult-brave-troops.html#ixzz0l07vJgpW. • http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7829946.stm • ‘Global War On Terror’ Is Given New Name. Bush’s Phrase Is Out, Pentagon Says. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/

article/2009/03/24/AR2009032402818.htmlabstract=1084585. • Bush likens ‘war on terror’ to WWIII. http://www.abc.net.au/news/ newsitems/200605/s1632213.htm. • A FIGHT VS. EVIL, BUSH AND CABINET TELL U.S. http://www. nydailynews.com/archives/news/2001/09/17/2001-09-17_a_fight_vs__evil__ bush_and_c.html • Transcript of President Bush’s address: September 2001. http://articles.cnn. com/2001-09-20/us/gen.bush.transcript_1_joint-session-national-anthemcitizens?_s=PM:US

T e r ro r

going on was beyond me! All I kept thinking was that I hope someone back home was taping it all. It wasn’t until later that day when the hangover wore off that I thought it was all a bit frightening – and so did everyone else it seemed. For the first time in living memory I think that my generation was frightened: for the first time in history we became afraid of TERROR. Nine days after the 9/11 attacks, during a televised address to congress, President George W. Bush launched the war on terror when he said, “Our ‘war on terror’ begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” What I want to know is, why did we take the ‘ist’ out of terrorist? Seriously. Terror is not an enemy. Terrorism even, is not an enemy, it is a tactic. Todd Richissin wrote in the Baltimore Sun that: “analysts say the incidents show that not only are there no front lines in the ‘war on terror’

but that there is no single war against it because there are few common causes, no common enemy and no common strategy for fighting one.” Which makes sense doesn’t it? It is the notion of ‘terror’ that bothers me. Now, you expect sensationalism from Dubbya, but the BBC? Recently there was a feature piece on the UK terror alert statuses on Radio 4. During the feature the presenter, Sarah Montague dropped the word TERROR no less than fifteen times during a three minute interview. I counted. Terror, terror, terror...blah, blah, blah. For three minutes. No wonder people are frightened. You see the way I see it, when you delete the ‘ist’ off the end of terrorist, the word becomes nebulous and indefinite. Back when I was a child, you heard of ‘terrorist bombs’ never ‘terror bombs’. Police arrested ‘suspected terrorists’ not ‘terror suspects’. You see a ‘terrorist’ implies a singular person intent on committing harm, whereas ‘terror’ could be anything, anywhere and anytime, and an enemy like that is far more sinister. n

Points of interest terror | terər

terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice

level represents the likelihood of an attack in the

noun

up to that date. Administration officials say that

near future. You should always remain alert to

phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because

the danger of terrorism, look out for suspicious

terror of darkness.

it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on

bags on public transport or any other potential

• the use of such fear to intimidate people, esp.

the military campaign. President Obahma’s

signs of terrorist activity you may encounter.

for political reasons : weapons of terror.

office recently sent a message to senior Pentagon

• [in sing. ] a person or thing that causes

staff explaining that “this administration prefers

There are five levels of threat in the UK:

extreme fear : his unyielding scowl became the

to avoid using the term Long War or Global War

Critical

terror of the Chicago mob.

On Terror (Gwot) ... please pass this on to your

an attack is expected imminently

• ( the Terror) the period of the French

speechwriters”. Instead, they have been asked

Severe (present level: March 2011)

Revolution between mid 1793 and July 1794

to use a bureaucratic phrase that could hardly

an attack is highly likely

when the ruling Jacobin faction, dominated

be further from the fiery rhetoric of the months

Substantial

by Robespierre, ruthlessly executed anyone

immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

an attack is a strong possibility

considered a threat to their regime. Also called

“overseas contingency operations”

Moderate

Extreme fear : people fled in terror | [in sing. ] a

reign of terror .

an attack is possible but not likely Threat levels:

Low

Reappraisal of terminology

The system of threat levels has been created to

an attack is unlikely

In 2005 Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld

keep you informed about the level of threat the

and the nation’s senior military officers began

UK faces from terrorism at any given time. This

speaking of “a global struggle against violent

system helps police and other law enforcement

extremism” rather than “the global war on

agencies decide how to allocate staff. The threat

C u r

a n t e

t u b a m

t r e m o r

• “War on terror” difficult to define. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/ nationworld/2002023596_russanal02.html • Bad air and rank hypocrisy. http://www.newstatesman.com/200003200023 • http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2001/war_on_terror/default. stm • Britain stops using ‘war on terror’ phrase. Expression makes militants feel too important, minister says. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18133506/ns/ world_news-europe/ • How the war on terror made the world a more terrifying place. http://www.

o c c u p a t

a r t u s ?

the-world-a-more-terrifying-place-438190.html • The war on terror has been about scaring people, not protecting them. http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jan/03/yemen-anti-terrorismrendition-security • CIA & The War on Terrorism. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/ciathe-war-on-terrorism/index.html • On this day: 12th September 2001: US declares war on terror. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/12/ newsid_2515000/2515239.stm

independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/how-the-war-on-terror-made-

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Mike502 25/03/2009 6:57 PM If you’re fighting an organisation that ’s waging a “jihad” against you, declaring it a “ war on Terror ” and referring to it as a crusade... probably not a great idea. You don’ t really need to be an exper t! Sense pre vails. Plus I can’ t see a prospec tive Jihadist getting worked up over the global overseas operation!

Gar yO 26/03/2009 9:38 AM How about: the “ War We ’re Gonna Lose ”. This shouldn’ t offend the terrorists and the Lefties (I think!) - the two most impor tant groups of people on this planet we mustn’ t offend.

fingy 15/02/2009 9:22 AM Well hopefully this signals an end to the West asking the Wise Woman for advice. Bush: What can we do about terrorists? WW: there are three things you can do Kill Blair Bush: Ne ver WW: Kill Yourself Bush: And the third? WW: Kill Ever yone in the whole world AHAHAHA!!! And unfor tunately this is the advice that was taken.

(...)

te r ro r

(...) WheatFromChaff 01/10/2010 12:34 PM “ Why of course the people don’ t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’ t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the countr y who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dic tatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dic tatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the countr y to danger. It works the same in any countr y.” (H. Goering - 18 April 1946)

Sidebar 01/10/2010 11:21 AM You don’ t know what threats await you each day. Carcinogen par ticles; the package delivered to your door is a bomb put there by a terrorist; check underneath the car there may be an explosive de vice attached; examine the phone for recording de vices; be aware of the TV, you could be exposed to messages which will control your mind; before you eat, give some the dog, if he foams at the mouth, don’ t eat it... Have a nice day.

(...)

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) theSkipper 01/10/2010 10:52 AM The

attacks

ne ver

occur, or

are

brilliantly

thwar ted ... Anybody know the one about the red crocodile powder? This bloke is walking along a street one day, and he sees another bloke putting red powder down a drain. So he goes over and asks him what on ear th the powder is for. “It ’s to keep the crocodiles away,” says the man with the powder. “But there are no crocodiles down the drains!” replies the first bloke. “It ’s damn good stuff!” says the man with the powder.

Merlin08 01/10/2010 11:1 AM Imagine if more than 5000 people had died from bombs in the UK last year. (for tunately they didn’ t). We would be in state of high aler t, ver y stric t security etc. Ac tually ver y few (was it none?) died from bombs in the UK last year. But more than 5,000 died in hospitals from hospital acquired infec tions. If it ’s death we care about perhaps we should get our security ser vices to have a look at our dangerous hospitals.

smuglyfrombrazil 01/10/2010 11:23 AM Inducing fear (of terrorism) is a business like any other business. Don’ t buy it and live happy. Beware of cars and junk food, that ’s all.

(...) 38

te r ro r

(...) moralwreck 01/10/2010 9:54 AM I suspec t that ar ticles like this are really deliberate

attempts

induce

complacency

and reduce vigilance. There - I’ve met one RDA obligation to awareness already. It is our duty - as citizens - to keep ourselves in MeerkatBat mode all day long. The first tell-tale sign of ‘under vigilance ’ is allowing yourself more than 15 minutes sleep per night. ‘Under vigilant ’ citizens are fifth columnists in our midst. Do the Right Thing : Help eliminate anyone who isn’ t suspicious of you.

Huntkillbur yFinn 01/10/2010 10:00AM Reccommended by 86 people “If e ver y thing is an emergency, then nothing is.”

ricoilatesla 01/10/2010 10:08 AM “Intelligence suggests that Iran, Nor th Korea, and Afghanistan are currently construc ting super terrorist robots out of hot lava and many sharp things.” The primar y objec tive of these robots will be to infiltrate your homes and run up your elec tric bill. Exper ts fear the super terrorist may also unplug tele vision sets thus interrupting streams of vital communication between the government and its people. ST ’s could look like anyone, therefore cease communication with the outside world, and most impor tantly check all food for germs which could lead to all and any thing.

(...) 39

Fear | The Happiness Index

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized : Gilbert K. Chesterton

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

The Happiness Index

hour, but tack on another 30 minutes for the drive to the gym, the shower and the drive back. In order for me to get the recommended eight hours of sleep1 I need to be tucked up in bed by 10.00 pm. Now

I must sound like a right miserable bastard

Most people I meet, it seems, hate their job. Generally whenever I speak to a colleague conversation is never centred around the good bits of your day but about how much you hate what you do for a living. Lately whenever friends ask me how my day has been, I usually reply shit sometimes pffftt and on good days not bad. God I must sound like a right miserable bastard, I’m surprised I have any friends at all! But, generally speaking work does suck. Someone said to me the other day that they thought Gok Wan had a great job. Really? Not when I saw him chain smoking outside the Arndale Centre in Manchester last year. Miserable as sin, and when some poor blighter asked him for an autograph, he just grumbled and walked off. You’d think he’d be full of the joys, but no – a smile and a scribble were far to much trouble for him. If someone other than the passport office asked for my autograph I’d be over the moon – but Gok, ha! Mind you his life is hard, I mean I don’t have my own TV show and dress young girls for a living – I suppose it’s all relative. The only people who seem to like their jobs are morons or call centre managers. Perhaps it’s not what we do to win our daily bread but how much we do for it. You see I was thinking about my average day. I generally work 9 to 5, five days a week. My alarm goes off at 6.15 am and I leave the house an hour later getting to work at 8.00 am. That’s roughly an hour driving (traffic permitting). I do my job, squeeze in a cup of tea every three hours and gobble something to eat in the middle of the day. When I get out of there at 5.00 pm. I sit for another hour in the car to get back home. The dog needs a fuss and a walk which takes about half an hour, then I get some tea which, if it’s part of my ‘five a day’ and more than a ready meal, takes at least forty minutes (it’s now 7.10pm). Eating dinner takes about fifteen minutes give or take, and washing up another five (by now its 7.30pm). If I was being good I would go to the gym for an

this leaves me one hour to make pleasant talk with my girlfriend, watch a film, read a book, play with my dog, do my personal administration, blah, blah – I have five hours during the week for play, and that is if everything is timed to military precision. At the end of most days I am too far gone to do anything constructive. Maybe we resent our jobs for taking time away from what we really want to do, maybe we are working too much. Weekends are a mad dash of shopping, more work and if I’m lucky, a hair cut a month. Shoehorning everything you want to do into a weekend is stressful. Now as societies go, we haven’t got it that bad. Generally we have wealth, freedom of choice and travel opportunities only dreamt of a generation ago. Materially, we have iPods, broadband and movies on demand and in today’s society women are no longer tied to the kitchen sink, homosexuality is no crime and our children are safer. We have a system of laws that pretty well safeguard us from anything harmful, and infectious diseases that plagued us one hundred years ago have all but been eradicated. So why are we not happier? By rights, surely we should be collectively over the moon, so why are we stressing the hell out of ourselves with unhappiness? One survey from BUPA claimed that around 7 million people which equates to one in four of the working population have sought medical help to combat stress or depression. A survey conducted by the National Union of teachers suggested that stress is the main health concern for four out of five schools with 40% of teachers reporting high levels of stress (and the government want people to teach?) An article in the Independent said that “nearly 20 per cent of the 2,050 workers surveyed by the charity Mind have phoned in sick to avoid work because of unmanageable stress levels, yet almost everyone lied about why they felt ill.” Mind even launched a ‘reclaim your lunch-hour’ campaign to draw attention to a healthy

Points of reference • Happiness index to gauge Britain’s national mood. http://www.guardian. co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/14/happiness-index-britain-national-mood • Plan to measure happiness ‘not woolly’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk11833241 • Prime Minister unveils ‘happiness index’. http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/uk/politics/prime-minister-unveils-happiness-index-2143950.html • Bhutan’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ index. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/asia/bhutan/8355028/Bhutans-Gross-National-Happinessindex.html • Leading article: An index of happiness is at least a worthwhile endeavour.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-anindex-of-happiness-is-at-least-a-worthwhile-endeavour-2143897.html • Call me a grump, but this happiness index is just a cynical attempt to control our minds. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1333922/Cameronshappiness-index-just-cynical-attempt-control-minds.html • What philosophy tells us about the happiness index. http://www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/15/happiness-index-philosophy • Britain’s happiness in decline. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/ happiness_formula/4771908.stm

T he happiness in d ex

work-life balance. So it isn’t just the people I work with that hate their jobs – seemingly it’s everybody! Maybe it isn’t stress that is making us unhappy, perhaps we are just born miserable? In a recent scientific study,2 researchers discovered that levels of a molecule called neuropeptide Y (NPY) directly relates to whether we have a ‘glass half empty’ or ‘glass half full’ attitude towards life. Apparently according to the tests, people with lower levels of the molecule are more prone to becoming stressed or depressed. Well, that explains me then. A glass and a half full of dirge in my body, ta very much. But simply blaming ones genes for the fact you feel unhappy is not really good enough, shouldn’t everyone be entitled to feel happy, even if they were born with Eeyore-syndrome. Bad genes or no bad genes, if stress leads to unhappiness and that leads to hate then hate can surely only propagate rage, which in turn leads to violence, and that is far more serious. In 2004 a 69-year-old man was found dead after being punched in the face when he reprimanded a man for riding his bike the wrong way down a one-way street in Wandsworth, South-west London. In one of the most bizarre rages ‘trolley rage’,

a woman was bruised and verbally abused by a woman in a ‘trolley rage’ incident at an Ipswich supermarket in 2003.2 The world is quite literally going bonkers. It’s not just the man in the street that overreacts to the slightest petty annoyance even the privileged are at it too. Take the millionaire supermodel Naomi Campbell, who, when she couldn’t find the right pair of jeans, threw a mobile phone at her assistants head, or Transformers star Shia LaBeouf who recently chased a photographer halfway down the street for err, trying to take a photo. Our culture is a complex one, and I am sure that if we were to go back to the 1970s, we would see the same anxieties and the same things to get upset about, just that today how and who we vent our anger at has changed. In the 1980s we changed from a near bankrupt welfare state to an economically charged society: greed was good and our social system was eroded to allow people to compete. As we competed, our anger internalised. Since the 80s we have had to change jobs more, move more and living alone has risen, weakening our social support structures. We also lead virtual lives online with people we have never met, and think nothing of lashing out on an internet forum

Points of interest footnotes

Trolley rage is the common name for a

that what a person says about their own

heightened level of anger and frustration while

happiness tends to tally with what friends or

seven to nine hours a night is advisable for

in a supermarket or shop of any kind. Trolley

even strangers might say about them if asked

adults, and a survey it conducted in 2002

rage is a very general term, in that it could

the same question. Most people say they are

suggested three-quarters of Americans had

apply to anything from stuck carts, to throwing

happy.

problems sleeping and a third were so sleepy

tantrums in the supermarket. Whereas it can

during the day their activities were affected

be caused by anything from items being out

The opinion poll by GfK NOP for The Happiness

of stock, to rudeness of fellow customers or

Formula series on BBC Two in 2006 provided

employees.

the first evidence that Britain’s happiness levels

The US National Sleep Foundation suggests

‘Happiness’ gene helps you look on the bright

are declining - a trend already well documented

side. Volunteers who had inherited two copies of the “long” variant of 5-HTTLPR – a gene

Politicians have long been tempted by the idea

in the United States. Polling data from Gallup

that controls transport of the mood-affecting

of a “happiness index”. Tony Blair commissioned

throughout the 1950s shows happiness levels

neurotransmitter serotonin – showed clear

various studies and “life satisfaction” seminars

above what they are today, suggesting that our

avoidance of negative images, such as fierce

but in the end those involved say he found the

extra wealth has not brought extra well-being.

animals, and a clear preference for positive

idea just too flaky.

The proportion saying they are “very happy” has fallen from 52% in 1957 to just 36% today.

ones, such as puppies. People with this variant combination are dubbed “LL” carriers.

Social scientists measure happiness simply by asking people how happy they are. It is argued

Points of reference • Hairdressers ‘happiest at work’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ business/4296975.stm • Meet Mr Wong - the happiest person in America. http://www.guardian. co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/08/mr-wong-happiest-man-america • http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/default.stm • Happiness is ... becoming a bit more scientific. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2010/nov/15/happiness-scientific-david-cameron • Unhappiness is inevitable. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2006/aug/28/comment.mainsection1

• Caught on secret helmet-cam: The moment furious driver unleashes road rage attack on innocent cyclist. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article1364839/Cyclist-road-rage-Neil-Chatterjee-throttled-BMW-driver-rush-hourattack.html • Shia Labeouf chase paparazzi. http://www.thetruegossip.com/2010/12/ shia-labeouf-chases-paparazzi.html • ‘I’ll curb my temper’, pledges Naomi. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ tvshowbiz/article-441631/Ill-curb-temper-pledges-Naomi.html

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

safely hidden by our keyboards. We have to travel further to get to work, so spend a lot more of our time in cars, hence a rise in road rage. There must, however, be a solution. There is and only David has the answer: the happiness index! Now David Cameron, Barrack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy subscribe to the idea that measuring a nations well-being by its GDP is an outmoded idea when what we really need to be measuring is national happiness.3 Now Lord Layard, policy adviser to Gordon Brown, reckons that, “the best society is that where the people are happiest, and the best policy is the one that produces the greatest happiness.” Well there you go then, easy – take the day off ! The Government wants us to be happy. Yay! Cameron said as he became Tory leader in 2005 that: “well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.” He added: “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general well-being.” Err, great, but how would you gather this happy-data? Philip Johnston writing in The Telegraph reckons that: “measurements of national well-being are already included in cross-border surveys carried out by the UN or the OECD and include such indicators as a perceived lack of

corruption; low unemployment; high levels of education and income; and the number of older people in the labour market. Using such criteria, polls can try to paint a picture of what a country thinks about itself.” O.K, but do remember to not just ask people as they are coming out the pub or on a warm July day, try asking in wet January and you will get a different outcome believe you me. How you can effectively measure happiness is beyond me. I can guarantee that what makes me happy and what makes you happy are two very different things. Happiness is such a nebulous notion, and unless they bring mind reading into the mix, there is no sure-fire way of gauging someone’s feelings. I can give the happiness census takers one piece of advice though: stay away from the people with Eeyore-syndrome! n

A typical questionnaire drawn up by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex asks the following questions to help gauge wellbeing: Have you recently... - Been a b l e to concentrat e on what e ve r you’re doing? - Lo st m uch sl eep over worr y ? - F elt tha t you were pl ay ing a use ful par t in t hings? - F elt ca pa b l e of m a ki ng de cisions about t hings? - F elt cons ta ntl y under st rain?

- F el t yo u c o u l d n’ t o verc o me yo u r d i ffi c u l ti es ? - Been a bl e to en j oy yo u r n o r ma l d ay - to - d ay a c ti v i ti es ? - Been a bl e to fa c e u p to p ro bl ems ? - Been th i n k i n g o f yo u r s el f a s a w o r th l es s p er s o n ? - Been feel i n g rea s o n a bl y h a p py, a l l th i n g s c o n s i d ered ?

D a niel H a mermesh : 2 0 1 0 “ The results are ver y simple: Better looking people are happier. It ’s true in a bunch of countries. It ’s true in both men and women.”

t he happiness in d ex

So how are we going to measure wellbeing? UK households are to be asked how satisfied they are

However, as David Cameron’s £2m plan to measure

with their lives in survey measuring happiness. The Office

the nation’s happiness got under way, the American

for National Statistics has published the questions it

psychologist whose work inspired it has said he has

is adding to an existing nationwide poll from April 2011.

changed his mind about the importance of being happy.

People will be asked to rank from 0 to 10 how ‘satisfied’

Professor Martin Seligman, director of the Positive

they are, and how ‘anxious’ they felt yesterday. The Office

Psychology Centre at the University of Pennsylvania,

for National Statistics says the aim is to get a fuller picture

insists he is not contradicting the doctrine which made

of ‘how society is doing’ than can be found simply by using

him a bestselling author and world-renowned expert on

economic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product.

optimism but just that we should be focusing less on people’s happiness and more on their ability to ‘flourish’.

The first results are due to be published by the middle of

He said he was naive in the past to think wellbeing was

next year. The questions will include:

based only on mood adding:

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? • Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?

“The word ‘happiness’ always bothered me, partly

• Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?

because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of

• Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in

different things to different people, and also because it’s

your life are worthwhile?

subjective,”

n e

c e d e

m a l i s

s e d

c o n t r a

a u d e n t i o r

i t o

Points of interest The tiny, Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan

Using a formula called the Gallup-Healthways

the clergy, chefs, beauticians, and plumbers

first invented the idea of using happiness as

Well-Being Index, the pollsters ‘Gallup’ identified

and mechanics. In contrast, social workers,

a measure of good governance – an idea its

a statistical hypothesis for the happiest

architects, civil servants and estate agents

superpower neighbour China has now borrowed.

individual: male, tall, Asian-American, an

made up the foot of the table. Only 2% of social

It was first proposed in 1972 by Jigme Singye

observant Jew, at least 65 years old, married

workers and architects say they are extremely

Wangchuck, the country’s former King. He

with children, and a business owner with a

happy at work, according to the survey.

said that instead of relying on GDP as the best

household income of more than $120,000. He

indicator of Bhutan’s progress, it should instead

also had to live in Hawaii, the apparently is the

Top five happiest jobs:

consider its “Gross National Happiness.”

happiest state in the US.

Hairdressers (40%)

When the New York Times called three

Clergy (24%)

If you are attractive, you are more likely to

synagogues in Hawaii to see if the hypothetical

Chefs/cooks (23%)

be happy in life, according to a study by

could actually be a reality, their search yielded

Beauticians (22%)

the University of Texas at Austin.Daniel

a perfect fit: a Mr. Alvin Wong, 69, a 5ft 10in

Plumbers (20%)

Hamermesh, professor of economics at the

kosher-keeping Chinese-American Jew, married

*% who rated their level of happiness as 10 out

University of Texas at Austin, said, “The results

to Trudy Schandler-Wong for 35 years, father

are very simple: Better looking people are

to two grown-up children and founder of

happier. It’s true in a bunch of countries. It’s

two healthcare management businesses. He

true in both men and women.” Physical beauty,

confirmed that he is indeed a happy person,

as well as height, can affect a person’s paycheck

and shared a few tips on happiness, as learned

and resulting happiness, Dr. Jennifer Hartstein

from his mother, who believed that “you don’t

said: “Research has found that if you are taller,

do things just for money, you do things because

you get a larger paycheck, up to $800 more

you want to do them and you love to do them.

than someone who is not as tall. So they’re not

This is what is going to make you get up in the

talking 5’2” to 5’5,” they’re talking 5’5” to 6 feet,

morning.” Easy!

of 10 in brackets

Top five unhappiest jobs: Social Workers (2%) Architects (2%) Civil Servants (3%) Estate Agents (4%) Secretaries (5%) *% who rated their level of happiness as 10 out of 10 in brackets

but it can get you more money.” She explained, “They think that’s because you might have more

According to examiner City & Guilds, hair-

self-esteem. You might have more leadership

dressers are the happiest workers in the UK,

qualities. So height is an advantage.”

with two out of five saying they are very content

(source: CBS News)

in their job. Next in the happiness stakes are

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) BritishChe 14/11/2010 8:24 PM Le vel of unhappiness: 11 out of 10. Mood: aggressive.

JonDess 14 /11/2010 8:20 PM I think Britain’s national happiness would be helped immeasurably by Cameron et al pissing off and ceasing to screw the vast majority of the population.

thea1mighty 14/11/2010 8:31 PM What is the betting that one of the questions will be ‘How happy do you feel at 4:55pm on a Friday?’ My own answer would be - ‘Not as happy as I would be, seeing rows of bankers heads on poles lining Horseguard.’

stfcbob 14/11/2010 8:33 PM Bankers and tax avoiders = happy Ever yone else = pissed off. There. That should save them a lot of time and money.

tissum 14/11/2010 8:35 PM Surely only a matter of time before the headline: Government to cut happiness by 30%

(...) 46

t he happiness in d ex

(...) rustyschwinnToo 14/11/2010 8:37 PM Allow me to save the government efficiency savings by poll avoidance: I’m pissed [off]. Great, government

meets

corporate

psychobabble.

Guardian - new instant poll please: “Are you satisfied that your le vel of satisfac tion is satisfac torily taken into account such that you are happy to happily par ticipate in the government ’s happiness sur vey satisfac torily?” +----------------------------+ “Nothing is more dangerous than a Gallup poll always taking ones pulse and always taking one ’s political temperature ” Winston Churchill.

singingringingtree 14/11/ 2010 8:40 PM I’m too cold, depressed and de -motivated to fill in a fooking sur vey.

Moosed 14/11/2010 9:07 PM Twat.

majorwinters 14/11/2010 9:26 PM You couldn’ t make this shit up.

(...) 47

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) tomfrom66 15/10/10 5:43 PM Happiness is a banker ’s bonus. Happiness is flipping your second home. Happiness is sacking people, and re -employing them on workfare. Happiness will be a visit to the food bank. Happiness is eating fast food, so that you pop your clogs before you get your pension. Happiness is a job in Downing Street taking the P155 out of the voters.

stinkbug2010 14 /11/2010 5:50 PM Slow “news ” day headline. This will go no where.

rustle 14/11/2010 7:31 PM He who laughs last, pays a wellbeing tax. 5% for a smile, 10% for a guffaw, 50% for a belly laugh! “Are you happy campers?” It ’s Butlinsesque!

Hardrada 14/11/2010 7.41 PM I’m not entirely convinced that the people responsible for causing most of society ’s miser y are the best qualified to assess the quality (or quantity) of it ’s happiness.

(...) 48

t he happiness in d ex

(...) bogwar t 16/10/10 3:12 PM Next up: benefits are to be withdrawn from all the unhappy people.

bogbrush2 16 /11/2010 4.23 PM I don’ t know about happiness, but if I could watch this current government, together with Blair & co boiled slowly to death in an upturned gasometer filled with their own excrement, I reckon I could crack a smile.

rustle 16/11/2010 3.33 PM “ While it ’s not the government ’s job to make people happy ” Why the hell not?

sarntcrip 16/11/2010 6:30 PM Make us happy Cameron, piss right off.

VelocetteKTT 16/11/2010 7.45 PM ‘’Months after becoming Tor y leader in 2005, Mr Cameron said gauging people ’s wellbeing was among the central political issues of our time ’’ ...It ’s vitally impor tant that we can gauge Exac tly how much fur ther we can squeeze the little people. The first erk wearing a rosette that comes up to me is really going to need a new clipboard.

(...) 49

Fear | Health

Health consists of having the same diseases as oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neighbours : Quentin Crisp

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Health Panic stations everyone, get the flu jab, get it now! OR... YOU...WILL...DIE!

So I am a man, I’m in my early 30s, and like most men my age, I have probably lived through the peak of what my body can be, and it is now quite clearly in decline. Now I’m not feeling hard done by, during my twenties I abused my body quite heinously for years, and to be fair I’m glad that it was robust enough to withstand the rigours of youthful exuberance. As I approached 30, I realised that the party had to end. The most frightening indication of this was my expanding waistline. You see I lived my twenties with reckless abandon; thinking nothing of late night drinking sessions finished off with a battered pie, scoffing to myself that my body could seemingly absorb my nightly intake of carbohydrate with no consequences. But, all the good times were having an effect and I didn’t like it: I was getting fat! Now because I bought the papers and watched the television I knew that fat equalled death, and a slow death at that, filled to the brim with bed sores and diabetes, and from what I was told, I didn’t want diabetes. So do something about it I must, and I did: I started buying Men’s Health magazine. Now a man’s mind works through a series of quite simple algorithms: namely, find a simple way of solving a problem by buying something! The ‘something’ I decided to buy was a subscription to Men’s Health which in turn led to a subscription to the most dreaded of places: a gym! I looked every month at the rippling cover stars and often deliriously dreamt that if I tried hard enough, I could resemble that guy! I could be him: that bronzed Adonis of a man on the glossy cover with very firm bits where mine were quite frankly very soft. Easy. It said so on the cover. I could achieve a beach body in six weeks. Six weeks? Astonishing. I was up for a bit of that. So I made a pact with myself to join a gym and get my burn out, up, or is that on? Now gyms are intrinsically hideous, sordid, grief holes.

The idea that you would willingly go into a room of complete strangers and grunt, pant and pull faces only your wife should ever see is beyond me. If ever there was a place where a slightly unfit man would feel genuinely frightened it was in a gym. I almost needed a beer or two to pluck up the courage to go. Armchair psychology aside what happened here was that a physiological change in my once svelte body, sparked a feeling of intense fear, which in turn led to other actions which increased the fear. My body was frightening me and my remedial actions were frightening me even more. Reading that magazine every month made me absolutely paranoid about my health. OK, so I was a little tubbier, but it then started to dawn on me that my loose living in my twenties could have done irreparable damage to my innards. I would read statistic upon statistic that told me how my heart might be enlarged, my liver may be too fatty and my colon was probably clogged and what’s more; unless I ate 56 eggs a day, drank a protein shake on the hour every hour and lifted weights before work, whilst at work and after work I would probably die a poor, under-sexed, wobbly, lonely whelp of a man with very small testicles. It did kind of work though. I developed a body neuroses; visited the gym about once a month when I had a day off from work, ate more green things and drank less booze, and eventually shed five stone. Suffice to say, after a while I stopped buying Men’s Health, and my anxiety level evened itself out. These days worrying about your health is a major pasttime for some and a money spinner for others. A survey of 3,000 sports clubs by the Central Council of Physical Recreation (CCPR), the trade body for sport, suggests that Britain is becoming a more active nation in the run-up to London 2012. The average club in Britain had 117 adult members and 107 junior members in 2008, compared with 113 and 98 in 2007, representing a 4 per cent and 13 per cent increase respectively. Not bad is it? Clever marketing coupled with shrunken testicles is getting people running around. It is not just adults either. Fat kids are in on the action too. In March 2007 the Times published an article

Points of reference • Shahira Fahmy and Thomas J. Johnson (2007) Mediating the Anthrax Attacks: Media Accuracy and Agenda Setting During a Time of Moral Panic . ATLANTIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, 15(1), 19–40 • Natalie Boero. (2007) All the News that’s Fat to Print: The American “Obesity Epidemic” and the Media. Qual Sociol (2007) 30:41–60 • To halt binge drinking, stop buying rounds. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ health/healthnews/8236863/To-halt-binge-drinking-stop-buying-rounds. html#article • Christine Newton-John ‘exercised her husband to death’ http://www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5741797.ece

• Membership numbers on increase in sports clubs despite recession. http:// www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/london_2012/article6933817.ece • Swine Flu Deaths Prompt Vaccine Advice. http://news.sky.com/skynews/ Home/UK-News/Swine-Flu-Deaths-Health-Experts-Warn-Those-At-Risk-ToGet-Flu-Vaccine/Article/201012215851827?f=rss • It’s official, the swine flu ‘pandemic’ is over (shame it cost us £1billion and scared thousands witless). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1248473/ Swine-flu-panic-national-website-helpline-shut-down.html • Sleep patterns ‘linked to heart attack risk’. http://www.nhs.uk/ news/2011/02February/Pages/sleep-patterns-predict-heart-attack-risk.aspx

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entitled: Worried parents are paying for children to get fit at the gym. Kids playing too much Call of Duty? No sweat, get em on the protein shakes! The article went on to name-drop David Lloyd, which has 59 clubs in the UK, and has more than 40,000 members aged 6-17, up from 36,904, while child membership at Esporta, with 53 outlets nation wide, has risen by 95 per cent in three years, to 19,000. Children are hitting the gyms like never before. An article in The Sun from 17th July 2008 told the story of a 10 year old Australian girl called Maughan Wellham, who flexed her muscles in a national bodybuilding competition. This sparked the usual public outcries and prompted the child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg to argue that she was too young to be flaunting her body and that it could send out the wrong message to image-conscious kids. “The thing that concerns me is that young people can damage themselves quite badly if they over-exercise when young.” Err, well ‘duh’ was that not completely obvious, she looked like Sylvester Stallone! Exercise can be dangerous, in fact it can get quite homicidal. In 2009 The Times ran a piece about a sexchange woman called Christine Newton-John (named after Olivia naturally) who pleaded guilty to reckless homicide after apparently exercising her husband to death. Mrs Newton is now serving a prison sentence for forcing her exhausted 73-year-old husband to swim in the pool of their apartment complex in Chardon, Ohio. The article explained: “Newton-John, who was born John Vallandingham, was caught on CCTV dragging James Mason, around the pool by his arms and legs. At some points Mr Mason, who was terrified of water, laid his head on the side of the pool gasping for breath ...the man was exercised to death...” Joseph Stehlik, the police chief of Middle-field, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer “...the video is bone-chilling.”

This surely was some feat as most spouses can barely cajole their husbands into doing the hoovering. Reading that article certainly made me a little cautious of going swimming with my significant other I can tell you. Ultimately if lack of exercise or too much exercise doesn’t scare you to death or actually kill you, then the evil scourge of mega contagions will. You can’t have failed to notice that the planet is gripped by the deadly fist of Swine Flu1. Last year everyone got very excited and grief stricken about Swine Flu. It was truly bizarre! Laminated notices telling you how to wash your hands appeared in every municipal toilet in the land, hand-gel dispensers materialised on office walls as if beamed there by Montgomery Scott, and people gobbled Tamiflu like ‘E’s’ at a rave. Then, it all went very quiet. Swine Flu seemed to vanish as quickly as it came and people very quickly forgot about washing their hands. All it amounted to was that we all became mass guinea pigs for a wide-scale drugs testing program. Then in December this year it sprung back up from the dead like one of those skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. Within seconds of an outbreak on December 11th 2010 Sky News was quick to act: Swine Flu Deaths Prompt Vaccine Advice Frightened yet? You soon will be! Panic stations everyone, get the flu jab, get it now! OR...YOU...WILL...DIE! GP surgeries were running out, Tescos were stockpiling the stuff and people were dying cold and alone left, right and centre. Well, everything but that last bit was true, not many people died at all really. Figures published in The Independent in December 2010 revealed “excess winter mortality [from flu] was 30 per cent lower in 2009-10 than in the milder winter of 2008-09” so what was all the fuss about? Apparently Swine Flu did us all a favour and helped save lives. Experts now say that H1N1 ended up saving lives rather than costing them – by driving out seasonal flu, which normally targets the more vulnerable

M a ril y n M a nson on swine fl u , N M E , S eptember 2 1 , 2 0 0 9 “So I have officially been diagnosed, by a real doctor, with THE SWINE FLU, I know ever yone will suggest that fucking a pig is how this disease was obtained. However, the doctor said, my past choices in women have, in ‘no way ’ contributed to... me acquiring this mysterious sickness. Unfor tunately, I am going to sur vive.”

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

elderly. Pandemic scares of invisible terrors are great though. Do you remember the foot and mouth outbreak at the end of the 1990s? Everyone went bananas and the disinfectant mats came out all over the shop. Cows were flung on giant barbecues, rich people couldn’t hunt and the annual balloon festivals in Northampton and Bristol were cancelled... Thing is I don’t recall hearing in all the calamity of anyone catching it though. Same as the flesh eating virus in the mid 1990s that was supposed to eat your face off like some alien creature would do to away teams in Star Trek, or S.A.R.S2 of the early naughties that, apart from sounding like one of James Bond’s enemy organisations, would get you to cough wildly then fall down dead. A good pandemic scare is an excellent way of reassuring you that a man with a bomb is the least of your worries, you could quite easily die just from getting out of bed in the morning. This winter I was ill with ‘Man-flu’ twice all over the festive period despite my new Mens Health inspired, soupdrinking state. Goes to show it doesn’t matter how healthy you are, you’re guaranteed to come down with something before Christmas. Being ill at Christmas sucks and what truly bites is when you are sipping Lemsip instead of Snowballs - so next year I am going to start licking door handles at the start of November to be swine flu clear well before Christmas Eve! I suggest you do the same. n

Swine flu: some figures Was the swine flue pandemic as bad as everyone said it would be? How much money was spent on the outbreak? • 65,000 Number of deaths planned for • 132m Vaccine doses ordered by the Government •28m Courses of antiviral drugs (Tamiflu, Relenza) were stockpiled in the UK • £1.2bn Cost of preventative measures • 494 Actual deaths from the virus (to April 2010) • 2-4,000 Estimated annual deaths from seasonal winter flu (in a mild year) (Source: Friday, 3 December 2010, The Independent)

footnotes: epidemics

Between 1990 and 2001 The New York Times

contagious disease of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats

to Hong Kong for a wedding, where he fell ill.

published over 750 articles on obesity, most

and wild ruminants, characterised by fever,

He is believed to have infected several guests

since 1998. In comparison, during the same

vesicles on the feet, mouth and udder and by

who were staying in the same hotel. After being

period, The Times published 544 articles on

death in young animals. FMD is caused by a

admitted to hospital, where he also passed the

smoking, 672 articles on the AIDS epidemic, and

virus of the genus Aphthovirus within the family

disease on to medical staff, he later died of the

531 articles on pollution. In the broadest sense,

of Picornaviridae.

infection.

these 751 articles are about obesity, fatness, and

(Source: R.P.Kitching and D.K.Mackay)

(Society for General Microbiology 2004)

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is a highly

been treating the cases in Guangdong travelled

body size, yet these themes arise in a range of contexts including health, weight-loss, children, beauty, worker productivity, public health, discrimination, and economics. Though many take the “obesity epidemic” for granted, these articles do far more than simply reﬂect the existence of a biomedical epidemic.

The SARS outbreak is thought to have

originated in the Guangdong province of southern China in mid-November 2004. Over 300 people were taken ill with a new infectious disease, and 5 people died. A doctor who had

(Borero, 2007) Points of reference • http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,2143290,00.html • Christopher Barclay. House of Commons paper. Research paper. 01/35: Foot • Ten years on from foot and mouth – a time to remember, and to plan for and Mouth Disease %20Real. Available at: www.parliament.uk/documents/ next time. http://outdoors.caledonianmercury.com/2011/02/25/ten-yearscommons/lib/.../rp2001/rp01-035.pdf on-from-foot-and-mouth-%E2%80%93-a-time-to-remember-and-to-plan-for• http://www.sgm.ac.uk/news/hot_topics/sars.cfm • Chris Jewell, Gareth Roberts. Foot-and-Mouth Disease 2007: Statistical • Oz girl flexes mini muscles. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ Surveillance in Real-Time. Dept Maths and Stats, Lancaster University; Dept • Christine Newton-John ‘exercised her husband to death’, http://www. of Stats, University of Warwick. Available from: www.svepm.org.uk/.../Foottimesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5741797.ece and-Mouth%20Disease%202007%20Statistical%20Surveillance%20in Times Online. • Beauty equals happiness, study says. http://www.cbsnews.com/ • Bryan E Denham (2008) ‘Folk devils, news icons and the construction of stories/2011/03/31/earlyshow/main20049221.shtml moral panics’, Journalism Studies, 9:6, 945-961

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Timeline of swine flu: Source - Daily Mail Online, 2nd July 2010 APRIL 24 2009: The Health Protection Agency says it is monitoring a

how easily swine flu can spread, using the slogan Catch It, Kill It, Bin It, is

deadly swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the United States after more than

announced.

60 people worldwide die after contracting the virus.

NOVEMBER 19: Plans to vaccinate more than three million healthy under-

APRIL 26: Iain and Dawn Askham, of Polmont, near Falkirk, confirmed

fives are revealed

as the first UK cases of swine flu after returning from their honeymoon in

DECEMBER 10: Sir Liam Donaldson says the pandemic is ‘considerably less

Mexico.

lethal; than feared, with 26 deaths for every 100,000 cases in England.

JUNE 14: Jacqui Fleming, 38, of Glasgow, becomes the first person in the

JANUARY 8 2010: The number of new cases in the UK falls significantly, to

UK to die after contracting the virus. Mrs Fleming died two weeks after

fewer than 5,000 new cases in a week, but the death toll rises to 360.

her son, Jack, was born 11 weeks prematurely. He died on June 15 - not from

MARCH 18: New figures reveal there have been 457 deaths in the UK since

swine flu.

the pandemic began.

JULY 2: The UK moves past the stage of containing the swine flu outbreak

MARCH 25: An independent review of the UK response to swine flu is

and into the ‘treatment phase’, with hundreds of cases recorded every day.

announced, headed by former Welsh Chief Medical Officer Dame Deirdre

JULY 9: The Government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson,

Hine, which will make recommendations about what should be done in the

confirms 14 people in the UK have now died after contracting swine flu.

event of future flu pandemics.

JULY 10: A hospital patient from Essex becomes the first person without Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1291099/British-taxpayers-

underlying health problems to die after contracting swine flu. JULY 23: New swine flu website receives 2,600 hits per second and crashes

spent-1-2bn-swine-flu-pandemic-was.html#ixzz1I7mg1rwk

within minutes of launching. SEPTEMBER 3: Government scientists revise estimate of the number of people in the UK who could die to a ‘worst case scenario’ of 19,000, down from the estimate of 65,000 two months earlier. OCTOBER 21: Mass swine flu immunisation programme gets under way. OCTOBER 25: A hard-hitting Government advertising campaign about

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Points of interest footnotes: health panics

Increasingly the term “epidemic” is being used in

existence of or even “spread” of fatness alone,

In conceptualizing moral health panics, Goode

the media, medical journals, and health policy

there must also be a shift in the signiﬁcation of

and Ben-Yehuda (1994) identified five criteria.

literature to describe the current prevalence of

fatness and fat bodies. People are confused by

First, a heightened level of concern about an

overweight in the United States. “Traditional”

the mixed messages they are getting. Is obesity

issue should appear, and that concern should

epidemics like cholera and inﬂuenza and “post-

genetic? Are carbohydrates the enemy? What

contain a certain amount of hostility toward a

modern” epidemics like obesity, youth violence,

about fat and calories? Do drugs work? In the

certain group of individuals, who are perceived

and drug use involve a rapid spread of fear and

midst of this confusion, even those doctors who

as a threat to society. A consensus in society

calls for vigilance (Glassner, 2000). Fear comes

appear most committed to scientiﬁc theories of

should consider the threat real, or legitimate,

to characterize the epidemic early on, in The new

obesity are centrally concerned with bringing

even though reaction to the issue is largely

York Times in 1994, one researcher is reported as

people back to an understanding of the root

disproportionate. Lastly, Goode and Ben-Yehuda

having said; “We’re frightened right now because

causes of obesity in this country-a sedentary

(1994) suggested, moral panics are generally

obesity is an epidemic that has made all of us

lifestyle, and an abundance of food.

volatile; that is, they tend to arise rapidly and,

wake up.” In the case of obesity, an epidemic

(Source: Boero, 2006)

typically, fade in similar fashion.

whose biological basis is questionable, this fear and sense of chaos cannot be fueled by the

P rofessor J ohn O x ford , April 2 9 , 2 0 0 9 “Really, there is ver y little evidence that masks actually offer much protection against flu. I think handing them out to the public as has happened in Mexico just destroys confidence.”

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Ron, Lincolnshire 01/07/2010 12:09 AM Ha! Just wait for the next manufac tured pandemic scare to boost pharmaceutical company coffers. Buy this drug or die. Lovely jubbly.

Sue 01/07/2010 14:13 PM At the time I thought it was scar y how quickly the swine flu vaccine was being administered. New drugs have to go through a vigorous testing process which takes years. I wondered at the time if there was a vested interest in releasing this vaccine to the public so quickly. The scare tac tics must have helped.

Karen 01/07/2010 12:00 PM Clearly a pan-ic-demic then!

dicey 03/23/2011 12:31 PM Diane Abbott, Labour ’s shadow public health spokesman, said: “ There needs to be a preemptive vaccination campaign targeted at children and young people, which could help to aver t a major pandemic.” Thereby re vealing in a single sentence that she understands absolutely nothing about the subjec t which she holds the por tfolio for. Why does this fail to surprise me after 15 years of pig ignorant Labour Ministers playing musical chairs with cabinet posts?

(...) 56

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(...) aswasizziz 03/23/2011 08:27 PM I won’ t be able to sleep after visualizing those enormous wasps with their lethal stings. They can chew meat you know! I won’ t be losing any sleep over the latest flu epidemic scare stor y though.

The Baldchemist 03/23/2011 05:51 AM Recommended by 11 people Fill ‘em with fear and then sell ‘em the cure. Biggest scam e ver. Even bigger than Madoff ’s ponzi scheme. (And led by the same group that run the World’s finances on Wall St and Central banks).

Jeremy Poynton 03/22/2011 11:10 PM Recommended by 20 people Oh jolly good. We haven’ t had a good public panic since Swine Flu (apar t from the imminent end of the planet as a result of Global Warming/ Climate Change/Climate Disruptions. Splendid. Keep the sheep intimidated eh?

stuar t66 12/20/2010 04:51 PM Recommended by 1 person “If swine flu pandemic is over, why the panic?” Hmmm, maybe because headline writers don’ t have a setting other than “panic ”?

(...) 57

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) LesterJones 23/12/2010 8:13 PM Yeah okay... ...we ’ve

got

growth

figures

down

and

unemployment figures up... ...we ’ve got massive public ser vice cuts and massive private pay hikes.... ...we ’ve got students re volting and re volting coalition hypocrisy... Yeah...okay... Time to wheel out the “ you’re all going to die of Brid Flu/Swine Flu/God Knows What Flu” and spin spin spin our way outta this reality...

LesterJones 23/12/2010 8:28 PM 10 more deaths, taking the total this season to 27. Just as a matter of interest...road deaths for 2009 were 2 , 222 ...and 24,690 serious injuries... So... although “H1N1 had shown itself to be a dangerous virus. “It is per fec tly capable of killing a per fec tly healthy young person,” it still has a long way to go before coming close to the car...

Watty145 23/12/2010 9:51 PM I agree it ain’ t pleasant, but do we really need the media to whip the nation up into a frenzy? Ah - of course... the queues have gone down at St Pancras and Heathrow’s open again... Cynical, moi...?

(...) 58

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(...) JoeDeM 23/12/2010 10:37 PM It ’s winter and there ’s flu about. And what do bears do in woods?

eroica 23/12/2010 8:51 PM I paid £8 at my local Sainsbur y ’s for a flu jab. What next, Tonisilec tomy at Tescos? Mamoplasty at Morrison’s? Chemotherapy at the Co -op? I trust they offering 3 -for-the -price -of-two, Buy One Get One Free or at least extra loyalty card points? The NHS is Safeways with us.

joe5000 24/12/2010 4:06 AM Clearly, the e vil tories have invented the flu to kill of all the poors.

SixBobBit 30/12/2010 9:37 PM Vote Tor y. Die of flu. It was in their manifesto...

tiredgiraffe 04/05/2009 1:34 AM A heightened awareness of our lack of control over the world is a classic symptom of depression. Depressives are much more realistic about the world than the rest of the population.

(...) 59

Fear | Crime

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless : Polly Toynbee

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Crime No doubt you will be banned from being cremated too incase someone inhales you.

Every day there is a piece in the papers that announces the introduction of a law banning a what not that hitherto you considered harmless. What do you do? Hurrumph and then you turn the page. We are so used to laws these days, or the profusion of them that we are taking crime for granted. But here is the thing: with all these new little laws, how do we differentiate between the big, bad juicy ones and the silly ones that you never though were crimes in the first place? Your bins will be monitored for weight, you will not be allowed to swat a fly, you will not be able to have unprotected sex with work colleagues. Pukka Pies will have to be marked with a government health warning and you will be prevented from telling blue jokes within 5oo yards of an under 25 year old. No doubt you will be banned from being cremated too incase someone inhales you. Naturally cigarette packets will be devoid of colour and logos because, you know, that will stop people reaching for the ciggies. Waiting at a bus stop will be considered loitering, driving after eating a champagne truffle will constitute drink-driving, and the annoying adverts for The Halifax will be made illegal (only one of these is welcomed). You see we live in a culture where the word of law has become a bit of a farce. We are really not taking the law seriously anymore. Just take the recent case of Paul Chambers who was arrested and threatened with prison for jokingly threatening to blow-up Doncaster’s Robin Hood Airport. For those of you who’ve missed this bizzare story, Chambers was a victim of the new year snowfall, arriving at the airport to find his plane cancelled. He consequently posted this on Twitter: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” A week later the police arrested him, questioned him for seven hours, confiscated two PCs and his iPhone, no doubt swabbed his body cavities for Semtex and sent him

back home. He was then charged with “sending by a public communications network a message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.” Madness! Now, it is clear that Chambers had been a bit daft, threatening to blow up an airport in the current panic climate, even in jest, is not altogether wise. Nevertheless, he was quite clearly joking and I’d bet everything I own that he wasn’t swapping bomb recipes with @osamabinladen just before the police snapped on their rubber gloves. The law has quite simply gone mad, that or the CPS have far too much time on their hands. This week’s police hoo-ha involved a police swoop on 6 year old girls who were causing criminal damage by picking spring daffodils! A police spokesperson explained: “Two police constables attended, spoke to the mother of the children and explained that as the flowers were laid by the council for the enjoyment of all, that people were not allowed to pick them. The officers had to advise her that by law it was criminal damage, in case they were not aware.” Honestly, the mind boggles. Just this week it was revealed that the Police are to release ‘crime-maps’ of the UK, which will show (at a glance) all the crimes committed on your doorstop. Great! As if you can’t see the crimes for yourself, hell you probably reported them in the first place! We live in the age of accountability and transparency overload. The public have a right to know what is happening on their streets, the government say, and by opening up this information they are giving people real power – and strengthening the fight against crime. Really? So how is looking at out of date crime data going to strengthen the fight against crime? Is it really going to make us more aware? Probably not as most robberies happen when you aren’t looking. Are we going to know the exact instance of crime, so we know specifically what to prepare for? No, it only gives a vague indication like ‘violent crime’, which could be anything from a minor shove to a full-on frenzied

Points of reference • Tom Wynne. (2008) An Investigation into the Fear of Crime: Is there a Link between the Fear of Crime and the Likelihood of Victimisation? Internet Journal of Criminology • Crime and Fear of Crime. Harmonised Concepts and Questions for Social Data Sources. Office for National Statistics, April 2008 • The words you read next will be your last. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2010/nov/15/charlie-brooker-twitter-terror-conviction • My tweet was silly, but the police reaction was absurd. http://www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/may/11/tweet-joke-criminalrecord-airport

• Police swoop on young sisters who picked daffodils in the park. http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/15/daffodil-girls-park-police-swoop-poole • No change in public confidence in official statistics. National Statistics. 22 september 2005 • Home Office accused of releasing selective knife crime figures. http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/13/knife-crime-data-home-office • Tory crime statistics row deepens. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ thereporters/markeaston/2010/02/conservative_estimates_on_viol_1.html • http://www.police.uk/ • Street-level crime maps launched online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-

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machete attack! So all it really gives you is the real power to decide not to move into an area. All you need to do is curiously type in your postcode to have a quick gander at where you live; confirm that you live in a Mad Max era of lawlessness and give yourself a heart attack. Concerned about the effect on house-prices? No? Well you might be after looking at the crime map. I mean, given the murder rate in Midsomer, houses there must be practically free! Back in the day information was a precious commodity, jealously guarded by the elite who withheld it from the masses in order to keep them in their place. Now information is everywhere, available to everybody, all of the bloody time. The information doesn’t stop at just crime. Alongside the map, there are details of local police officers, how to get hold of them, and when the next beat meetings are. Like we really care. At least I know that the team leader is a Sergeant called (quite reliably) Rod, and that PC Claire Labrum looks a bit tasty. So what are we supposed to do with this information? Oh, there isn’t really anything we can do with it other than satisfy our prurience, raise the terror levels of the home counties curtain twitchers and scare old people. Fantastic! Oh and thanks for closing most of my counties police stations, that certainly ought to help the fight against crime! n

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C h a rlie B rooker , T he G u a rdi a n , M ond a y 1 5 N ovember 2 0 1 0 “Anyway, I’m writing this on Friday, so by the time you read this on Monday my strangling rampage will have begun – unless the authorities have intercepted these words and arrested me in the interim, in which case I’d like to make it absolutely clear that I intend to strangle ever yone in the prison before turning my hands on myself. Attention home secretar y: you’ ve got three days and a bit to get your shit together. Otherwise I’m strangling this planet sky-high.”

Points of reference • Street-level crime maps go live. http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/ Newsroom/DG_194160 • Most dangerous neighbourhood identified by crime map. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8294418/Most-dangerousneighbourhood-identified-by-crime-map.html • Online crime maps crash under weight of 18 million hits an hour. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/01/online-crime-maps-power-handspeople • http://www.upmystreet.com/local/crime-in-uk.html

• Ten per cent of all gun crime in London are committed in Lambeth, figures show. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/03/31/ten-per-centof-all-gun-crime-in-london-are-committed-in-lambeth-figures-show-11587523027260/ • Tories plan bonfire of Labour laws. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/politics/article7114002.ece • The Blair years: new law passed every three hours. http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-459698/The-Blair-years-new-law-passed-hours.html • http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/crimeFear.php

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Twenty activities outlawed by Labour Just a sample of the legislation passed or existing legislation amended under the last Labour government.

• Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act 1998

• Vehicles (Crime) Act 2001

Causing a nuclear explosion.

Knowingly etc selling plates which are not vehicle registration plates.

• Scallop Fishing Order 2004 If a boat breaches the restrictions in articles 3, 4 or 5, the

• London Underground (East London Line Extension) (No 2)

master, owner and charterer are each guilty of an offence.

Order 2001 Any person who, without reasonable excuse, obstructs any

• Measuring Instruments (Automatic Rail-weighbridges)

person acting under the authority of the Company in setting

Regulations 2006

out the lines of the scheduled works, or in constructing any

A person shall be guilty of an offence if he uses for trade

authorised work or who interferes with, moves or removes any

an automatic rail-weighbridge to which there is affixed a

apparatus belonging to any such person shall be guilty of an

disqualification sticker.

offence.

• Scotland Act 1998 (Border Rivers) Order 1999

• Courts Act 2003

Unauthorised fishing in the Lower Esk.

Assaulting and obstructing court security officers.

• Apple and Pear Orchard Grubbing Up Regulations 1998

• Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005

Any person who (a) intentionally obstructs an authorised

Part seven of the Act created offences of failing to nominate a

person in the exercise of the powers conferred on him by

key-holder where an audible intruder alarm is present.

regulation 10 above, or a person accompanying him and acting under his instructions or (b) without reasonable excuse, fails to

• Merchant Shipping (Miscellaneous Amendments)

comply with a requirement under regulation 10 above, shall be

Regulations 2002

guilty of an offence.

If any officer appointed in accordance with regulation 30(1) reports to the master or other officer in charge of the bridge a

• Protection of Wrecks (RMS Titanic) Order 2003

door to be closed and locked when it is not in fact closed and

A person shall not enter the hull of the Titanic without

locked he shall be guilty of an offence.

permission from the Secretary of State. • Bus Lane Contraventions (Penalty Charges, Adjudication • Merchant Shipping (Crew Accommodation) Regulations 1997

and Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2005

Failure to provide adequate facilities for crew members.

Failing without reasonable excuse to attend a hearing held by an adjudicator, or to produce any document to an adjudicator.

• Transport Act 2003 A person commits an offense if he provides air traffic services in

• Vehicle Excise Duty (Immobilisation, Removal and Disposal

respect of a managed area.

of Vehicles) Regulations 1997 Failure to rigorously separate the accounts of ground-handling

• Polish Potatoes (Notification) (England) Order 2004

activities from the accounts of other activities in accordance

No person shall, in the course of business, import into England

with current commercial practice.

potatoes which he knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.

• Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 In relation to certain invasive non-native species such as the

• Learning and Skills Act 2000

grey squirrel, ruddy duck or Japanese knotweed, selling any

Obstructing an inspection by the Adult Learning Inspectorate.

animal or plant, or eggs or seeds.

Care Standards Act 2000. Obstructing the work of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales.

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Banned by the nanny state: When the law just goes too far. The world has gone bonkers! • Pantomime artists told not to throw sweets to children in the audience for fear of causing injury • Children told to wear goggles to play conkers at school • Teachers told not to hand out plasters in case of allergic reactions • Hanging baskets banned in case they fall on people • Parents asked not to bring homemade cakes to school fêtes

• Flowers banned at a hospital in attempt to stop spread of MRSA • Manufacturers stamp bags of peanuts with warning that they "may contain nuts" • Children banned from using egg boxes in art class in case they catch salmonella • Children forced to ride inflatable sheep at a Welsh Donkey Derby

FEAR OF CRIME David G. Green The Institute for the Study of Civil Society The Government has not only set itself targets for reducing crimes such as burglary, robbery and car theft, it also aims to reduce the fear of crime. In Crime in England and Wales 2002/03 the Home Office claims that there is unjustified fear: ‘In spite of the significant falls in the main volume crimes in recent years, almost three-quarters of the public still believe that the national crime rate has been rising.’ The summary elaborates: ‘Over one-third of the public (38%) believed that crime had risen “a lot”, and a further 35 per cent felt that crime had risen “a little” over the previous two years despite the total number of crimes reported to the BCS falling by 17 per cent since 1999.’ It goes on to blame tabloids: ‘Readers of the national tabloid papers are much more likely to consider the national crime rate to have increased a lot over this period, compared to broadsheet readers (43% compared with 26%).’ However, for 35% of people to believe that crime had risen ‘a little’ was perfectly understandable. The Home Office itself over the last couple of years has claimed that crime was stable and during 2002 there was considerable coverage of the rise in violent crime, acknowledged by the Government as a fact leading to its street crime initiative. Moreover the Home Office has also caused confusion in the public mind by saying that crime is both up (after changes in the method of recording

made the figures more reliable) and down (after

People were also asked about the likelihood

subtracting the additional crimes added as a

that they would personally be the victim

result of the new recording standard). To be

of crime in the next year, and if so whether

certain about the crime figures requires quite a

they were ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ to be a

bit of sophistication.

victim. The actual risks of becoming a victim of car crime according to results from 2002/03

But Fears Are Realistic

interviews for vehicle-owning households were 6.8 per cent (suffering a theft from a vehicle); 1.5

However, the Home Office report also says that anti-social behaviour was more likely to be considered a problem by people living in inner

per cent (having their vehicle stolen); and 3.4 per cent (burglary). How did people perceive the risk?: 3% said they

cities, council estates and areas with low social

were ‘very likely’ to be burgled, 5% thought it

cohesion, and that ‘perceptions are to some

very likely they would experience theft from their

degree associated with actual levels of risk’. It

car and 4% thought it very likely their car would

would be generally acknowledged that tabloid

be stolen. These estimates are very realistic.

readers compared with broadsheet readers are

If we compare ourselves with other countries

more likely to live on council estates and in the

or with our own history, the crime rate is high.

inner city and so it would be more true to say

The number of recorded crimes per 100,000

that their perceptions reflect local experience

population in 1950 was 1,053 per 100,000 and in

not the perceptions of tabloid journalists.

1960 still only 1,610. By 1992 the figure reached

Another way of looking at the answers people

10,943. The latest figure for 2004/5 is 10,537,

gave to the BCS is to add together those who

well over ten times the rate in the 1950s. Rather

said that national crime had remained the same

than making it seem that people are in the grip

or increased ‘a little’: 59% of respondents. And

of irrational fears and implying that these fears

when asked about their local area, 68% said it

are whipped up by the tabloids, the Home Office

was the same or had gone up ‘a little’. In other

could more usefully direct its energy at reducing

words, a significant majority of people gave

crime and recognising the objective seriousness

perfectly intelligible answers. The Government

of the situation.

dare not claim that the majority are ‘stupid’ and so it tries to discredit them indirectly by blaming the tabloids.

J o a nn a B o u rke , T he G u a rdi a n , j u ne , 2 0 1 0 “A mood of impending calamity hangs over us. The financial system is imploding, there is systematic pollution of our environment, and we are being told by a former chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales that there is a crisis in our criminal justice system. The Spectator broadcasts its view that Britain is a “crime hotspot ” and that the public ’s fear of crime is far from being exaggerated. It seems that we are being encouraged to be frightened.”

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) bojimbo261 23/06/2010 2:06 PM Crime is falling .................................except for knifings and shootings.

redphantom 23/06/2010 6:26 PM It seems that we are being encouraged to be frightened? It â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s called the shock doc trine, keep the people disorientated with various demons and you can push through unpopular economic policies.

bojimbo261 01/02/2011 4:35 PM But people - crime is falling. (so say official figures).

Westmorland 01/01/2011 6:27 PM This is all a bit meaningless. Stats without context and detailed explanation are a complete waste of time. Indeed, for those domestic roads its hard to work out whether violent crime is inside the house, i.e. domestic violence or...? Most of these streets are inner city, with many having night clubs and pubs. Does counting the number of Asbos mean its a safer and better policed area or...? How many people use these streets matters also and will reflec t in the number of crimes - hence

c r ime

(...) ...most of the streets are inner city and near pubs and clubs. Ranelagh Street in Liverpool has se veral pubs and clubs off it. The road in Preston just looks like a back alley dive with a few clubs in it, so not surprising. And do they arrest more people in Preston...? And how come Oxford Street has such low crime statistics when people have been stabbed and mugged and pick pocketed - what years are we talking about - what trends of crime - up or down - how violent was the crime? A murder in Oxford Street is not the same as some drunk punching another drunk in Preston. There is nothing about the circumstances of the crime so how can you judge whether it may affec t you just passing down the road. What is the point of the map? What is the reasoning behind it? In the end who cares, crime is often a matter of luck and being armed with a map of crime means nothing in terms of what happens in the future and whether you will be a vic tim. It seems to me that this map is just another fear fac tor to make us worr y about going out and will stereotype areas e ven though maybe a lot of the crime is between people known to other people and domestic, and is mostly to do with pubs and the numbers of people. The media already makes people fear ful and blows crime out of propor tion. Stats are abstrac t, they don’ t reflec t “reality ” but they can distor t people ’s perceptions. Is this a ploy by the police to help them from the cuts?

(...) 67

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Daisy24 02/02/2011 9:08 AM Only 2 entries for Merseyside, I’ll have you note.

Sealion 10/02/2011 8:10 AM When I get burgled, I want the police to turn up in less than 12 hours and make an attempt to solve the crime. They do neither. That is far more impor tant to me than my ability to go online a month later and see a little marker on a map that shows me there was a burglar y in my street.

Lovetruncheon404 10/02/2011 8:11 AM All it will tell us is which areas have the most crime. “ Who wouldn’ t want to be sure, for instance, about the safety of their child’s route to school?” Are you deliberately tr ying to be absurd?

Kiddies

star t

taking

another

route

leaving all those paedos out there lying patiently in wait fore ver for someone to go past?!

UnAnneeSansPizza 11/06/2010 5:20 PM Sounds like a clear case of Assault And Twatter y to me. And yes, I know that ’s appalling.

(...) 68

c r ime

(...) Mar vinThePA 10/02/2011 8:32 AM How can they make the police accountable: If they don't tell us what happened (the catego ries are too broad). If they don’ t tell us where it happened (the locations are de -localised) If they don't tell us when it happened (its monthly). Without this information (what ,where, when) you cannot tell the difference between multiple call outs to a single domestic dispute and weekly Friday night violence outside the local pub?

klang 10/02/2011 8:55 AM It might e ven make the insurance companies accountable. “I’m sorr y, Mr Klang, but you live in a crime hotspot.” Yeah, right.

Sealion 10/02/2011 9:05 AM And on that whole accountability thing.... When a policeman shoots someone se ven times in the face and then lies about it, I want him prosecuted. When another policeman hits a man from behind with a stick for no reason (possibly contributing to his death), I want him prosecuted, not given a years free holiday.

(...)

Fear | The Big Society

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it : John Lennon

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

The Big Society Remember what your careers teacher said: working for nothing looks great on your CV.

What is the Big Society? Do you know? Do you know? Nobody really knows. Everyone is on the quest – society quest! Academics are puzzling over clues, the opposition pour scorn on the idea and your ‘average Joe’ has probably passed it over; special clubs and groups are forming to debate the evidence, political pundits are in a tiz and yet nobody has cracked the mystery of the Big Society – yet, but it is surely only a matter of time. Those wily scamps behind the scheme have yet to divulge what the pay off will be when the puzzle is solved. I am slightly suspicious that this whole Big Society will turn out to be an advertising campaign. You know the sort, one of those teasers where they get you excited by an intriguing phrase or name without yet knowing the product. Just as we lose interest in the riddle and start to give up, it will be revealed that the Big Society is a new brand of toilet paper or eco-friendly people carrier. The only person (we hope) who knows is the orchestrator of the grand plan and who better than to explain it. This is an edited extract from a speech given by the David Cameron on the 19th July 2010: “Let me briefly explain what the Big Society1 is and why it is such a powerful idea. You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society… The Big Society is about a huge culture change – where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace – don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.” So its about encouraging everyone who isn’t attached to the state giving something back to their community. It’s all

about society, for whatever that is, and taking the power back. Under the big society, people would gladly volunteer in their communities, set up schools and after school clubs, help neighbours, and even run some public-services. Not that these ideas are anything new – even I worked in a charity shop once. Huge numbers of people already do voluntary work and I bet they are getting quite irritated that David Cameron seems not to have noticed. As for not turning to officials, well there could be a couple of reasons why Dave might not want you to do that – either you have taken his words to heart and become self-sufficient – or you cannot find the official you need, because so many of them have been sacked. When the size of the police force has been cut, crime prevention will become the work of volunteers Ha! So you are on your own kiddos: cue lawless society. Gone are the days of relying on uncle Blair and aunty Brown to clasp you to their nourishing teats. Yes, it is true that we were told what to do a lot by the New Labour government. Between 1997 and 2006, Tony Blair’s government created more than 3,000 new criminal offences during a nine-year tenure, one for almost every day it has been in power up to that point. How many finger-wags did we get in our direction when it came to eating healthily, driving slowly, partying sensibly or recycling responsibly – the list goes on. We were truly stifled in the latter days of the New Labour government, a government which, at times, just didn’t seem to know when to stop tinkering and poking their noses in. I guess that is why they are now in opposition. Presumably if (and it’s a big if) we finally bring the deficit down, we are not going back to big government. Will we therefore have a smaller government? Maybe less ministers for this and for that – do we really need four Under-secretaries of State? When Emperor Thatcher talked of “rolling back the frontiers of the state” 2 she had a big society idea – privatisation! Now that was a doozy. David Cameron cannot match that. This Big Society is more a collection of small ideas with a common theme; doing stuff for free, and for all the talk about power being devolved back to us, it’s going to be directed from the centre after

Points of reference • http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/big-society • David Cameron launches Tories’ ‘big society’ plan. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-10680062 • David Cameron launches his Big Society. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ politics/david-cameron/7897445/David-Cameron-launches-his-Big-Society. • Cameron relaunches Big Society ‘with moral purpose’ http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8320702/Cameron-relaunches-BigSociety-with-moral-purpose.html • Big Society: reactions to David Cameron’s project. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8323095/Big-Society-reactions-to-David-

Camerons-project.html • David Cameron’s spending cuts are undermining Big Society, charity chief claims. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8307867/DavidCamerons-spending-cuts-are-undermining-Big-Society-charity-chief-claims. html • ‘Big Society’ named word of the year. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/8154591/Big-Society-named-word-of-the-year.html • David Cameron: Have no doubt, the big society is on its way. http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/12/david-cameron-big-society-good

t he big s o ciety

all, besides all the scorn Mr Cameron has poured on ‘top-down’ government. The power that central and local government has derives from their right to raise taxes. But David Cameron is not going to give “communities, neighbourhoods and individuals” tax raising powers, which means any new ‘power’ they will have will be pretty limited. Community projects are therefore used to bolster the much valued local facilities that are very vulnerable to spending cuts. David Cameron is essentially saying that if you want to keep them, you raise the money to maintain them. Of course he doesn’t say this directly – he wouldn’t, but it does play on our collective fear of loss. David Cameron’s state would be smaller, yet he reckons it would be stronger. It would, according to his rhetoric: “agitate for, catalyse and galvanise” change, whatever that means. Mr Cameron’s Big Society is not a return to rampant individualism, nor is it get ‘summat for nowt’, nor is it über privatisation but a radical attempt to strengthen communities and civil society, allegedly. So get out there and make this society BIG3 – and remember what your

The Big Society at a glance (Source: BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12443396)

• David Cameron’s big idea, unveiled before the general election • General phrase to describe shift of power from central government to communities and to volunteers • Covers measures such as giving communities more control over issues like housing, planning, schools • Also said to include charities or non-profit groups taking over running of some public services • David Cameron also says it can help tackle what the Conservatives call the “broken society” • The Big Society concept has proved difficult to define and has been criticised by some Conservatives for clouding election message • Labour and unions say it is a cover for spending cuts

careers teacher said working for nothing looks great on your CV. n

U l t r a

p o s s e

n e m o

o b l i g a t u r

Points of interest parents put their children first. Friends look

Dictionaries, said: “ ‘Big society’ was for us a

out for the neighbours, families for their elderly

clear winner because it embraces so much of the

come together to improve their own lives.

members. That is the starting point for care

year’s political and economic mood.

It’s about putting more power in people’s

and support—the unsung efforts of millions of

hands – a massive transfer of power from

individuals, the selfless work of thousands upon

to take on a life of its own -- a sure sign of

Whitehall to local communities. The Office for

thousands of volunteers.It is their spirit that

linguistic success.” The official meaning is: “A

Civil Society, part of the Cabinet Office, works

helps to bind our society together. Caring isn’t

political concept whereby a significant amount

across government departments to translate

measured by what you say: It’s expressed by

of responsibility for the running of a society’s

the Big Society agenda into practical policies,

what you do.”

services is devolved to local communities and

footnotes: what is the big society? •1

The Big Society is about helping people to

volunteers.” Last year four words were named

provides support to voluntary and community organisations and is responsible for delivering a

“Taken to mean many things, it has begun

The phrase was coined by Prime Minister

number of key Big Society programmes.(Source:

David Cameron, who said in July 2010: “The big

The Cabinet Office)

society ... is about liberation – the biggest, most

word of the year. They were “tweet”, “simples”, “staycation” and “jeggings”.

dramatic redistribution of power from elites in 2

Margaret Thatcher

Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.”

1986 Conservative Women’s Conference:

Staff from Oxford University Press said that

“[The Big Society] is one in which people do not

the contest is not limited to a single word and

leave it to the person next door to do the job. It

is open to two-word expressions. Language

is one in which people help each other. Where

expert Susie Dent, a spokeswoman for Oxford

a l a st a ir c a mpbell : comm u nic a tor , writer , str a tegist * F ebr u a r y 2 3 , 2 0 1 1 “If there is anyone there who can help me with a clear succinct explanation either of the Big Society, or the central tenets of his foreign policy, I would be really grateful. I will pass it on to DC, so that he knows what it is he is saying.”

*According to his web -site!

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Baron Marcus Aurelius Beer 02/14/2011 03:14 AM Recommended by 3 people Big society is watching you Dave....

lordlondon 02/14/2011 01:55 AM Recommended by 7 people Dave. We have had enough of: 1) Treason. 2) Lies. 3) Spin. 4) Corruption. 5) Destruc tion of the Armed Forces. 6) Over taxation. 7) The EU 8) Horrendous payments to the EU that we cannot afford. 9) Paying for extravagant “foreign aid” that we cannot afford. 10) Bad government. 11) David Cameron.

fledermaus 02/13/2011 09:59 PM Recommended by 5 people “Moral” government? Like Tony B. Liar ’s Catholicism, and John Major ’s screwing-around? Religious hypocrisy (any religion, that is)

(...) 74

t he big s o ciety

(...) Bill MacLeod 02/13/2011 08:10 PM Recommended by 10 people The BIG society is about to give you a BIG kick in the backside Cameron.

kinabalu 02/14/2011 04:57 PM Recommended by 32 people Surely someone can take Cameron on one side and whisper e ver so politely in his ear: “ This is barmy mate ”. Go on, somebody... do it.

freedom4citizens 02/08/2011 05:28 AM Forget the stupid “big society ” thing. SMALL GOVERNMENT That is what we need. And it costs less! Cuts help achie ve it. We need a government reduced by 50%. All the pen-pushing, chair-warming, rubber-stamping

bureaucrats,

quangocrats,

sinecured troughers - can go!

Caledonian_Comment 02/07/2011 01:11 PM Recommended by 1 person The Big Society. Cuts - cuts -cuts. And if you want something that ’s been cut, do it yourself and pay for it yourself. Remember, we ’re all in this together. Unless you’re a banker or an MP on the fiddle. After all, some are in it together less than others.

(...) 75

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) hermionegingold 12/02/2011 9:39 PM Hi Dave, bye Dave. You are beyond polite comment, x

smcgrath 12/02/2011 9:43 PM For goodness â&#x20AC;&#x2122; sake Cameron, get out. Get out, get out, get out GET OUT, GEEEET OUUUUUT.

Mor tlach 12/02/2011 9:43 PM The hidden agenda: tax reduc tions for the rich. Health ser vices privatisation. Education cuts and student tuition fee increases. Bonuses are back for bankers. Increase unemployment and VAT. Give up on Sure Star t. Sell off national assets. Over throw the welfare state. Cut public ser vices. Immigrants are not welcome. Economic growth in re verse. Tax credit removal. Yes, Nick Clegg is a Tor y.

(...)

t he big s o ciety

(...) JudeNicho 12/02/2011 9:47 PM Look Dave, I’ll ignore most of the BS, and just go for one point. If people ‘ want ’ to run their post office etc, you’re going to let them. Some things that the council do, or the government do, I’m sure I could organise them better, do them better. Unfor tunately, I’m working really hard five to six days a week earning not too much money from my job to pay the rent. My free time is cooking, reading, going out with my friends, and exercising to make sure I don’ t end up a fattie. Honestly, I promise I’m not shirking, don’ t have time to run a post office etc. And I don’ t e ven have kids. Who is your bloody big society?

upnor thkid 12/02/2011 10:01 PM “Am I jumping the gun, Cameron, or are the words “I have a cunning plan” marching with ill-deser ved confidence in the direc tion of this conversation?”

perclue 12/02/2011 10:05 PM “And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.” I know it ’s repetitive, but i’m going to quote it again. WTF?

(...) 77

F e a r | Te c h n o l o g y

In the year 2025, the best men donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t run for president, they run for their lives : Stephen King (The Running Man)

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Technology For many of us, computers are boxes of wizards and magic, and as for understanding where iPhone apps come from, well the fairies put them there.

Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner1, warned that the modern age would herald technological overload. In his landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both ‘confusing and harmful’ to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an ‘always on’ digital environment. It’s worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once Tweeted and was completely ignorant about computers. That’s not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information that was to come with the proliferation of books. In 2005 the BBC warned of the dangers that people using wireless high-speed net (wi-fi) face regarding ‘fake’ hotspots. The latest threat, nicknamed evil twins, pose as real hotspots but are actually unauthorised base stations, Cranfield University experts explained. Evil twins? Wireless base stations are called evil twins? The terminology may be terrifying but are fake hotspots really something to be scared of ? Well, yes and no. No in that they won’t kill you, but yes if you worry about criminals stealing your bank details to buy themselves holidays in Barbados. Cybercriminals don’t have to be that clever to carry out such an attack warned Dr Phil Nobles, a wireless net and cybercrime expert at Cranfield. Which means even stupid criminals are dangerous ones if they use the right technology. Forget fertilizer and chapati flour as agents of terror, just be very careful who visits Maplins. Crooks have long been able to read bank details off your old PC. Want rid of the sexy photos of you and your ex, no sweat just hit delete. Sorted? Well, no – at least, not according to recent news reports warning that identity thieves can access deleted files from the hard drives of discarded computers, many of which seem to end up in places like Nigeria. In

2006 BBC investigators discovered that the hard drives from many recycled British computers are turning up in Nigeria, a country notorious for financial fraud and identity theft. Not even technology can ease our anxiety, instead it seems to do nothing but heighten it. The more we consume technology the more pitfalls rear their ugly heads. New technology means new dangers. Just take internet safety, a malady that encompasses credit card fraud, cyberbullying and most heinously of all, child pornography. Ten years ago you might have only feared that your child would be physically snatched by a stranger with a bag of sweets, now your child could be led ‘pied piper’ like through the maze of social networking sites into the clutches of a dirty old man pretending to be one of JLS. We live lives that are ever more reliant on technology, yet because very few people know how the technology works, we find it very difficult to protect ourselves when something goes wrong with it. For many of us, computers are boxes of wizards and magic, and as for understanding where iPhone apps 2 come from: well the fairies put them there. But our fear is not just restricted to the internet. How often have you been told that there are certain places where we must not – under any circumstances, on pain of death, if our lives depended on it – use our mobile phones? Each time we board a plane we are warned that our phones could interfere with the computers that keep planes in the air, and that a simple text to remind your neighbour to feed the cat could trigger a disaster. Yet OFCOM confirmed it would allow phones to be used on UK-registered planes. Surely this must mean that all the scare-mongering was an insidious ruse to get us to put our phones down and pay attention. Let us not forget that we are also told that making calls on petrol station forecourts can trigger explosions, and that if we use them in hospitals, life-support systems could fail. “There is practically no evidence to say mobile phones pose a risk” said Dr Adam Burgess, sociology lecturer at Kent University and the author of Cellular Phones, Public Fears and a Culture of Precaution. Partly because technology has moved

Points of reference • Approval for mobiles on aircraft. • Warning sounded on web’s future. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7613201.stm • Warning of data ticking time bomb. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6265976. stm • Shrewsbury now a hotspot for identity theft. http://www.shropshirestar.com/ news/2011/04/15/shrewsbury-now-a-hotspot-for-identity-theft/ • http://mobile.pcretailmag.com/news/36226/Smartphone-wi-fi-evil-twinsecurity-flaw-exposed • Mobiles in aircraft edge closer. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ technology/3665848.stm

• Why is the use of mobile phones prohibited at petrol pumps? http://articles. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2004-12-05/open-space/27172153_1_mobilephones-petrol-pumps-flammable-vapours • Fears for pupils with unchecked internet access. http://www.yorkshirepost. co.uk/news/at-a-glance/education/fears_for_pupils_with_unchecked_ internet_access_1_3279889 • Pope says technology can’t replace God. http://www.theinquirer.net/ inquirer/news/2044240/pope-technology-replace-god • Why do we wait in line for gadgets? http://www.electricpig. co.uk/2011/04/06/why-do-we-wait-in-line-for-gadgets/

techn olo g y

on, so the risk today is far lower than it would have been, and as for exploding petrol stations – are we really doomed if we send a text or make a call while filling up? Don’t panic, “the risk from phones was always hypothetical,” Burgess explains “in America, there have been claims that explosions at petrol stations were down to mobiles. But the explosions have since been found to be caused by sparks from the static on peoples’ clothes as they get out of their cars. The claims against mobiles are based on no evidence.” So just don’t fill up wearing a shell suit. Some of our technophobia dates back years. What about the playground myth that putting a metal object in a microwave oven will cause a chain reaction that will likely destroy your house. Just like the videos on YouTube of nutters putting crap in blenders for a laugh, so too is it filled with similar fools putting stuff in microwaves to see what happens. Invariably the results are not good for the micro-waved object, and as you would imagine, the microwave oven doesn’t usually come out of it too

b u s u s

n o n

well either. Metal conducts the microwave energy, thus getting very hot and sparky. This reaction tends to cause a commotion within the microwave. So even though it may kill your microwave, you will probably survive. So we have simply been overreacting to the techno menace. No not according to the Daily Mail (surprise surprise) who recently reported that social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact. Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries. It could also impair mental performance. As if ! None of this will actually happen. The benefits of technology far out weigh the negatives. So before you start worrying about a future where your toaster gets pissed off enough to try to kill you, stop, think about it and get it down on a tweet.3 n

t o l l i t

u s u m

Points of interest footnotes: 1

Konrad von Gesner was born on March 26, 1516,

realising that they could not prevent their staff

making espionage possible from the other side

from surfing the sites in work hours. A 2007

of the world.

in Zurich. The man who was to become known as

study found that Facebook’s British members

the German Pliny. He composed his Bibliotheca

spend an average of 143 minutes a month on

Sabotage

universalis, a vast encyclopedia in which he

the site checking on their friends, looking up

Military activities that use computers

listed alphabetically all of the authors who had

former partners and updating their profile.

and satellites for coordination are at

written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, with a

However, some people argue that Facebook is a

risk of equipment disruption. Orders and

listing of all their books printed up to that time.

valuable tool that they use to stay in touch with

communications can be intercepted or

This work made Gesner famous, and offers of

colleagues and business associates.

replaced. Power, water, fuel, communications,

employment poured in, including one from the Fuggers, the richest family of Europe.

and transportation infrastructure all may be Think terrorist bomb plots were terrifying? Then

vulnerable to disruption.

consider cyber-warfare. Cyberwarfare has been 2

if you want ‘Apps’ you need something for

defined by U.S. government security expert

Electrical power grid

them to run on. Apple recently launched the

Richard A. Clarke, in his book Cyber War (May

The federal government of the United States

iPad 2 whereupon people queued for hours

2010), as ‘actions by a nation-state to penetrate

admits that the electric power transmission

outside Apple stores worldwide in order to

another nation’s computers or networks for the

is susceptible to cyber-warfare. The United

be the first of their friends to own the device.

purposes of causing damage or disruption.’ The

States Department of Homeland Security works

Gamers will happily queue for a new console

Economist goes a step further by describing

with industry to identify vulnerabilities and to

and, occasionally, even for a new game. Outside

cyber warfare as ‘the fifth domain of warfare.’

help industry enhance the security of control

of the technology field it’s not unheard of for

Cyber-warfare consists of many different threats

system networks, the federal government is also

people to queue for new books – think of the

including:

working to ensure that security is built in as the

Harry Potter series, for example – or to watch new films.

next generation of “smart grid” networks are Espionage and national security breaches

developed. Will it work?

Cyber espionage is the act or practice of 3

Social networking site such as Facebook and

obtaining secrets (sensitive, proprietary or

Twitter are costing the British economy dearly.

classified information) from individuals,

In recent years tens of thousands of workers

competitors, rivals, groups, governments and

have been banned from using social networking

enemies also for military, political, or economic

sites such as Facebook by employers seeking to

advantage using illegal exploitation methods on

curb the wasting of office time. IT experts say

internet, networks, software and or computers.

that companies are asking for help in blocking

Classified information that is not handled

access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter after

securely can be intercepted and even modified,

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Knapster 2/2/2011 1:39 AM In 2030 we ’ll still use QWERTY keyboards and umbrellas but Gillette will tr y and flog me a 22 micro -bladed razor. Oddly there will be no progress in architec ture as de velopers adopt e ver more bizarre ‘heritage ’ features, so much so that mock iron-age roundhouses will become the proper ty of choice. Text messages will cost less per by te than sending data to the Hubble space telescope - hasn’ t happened yet, so they ’re bound to do it within 20 years.

Lushattic 3/02/2011 12:22 AM We still won’ t have Jetpacks. This future is rubbish.

Chapman 03/01/2011 10:51 AM There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binar y and those who don’ t.

AndyP 03/1/2011 14:21 PM Over 20 years ago one would have been considered a GEEK if you knew any thing about computers. The tide has turned and the shoe is on the other foot now, in that if you DON’ T know about computers you are considered a geek.

(...) 82

techn olo g y

(...) RichSweetman 01/03/2011 04:14 AM Are not all people scared/afraid of what they do not understand? It ’s somewhat like a phobia, I guess the answer is, dive in, tr y it and yes you make mistakes but feel better for it. Modern computer software contains help files which also aid newbies so there really is no reason to be scared of computers. What is the worst that can happen?

markgoodman 25/1/2011 13:12 PM My computer will be more afraid of me after I’ve smashed it with a hammer.

PeterUK 25/1/2011 13:12 PM It ’s not the computers that scare me, it ’s the techies that bore you rigid with their fascination for the detail of what ’s inside them that frightens me to death.

Darren, UK 25/1/2011 15.34 PM In response to Peter ’s comments re Techies. 001110001111000111100011101001100111001111 So there!

(...) 83

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Chrishaggen 02/02/2011 4:49 AM Of course people are scared of MP3s, when you look at the contradic tor y messages being sent out its obvious. The RIAA suing people for downloading music and burning CD’s is not going to encourage people to download music.

Pburns 3/02/2011 12:22 AM The only thing that terrifies me about my computer is the tangle of wires around it. It ’s as impenetrable as a mangrove swamp and I wouldn’ t be surprised if Lord Lucan was lost in there somewhere. Why oh why must e ver y scanner, monitor, modem, screen, joystick, etc. have its own separate transformer to add to the rats nest that is today ’s PC . Sadly “ wireless ” doesn’ t mean extor tionless else I’d jump on this technology bandwagon too.

Jim 03/01/2011 10:51 AM It ’s

machine,

inanimate.

Faults

can

correc ted. Software is benign, faults can be correc ted. Now, surger y, that ’s something to be scared of!

(...)

techn olo g y

(...) chrisjwooduk 22/05/2007 1:10PM All science has potential danger. Computer monitors and TV damage our eyes, cars pollute and kill us and the planet. The oldests e ver science ‘fire ’ is still arguably the most dangerous of inventions. But we still use it in a safe and managed way. Instead of ripping wi-fi out of schools and homes simply tern it off when not in use. I have wi-fi at home and intend to keep it but as I don’ t like to waste elec tric its always turned off unless I want to use the laptop. With proper lesson plans which are already in place the network could be ac tivated and deac tivated as required. This would limit any potential danger but still allow the use of this technology. If we stopped using e ver y thing that may damage use society would simply stand still. After all e ven a pen could snap and stab you.

nomster 31/03/2011 9:53 AM Anyone not interested in the iPad has no interest in technology. There are many alternative web sites which do not mention the most copied new

technology

produc t.

Examples

include;

The Gentleman’s Pur veyor of Wasps, House and

Garden,

Wasps

and

Garden

(requires

subscription), Me and my Bagpipes, Eggs - a Social

Histor y,

Saucepan

Polishers

Re view.

That ’s the great thing about the Internet, you don’ t have to go where you don’ t like the content. Don’ t let the door hit your butt on the way out.

(...)

Fear | Alien Invasion

Babies have big heads and big eyes, and tiny little bodies with tiny little arms and legs. So did the aliens at Roswell! I rest my case : William Shatner

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Alien Invasion “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

On October 30, 1938, a news flash interrupted, a popular American radio show. The listeners were told about a huge explosion on Mars and that a large object was moving toward Earth at “enormous speed… like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun.” The music was interrupted again, and this time the news was shocking: Aliens from Mars were attacking New York City. Like all good news reports a reporter on the scene described the events as they happened: “They rise like a line of new towers on the city’s West Side. Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now! Smoke comes out, black smoke, drifting over the city. People are trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re – they’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue… Fifth Avenue… a hundred yards away!” Radio listeners across America panicked. People jammed the roads, hid in cellars, loaded guns, even wrapped their heads in wet towels as protection from Martian gas, in an attempt to defend themselves against aliens, oblivious to the fact that they were acting out the role of the panic-stricken public that actually belonged in a radio play. Thousands of Americans honestly believed Earth was under attack. They heard reporters on the radio describing terrifying scenes of death and devastation. They heard sirens and explosions and the screams of dying people and, for several browntrousered hours, America seemed to be at the mercy of evil alien invaders. It turned out that America had been duped. The radio show was a work of fiction, an Orson Welles dramatisation of The War of the Worlds. How did it get people so terrified? Perhaps it was the fact that Americans were already in a state of fear – World War II was brewing in Europe, and soon America would be at war as well. More likely, though, when Americans looked at the sky, they were simply ready

to believe that there is life out there and that it was hostile: dangers lurked abroad – why not in outer space? Nothing can be as frightening as the possibility of alien life coming to Earth, even though finding life in space would be one of the most important and mind-boggling scientific discoveries of all time. Space is the ultimate unknown and if history has proven nothing is that mere humans are terrified of that which we know nothing about. The internet is brimming with scare stories about aliens. Aliens will take you from your bed, hijack your vehicle on a lonely highway, reign terror on your head by way of death beams, mutilate your cattle or generally just land their craft in a field and chase you around with a sinister anal probe. Of course, unlike the economic meltdown or global terrorism, which is obviously real (or is it?), the jury is still out on extraterrestrial life. Now the whole notion of aliens and if they exist genuinely fascinates me, not enough for me to make a pilgrimage to Roswell1 or anything like that, but some of the conspiracies of whether or not we are visited by other races are utterly compelling. Of course they could be complete bunkum, such is the danger with all conspiracies. Is there any truth in the alien myth? Who knows, Mulder and Sculley tried to get to the bottom of it, oh hold on that was fiction, but there have been real Mulder and Sculley’s trying to figure it out since the fifties. 1952 actually, when Project Blue Book2 was initiated by the United States Air Force. Project Blue Book was one of a series of systematic studies of Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) conducted by the United States Air Force (U.S.A.F.). Started in 1952, it was the second revival of such a study. A termination order was given for the study in December 1969, and all activity under it ceased in January 1970. The project had two main goals: to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFOrelated data. Thousands of UFO reports were collected, analysed and filed. As the result of the Condon Report, which concluded there was nothing anomalous about any UFOs, Project Blue Book was disbanded in December 1969.

Points of reference • UFO hovers over Jerusalem shrine. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8298744/UFO-hovers-over-Jerusalem-shrine. html • Alien life deemed impossible by analysis of 500 planets. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8276756/Alien-life-deemed-impossible-byanalysis-of-500-planets.html • Earth must prepare for close encounter with aliens, say scientists. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jan/10/earth-close-encounter-aliensextraterrestrials • Is there life out there? Almost definitely, say UK scientists. http://www.

guardian.co.uk/science/2007/jun/06/spaceexploration.uknews • Aliens from outer space are safe to fly over Denver. http://www.guardian. co.uk/science/2010/nov/03/denver-ufo-aliens-proposal • Aliens visiting Earth will be just like humans, scientist claims. http://www. guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/25/aliens-space-earth-humans • Vatican to welcome aliens. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ belief/2009/nov/16/aliens-vatican-extra-terrestrials • First contact: The man who’ll welcome aliens. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ global/2010/mar/06/paul-davies-aliens-welcome-jon-ronson • UFO sightings: The British X-files in full. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/ datablog/2009/aug/17/ufo-sightings-x-files

alien inva sio n

In the end 12,618 UFO reports were recorded, and it was concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars) or conventional aircraft. A few were considered crack-pot hoaxes. 701 of the reports — about six percent — were classified as unknowns, defying detailed analysis. We even had our own Ministry of Defence project, that has recently been released to the public. Ultimately most things are explained away and what can’t be… is usually explained away. There is usually however no smoke without fire, and whilst I would be quick to dismiss the accounts of aliens popping round for tea if it was recounted by a slack-jawed hillbilly from Eastern Wyoming, in recent years sceptical believers have started to appear in the science community. The assumptions of the astronomical community is that there is alien life in outer space, but it isn’t coming here. As recently as last year NASA scientists theorised that alien life was living and breathing on Jupiter’s moon Titan.3 But as to walking talking little green men, well they haven’t detected a single signal sent to us and we have been sending signals out into space for years hoping to

get a response. So life is out there, but nobody is coming here because interstellar travel is out of the question, and they haven’t sent us a signal anyway so we can all breath easy: case closed. Mind you, what if they’re listening but just don’t like our tune. A parallel might be the way we sometimes screen our calls, listening to messages instead of answering right away, perhaps aliens see us as intergalactic tele-sales operators. Would they even contact us at all? As noted UFO researcher and former nuclear physicist Stanton Friedmann4 pointed out, did Columbus send a smoke signal to the Indian natives before he set off ? Last year The Sunday Times ran the article: Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking believes that in a universe so vast, the sheer numbers on stars and already discovered planets (at last count 450) would suggest we are not alone, and that the Earth is not the only planet to harbour life “to my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make

Points of interest footnotes: 1

The Roswell Incident involved the recovery

moon. Data from Nasa’s Cassini probe has

the Zeta Reticuli Incident, was that they were

of materials near Roswell, New Mexico, USA,

analysed the complex chemistry on the surface

victims of a UFO abduction. In 1961, Betty and

on July 7, 1947, which has since become the

of Titan, which experts say is the only moon

Barney Hill were abducted by aliens and taken

subject of intense speculation, rumor and

around the planet to have a dense atmosphere.

aboard their spacecraft. During her abduction,

questioning. There are widely divergent views

Betty was shown a star map. She was asked

on what actually happened and passionate

debate about what evidence can be believed. The

an American physicist and professional

Betty had no knowledge of astronomy, she

United States military maintains that what was

ufologist, currently residing in Fredericton,

couldn’t reply. After her abduction, and under

recovered was a top-secret research balloon that

New Brunswick, Canada. In 2007, the City of

hypnotic regression Betty Hill drew the star

had crashed.

Fredericton honored Friedman by declaring

map as accurately as possible. A few years

August 27 Stanton Friedman Day. Friedman has

later, Marjorie Fish built a few models of star

was of a crashed alien craft and that the

written books on the UFO phenomenon and was

systems using plastic balls and wire .. one of

military covered up the craft’s recovery. The

the first civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO

these models matched Betty Hill’s diagram. The

incident has turned into a widely-recognized

incident. Since 1967, he has spoken about UFOs

star system from which Betty had been told the

and referred to pop culture phenomenon, and

at more than 600 colleges and universities and

aliens originated from was Zeta Reticuli.

for some, Roswell is synonymous with UFOs.

more than 100 professional groups in the USA,

It likely ranks as the most famous alleged UFO

Canada, and 16 other countries. Friedman used

incident.

to bill himself as ‘’The Flying Saucer Physicist’’

planets orbiting other suns have been discovered

due to his nuclear physics degree. He’s one of the

and officially announced. However, in what

few scientists with legitimate scientific degrees

may be a breakthrough for ufology, on the 20th

systematic studies of Unidentified flying objects

to publicly speak out about UFO phenomena at

of September, 1996, a planet was discovered

(UFOs) conducted by the United States Air Force

length and one of the fewer qualified to espouse

orbiting the star Zeta 2 Reticuli.

(U.S.A.F.). Started in 1952, it was the second

a professional conviction of their reality and

revival of such a study. A termination order was

validity.

Many UFO proponents believe the wreckage

Project Blue Book was one of a series of

Stanton Terry Friedman (July 29, 1934) is

given for the study in December 1969, and all

by an alien to point out the Earth, but since

Since the 6th of October, 1995, several new

Cattle mutilation (also known as bovine excision) is the apparent killing and then

activity under its auspices ceased in January

1970.

married couple who rose to fame after

circumstances. Sheep and horses have been

they claimed to have been abducted by

allegedly mutilated under similar circumstances.

Researchers at NASA believe they have

Betty and Barney Hill were an American

extraterrestrials on September 19-20, 1961. The

mutilation of cattle under unusual or anomalous

Since the time that reports of purported

discovered vital clues that appeared to indicate

couple’s widely publicized story, commonly

animal mutilations began, the causes have been

that primitive aliens could be living on the

called the Hill Abduction, and occasionally

attributed variously to natural decomposition,

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” But his assumptions came with a dire warning. He suggested that aliens would just as soon raid earth for its resources as pop by to borrow a few tea bags: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.” So a bit like in the film Independence Day, and we all know how that turned out. He concluded that trying to ‘make contact’ with alien races is ‘a little too risky’. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in California, the world’s leading organisation searching for alien signals, disagrees. “This is an unwarranted fear,” Shostak says. “If their interest in our planet is for something valuable that our planet has to offer, there’s no particular reason to worry about them now. If they’re interested in resources, they have ways of finding rocky planets that don’t depend on whether we broadcast or not. They could have found us a billion years ago.” Seems reasonable, and this view is generally echoed by most supporters of SETI who have generally taken for granted an axiom that altruism – a selfless imperative to assist others without expectation of reward—is likely to be the primary attribute among advanced technological civilisations. As Will Smith’s Character in Independence Day, Captain Steven Hiller said: “I really don’t think they flew 90 billion light years to come down here and start a fight. Get all rowdy.” However there is never a guarantee. Tell that to the thousands of socalled ‘alien abductees’5, whose claims of alien encounters

A u t

would give most people the heeby-jeebies! Mind you, If aliens are kidnapping people on the scale that abduction belief suggests, no one could walk the dog at night without bumping into alien kidnapping gangs in a hurry to make their nightly quota. Muggers in hoodies would be the least of your worries. But in all the stories there has never been a documented missing foetus or alien implant with ‘made in Zeta Reticuli’6 stamped on it. To this day no security cameras have captured aliens in action which is the sort of evidence we would expect to have by now. Today every mothers granny has a camera on their mobile phone so the Facebook, Flickr and Youtube should be flooded with images of aliens doing all sorts of things, but you know what, there aren’t. Many people around the world are convinced aliens have made it to Earth, some say they are walking amongst us and others say our governments are working with them. For every Midwest American farmer that reports meeting E.T., there are just as many officials from military, intelligence, science and law-enforcement backgrounds who claim to have witnessed either aliens themselves or been part of a cover up to keep it all quiet. Aliens announcing their presence would undoubtedly be the story of the millennium. n

v i n c e r e

a u t

m o r i

Points of reference • We’re not alone, says former Nasa astronaut. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ science/2008/jul/26/spaceexploration • Aliens might not be friendly, warns astronomer. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/science/science-news/7066554/Aliens-might-not-be-friendly-warnsastronomer.html • Disclosure Project and Death & Destruction caused by UFOs. http://www. alienresistance.org/disclosureproject_ufoharm.htm • MoD: UFOs are not a military threat. http://www.channel4.com/news/ articles/science_technology/mod+ufos+are+not+a+military+threat/35667 72.html

• Ronald Reagan, UFO’s, and the Alien Threat. http://www.suite101.com/ content/ronald-reagan-ufos-and-the-alien-threat-a301596 • UFO menace ‘not a threat’. http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/21167-ufomenace-not-a-threat • WikiLeaks Set To Reveal US-UFO War In Southern Ocean. http://www. eutimes.net/2010/12/wikileaks-set-to-reveal-us-ufo-war-in-southern-ocean/ • Rendlesham Forest UFO mystery still leaves questions. http://news.bbc. co.uk/local/suffolk/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_9301000/9301923. stm

alien inva sio n

Points of interest normal predators, cryptid predators,

organization, started by Dr. Steven M. Greer

The conference hosted over 20 witnesses, most

extraterrestrials, secretive governmental or

in 1993, with the intention of de-classifying

of them ex-military, who provided testimonies,

military agencies, and cults. ‘’Mutilations’’ have

and disclosing all information on unidentified

some of them about the cover-up of the UFO

been the subject of two independent federal

flying objects (UFOs) and issues related to

issue, while others relayed third-person

investigations

extraterrestrial life that the group alleges covert

accounts or gave their opinions.

elements of the United States government Robert Scott Lazar (January 26, 1959), or Bob

have classified and kept secret. The group also

Majestic 12 (also known as Majic 12, Majestic

Lazar, is owner of a mail-order scientific supply

requests open and honest hearings regarding

Trust, M12, MJ 12, MJ XII or Majority 12) is the

company and claims to be a physicist who

the UFOs, extraterrestrials, and advanced-

purported code name of a secret committee of

worked from 1988 until 1989 at an area he

energy and propulsion systems that also

scientists, military leaders, and government

alleges exists called S-4 (Sector Four). He claims

allegedly remain classified. Dr. Steven M. Greer

officials, supposedly formed in 1947 by an

that S-4 is situated at the edge of the (dry)

introduced ‘’The National Disclosure Project’’

executive order of U.S. President Harry S.

Papoose Lake bed, near Groom Lake, Nevada,

to the media and the public on May 9, 2001 at

Truman. The primary evidence for the existence

about 15 miles from Area 51. Lazar claims this

the Washington’s National Press Club. It was

of a group named Majestic twelve is a collection

area was devoted to the study and back-

notable for being the largest meeting in the UFO

of documents that first emerged in 1984 and

engineering of extraterrestrial space vehicles.

community and the large amount of attention it

which have been the subject of much debate.

In a series of interviews, he provides supposed

received. Among the participants were:

The original MJ-12 documents state that: The

details on the origin of the alleged craft and

Sara McClendon

Majestic 12 group... was established by order of

their mode of propulsion.

Jon Cypher

President Truman on 24 September, 1947, upon

John Callahan (FAA)

recommendation by Dr. Vannevar Bush and

Charles Brown (US Air Force)

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

The Disclosure Project is a non-profit

The truth is out there Eisenhower Meeting

involved could take a few cows and test their

December 1980, just outside of RAF Woodbridge,

On the night and early hours of February 20-21,

implanting techniques on a few human beings,

used at the time by the U.S. Air Force. Dozens

1954, while on a ‘vacation’ to Palm Springs,

but that they had to give details about the

of USAF personnel were eyewitnesses to various

California, President Dwight Eisenhower

people involved. Slowly, the aliens altered the

events over a two- or three-day period. It has

went missing and was allegedly taken to

bargain until they decided they wouldn’t abide

been claimed that the UFO was interfering with

Edwards Air force base for a secret meeting.

by it at all. Back in 1979, this was the reality and

the nuclear missile launch systems of weapons

When he showed up the next morning at a

the fire fight at Dulce occurred quite by accident.

stored at that time at the base. It has been

church service in Los Angeles, reporters were

I was involved in building an addition to the

compared to the Roswell UFO incident in the

told that he had to have emergency dental

deep underground military base at Dulce, which

United States, and is sometimes referred to as

treatment the previous evening and had visited

is probably the deepest base. It goes down seven

“Britain’s Roswell”.

a local dentist. The dentist later appeared at

levels and over 2.5 miles deep.’

a function that evening and was presented as

Moon photographs

‘the dentist’ who had treated Eisenhower. The

Project Serpo

Donna Hare, revealed during the ‘Disclosure

missing night and morning has subsequently

Project Serpo is the name given to what is said

project’ how NASA managed to cover up and

fueled rumors that Eisenhower was using the

to have been a top-secret exchange between the

erase anomalies such as UFOs from satellite

alleged dentist visit as a cover story for an

United States government and an alien planet

photographs. During the 60s and 70s she was

extraordinary event. The event is possibly the

nicknamed Serpo. Details of the exchange and

a slide technician with NASA. Hare recounted:

most significant that any American President

what it was supposed to have entailed have

“I worked at NASA throughout those Apollo

could have conducted: an alleged ‘First Contact’

appeared in several UFO conspiracy stories

missions. I had a secret clearance so I thought

meeting with extraterrestrials at Edwards Air

over the last 30 years, including one incident

I could go anywhere in the building... they

Force base (previously Muroc Airfield), and the

in 1983 in which a man identifying himself

developed pictures taken from satellites and

beginning of a series of meetings with different

as USAF Sergeant Richard C. Doty contacted

also all of the [space] missions, the Apollo

extraterrestrial races that led to a ‘treaty’ that

investigative journalist Linda Moulton

missions, flight missions. I was talking to one

was eventually signed. This astonishing First

Howe claiming to be able to supply her Air

of the photographers and developers and he

Contact event, if it occurred, experienced its

Force records of the exchange for her HBO

was putting together a mosaic which is a lot

50th anniversary on February 20-21, 2004.

documentary ‘’The ET Factor’’; only to pull out

of photos – smaller photos into a larger photo

without providing any evidence to substantiate

pattern... he directed my attention to one area,

his story.

he said, Look at that. I looked and there was

Dulce Incident The following is an account by Phil Schneider

a round oval shaped, well it was a very white

‘Back in 1954, under the Eisenhower

Rendlesham Forest Incident

circular shape of a dot and it was black & white

administration, the Federal government decided

The Rendlesham Forest Incident is the name

photography, so I asked him if that was a spot

to circumvent the Constitution of the United

given to a series of reported sightings of

on the emulsion and he said, ‘’Well I can’t tell

States and form a treaty with alien entities.

unexplained lights and the alleged landing of

you, but spots on the emulsion do not leave

It was called the 1954 Greada treaty, which

a craft or multiple craft of unknown origin in

round circles of shadows.’

basically made the agreement that the aliens

Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England, in late

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Randy Sparklepants 02/01/2010 06:29 PM You puny ear thlings are no match for us; you will ne ver figure out our ingenious plan to disguise ourselves as post boxes and our plot to use comedy to topple humanity. We are the Superbrights and nothing can stop us; well except gravity.

jellyfish 01/31/2010 06:1 7 AM Don’ t these stories/ideas get announced or published AFTER the horse has left the barn??? I bet you someone has made contac t and the visitors are hostile! Better go stock up on rice & water and hide in the basement...

terr y1595557 01/29/2010 09:59 AM They need to search for intelligent life in Washington DC before they star t looking on others ’ planets. Oh wait there is no intelligent life Washington

only

politicians. Ne ver

mind.

Truth SUKS 01/28/2010 02:47 PM I Gotta chuckle at the large boatload of dor fus geeks who take this stuff seriously. If there are aliens then I’m a monkey ’s uncle.

(...)

alien inva sio n

(...) HealingMindN 01/27/2010 11:15 PM Hey! I for one welcome our alien visitors, mainly the beautiful, sexy ones who look like Playboy models and feed off our emotions. There is no true “good or e vil” among ETs according to Dr. Salla at exopolitics.org; they are far more complex than humans and they always want “something.” That ’s fine by me. I always want “something” too.

RickNToronto 25/01/2010 8:48 AM Oh Lord... if they really are like us then some of them may e ven be Tories!!!

Talkthetalk 25/01/2010 9:26 AM I belie ve in Extra-terrestrials because I belie ve in the human testimony but what really intrigues me is: do they need to eat like we do? If so do they cook food and does it taste good? If not I think it is better to be us, not withstanding all our “greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others ’ resources ”!

IKNOWNOTHING 25/01/2010 10:24 AM We are already here; I look like a keyboard. Your planet is great. Except for the “pop” music, which is shit.

(...)

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Workshop 25/01/2010 12:12 PM I don’ t think they ’ll be like us, they won’ t be clean. I mean there ’s no water in space.

Trichome 16/11/2009 3:48 PM The timely arrival of an intelligent alien on planet Ear f would signal the beginning of the end for peculiar belief systems such as Catholicism. Ac tually, the alien wouldn’ t e ven need to be that intelligent... .. aye, gonnae gie us a ride in yer spaceship mister? Then again... what happens if it ’s a fish?... or a sentient loaf of bread?... that ’ll just make things worse huh?!? ...hmm...

XtalDave 10/01/2011 7:10 AM I for one welcome our violent and exploitative overlords.

tomnze 10/01/2011 8:44 AM Sounds like rubbish. Such aliens would be explorers and ver y unlikely to be violent - at least in the first instance. After all, Captain Cook just went out to discover new worlds, the nasty stuff came later. Besides, any race that can master interstellar travel is unlikely to gain any thing of great value from us. We would be like ants to them.

(...) 94

alien inva sio n

(...) raftspider 10/01/2011 9:19 AM For one thing, their plastic won’ t work in our ATMs and for another, their extermination will use up all our nuclear weapons. Good job we ’ve still got those, eh?

Stevedev 10/01/2011 11:06 AM Right, that ’s it!! I’ll be on the blower to Morgan Freeman, Chuck Norris, and Mr Bean. If they can’ t saves us were truly F***ed...

DavidMillipede 10/01/2011 11:18 AM I really can’ t help wondering if there is intelligent life on ear th...

Hibernica 10/01/2011 11:44 AM Personally, I think that aliens must be really stupid. I mean, they travel for zillions of light years to visit us and the only people they make contac t with are crazed rural lunatics who invariably have long standing drink problems.

crapweed 10/01/2011 1:18 PM I come in peace... Quick, kill it.

(...) 95

Fear | The Planet

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I want to see the managerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; : William S. Burroughs

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

The Planet If the global collapse doesn’t happen, you can at least credit Ruppert’s message for helping you lose a few pounds.

Issues surrounding our precious planet are probably the most serious issues we confront in this book. Often changes to our eco-systems don’t have an immediate impact, certainly ones we can see, which has made stories of eco-doom the most sustained and enduring over the past twenty years. But how much should we fret? Not at all if you believe Jeremy Clarkson, but if you listen to the likes of the government’s chief scientist David King who pronounced that climate change was a greater threat than terrorism than perhaps we should be afraid, very afraid. With terrorism the nature of the danger is relatively straightforward, with nature we don’t really know what we face and from where. The end is not only nigh according to the recent glut of ecomentaries, but it’s right flaming well here on our doorstep. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth1 was really the first and most genre defining of the eco-doom films. Nobel, Oscar, Grammy and Emmy award winning former US vice president and environmental activist Al Gore is really big on warning us about the cataclysmic disaster that awaits us due to mankind’s incessant need to destroy our atmosphere. “I look around for meaningful signs we are about to change,” he said. “I don’t see it right now.” He is referring only to climate change, which is, as we all know, just one of Gaia’s maladies. Climate change today is a political and economic issue for the G20, not to mention a political hot potato, as the buck for who is responsible for sorting it out gets passed around like a parcel as at a kids party. It seems obvious to most that some climate change is inevitable and we are used to the phrase ‘climate change’ being prefixed by the words severe, worrying or dangerous. But will things actually get worse? The media as we have seen has a habit of emphasising the negative aspects of climate change. So while headlines warning of ‘mega droughts’ and ‘burning Britain’ resonate here,

potentially increased crop yields and reduced winter deaths in other parts of the world go un-remarked. Despite this, the planet still remains largely habitable with much of its surface amply suitable for human life. Climate change over the next hundred years need not prove catastrophic, just mildly inconvenient. Some societies today struggle to survive in areas already maladapted to human life, either due to natures effects or human intervention anyway. This is not to say all is fine and go back to burying our heads, but what can you and I really do? Changing light bulbs and turning appliances off instead of to standby seem to be the solutions most easily affected by individuals, but surely this is insignificant compared to the industrial carbon output of most countries. China’s carbon emissions will peak between 2030 and 2040, the country’s science and technology minister told the Guardian as the global climate change summit began in Copenhagen. But it’s not just China that is to blame, or even the perennial pariah of global eco-destruction the United States of America: we all are. You, me and your granny have been reliant on the Earths resources all our lives, and we are now paying the price. In the latest eco-doom movie ‘Collapse’ 2 Michael Ruppert a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and noted conspiracy theorist sits in a darkened room, chain-smoking and warning that “things are falling apart.” In Collapse, Ruppert states things that are clearly true, makes claims that are fairly plausible and delivers predictions that no viewer without a time machine can adequately evaluate. He says ‘peak oil’ production has already been reached, meaning that petroleum supplies will continue to fall and prices rise until petrol, plastic, pesticides and other oil-derived products become unaffordable. Put simply: modern civilisation has dug itself so far into an oil-reliant lifestyle in the pursuit of out growth-based society and that we can’t just up and switch our game plan to alternative energy without getting over a whole load of hurdles. It’s pretty dramatic stuff and if it weren’t for the fact that Ruppert appears to be one of the most reasoned investigative journalists I’ve seen on

Points of reference • Asteroids: a guilt-free form of doom. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/ space/7920173/Asteroids-a-guilt-free-form-of-doom.html • Collapse. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/oct/03/collapse-filmreview • What Japan’s disaster tells us about peak oil. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/2011/apr/04/japan-disaster-peak-oil • UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. http://www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece • The looming crisis. http://www.economist.com/blogs/ freeexchange/2011/04/climate_policy

• Why the UN can never stop climate change. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/2011/apr/04/un-climate-change • ‘Peak Oil’ Global energy crisis looming. http://www.btinternet. com/~nlpwessex/Documents/energycrisis.htm • Fears over looming energy crisis in UK. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article1813006.ece • Stability fears rise as oil reliance grows. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ business/3953907.stm

t he pl a net

camera, one could easily dismiss him as a nut. So in the words of Lord Tebbitt3 get on your bike and start growing your own food. It can’t hurt. If the global collapse doesn’t happen, you can at least credit Ruppert’s message for helping you lose a few pounds. But while we are busying ourselves swapping bad light bulbs for ones that are about as effective at lighting a room as a glow worm, we are neglecting one huge fundamental disaster that has been affecting life on earth long before we were alive to worry – death from above! No not the Canadian band or the alien menace but lumps of crud from space. People laugh about the story of Chicken Little who cried out that the sky was falling, but a group of astronomers have warned that a cataclysm like that may very well happen before this century is out. An asteroid has been discovered that is nearly a quarter of a mile wide that they think might slam into the Earth in less than 30 years from now. The group named NEO (cool name) is made up of people who are experts in near-Earth objects (hence the name). The asteroid in question was identified in 2004 and studied in 2005 for its trajectory. At first they were scared enough to believe that it could hit the earth in 2029. Then they did some more fine-tuning of their computer data and decided that in 2029 the asteroid will be closer to the earth than the moon is. It will be seen in the sky with the naked eye. And that will bring it close enough to Earth’s

M a l a

t e m p o r a

gravity to cause its orbital trajectory to alter. The next time it gets that close to our neighbourhood will be 2036, and the scientists think its trajectory change could well have put it on a collision course with Earth. Studies show that if a meteorite hits in 2036, it will land somewhere in the eastern hemisphere, releasing energy 100,000 times the energy released by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Debris and dust kicked up by this blast would cloud the entire earth, probably for months. Well at least I won’t have to worry about working until I’m 68 but really should we be worried? Jenny McCartney writing in the Telegraph isn’t: “Global warming, for example, worries me primarily because I – with my energy-guzzling, waste-producing ways – feel murkily implicated in having created the problem. An asteroid does not, because it is a random chunk of hurtling rock.” Quite, asteroids are a kind of guilt free harbinger because, hey we didn’t cause them. Meteorite impacts are quite literally acts of God. But looking on the bright side of death-rocks from space, while an asteroid spelt disaster for the dinosaurs, it was good news for mammals. As a recent study by Jessica Theodor and colleagues at the University of Calgary showed, with less competition for vegetation, mammals could evolve and get about a thousand times bigger. We owe our very existence to a deep impact. Ah well what comes around goes around. n

c u r r u n t u r b e s

Points of interest footnotes:

himself as an investigative reporter and radical

Collapse

thinker, has authored books on the events of the

Why are we doomed? Oil

An Inconvenient Truth is a passionate and

September 11 attacks and of energy issues. Some

What can we do? Nothing

inspirational look at former Vice President Al

call him a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist.

Taken from Climate Crisis

Gore’s political crusade to halt global warming’s

Flow Norman Beresford Tebbit, Baron Tebbit CH, PC

deadly progress by exposing the myths and

misconceptions that surround it. In this

(born 29 March 1931) is a British Conservative

What can we do? Boycott Nestle, Coca-Cola

intimate portrait of Gore and his “travelling

politician and former Member of Parliament

and the IMF

global warming show,” Gore comes across as

(MP) for Chingford, who was born in Ponders

never before in the media - funny, engaging,

End, Middlesex. His speech: ‘I grew up in the ‘30s

The End Of The Line

open and intent on alerting citizens to this

with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He

Why are we doomed? Seafood extinction

“planetary emergency” before it’s too late.

got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept

What can we do? Don’t eat seafood

Why are we doomed? Fresh water running out

looking ‘til he found it.’ 2

Collapse, directed by Chris Smith, is an

Vanishing of the Bees

American documentary film exploring the

Over that last few years there has seen a rise

Why are we doomed? Bees

theories, writings and life story of controversial

in the number of cinema films that have dealt

What can we do? Follow their Twitter campaign

author Michael Ruppert. Collapse premiered

with threats to our planet, both ecological and

at the Toronto International Film Festival in

man-made. The following are films cashing

Food INC

September 2009 to positive reviews. Ruppert, a

in on the current popularity of the eco-doom-

Why are we doomed? Factory farms

former Los Angeles police officer who describes

documentary:

What can we do? Take up ‘Meatless Mondays’

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Clive 30/03/2009, 3:40 pm Green energy - fantastic! We ’ve been dragging our heels for decades. But aren’ t we missing the point? Population growth of around 2bn in 1930 to 8bn or so in 2030 is just stupendously crazy and clearly unsustainable! A few weeks ago the BBC tried to raise the overpopulation issue but stony silence seems to have been the stern response. And Mr. Pope, you are assisting in the miser y and death of untold millions in your continued mindless stance on bir th control. Surely we are rushing towards disaster as per the renowned lemming?

Dark Side of the Goon 30/03/2009, 8:06 PM “Mankind must once again become selfless and not full of greed”? When were we e ver, as a species, that? We now have the tools to understand the scale of the problems our ambition has created, we may also have the tools to solve those problems; let ’s hope we have the wisdom to recognise what must be done in order for all the nations of the world to avoid the mistakes of the de veloped West.

(...) 100

t he pl a net

(...) RickMcDaniel 31/03/2009 00:12 AM The problem for all of the world, which is a quandar y for all, is that world populations have exceeded the safety le vel of the planet. That means absolutely NOTHING we do will matter, if we do not REDUCE world populations. I do not mean in the long term, either. I mean within the next 20 yrs. We must STOP having children, or we cannot save the planet. It is that simple. There are too many of us, driving cars, building houses, building office buildings, building fac tories, conver ting forest lands to cities, and farms. The more of us there are, the faster we destroy the environment. Science has been tr ying to tell world governments that fac t, for a few years now. Governments refuse to listen. Why, you ask? Simple. Population growth fuels the economy. Without it, the economy stagnates. There is the Catch-22 . So, are we doomed? Perhaps we are.

Sadvito 31/03/2009 00:12 AM I’d love the Honda, but I need a car now. It will probably be another VW diesel.

GeneralX 15/09/2009 10:46 PM “Anyone who cares about the sur vival of our planet should star t praying” Where I stopped reading.

(...) 101

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) DNAtheist 15/09/2009 10:50 PM For the Nth time, the planet is not doomed. At least not by any thing our currently petty intelligence can create. We ’ve had the potential to

destroy

our

species

for

se veral

decades

though, and fur ther technological gains will no doubt increase both our options for annihilation as well as those to remake and better ourselves. The

ignorance,

inanity,

insanity,

gullibility,

stupidity, greed, maliciousness, capriciousness, small-minded and downright bigoted meddlings of power-crazed, shor t-sighted (and tiresomely pious) fools will only ser ve the former though. I count Bush and his cronies amongst the worst offenders I have borne witness to. A pox on them and all their kind - and by that I mean those espousing the aforementioned charac teristics.

TonyBlairHere 16/09/2009 1:20 AM “ When I see Madonna rowing across the Atlantic I’ll star t to listen” When

see

journalists,

climate bankers

scientists, and

the

politicians,

other

jokers

involved in global warming alarmism take a 50% salar y cut ‘ to save the planet ’, I’ll pay attention, not one second before.

(...) 102

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(...) 18Rabbit 16/09/2009 7:49 PM Since the World is going to end in 2012 , (Mayan Calendar says so) there is really no global warming problem. And if that doesn’ t work an Asteroid is supposed to destroy the ear th in the ‘30s. Personally, I think the Yellowstone Super volcano is going to wipe out all life as we know it in the next 50 years. In the end we are all going to die. Fearing death and irrationally attempting to fix things that may not be broken is hardly a recipe for a satisfac tor y life. If you want to flagellate yourself

and

propitiate

Gaea,

through

this

global warming nonsense that ’s great, but as for myself, I’ll be down the pub.

ambivabloke 16/09/2009 12:37 PM Give me a break, the U.S. could disappear tomorrow and the future emissions of China and India alone will make the American contributions quaint. As for health care, Brit journos might consider spreading their yank-obsessed wings to other par ts of the planet, it ’s a little creepy.

Tumour 16/09/2009 12:14 PM Americans as a whole are so ignorant and bigoted of course we are doomed. Who cares anyway, mankind is a disease and it ’s way overdue for extinc tion.

(...) 103

Fear | Hollywood

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious. : David Mamet

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Hollywood: A recipe for disaster He turns to the bartender and whispers “it’s begun”

Lets go back to the 1970s, when disaster movies were quite fashionable. The disaster movie, a film where the stakes are high for everyone, can be traced back to the aviation drama The High And The Mighty (1954), starring John Wayne, which birthed the four Airport movies of the 1970s thereby setting the gold standard for cataclysmic entertainment for that decade. Disaster films such as, The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), are understood to have resonated with audiences on account of the 1970s being such a horrendous decade: the OPEC crisis, Watergate, Vietnam, inflation, terrorism, threeday week, and all that. They indirectly summarised the anxieties felt by the public, most notably the baby-boomers that hitherto had had a relatively easy ride. Of course by the 1980s everyone had got a bit tired of being frightened, with Airplane! wonderfully cutting open the belly of the disaster beast, to feed on its ham-flavoured innards. It parodied all the clichés: food poisoning, woeful alcoholics, flashbacks, love lost, love found, passengers with remorse, passengers who repent and some singing nuns. It was nigh on impossible to make an aircraft disaster movie after Airplane! because no one would take it seriously. It was also difficult because the 1980s, unlike its predecessor, was not a time for wallowing in self-pity. It was a time of boom, prosperity, greed and St. Elmo’s Fire! As the 1990s heralded a new decade of further prosperity, bought largely by the fall of the Berlin wall1 and Gorbachev’s Glasnost2, all went quiet on the disaster movie front. Jurassic Park (1993) was the nearest we had, but that was more or less psuedo-science for kiddies. It would be 1996 before we were treated to Roland Emmerich’s Alien invasion buster Independence Day, where our senses were reawakened to the notion that there is always someone bigger and better out there that can squash us! Following Independence Day, we had a spike in the disaster flick, the last few years leading up to the millennium were cinematically

not easy for poor old planet Earth. Volcanoes, floods and a giant Japanese lizard with a a bad attitude and a penchant for fish were some of the dangers it had to contend with. We were slap bang in the midst of pre-millennial angst, and what better way to assuage our anxieties than with a healthy dose of earth shattering drama. And earth shattering it was quite literally as we were treated to two films that dealt with falling rocks from outer space: Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998). The Towering Inferno and even Independence Day were small fry compared to comets, that could quite literally destroy everything. Of course the future of the earth had been threatened by cinematic rocks before. In 1979 Sean Connery starred in Meteor and teamed up with the Russians to deflect a killer asteroid, but probably the best-known earlier treatment is the 1951 classic, When Worlds Collide. The only difference is that by the 1990s we could scare with far better special effects and Michael Bay’s own brand of ‘bayhem’. Ultimately good disaster films are good entertainment and like the ‘Slasher’3 genre, pretty generic. Lets see… You have to open with life going on normally. Some guy would be picking his kids up from school or be seen yelling at his divorce lawyer, but he would be aware of something unusual: perhaps the bees are flying upside down. Then you switch to a scientist hard at work charting stars or something, noticing something which isn’t where it normally is in the sky. He has his findings confirmed by an older, seasoned scientist or sage, that adds a further nugget of wisdom. Panic stations begin now! Obviously a hero is needed, usually a bum with a drink problem. Ultimately flawed but with a strong sense of honour. Perhaps he fought in Iraq? The story would then switch to the White House where the exasperated scientist is desperately trying to explain to the President and sundry chiefs of staff, that doom is on its way. No doubt using lolly pop sticks and Malteasers as visual aides. Of course the open-minded President is immediately shot down by a cynical secretary of state who completely poo-poos the scientists theory. You then start seeing calamity across the globe, perhaps

Points of reference • How to write the perfect disaster movie. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/ filmblog/2008/dec/12/perfect-disaster-film • Could 2012 be the greatest disaster movie ever? http://www.thisislondon. co.uk/film/review-23769155-could-2012-be-the-greatest-disaster-movie-ever. do • The Top 100 DISASTER Movies. http://www.movie-film-review.com/ devtop100.asp?no=100&type=4 • US turns to king of the disaster movie for its happy ending. http://www. independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-turns-to-king-of-the-disastermovie-for-its-happy-ending-1989940.html

106

• Rey Juan Carlos (2010) Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Panic: The Popular Genres of Action and Fantasy in the Wake of the 9/11 Attacks. Volume 38, Number 1 / January-March 2010 • Don’t panic ... it’s only the latest disaster movie. http://www.dailymail. co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-471211/Dont-panic---latest-disaster-movie.html • A disaster waiting to happen? http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/ may/22/features • Frank Furedi. Japan: a catastrophe, not a disaster movie. http://www. frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/442/ • Michelle de Carion. Doom and Gloom. http://www.christianitytoday.com

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in a montage where cities (not American) are slowly being destroyed. The scientist watches it all unfold on the telly in a bar where he is no doubt drinking himself to death. He turns to the bartender and whispers ‘it’s begun’. Cue a mad rush to get back to the White House, perhaps picking up his family and estranged spouse on the way, dodging looters and crashing cars. The President is summarily convinced by more lolly pop sticks and a crying child, and they climb aboard Airforce One and fly to Area 51. They set up a crack team of commandos and hatch a plan to shoot a what-sit at an evil cloud, maybe using alien technology. Their plan fails, but somehow the alcoholic bum from earlier wants a shot at redemption, so he volunteers to the amazement of all. Maybe he is atoning for some sins. He might have murdered his brother? Anyway a few more lost cities later, they succeed and cue parting shots of the American flag in tatters, jubilation all round the world and a few shattered monuments. Of course quite predictably the millennium came and went without incident, but as 9/11 proved, this world was not out of the woods when it came to disaster. Modern terrorism and the disaster film share a common emotional link: the dramatic impact on audiences through formulas of Panic. In the wake of 9/11, Hollywood experienced a renaissance when it came to fear, panic and disaster. Films such as United 93 (2006) and World Trade Center (2006) (which portrayed the events of 9/11 directly) aside,

C r a s

most films were not reconstruction’s of those events. Steven Spielberg shapes up as a director for which global terrorism provided a call to action. Minority Report (2002), The Terminal (2004), War of the Worlds (2005) and Munich (2006) all tap into disaster as a source of entertainment, offering reflections of America’s anxiety. But where United 93 depicted actual terrorism, films like Minority Report or M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) instead tap into more covert anxieties such as our perceived diminishing freedoms or infringement of civil liberties. The Disaster movie has gone all intelligent. The notion of invasion has also been renewed. War of the Worlds (2006), Signs (2002) and in 2008 The Mist, Cloverfield and The Happening were films that dealt with the threat of invasion, usually by preternatural beasts, of which we have little defence. But instead of simply being ‘shoot-em-ups’ like Independence Day a decade earlier, they focus on notions of loss, from a point of view of the family and social disintegration, with man pitted against man for survival. Of course they aren’t always intelligent. Take 2012 (2009), where the planet tears itself apart due to the earths core being microwaved or some such bunkum. Still I would rather munch my way through popcorn to 2012 than to Michael Rupperts Collapse (2010), which is far too near the realism knuckle for me. n

c r e d e m u s ,

h o d i e

n i h i l

Points of interest violent manner, often with a cutting tool such

• The killer reidentifies the guilty parties.

The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was

as a chainsaw or knife. Although the term

• A member of the old community trys to warn

a barrier constructed by the German Democratic

“slasher” may be used as a generic term for

the young community (optional).

Republic (GDR, East Germany) starting on 13

any horror movie involving graphic acts of

• The young community takes no heed.

August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin

murder, the slasher as a genre has its own set of

• The killer stalks members of the young

from surrounding East Germany and from East

characteristics which set it apart from related

community.

Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed

genres like the horror film. Vera Dika attempts

• A member of some type of force like a detective

along large concrete walls, which circumscribed

to define the sub-genre by its often formulaic

etc., attempts to hunt down the killer.

a wide area (later known as the “death strip”)

plot structure. She theorizes that the slasher

• The killer kills members of the young

that contained anti-vehicle trenches, “fakir beds”

films loosely adhere the following formula:

community.

footnotes: 1

and other defenses.

• The hero/heroine sees the extent of the Past event

murders.

• The young community is guilty of a wrongful

• The hero/heroine sees the killer.

openness, and transparency in the activities

action.

• The hero/heroine does battle with the killer.

of all government institutions in the Soviet

• The killer sees an injury, fault or death.

• The hero/heroine kills or subdues the killer.

Union, together with freedom of information,

• The killer experiences a loss.

• The hero/heroine survives.

introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second

• The killer kills the guilty members of the young

• But the hero/heroine is not free.

half of the 1980s. The word “glasnost” was first

community

Glasnost was the policy of maximum publicity,

used in Russia at the end of 1850. Present events 3

A slasher film is a type of horror film typically

involving a psychopathic killer stalking and

• An event commemorates the past action. • The killer’s destructive force is reactivated.

killing a sequence of victims in a graphically

107

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

Films are just made up rubbish Sift through most science fiction disaster fluff and you realise most of it could never happen in a million years...

Ecological disaster In The Day After Tomorrow melting sea ice in the Arctic stops the Gulf Stream and causes certain parts of the Atlantic coast to get colder, because there is not enough salt in the sea or something. In the film it happened almost overnight, however, it very definitely will never happen overnight and cause mega ice-blasts. In fact, even if all the ice in the world melted, it would only raise the sea levels by about 200 feet. Noah, stand down with the blueprints. The rare element “Explodium” Everything is better with explosions, just ask Michael Bay. Well, disaster only delivers a cinematic punch when mixed with nitro-glycerin, which is why you have stuff blowing up in complete ignorance to sciences and logics. In the movies nothing ever just breaks. If it’s even slightly mechanical or electronic, its destruction is loud and accompanied by impressive pyrotechnics. Circuit boards, food processors, and New York are the most volatile substances in the known universe. Research shows that cigarettes will not set fire to puddles of petrol, no matter how nonchalantly you flick one in. Objects that are particularly prone to exploding include: • Anti matter • Monsters • The earth’s core • Cars • Robots, especially giant robots (see Decepticons) • Spacecraft • Instrument panels • Heads • Planets • The city of................. (insert major American city here) • Zombies (see Zombies) • Nuclear power plants • EVERYTHING in a Michael Bay movie. • Human beings Smile, you’re on camera Now this happened in Enemy of the State, but it mainly happens on CSI: enhanced pixel software. In any of these shows if you zoom in really tight on a pixillated security camera picture until the pixels almost fill the screen, you then press the magical ‘enhance image’ button and make it all perfectly clear. What! No, no can do, a pixel is a pixel.

108

Alien spaceships aren’t 3G yet It is almost impossible to write a computer virus that will affect both Macs and PCs let alone advanced alien craft, yet somehow Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day can upload malware into an alien mainframe to bring down its shields. It’s a good thing they didn’t have Little Snitch, or humanity would have been really screwed. Lasers Laser beams move at the speed of light, because, well, they are light. What they don’t do is zoom through the space ahead of your spaceship like giant neon spears. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even light up – especially not in space, where there would be no air particles for light to diffract off. Invisible force fields that stop visible laser beams are another no no. Laser beams are light. Visible light. Anything that stops visible light will stop them – anything visible light can pass through, can pass through. So how on earth do they bounce off invisible deflector shields? Plants are ‘pissed off ’ Plants are pretty harmless, but if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from films, it is never to trust anything. This is certainly true in The Happening, which sees plants evolve to emit a deadly neurotoxin that convinces humans to shoot themselves in the head. Should you start avoiding garden centres at all costs? Well no. The nearest you will get to anything like that is a runny nose and itchy eyes, commonly known as hey fever. Zombie apocalypse It’s generally accepted by cadaver experts that dead bodies are going to continue to rot, even reanimated ones shambling around the streets. What the movies fail to convey, however, is the gruesome yet strangely hilarious effect the hot sun has on a rotting corpse. A walking blob of putrefying flesh is gonna go bad pretty quickly, swell up and finally explode! Run to high ground and sit it out. This is not to mention the tasty smell these rotting flesh bags would emit to any passing flies, maggots or crows. Dinner’s up buttercup! Sick people: The threat of a global pandemic, be it natural or man-made, is ‘bigged up’ every flu-season. We do get pandemics, after

ho llywo o d

all the world is very small place these days and anything

course they can’t! They can’t even stop the banks selling us

that originates here could spread around the globe within

down the river! You probably didn’t vote for them anyway.

24 hours. But if something does get out it probably will not

But don’t worry... in between dithering and not listening

turn us all into rage fuelled zombies! While the 28 days/weeks

to alcoholic scientists they will no doubt hold prime-time

movies are fun, marauding sick people is pretty far-fetched.

press conferences to keep you posted on exactly how bad

The disease would have logically wiped itself out much

the situation is. This is probably the only thing that the

faster than indicated in the movie. None of the ‘infected’

movie makers get bang on!

took care to insulate themselves from cold, drink water, or sustain food. The human body cannot sustain itself

Surviving terrible injuries

without water beyond 10 days. So, the infected aren’t going

Look, we know movies aren’t real. Hollywood likes to

to be running anywhere after about two days and will be

exaggerate reality, probably because reality is so bloody

completely incapacitated beyond that. Like zombies, lock

boring, and exaggerating physical abilities is part of the

yourself in the tallest building with a bottle of Evian and sit

course. Now someone always gets bashed over the head

it out, after 10 days the planet will be yours!

and knocked out in most of these films. Usually to wake up fine hours later. Now being unconscious for five minutes is

Decepticons

usually trauma enough to have an overnight stay in ‘hotel

In the Transformer movies the big threat comes from

NHS’, but hours? That is serious brain damage territory. Loss

Decepticons: giant walking weapons of murderous doom

of limbs is even weirder. Exploded limbs usually ooze blood

right? Well wrong actually. Yes they come up with stupid

in massive (and fear inducing) amounts, rarely do you get

schemes to destroy mankind, and make a lot of ‘splosions’

a clean, instantly cauterized cut. It is possible to survive

but get a rag tag team of US soldiers in and they fall like

losing a limb, but to prevent bleeding out, you have to apply

flies. Advanced alien robots are felled quite easily it seems

direct pressure to the wound or, in cases of severe bleeding,

with conventional human built weapons, especially if you

wrap a tourniquet tightly around the stump. Either way, the

shoot them in the crotch, whilst on a motorbike.

last thing you want to do is to keep running around, since that will only increase flow of blood spurting from your

Volcanos

body. If you’re watching the new series The Walking Dead, a

In the movie ‘Volcano’ the La Brea Tar Pits inexplicably turn

severed body part just came up as a major plot point. Daft!

into a volcano, and it’s up to a plucky geologist (Anne Heche) and veteran cop (Tommy Lee Jones) to save Los

A Computer becomes self-aware and kills you

Angeles from the river of (very slow moving) lava. Even

The microwave-sized IMSAI 8080 computer the Matthew

though someone points out in the film that a volcano can

Broderick used in Wargames to take over the national

erupt with the force of a nuclear blast, we find out that the

nuclear missile fleet had 64KB of memory. That means if it

one under LA is really small and doesn’t erupt at all. Actually

tried to open a Word document today, it’d get about half

it just oozes lava down the street for a bit before being

way through before it crashed. Self aware indeed.

stopped by a few busses and the fire brigade. And talking of killer computers... If disater strikes avoid all major landmarks

Terminator asks you to believe a computer becomes aware

If it has ever featured on a postcard, it will probably kill you.

and builds an army of machines to wipe out the humans

Think about it. How many times have hapless Parisians

who survive the nuclear holocaust in created. But aside

looked up in horror to see the Eiffel Tower toppling toward

from being quite cool-looking and Austrian they are beyond

them? Or Whitehouse secretaries running as dangerous alien

useless as harbingers of doom as they are outwitted by

energy beams pound down upon them? Simply put, disaster

a waitress and Eddie Furlong, no less than three times.

only strikes well known landmarks. Best thing to do then

Not content with that humiliation, Skynet sends a T1000

is find Dagenham town hall, find a magazine and sit in

made of liquid metal that can only terminate someone by

reception – you will be completely safe to plan an uprising

stabbing them. If that wasn’t enough these things ask the

against our evil alien overlords.

name of their victim first then stare at them for an extended period of time before slowly drawing a weapon. If this

Governments

prophesy ever comes true, just tell them your name is Norris

Do you really trust your government to contain a rage virus?

McWhirter and walk calmly away.

Can they keep you safe from aliens, volcanoes, asteroids, hemorrhoids, Mayan prophesies or evil machines? Of

109

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Snapshackle 01/01/2010 9:27 PM Oh God no. Global Warming is a ver y serious subjec t and the last thing we need is a lot of luvvies mis-por traying it.

InspectorCallahan 01/01/2010 9:37 PM A future anthropologist studying Hollywood films of the noughties would probably deduce that our biggest fear was the living dead rising from their graves and eating us.

Theloonyfromcatford 01/01/2010 10:23 PM Yeah - South Park trumps science. Anyway, Hollywood

has

por trayed:

war, cults, rape,

murder, drugs, viruses, Nazis, bank robbers, terrorists and the Royal family... Using denier logic I reckon, therefore, these things don’ t ac tually exist in real life.

Hopfrog 02/01/2010 12:11 AM It ’s now 4 years ago since I first heard ‘ we have 10 years left ’. Then each succeeding year was told we ‘had 10 years left ’. Where exac tly are up to with this movie folks?

(...) 110

ho llywo o d

(...) DougallTheDog 01/01/2010 9:39 PM Films always reflec t the paranoias of the age. Scares about the Cold War gave us UFO films and ver y good they were too. Of course, UFO’s didn’ t exist, and neither does man made global warming. If mankind needs to worr y about any thing, perhaps we should worr y about real problems. Ones that ac tually could kill us. Yellowstone park is what they call a super volcano. A reser voir of magma, 200 km deep and 72 km across. It has in the past gone bang in a rather dramatic way, over 100 times. It does so e ver y 600,000 years or so. The last time was 630,000 years ago. It is therefore overdue. The last time it blew up, it put out enough material to bur y California to a depth of six metres, although it was spread over most of western America, Canada and Mexico. That is apar t from the fac t would cause the planet to be ver y cold for abut 10,000 years and would decimate the population, or a big rock could come crashing down onto our poor little planet and doo much the same thing. We wouldn’ t see it coming and would probably not realise what had happened, what with all the tsunami, ear thquakes and volcanic eruptions. Again, it would get cold and would kill most of the people currently alive. Both these things have happened before and will happen again. Of course, you can’ t raise taxes on the back of either, so I guess Al Gore will ne ver tr y to make money off the back of a ManBearPig scare stor y.

(...) 111

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) Rushtojudgement 02/01/2010 1:04 AM Grease 2 ...now there was a disaster of a movie : )

JamesCameron 02/01/2010 6:42 AM As the le vel of teaching in our schools collapses so movies take over as the only sources of education for the masses. A surprising number of Scots think “Bravehear t ” is a documentar y and that Wallace, the giant medie val Nor thumbrian, was ac tually an Australian dwar f wearing face paint like a suppor ter of Glasgow Rangers. I suppose in many ways “Allo, Allo” is closer to the reality of the occupation than the French would have us belie ve; “Rab Nesbitt ” is definitely an insight into proletariat life in the industrial graveyard of urban Scotland; and “Blackadder goes for th” (especially

with

Stephen

Fr y

playing

Field

Marshall Melchett) is almost too true! Howe ver it is difficult to imagine that the disaster movie genre of global warming can get much wackier than Al Gores “Inconvenient Truth”.

fabiusmaximus 02/01/2010 10:47 PM Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide No escape from reality Open your eyes Look up to the skies and see ................

(...) 112

ho llywo o d

(...) kingkp 02/01/2010 4:54 PM I would suggest there are many more plausible disaster scenarios in which mankind could self destruc t. Biological war fare for one, which seems to be completely ignored by the mainstream media. Have we forgotten already the anthrax attacks in America shor tly after the twin towers were destroyed? It ’s a far more interesting theme for a screenplay and orders of magnitude more probable, given that we have just experienced the coldest winter in 13 years with the prospec t of the coldest in a 100.

ytrewq 03/01/2010 1:48 AM Some good screenplay ideas here. How about: Al Gore and George Monbiot tr y to out-predic t each other in their pursuit of Angelina Jolie. Hilarity and steamy par tial nudity ensue. “How Green Was My Rapture ”. It happens but only Greens are lifted up. Or alternatively only Greens are left behind. Works either way.

TheNuclearOption 03/01/2010 2:1 7 AM The ultimate scar y movie would be the reality of a Green government with real power, the nanny state on steroids.

(...) 113

Fear | The Environment

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather : John Ruskin

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

The Environment Stay off the roads unless it is absolutely necessary

What surprised me most about this winter was that it was winter. Now I’m not trying to be glib, but winter is a cold time. Usually winter is freezing, and it always has been whilst I have been on this planet despite what scientists would have you believe. There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time, you’re right, probably not, but it will be snowing on the M25. For the last five years we have had a cold, icy winter, but instead of just dealing with it, we get bombarded with useless advice. The worst of which come by way of the police. Like clockwork the police warned motorists to stay of the roads unless it is absolutely necessary which surely is all the time. I mean you wouldn’t ever leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary. Run out of eggs? Go to the shop and get some. Is it necessary? Yes, I’m making an omelette! Every time you leave the house it is usually for a good reason, unless you are one of those people that like going outside just for fun - sometimes up hills, in which case you are likely to be unaffected by fear and doubtless won’t be reading this book in the first place, but in the last five years as soon as a flake of snow hits the met office roof, its all PANIC! Don’t go outside, don’t drive, don’t leave your house or you will DIE! There is a pattern to all of this. You see, it’s the phrase ‘absolutely necessary’, which I suppose means don’t go out for eggs, eat what you have in the cupboard instead. Going out for eggs is not a necessary journey, nor is buying a blender, a new pair of shoes or a Costa coffee. They are all frivolous things that you could put off till the summer. But, and I think I speak for most people on a snow covered morning, we daily make necessary journeys to work. Work, the place we spend most of our days, earning money to buy eggs and machines to blend them in. People have to go to work, we may not like going but we have to. So it really doesn’t help when the police tell people to stay at home. So what are you to do?

Unless you have a very understanding boss you have to soldier in, no matter the consequences, which renders the obviously well-meaning advice totally useless. The media always act surprised when it snows in winter. It’s usually the worst winter for thirty years each and every winter, which is a bit daft. Mind you saying it is the worst winter since the last one doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it. This year it snowed a fair bit, and it was beautiful - just like a a real Christmas card. Surely we should be able to take the snow for what it is (snow) and enjoy it. Nope, too easy. The media hype snow as they do everything else and turn a seasonal flurry into armageddon. Live coverage, boasted the Guardian’s news blog. It’s live, don’t get caught out. Stay tuned to the handy snow disruption blog for all the latest information on how it’s really pelting down outside, and whatever you do don’t go out to have a look, the police have issued warnings. But coping with winter precipitation is increasingly making us all look a bit wet behind the ears. During the ‘snow chaos’ one onlooker snowed in at Heathrow commented on a BBC bulletin: “There were a lot of Americans and Canadians on the plane who couldn’t understand why so little snow had brought everything to a halt.” The rest of the world isn’t concerned about a bit of snow but we are terrified of it. Two days into the seasonal weather, supermarkets were insisting that there were no major food shortages, although Sainsbury’s were reportedly stocking more UHT milk where sales rose 20%. An M&S spokesperson said: “We haven’t seen evidence of panic buying but we are seeing strong sales of thermal clothing. Compared to last week, M&S is currently selling 121% [does that even exist?] more thermals, 72% more thermal tights and 52% more thermal socks.” (We will die well insulated). Still all the cold makes a change from the years where we were told the Earth was going to heat up, and that the new capital of England was likely to be Birmingham. Back in 2005 the UK Climate Impacts Programme1, said that very hot and dry summers of the sort Britain experienced

Points of reference • Britain’s first olive grove is a sign of our hotter times. http://www. independent.co.uk/environment/britains-first-olive-grove-is-a-sign-of-ourhotter-times-405557.html • UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. http://www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece • Snow! UK travel disruption continues – live coverage. http://www.guardian. co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/18/snow-travel-weather-uk-transport-chaostrains-flights-roads • Snow travel chaos disrupts Christmas week. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-12034317

116

• Panic-buying as heavy snow hits. http://www.metro.co.uk/news/807921panic-buying-as-heavy-snow-hits • Panic buying hits supermarkets as shelves stripped of essentials over snow fears. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1242099/Supermarket-hitpanic-buying-shelves-stripped-essentials-snow-fears.html • Snow Chaos...with worse to come. http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/ view/214553/Snow-chaos...with-worse-to-come/ • Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/topics/weather/4436934/Snow-is-consistent-with-global-warming-sayscientists.html

t he envi ro nment

in 1995 will strike in one in three years by the 2050s. Maximum temperatures in southern counties, such as Berkshire, which now reach about 34C (93F), will start to exceed 40C. By 2080, South-east England could become on average 5C warmer in summer, making it as hot as Bordeaux now2. A book published as part of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ world tour in 2007 - The Global Warming Survival Handbook - said there would soon be ‘searing temperatures, killer storms, drought, plague and pestilence’. Great, don’t jet to the Canaries, stay in Skegness. But this view now seems totally at odds with current events. What bothered us at the end of 2010 was not how to explain to the bronzed children of the deserts of Sussex why snow disappeared from our lives, but rather how to negotiate actual snow, the wrong type, wet or otherwise. Again, this isn’t to say that the snow proves there is no planetary warming at all. If it is mad to cite every change in the weather as proof that earth is doomed, then it’s probably also foolhardy to prance around in the white stuff in the belief that it proves that all environmentalists are deluded worry-worts. Those that predicted that snow would disappear are surely now kicking themselves with humility. But no. The most revealing thing about the snow chaos is that it is held up as evidence that the public are wrong not the experts. Because what we don’t understand – idiots that we are – is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialised society is to blame. The Guardian (again) ran the sensationalist headline:

We were all duped. The scientists never said Britain would get hotter (even though they did3), they always said we, up here in the North, would get colder, and all the warm parts would get warmer. It went on to relay that: “According to NASA’s datasets, the world has just experienced the warmest January to November period since the global record began, 131 years ago; 2010 looks likely to be either the hottest or the equal hottest year. [make your mind up] This November was the warmest on record.” But still what about the foot of snow outside, remember, do not travel unless it is absolutely necessary! But we are all stupid thickos “simple, earthy creatures, governed by our senses” and obviously global warming trends don’t mean that every region becomes warmer every month. Duh. Bloody British, always talking about ourselves. What this all boils down to is the extent to which the notion of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. Sod what the science does or doesn’t reveal: the environmental do-gooders biblical fantasies about droughts and plagues will endure because their view is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. Theories on global warming are as changeable as the weather, and to my mind at least, a tad unscientific. Let us all spare a thought for poor Mark Diacono, olive grower extraordinaire. The Independent reported back in 2005 that Mark planted Britain’s first olive grove in Devon, no doubt on the advice of several studies suggesting that, in decades to come, olives, vines and other warm-climate plants will be likely to flourish in a substantially warmer Britain. Bet that grove isn’t doing so well today. n

That snow outside is what global warming looks like.

B AA boss C olin M a tthews on snow ch a os , F ebr u a r y 2 2 , 2 0 1 1 “If someone loses a flight, a business flight, you get really angr y, but when it ’s your Christmas holiday that you are losing, it ’s really infuriating.”

N a t u r a

v a l d e

s i m p l e x

e s t

e t

s i b i

c o n s o n a

Points of reference • BAA boss regrets passengers’ pain over snow chaos. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/business-12524144 • Snow chaos hitting trade hard, say business leaders. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-wales-12045774 • Brendan O’Neill: The Icy Grip Of The Politics Of Fear. http://www. thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/2163-brendan-oneill-the-icy-grip-of-thepolitics-of-fear.html • Snow misery continues in north east of Scotland. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-11886652 • Motorists’ snow misery on ‘worst ever’ M25. http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/

news/s/2083261_motorists_snow_misery_on_worst_ever_m25 • Snow misery eases but anger remains. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ latest/2010/12/23/snow-misery-eases-but-anger-remains-115875-22801890/ • UK faces ‘global warming disaster’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ uk/2259698.stm • Sea change: why global warming could leave Britain feeling the cold. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/oct/27/science.climatechange • Global warming will bring killer heat, floods and storms to Britain. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6585444/Globalwarming-will-bring-killer-heat-floods-and-storms-to-Britain.html

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MODERN DAY ANXIETIES,PANICS AND DELUSIONS

We h a v e b e e n h e r e b e f o r e For the last two years the forecasters threaten us that this winter will be worst than the last. When the first few flakes of snow begin to fall, the nation is instantly plunged into chaos, the trains cease to run and police warn everyone to stay indoors, it would be as well to remember past winters, like 1947 when it was really, really bad. The following was taken from “Since Records Began: The Highs and Lows of Britain’s Weather” by Paul Simons as reproduced on www.grumpyoldsod.com “After the Second World War Britain was bombed out, bankrupt,

Those delivering food supplies were battling to get through

exhausted and desperately short of fuel. The winter of 1947 sank

blizzards and snowdrifts, and the Attlee Government was

the country to a level of deprivation unknown even during the

seriously worried that the country could slide into famine.

war. A catalogue of weather calamities precipitated a national

March turned out even worse than February. March 5 brought

crisis and changed Britain and the rest of Europe for decades

the worst blizzard of the 20th century. Supplies of food shrank so

afterwards.

low that in some places the police asked for authority to break

The winter began deceptively, with just a brief cold snap before

open stranded lorries carrying food cargoes. On March 6 The

Christmas 1946. Snow lay thick on the ground when, in mid-

Times reported: “The blizzard has virtually cut England in two. It

January, temperatures soared so high that it felt as if spring had

is almost impossible to get from South to North.”

arrived early. The snow thawed so rapidly that it set off floods -

another spectacular disaster. After weeks of deep frost, the

houses and a railway bridge in Birmingham.

ground was so hard that the melting snow ran off into raging

But real winter arrived soon afterwards as the country was

torrents of floodwater and, to make things worse, a huge storm

gripped in an Arctic freeze that lasted for two months, with snow

dropped heavy rain. Indeed, it was the wettest March on record

whipped into monstrous drifts that buried roads and railways.

in England and Wales. The winds whipped up floodwater into

The temperature fell to -21C at Woburn, Buckinghamshire.

waves that breached dykes in the Fens, flooding 100 square miles

On February 20 the Dover to Ostend ferry service was

of rich farmland, and houses collapsed. Canada sent food parcels

suspended because of pack-ice off the Belgian coast. It became

to stricken villages in Suffolk, and the prime minister of Ontario

the coldest February ever recorded - and there was virtually no

even offered to help to dish them out. It is difficult to imagine

sunshine for almost the whole month.

a worse run of weather, although the Government was blamed

The freeze paralysed coalmines, with coal stocks often stuck at

for the food and fuel crises. Elected in the summer of 1945 with

the collieries by railways and roads buried in snow. Even carrying

a landslide majority, the Labour administration had embarked

coal by sea was hazardous, with storms, fog and iced-over

on a radical programme of nationalisation, including the health

harbours.

service, coalmining, electricity supply and railways. But it was

A week after the freeze began, the Minister of Fuel and Power,

caught unprepared when people began to buy electric fires and

Emmanuel Shinwell, ordered electricity supplies to be cut to

immersion heaters, and power stations could not meet the rising

industry, and domestic electricity supplies to be turned off for

demand for energy.

five hours each day, to conserve coal stocks. Whitehall and

Yet despite the collapsing economy and threat of starvation,

Buckingham Palace were reduced to working by candlelight.

the Government carried on behaving as if it were in control of a

Television was closed down, radio output reduced, newspapers

world superpower. Military expenditure was 15 per cent of GDP -

cut in size and magazines ordered to stop publishing. The

far higher than before the war - and included the development of

emergency package hardly made a difference to power supplies

Britain’s own nuclear bomb, as well as forces stationed in Europe

but was a crushing blow to public morale.

and across the Empire. With a hugely ambitious programme of

Food supplies shrank alarmingly and rations were cut even

free healthcare and reconstruction, it was simply unsustainable.

lower than they had been during the war. Farms were frozen or

The winter of 1947 led to savage cuts in public spending at home

snowed under, and vegetables were in such short supply that

and contributed to the humiliating devaluation of sterling from

pneumatic drills were used to dig up parsnips from frozen fields.

$4 to $2.80 the next year.

For the first time, potatoes were rationed after some 70,000 tons

Less than two years after winning the war, the nation was

of them were destroyed by the cold.

left freezing cold, plunged into darkness and on the brink of

The Government tried a deeply unpopular campaign to

starvation - and for many people it showed that national

encourage everyone to eat a cheap South African fish called

planning and socialism did not work.

snoek, millions of tins of which had been imported - but it tasted disgusting and was used eventually as cat food.

118

Eventually, on March 10, a sustained thaw set in - and triggered

just as hurricane-force winds brought down roofs, trees and even

Labour was turned out of office in a landslide defeat at the next general election.”

t he envi ro nment

Points of interest footnotes: 1

The UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP)

helps organisations to adapt to inevitable

and, by the 2020s, the climate will be nearly

sheet for the first time, scientists predicted that

another full degree warmer than the average of

global warming would cause temperatures in

1961-1990.

the UK to rise by up to 3.5°C in the 21st century,

According to the UK Climate Impacts

climate change. The impact of past greenhouse

research published predicts. The increase would

gas emissions will influence our climate for

Programme, very hot and dry summers of the

have meant that the north would get wetter,

decades, so alongside efforts to reduce emissions,

sort Britain experienced in 1995 will strike in one

and the south drier with storms becoming more

we need to prepare for the climate change that

in three years by the 2050s.

ferocious. We are yet to see this change.

we cannot avoid. 3 2

Since 1900, the average UK temperature has

According to a report published in 1998 by the

Department of the Environment, Transport and

risen by about 1C, and the growing season has

the Regions in which a team of British, American

lengthened by about a month. Currently, the

and Dutch scientists used groundbreaking

temperature is rising by between 0.15C and

satellite technology to measure accurately

0.2C per decade but the rate itself will increase

the 12 million square miles of the Antarctic ice

On the 5th March 2010, The Met Office confirmed it was to abandon long range weather forecasts, finally acknowledging criticism. The most recent forecasts were so inaccurate, that even the BBC was reconsidering whether to appoint an alternative supplier, such as Accuweather, after 88 years of continuous service from the 1,700-strong MoD unit. The Met

Widespread ice poses hazard for

3 Dec 2010

the weekend Met Office supports new climate

3 Dec 2010

science exhibition

Office have become adept at stating the obvious. Take a look at the press

Near record temperatures in 2010

2 Dec 2010

releases for this winter (keep in mind it was winter). You might as well

Staying very cold with

2 Dec 2010

just look out of your window each morning!

widespread ice Freezing weather continues with

1 Dec 2010

more snow

Same old, same old We have been here before. All this talk of a doomed planet is nothing new. Look at this lot and you will see that the state of our planet is far worse than suggested by even the most rabid of contemporary campaigners like Al Gore. Among the things we ignored thirty years ago were… • in 1970: "In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.

Why is it so cold and snowy?

30 Nov 2010

Icy conditions continue with

29 Nov 2010

further snow Big chill breaks November tem-

28 Nov 2010

perature records Big chill continues with icy winds

27 Nov 2010

Big chill continues across the UK

26 Nov 2010

Cold and snow arrives in the UK

24 Nov 2010

UK set for early taste of winter

23 Nov 2010

UK set for early taste of winter

22 Nov 2010

Colder weather on the way

19 Nov 2010

Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish" (Paul Ehrlich "Earth Day") •Again 1970: ‘By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.’ (Life magazine,) • in 1976: "This (cooling) trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century" (Peter Gwynne "Newsweek") • in 1990: “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots… [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” (Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press.)

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MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) undercurrent 18/12/2010 11:09 AM It seems that the jet stream has become a Nor th/ South affair - rather than the usual West/East flow. But what shifted it into this new alignment? In the meantime I can repor t -15c in Southern Poland with about 1 metre of lying snow and all transpor t systems operating normally.

Greggywocky 18/12/2010 11:39 AM It is snowing here too. The snow is white and cold.

plant27 18/12/2010 12:07 PM Please would repor ters stop using the word chaos

e ver y

time

snow

mentioned.

It ’s

lazy journalism. When we have snow, we can confidently predic t that people ’s journeys will be delayed and that there will be more accidents. Confident predic tion is not a feature of ‘chaos ’. Really.

KaffirLatte 18/12/2010 12:29 PM BREAKING NEWS! LATEST UP TO THE MINUTE UPDATE>>> Snow still white. Stay tuned for fur ther updates

(...) 120

t he envi ro nment

(...) SoAnnoyed 18/12/2010 1:35 PM I am here in London, and I can confirm for you all that this morning’s snowfall is still on the ground. The snowfall appears to be just lying there for the moment, as though biding its time. It ’s really anyone ’s guess as to what the snowfall will do next. I shall keep you all posted on the snowfall situation here.

AnnabelAndrews 18/12/2010 2:47 PM This morning I watched a lorr y stuck on Putney Hill outside the station. Lots of people helping the driver with grit and shovels. He e ventually made it up the hill and e ver yone cheered. It was a nice moment.

AneliyaEssex 18/12/2010 4:55 PM Panic bought satsumas. Well snow makes you do that doesn’ t it?

Sparebulb 18/12/2010 11:35 AM I am laughing, live coverage of it snowing, surely this is the ‘potter ’s wheel’ of new media journalism. I’m still laughing, pathetic.

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MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

(...) TheMotorcycleBoy 18/12/2010 8:37 PM When did we star t to refer to ‘ Winter ’ as ‘ The Big Freeze ’? As for why Britain is worse -able to cope than our foreign neighbours, the only real difference is that they are prepared to shell-out for snow chains and snow tyres for their cars. Basically, if e ver yone was prepared to pay less than 1/2 the cost of their yearly car insurance on winter car equipment we would be able to carr y on entirely as normal. But where ’s the fun in that ;)

TheGreatRonRaffer ty 18/12/2010 11:37 AM We ne ver had snow like this. Except for 1947, 1956, 1963, 1979.

Reflexive 18/12/2010 11:47 AM Help! I’m writing from my phone, trapped inside a giant snowman. Was rolling the main body down a hill and got caught in the gathering ball. Problem is, friends didn’ t see it happen, and my mouth is full of snow so can’ t shout. They reckon I’ve disappeared to the pub to meet Sheena (I don’ t e ven like Sheena!). Please get me out of here before I freeze! I’m in ... hang on, damn batter y is low ... I’m in the park next to Tesco’s supermar...

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t he envi ro nment

(...) TheNewNumberTwo 18/12/2010 12:33 PM I realise that e ven the slightest hint of inclement weather in London is of course to be repor ted as a national, nay a global, nay a universal disaster of bibically apocalyptic propor tions.... But I do hope that you realise that we here in the Great White Nor th do spend our time pointing and giggling at the hysteria. Keeps us warm if nothing else. But really! A live blog? What are you honestly going to do with it. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s still snowing. Update - It ’s ...

Hugekebab 18/12/2010 12:47 PM BREAKING NEWS! LATEST UP TO THE MINUTE UPDATE>..>> Snow is now yellow. Don’ t eat, repeat, don’ t eat. Stay tuned for fur ther updates.

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E p i l o g u e | Tr u s t

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost : Barack Obama

A handy self help guide:

6 How to navigate through modern day anxieties, panics and delusions

Vested Interest: You have to ask yourself who is making the statement who has originated the story? Why is the story being told? Is it to help you? Think objectively, does the story even apply to you in the first place? Use these questions to help filter the stories for personal relevance.

Language: Look at the language. Emotive words are used all the time to grab attention. ‘Chaos’ when it applies to a riot may be more appropriate than if it is applied to some vehicles skidding on ice. Terror is another. Remember the English language implies ‘terror’ is a feeling, not an action. We would be foolish to deny that there is a risk of terrorist attacks. Of course there is. There are groups of people out there that aren’t too keen on us, but we as a society should not be playing into their hands by appearing to be frightened about it. Let’s tone it down for goodness sake. Firm, but sensible precautions, yes. Constant vigilance, O.K then. Large, effective and properly-resourced security organisations, yep, I’ll buy into that. Newspaper headlines about scare-mongering by politicians and other public figures, no, absolutely not! Because it’s not the terrorists they’re after, really, is it? What the powers that be really want is for us to keep doling out cash, to accept more and more erosion of our personal freedoms, to allow them to become more and more powerful and important, to gladly and gratefully hand our lives over to them so they can stay in power for ever and ever. It’s not the terrorists they’re after. It’s us. Keep us frightened, and we will gladly accept any help that is offered us. It’s called the fight-or-flight response. ‘Deep trouble’ is a term that’s used a lot lately. As I write this Spain and Portugal are in ‘deep trouble’ over the value of their currency. Now I may be being completely daft here when I say that I thought terms like ‘deep trouble’ were reserved for when the sky boils red, and our skins fall off. Surely that is deep trouble – Portugal’s problem is just ‘bad management’? I suppose what it comes down to is ‘deep trouble’ is our automatic default descriptor for virtually every problem, major or minor. Whenever the smallest thing goes wrong, someone will tell us we’re up to our eyes in it and the end of the world is at hand. It’s probably just another symptom of the Stupid Society. Ignore it.

Surveys: Always a tricky one. Ask yourself: who conducted it? Are they legitimate? Do they have vested interests in portraying ‘false’ information? Are they paid – if so who is footing the bill? Consider things like sample size, if the sample is too small, the information may be wildly skewed. If it is measured in thousands, then the sample may be too big, and you may be being overwhelmed by the weight of numbers. Consider who was polled. Polling elderly how they feel about skateboarding, is completely different from asking the under 20s. Also how have the statistics been collated – has it been independently verified?

Numbers, numbers, numbers! People who want to make the biggest impact, will always choose the biggest number. “30 percent of workers polled say they hate their job” would have a radically different meaning if the workforce measured in the thousands over one that measured in the tens. Consider this news story: “More than 85% of the teachers who responded to a survey by the ATL union said they believed that poverty had a negative impact on the well-being of pupils they taught.” Earlier this month, the government said changes to the benefits system would lift 350,000 children out of poverty, as it published its child poverty strategy. O.K. but define poverty. Of course nobody would dare criticise the government or organisations for wanting to ‘stamp out child poverty’. But! Just who are these poor starving children? How do you define poverty? I have searched for a formula and haven’t found one. The Telegraph states that: “The official definition of the poverty line in Britain is any family living on less than 60 per cent of the median income, which is measured by halving the difference between the highest and lowest incomes.” In research, commissioned by child poverty campaigners and community service volunteers, it claims that one in five British children think that not owning a mobile phone is a sign of being poor. They consider themselves poor if they don’t have all the things our society dictates kids should have? So stamping out child poverty means making sure every child in the country has an Xbox, an MP3 player, a mobile phone that takes video for when they go happy slapping, and a new pair of designer trainers every week? Poverty to us is very different to poverty in the developing

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world. You see numbers can be poles apart. Beware of broad statistics: often finding meaningful comparison with an opposing statistic is impossible. Graphs and charts can also be unreliable. How is the graph drawn up? If it is on a television bulletin, was it on screen long enough for you to really scrutinise it? Do not be fooled by things that appear technical!

Timeframes: The polar ice caps are melting! Yes, well over what time period? If it is over a matter of weeks, then you had best build an Ark. If is over hundreds of years, then sit back and relax, that is your great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren’s problem. Also ask yourself – why now? Is there a particular reason why, on this day, new crime figures are released saying there has been a drop in crime? It wouldn’t be the week before a general election would it?

Wild stories: We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth about science and history are more reliable than ever before. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information – the internet – and we readily believe it. Never get your information from only one source, be that the BBC or @georgebush. Odd how ready we are to suspect our government or the Americans of all sorts of conspiracies, when we also know none of them could organise themselves out a paper bag.

Red tape: We live in an age where there is a piece of paper for everything. Rules, rules, rules, blah, blah, blah. Health and safety can quite literally terrify you to death. Recently a risk-assessment was unearthed which Metropolitan Police officers have to fill in before they can intervene in an emergency. You might think that what matters in such cases is the risk to the public. But no – what is to be assessed is the risk to the police. The form lists 238 possible hazards to officers planning any kind of operational activity, such as security at a pop concert, or an operation to deal with an emergency, such as a bombing or a riot. The senior officer involved must tick the relevant boxes, fill in an inventory

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of ‘risk activities’, calculate levels of risk and submit their recommendation for the assessment to be confirmed and signed. It comes close to redefining the word ‘risk’ to encompass the whole of human life. For it is hard to think of any situation which it does not consider to pose a threat to an officer’s health or safety. Accordingly, such rules are codified into laws to protect us – from ourselves. Before you last ounce of common sense is taken away think! Are you really that stupid? Abject defeatism: A favourite of the newspapers, especially the Daily Mail! Be on guard for stories telling you that there is nothing you can do. If there is nothing you can do, why are you being told about it? It is probably a useless story designed to make you feel frightened and hopeless. Life is too short to worry about something that cannot be changed.

Future scenarios: Many stories present a series of possible outcomes. Make sure you are not taking heed of the worst case one. Also consider the bigger picture. Yes it is bad if 30 people die of swine flu in the United Kingdom but in a country of around 61,838,154 it really isn’t too much of a worry. Always try and keep a sense of proportion. Difficult when world leaders, let alone the press, are running around like headless chickens. Again will what you hear affect you? Will it though? Will it really?

Nowt so queer as folk: Remember it’s not just conspiracy theories about little grey men that you sometimes have to take with a pinch of salt, real life can often yield it’s own bizarre tales. Take the case of 10-year-old Ryan Stupples who was banned from his school dining hall because his packed lunch broke the government’s healthy eating guidelines. Ryan’s lunch consisted of a sandwich, fruit, fromage frais, cake, mini cheese biscuits and a bottle of water. The cake and the biscuits broke the snack limit. They were discovered when a teacher checked his lunch box. Headteacher Malcolm Goddard said “We take healthy eating very seriously and everyone is aware of our new policies. A letter was sent to parents at the beginning of term saying packed lunches must contain no more than two snacks”. The school said the letter was based on health guidelines issued by the Department for Education and Skills. How many times

have we heard this sort of thing? - we sent out a letter, everyone knew of our policies, so no-one can complain. The fact is, if your policies are rubbish there’s plenty to complain about. Making a policy (or in your case borrowing it from the Health Secretary so you can hide behind them when questioned) and then enforcing it with totally, mindless rigidity is the mark of complete stupidity. So next time you hear of a story like this, relax. Just see it for what it is – a big fat joke!

The fear-mail of the species: Have you ever been forwarded an email like this, perhaps even this one? “An important message from the Police. Please pass this along to all the women you know. This actually happened a few weeks ago on the M3 Fleet Services. It was early evening and a young girl stopped to get petrol. She filled the tank and walked into the store to pay. The cashier told her, ‘a man just got into the back of your car. I’ve called the police and they’re on their way. When the police arrived, they found the man and asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was joining a gang and the intention is to kidnap a woman and take her back to the gang to be raped.” The email burbles on in frightening detail, before finishing with: “Ladies, you or one of your family and friends could be the next victim.” The warning is signed “Met Police.” The reality, of course, is that the police would never send out public safety information in this way, this version of the service station fib is thought to have originated in Australia, and this email has been doing the rounds for some years - as have several other hoax emails that have recently resurfaced. Have you heard about the Aids infected needle hidden in cinema seats… I mean please! It is of course a complete fake. God knows who would concoct something like this (the mind boggles) but they do from time to time. They nearly are always aimed at women, perhaps sensing that woman have a greater understanding of self preservation. Tony Neate, a former police detective and now managing director of Get Safe Online, says most unsolicited emails are a form of spam: “It is scary because people don’t know what to believe. Anything that comes from a large organisation such as the police or which purports to be ‘very important’ is almost

certainly a hoax. Treat it with suspicion and do a search on it. If you type in a few key words, usually you’ll find it straightaway.” Increasingly, these scares are also doing the rounds on Twitter and Facebook. Whilst it is always good to have a healthy dose of caution as you go about your business, do not rely on Facebook groups or forwarded emails to warn you of impending doom: that is what the tabloids are for. There actually aren’t nearly as many threats on the web as people make out. There are quite a lot, of course, just not as many as everyone thinks. The so-called experts like to keep us worried so we’ll think they’re important and buy lots of anti-virus software. So take everything with a hefty pinch of salt.

Remember it’s not your fault: These days the combination of official self-righteousness with contempt for the citizen is too familiar. You know the sort of thing. Council decisions to only collect rubbish once a fortnight even in high summer and charge you for its weight. Another favourite is the new habit adopted by restaurants, no doubt to curry favour with the government, of putting how much fat is in your chocolate cake. Talk about making you feel guilty! Have this cake, go on, but you will get fat. Everything is always your fault. Even lack of rain in the summer is YOUR FAULT. Do not wash your car or water your lawn, even though you had to suffer a hell’s winter in snow. Never mind that your water company paid its directors huge bonuses rather than fix your pipes: the shortage is your fault for filling your kiddies paddling pool… All these things are out of your control, so don’t worry about them. Do not listen to the nay-sayers and worry bureaucrats, life is too short – just have another slice of cake and ask for extra cream.

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Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future : Audrey Hepburn

MODERN DAY ANXIETIES, PANICS AND DELUSIONS

E P I L OG U E Fear or trust : Who loves you, and who do you love?

Confucius told one of his disciples Tsze-kung that three things were needed for successful government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler can’t hold on to all three, he should give up the weapons first and the food next. Trust should be guarded to the end: “without trust we cannot stand.” Confucius’ idea seems sensible enough until you realise that unfortunately, starving people tend to lose their trust in governments as well, but his point was sound. A lack of food need not topple governments when they and their rationing systems are trusted, as we know from WWII. As we have seen recently, weapons did not help the Egyptian government hold on to power when their army lost trust and defected, but it isn’t only rulers and governments who prize and need trust. Each of us and every profession and institution in the land needs to trust. We need trust because we have to be able to rely on others acting as they say they will, and because we need others to accept that we will act as we say we will. I forget who it was that said that ‘a complete lack of trust would prevent you even getting up in the morning’ but it’s true. How often have you boarded a train, without implicitly trusting that the driver knows when to stop at red lights. We take trust for granted, we have to: without trust our society would collapse. We may need trust, but trusting these days often seems difficult and risky. To be perfectly honest we often hear of the untrustworthy actions of politicians and officials, police and exam boards, banks and by our military and you can’t help but feel a bit miffed when such 132

stories break. If the papers are to believed we supposedly face a deepening crisis of trust. Nick Clegg said that the “problems we face today are that the people do not trust politicians; but it is perhaps an even greater problem that politicians very often do not trust the people.” No greater illustration of this was the fall out and subsequent ‘hoo-ha’ over the cash for duck-ponds scandal of 2010. We lost trust in authority, and many would say we voted with our distrust at the general election. Did the politicians trust us? The last Labour government passed more legislation in their time in power than I have had hot dinners! They were even spying on people’s bins – so no, probably not. We read daily of aspirations and attempts (usually by way of more legislation) to make businesses and professionals, public servants and politicians more accountable in more ways to more stake holders, but can a revolution in accountability remedy our crisis of trust? For each of us, trust is a fundamental element in our lives – it governs our existence. In the animal kingdom, you will often see birds, rodents, rabbits and even cats and dogs, look up to the sky skittishly for predators from above. We on the other hand rarely look skyward. Our predators no longer come from the sky, we trust the sky, trust it enough not to give it a second glance. Our ‘predators’ meet us at eye level yet we are not suspicious of everyone we meet. In hundreds of ways we trust others to do what they say, to play by the rules and to behave reasonably. We trust other drivers to steer well; we trust post people to deliver letters efficiently (well most of the time); we trust doctors to prescribe the right drugs – and

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guess what – most of these people are complete strangers. When we place trust do we not assume that others will act reliably and predictably, as we assume that death is reliable, and that England will lose the World Cup predictably? Sometimes we place trust in spite of past disappointment, or without much evidence of reliability. We trust blindly because we adhere to a herd mentality. In the 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch argued that the tendency toward conformity in our society was so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning people were willing to call white black if it fit the perception of the herd, demonstrating that we will conform to group opinion even when that opinion contradicts what our senses tell us. If everyone else trusts that Tamiflu is safe, then I must too: if I die, we all die. Look at the trust we place in the internet. We put personal details in a Tweet for the whole world to see, yet stop a random stranger in the street and tell them the same personal details? No chance. Again, everyone else Tweets, so it must be OK. In dangerous times, as we know, placing trust can be risky – it can be frightening. Holding ﬁre in battle might allow an enemy to ﬁre first which rarely ends well for the hesitant. We are one of the most informed generations in the history of mankind. We place our trust in the media, so much so that thousands readily took Tamiflu despite it not being fully tested. Why? Because the media said it would be all right. Information is abundant, but it’s often mixed with misinformation and sometimes disinformation. It can be hard to check and test what we read and hear. Of course we can check weather forecasts for their accuracy

by waiting for tomorrow, but life rarely offers us the luxury of that kind of foresight – how can we tell whether a product or a service will live up to its billing or if the statistics we read really speak the truth? As I said for very practical purposes we need to place our trust in the hands of strangers and unknown institutions, yet out trust is not given out uniformly; we still refuse it to some. Would you trust a stranger to look after your children if you simply bumped into them in the street? We need ways of telling the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, and how do we do it – we listen to our gut. Most of the time we rely on our gut to make the decisions and not our head. As Dan Gardner surmises, “we are the safest, healthiest, and wealthiest humans who ever lived, but you would be hard pressed to know that because ‘gut’ isn’t paying attention to numbers or facts.” Almost 3,000 people died on 9/11, but almost 1,600, died in the years following the attacks because they became afraid of flying and chose to drive instead. If those people had listened to their heads and not switched to car travel they may still be here today. Gut and Head work very differently. The ‘head’ works slowly, examines the evidence, and tries to calculate the probabilities. ‘Gut’ however works entirely differently. It works fast, and without our awareness, to arrive at snap judgements. Subjective judgements. A decision that is based on our gut is difficult to explain in words. You don’t know why you feel the way you do, you just do and that usually is the decision made. Yet this book is evidence that perhaps our society is losing the ability to trust the judgements of experts. 133

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A little scepticism is healthy, but perhaps our society is in danger of moving from scepticism to cynicism, especially when appeals to our humanity are based on fear. Mediahyped fear is leading us to distrust authority. Governments have tried to counter this by promoting a revolution in accountability and requirements for transparency in public life. Something like the new police crime maps are one such case, but is transparency always needed or required in order for trust to flourish – does all this transparency make us trust more? Politicians have to be honest now and declare all expenditure, but is that really enough to restore the public’s faith in the ‘system’? There are powerful institutions out there that have so far managed to avoid the excessive aspects of the revolution in accountability and transparency. Most evidently, the media, usually preoccupied with others’ untrustworthiness, have escaped demands for accountability. It is sad that often outstanding reporting and accurate writing mingles with editing that smears, sneers and jeers, names, shames and blames, misrepresents, denigrates, and often teeters on the brink of defamation. In this bizarre little world, commitments to trustworthy reporting are erratic: there is no shame in writing on matters beyond a reporter’s competence [you are reading this now], in creating misleading headlines, in omitting issues of public interest or importance, or in reinterpreting others’ speculations as supposed ‘news’. The News of the World are in the midst of a wire tapping scandal, where In 2007, the paper’s royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed after admitting hacking into the phone messages of royal staff. The paper said it was an isolated case but last year The Guardian reported that 134

several public figures may also have had their messages hacked into by News of the World reporters. It then came to light that Scotland Yard bungled the case and is now being investigated itself. It seems you can’t trust anyone these days! But how can we impose regulations on the press, or anyone for that matter without sacrificing our freedom of speech? Morality and accountability does not have to mean censorship. What is published, aside from slim requirements to protect public safety, decency and perhaps personal privacy, is relatively open to interpretation, so long as you don’t deceive. BBC corespondent Mark Easton reported that shadow home secretary Chris Grayling defended the Conservative Party’s use of figures suggesting ‘significant’ rises in violent crime – even though the official source statistics warned they should not be used in that way. The Tories have since used the data in a release sent to every constituency in England and Wales – statistics which one police force has described as ‘extremely misleading’ and which appear to have been labelled ‘inaccurate’ by some Conservatives. Crime figures are notoriously misused by politicians. According to Sir Michael Scholar, In 2008 Downing Street ‘caused’ the Home Office to issue selective knife crime figures in a fact sheet which coincided with an anti knife crime launch, backed by Gordon Brown. The fact sheet was ‘selective’, according to the UK Statistics Authority, and did not carry all the statistics which were gathered. The odds of a child younger than 14 being kidnapped are 1 in 655,555. The odds of drowning in a swimming pool

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are 1 in 245,614 (2.5 times as likely), and of being killed in a car crash are 1 in 29,070 (26 times more likely). The selective use and spinning of crime statistics by politicians over decades helps explain why many people have lost complete faith in the data. Of course big numbers do a big job of impressing and that is why they are routinely used to fan the flames of fear in the publics’ eyes. Death-pernews-story for smoking is 8,571, but for mad-cow disease only 0.33. Christmas tree lights in reality kill more people each year than shark attacks. Trust will not be restored by an election campaign in which official statistics are routinely abused anymore than it will in a system that lies to illegally invade a country. Do we trust less today, or are we just more inclined to spread suspicion? Are current levels of mistrust greater than those of the past? Some sociologists have suggested that the crisis of trust is real and new because we live in a risk society. That is not to say it was less ‘risky’ in the nineteenth century, just that the risks were different. A great deal of money is made by spinning fear, and the ‘spinners’ have learned how to tap into our gut. Extra security at airports. Speed cameras to eliminate risks bought about by our increasingly powerful cars. Trident submarines to eliminate a cold war threat that no longer exists. Balloons to prevent you from getting fat, and so on. The techniques of using fear to sell have now been adopted by politicians, bureaucrats, and charitable organisations. The argument made by the Bush administration about why we should invade Iraq was not based on facts. It was based on fear, ‘Saddam Hussein

might have nuclear weapons.’ That was enough: might! Ultimately we are totally irrational with our fears. The thought of Fukushima becoming another Chernobyl strikes fear into our souls, yet in a blink of an eye we would burn ourselves to a crisp in radiation to get that Hollywood tan. Our society has an irrational fear of terrorism, when in reality, the terrorist threat is tiny compared to global pandemics, or a planet unable to sustain its swollen population. We are fearful of silly things sometimes, things that pose very little risk to us. Bad things do happen in life, the best we can hope for is that we are equipped enough to dodge them. The human race has endured for thousands of years. We have beaten disease, battled against tyranny, created technological wonders that amaze and confound us and even travelled to other worlds. We are a tenacious race. We are precious – our lives are precious. You and I may never be afforded wealth or power, but we do have free will. This book has been filled with modern day anxieties – anxieties which affect us all. We will probably have forgotten about some of them in years to come, no doubt new ones will take their place. Should we worry about them all now? Well, perhaps a little, now and again, but we must never live in fear. The freedom we enjoy, is a freedom against fear. The more we give in to our fears, the more our freedom erodes. As Franklin D. Roosevelt stated so emphatically in 1933: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” If life is like a game of roulette, betting on fear will guarantee that we will lose every time. n 135

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ADD E N D U M Stop press – Obama: 1, Osama: 0 Breaking news: In the early hours of May 2nd 2011 the news broke of the death of the worlds most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. The man responsible for starting the terror ball rolling; the man whose actions have led to an increased state of threat around the globe, and the man whose actions precipitated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He died at our hands, well at American hands... allegedly. As this book goes to print it is the global media story of the hour. After evading capture for almost ten years, bin Laden was eventually located at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which was secretly monitored and when the time was determined to be right, the US president said, he authorized a ‘targeted operation.’ “A small team of Americans carried out the operation,” Obama said. “After a fire fight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” DNA testing confirmed that it was bin Laden, sources told ABC News. “Justice has been done,” Obama said. Former President George Bush called the operation a “momentous achievement” that “marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.” And the back-story? After declaring war on America in 1998, bin Laden is widely believed to have been behind the bombings of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on 138

the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the attacks on New York and Washington. Since the terrorist attacks now unanimously named 9/11, bin Laden’s arrest was a top priority. Altogether more than 3,000 people died in those attacks, which led to the US-led operation against the Taliban. Allied forces moved into Afghanistan late in 2001. At the time, it was believed that bin Laden might have been killed during the battle for the Tora Bora cave complex. He hadn’t, as subsequent videos of him surfaced over the coming months and years. In reality, he had slipped across the border into Pakistan, a country in which, according to the BBC, he achieved a sort of cult status. In February 2003, an audio tape, purporting to be of bin Laden, was delivered to the Al-Jazeera television company. The intent of the message was clear. Of the US-led invasion of Iraq, the voice said: “This crusaders’ war concerns, first and foremost, all Muslims, regardless of whether the Iraqi socialist party or Saddam remain in power. All Muslims, especially those in Iraq, should launch a holy war.” The secret operation was carried out by US Navy Seals, elite soldiers flown by helicopter from neighbouring Afghanistan, who fought their way into the compound. In the last few days the US has offered differing accounts of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Originally, officials said the al-Qaeda chief had “participated” in a fire fight when

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he was shot dead. The following day, the White House corrected this, saying bin Laden was unarmed. But insisted that he was resisting capture – though never made it clear how he was doing this. Case and chapter closed. Well, not entirely... The latest account, as this book goes to press, has the US citing that just one person in the compound, possibly a guard, was armed and fired a shot. The President’s spokesman suggested the initial confusion was the result of trying to provide a great deal of information in haste. And so starts the conspiracies. Blogs, forums and web pages – including a Facebook group entitled “Osama bin Laden not dead” – maintain that the US government faked the raid. There has never been evidence of a body, bin Laden was reported to be ‘buried at sea’ in line with Islamic custom, although the action was criticized by Muslim scholars who claimed it had breached sharia law. No photographic evidence either. The US has ‘flip-flopped’ between suggesting a photograph would be released and it wouldn’t, before being categorically denied by President Obama who claimed a photograph would be: “an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool” Some have stated that the photograph would be too horrific to show the public as he had been shot in the head. President Obama said: “There are going to be some folks

who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you won’t see bin Laden walking on this earth again.” Well, that is that then. Go about your business, carry on people... nothing to see here... An anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in the Iraq, also disputes the news. She said: “I am sorry, but if you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid. Just think to yourself – they paraded Saddam’s dead sons around to prove they were dead – why do you suppose they hastily buried this version of OBL at sea? This lying, murderous Empire can only exist with your brainwashed consent – just put your flags away and THINK!” You see when you do stop to think about it, there is absolutely no credible or viable evidence to suggest any of these events are true. The only exception to this being a large chunk of an unknown ‘secret’ helicopter in the grounds of Osama’s ‘secret’ compound. Lots of secrets. And, with all the secrets it is hard not to smell a rat here. Imagine if I ended this book with the following statement: “I shot Bigfoot yesterday, ate him and dumped his remains in a lake. No need to prove it, just believe me. It happened. Honest”. This news either ends a chapter in the “war on terror”, or begins a new one. It also goes to show that conspiracy, confusion and speculation continue and that fear, trust and the reliability of the media will continue to be questioned. 139

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L AT IN

TRA N S L ATI ON S

p1. Timendi causa est nescire - Ignorance is the cause of fear. p15. Vendidit hic auro patriam - He sold his countr y for gold. p24. Credo quia impossible est - I believe because it is impossible. p33. Cur ante tubam tremor occupat ar tus? - Why should fear seize the limbs before the trumpet sounds? p43. Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito - Yield not to misfor tunes, but advance all the more boldly against them. p53. Mens sana in corpore sano - A healthy mind in a healthy body. p61. De minimis non curat lex - The law does not concern itself with trifles. p71. Ultra posse nemo obligatur - No one is obligated beyond what he is able to do. p79. A busus non tollit usum - Abuse of a right does not invalidate use. p88. Aut vincere aut mori - Either to conquer or to die. p97. Mala tempora currunturbes - Bad times are upon us. p105. Cras credemus, hodie nihil - Tomorrow we believe, but not today. p115. Natura valde simplex est et sibi consona - Nature is exceedingly simple and conformable to herself.

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G UIDE

L I N OC UT S

Cuts Will Not Be Nice : Leicester Mercur y : 4th May 2011 The End Is Nigh : BBC News : 8th September 2008 Bang, Bang, you’re Dead : Phoenix New Times : 9th September 2009 Don’ t Worr y, Be Happy : BBC News : 22nd June 2007 Flu Death Toll Hits 39 : The Independent : 30th December 2010 Top Cop’s ASBO Fear : The Mirror : 25th June 2007 It Could Be You : The Sunday Times : 25th May 2008 Net Crime, The Big Fear : BBC News : 8th October 2006 War Of The Worlds : The Obser ver : 12th June 2005 The Day The Axe Fell : The Times : 21st October 2010 You Couldn’ t Make It Up : The Guardian : 15th November 2007 Snow! Freeze Grips U.K. : The Sun : 26th November 2010 Fear is a Four Letter Word : The Metro : 21st October 2010

Smile. I mean, whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the worst that can happen?