Robots and the future for humanity and beyond

A new report from the EU parliament suggests that we are on the cusp of a new robot-led industrial revolution. It seems that, while we writhe and curse over immigration, robots are coming over here, about to take our jobs. Soon, it is suggested, robots will be more intelligent than people—after which point, anything goes. Automation will destroy our society by putting the vast majority of people out of work, while a tiny elite enjoy all the blessings wealth can bestow, protected by a security army of, you got it, robots.

So the MEPs have been discussing robots and the fears of economic apocalypse, but also our likely Terminator-esque future, in which Nazi robots take over and ubermensch the shit out us. To counter this, the MEPs made recommendations taking inspiration from Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which he devised for his 1942 short story Runaround.

These rules state:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
A robot must obey the orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws

In addition, robots would have to be installed with a 'kill switch', for when Skynet gets too big for its boots.

However, these rules seem to me to be fairly pointless, beyond furnishing an illusionary sense of security as we plunge headlong into the new industrial revolution. After all, once the robots are in charge, it's hard to see what would stop them changing the rules as they see fit. If they are indeed more intelligent than us, they might know better than us. In any case, we wouldn't be able to win the argument intellectually, let alone force them to do what we wanted. It's hard to believe that any security we had installed couldn't be bypassed by a greater intelligence. As we're seeing in the US, all the safeguards you might install are only as safe as the people you entrust to keep them. Once the robots are in the presidency, the Senate and the House, so to speak, they can change the constitution to whatever suits them.

So, it appears that robots could soon relegate man back down to less than top dog. Finally we will be subservient to another—and our vanquishers will be of our own devising. And while the possibilities for apocalyptic outcome just trip off the tongue, there are, if not good reasons to be optimistic, then at least ways of thinking about it that don't require smoking ruins and robots zapping the last few John Connors.

Because we're going here, no two ways about that. For all our science fiction fears, and realistic worries about automation, we aren't going to stop. This is humanity—we could no more not go down this road than we could have not built a nuclear bomb, or climbed Everest. So, we should be welcoming the rise of robots—if only because we have to—and finding good things about it.

For example: the rise of Trump has brought a constant shriek of "where are the adults?" Perhaps robots are going to be the adults that prevent Trump from destroying the world in a social-media related fit of pique. Perhaps robots are going to be the ones that save democracy, by defending it from its worst excesses. If we cannot be trusted to elect decent leaders, or to be decent leaders, perhaps robots, with their hyperintelligence, will have to do it.

Perhaps robots can help us not destroy the planet, or at the very least get those climate change deniers to shut the fuck up on Facebook for five minutes. Perhaps robots can solve the philosophical problems we have been unable to—the 'hard problem' of consciousness, for example, or that of free will and determinism, and thereby usher in a new Athenian idyll.

Talking of the Greeks, it's just possible that our fear of robots is analogous to the fears the Mount Olympus gods once had of us. Perhaps we are destined to be the new gods, and the robots our progeny. And hopefully they would respect—even worship—us, for a while anyway, before casting us aside as we did to ours.

And looking further forwards: perhaps robots are, in the end, the way that we will ensure the survival of life. Because if life has a purpose—or at least, if humanity's grasping towards knowledge has a purpose—it is, presumably, to get off this spinning space rock before we blow it up, an asteroid smacks it or the sun consumes it. We know the chances of humans surviving deep space travel are extremely low, and the Star Trek world of humans living in deep space is even more unlikely. Robots, however, built by us to reproduce and adapt on a survival-of-the-fitness regime, could plausibly go out and thrive in the great yonder. OK, it wouldn't be organic life, but we can probably, um, live with that. Perhaps our robots would be so clever, they could make themselves organic. But it would ensure the continuation of a working intelligence, even a consciousness, one blessed, at the outset at least, by humanity.

Vote goat – general election special

I live in a safe Labour seat. Very safe. They could put up a goat for election, a Satanist, Stalinist baby-eating, crack-smoking goat, and it would trot to victory without breaking a sweat. Labour has held this seat for so long the other parties are reduced to standing at the back dressed stupidly and looking stupid. It's so safe Fort Knox is on the phone, looking for tips. (Speaking of which, does anyone say "safe" any more? As in "Here's your ten-pound draw." "Safe, mate." I haven't said it for years, but then I haven't bought a ten-pound draw for years either, so maybe that's why.)

So anyway, I don't need to vote Labour in this election, because as I say, the whole goat thing, even though I hope to God's highest hopes that Red Ed gets in – HOPE TO FUCK – and not Cameron & his tribune of absolute cunts. But Labour are in round my way whatever I do, so I was going to vote Green, because you know, encourager les autres and all that.

But now, you see, with the whole Cameron claiming that getting the most votes counts in the legitimacy stakes – despite the whole parliamentary democracy thing – now I have a reason to vote Labour, to shore up their vote against such manifest shenanigans. But then again, my one little biddy vote doesn't count for much. But then again, what if other people think like me? So here's the thing:

I'm not positing any laws of spiritual causality here. I don't imagine what I choose to do will somehow influence anyone else. But I've noticed that I'm not an original thinker. I've noticed that when I think of a joke to tell on Twitter, someone else has thought of it; when I think of a comment to write under an Owen Jones CiF piece, someone else has already written it. In short, I'm one of a lot of thinkalikes. So, I have to conclude that whatever I decide to do viz this Labour/Green/Goat scenario, others will have also concluded it. Those of us bound together across space and time by our less-than-original minds will all vote the same way, so what I decide could count for a lot, or at least enough to wipe that smug cunt fuckwit leer off of Cameron's self-satisfied mug. That would get his goat. Vote goat.

Happydom

Newspapers are abuzz today with news of a happiness gene, as researchers at LSE have found that people with two long versions of the gene 5-HTT were 17.3% more likely to say they were "very satisfied" with their life compared to those who had two short versions. People with one long version of the gene were 8.5% more likely to be "very satisfied".

As a person who probably has two dwarf versions of this gene, I obviously take an interest. But what occurs to me today is this means that there is obviously evolutionary advantage in being unhappy, in being dissatisfied with life, otherwise women would have long given short shrift to those men among us with pygmy-length happy genes and the whole human race would by now be living in a bubble of ecstatic contentment. The way people sometimes talk to me you'd think that misery was a dangerous weapon that could harm innocent children, but it seems that evolution thinks differently and in fact misery is a valuable tool in the human toolbox.

This asks questions about the value of the Gross National Happiness statistics that, in some form or other, we may be moving towards. I've always thought they were a good idea, in part to try and break the idea that money is the only or best means of valuing things. But if unhappiness and dissatisfaction is actually evolutionarily selected for, then a happy country may not actually be a happy country. Or, to put it in less obtuse terms, a happy country may not be as obviously a good thing as it might seem.

Late added extra: Does Depression Help Us Think Better?

Angry People in Local Newspapers

A blog that does what it says on the tin. APILN provides a fairly constant stream of photos snipped from local rags around the country (and increasingly from Australia) where the subject seems to have been asked by the photographer to grimace in such a way that their tragic tale is told across their brows. Because a picture tells a thousand stories and all that. And not always the story that was intended. I love this site, partly for the photos but mainly because, by selecting stories on the basis of the pic, it offers a skewed digest of the world of local papers, full of human interest, faceless bureaucracy, mean landlords, sad kids, hard-done-by OAPs, pickled onions and grimacing.

what makes a good headline

The price we pay for our house prices

Fucking house prices.

House prices are supposed to be falling soon, by 20% some have said, although some disagree, and some said this some time ago. So nobody knows, but the likelihood is that nothing is going to be done about the insane price of houses, especially in London. Most newspaper articles herald a fall in house prices with much the same foreboding they might mention the sighting of four horsemen on the horizon. Here's a good article about why the value of your house is mostly a chimera, since no matter how expensive your house has become you can't sell it without needing to buy somewhere else and that is also likely to be comparatively expensive, unless you fall into some slender categories: 1) moving to a smaller property or 2) moving to a poorer area or, at a push, 3) both of these.

Otherwise, your house could worth all the cheese on the moon and it won't be any good to you. The nonsense about "releasing equity", ie. remortgaging, is equally irrelevant, as he points out in the moneyweek article, since you can only release equity when you sell the house, and the money you've borrowed off it will have to be paid back either by selling or by simply paying it back, like any other bleeding loan.

But the problems with ridiculous house prices go beyond first-time buyers priced out of their own neighbourhoods by whoever the hell it is fuelling this insanity and into the murky world of inheritance tax. My friend's mum is very ill with cancer and is likely to die soon enough, whereupon the house that he, his mum and his sister live in will be part of her estate. Now inheritance tax must be paid on 40% of everything over £300,000 (or thereabouts) in her estate. Their house, which they have lived in since day dot, is probably worth £700,000. Not because they paid £700,000, or because they have £700,000, or because it's worth £700,000, but because this fucking insane house price balloon bubble decrees that it would sell for £700,000. Which is nice and all, except that as we saw earlier, the value is illusionary - it has no meaning - unless you want to sell. Or, as in this case, when the government gets involved to make sure it gets it hands on its death booty. So my pal and his sister will get 18 months after their mum's death to sell the house they have lived much of the lives, and where they currently care for her, sell the house in order to pay off the tax incurred simply because of house prices, and nothing to do with whether they wish to sell the house, which they don't.

This is an increasingly common situation for people whose parents bought a house when prices were reasonably in line with wages, who haven't been able to get on the housing ladder themselves, who stand to make no money from the price bubble, and in fact stand to have to sell their house and be out of pocket for no other reason than the house's value on the market, which is a total irrelevance most of the time. If they lived in Huddersfield, where an equivalent house is "worth" much less, they'd never have this problem, since the value of the house would be less than the tax-free threshold. There could be rules to excuse the value of the primary property in an estate, or rules that raise the threshold in line with average house prices in the area, or rules that allow the tax to be held-over until the house is sold, at a time of the inheritor's choosing, but there aren't. So this 20-year housing bubble continues fucking people, even those who already have a bought-and-paid-for-over-25-years house.

Lately Cameron's mob have said they will cap housing benefit, to try and rein in some of those tabloid outrages where a immigrant family live in some decked-out mansion and housing benefit meet the exceptional rent demands. Now, when I used to claim housing benefit, I was told in no uncertain terms that I couldn't possibly get more than about a thruppenny bit contribution from the HB squad, so I have no idea how this sort of thing happens, but maybe a key reason the London housing benefit bill is so large is that London rents are so astronomical. And is not the astronomicism of rents something to do with the house price bubble? Or is that just more house price babble?

The Stag's Dead: A victory for common bastards

The Stag's Head lies in the backstreets at the border of Hoxton and De Beauvoir Town, in about as unprepossessing a location as you can imagine. It nestles between the sprawling council estates and derelict-looking industrial units, and looks from the outside like the sort of pub you go into to get shot if you happen to have annoyed the local villains. It's on the corner of two of the quietest streets in London, so the footfall is on a par with that at the north pole. Of course it was not long for this world, like all local boozers, it was due for a swift knocking-down and selling on for yuppie flats, except that Matty, Ellie and Zack got hold of it and through a combination of 1) putting on live music, including folk sessions, 2) getting the trendies in while 3) keeping the locals on board, 4) leaving the decor as was, instead of the usual tarting up by people with the interior design sense of a drunk racoon, 5) dishing out free food, instead of charging fistfuls of cash for supposedly organically massaged beef, 6) not raising the prices, 7) some mighty lock-ins, through this combo - in short, by treating their punters like people not cash machines - they managed to increase the pub takings from basically fuck all to a whopping health; the pub is packed several nights a week and throughout the day at weekends; there's a local community interaction thing going on, people belong there, feel comfortable there, get to put their nights on with little fuss there, it is one of the very few pub take-overs by a "trendy" crowd that has managed this fine balancing act and is probably the template all you wannabe landlords and landladies should aspire to, especially in London where the decent pubs, ie. the pubs that aren't just about cashing in or trendying up, are going, going, gone.



Corporate Scum
But what the fuck, you think you can just have this info and that's it? You think that the pub isn't getting closed by their pubco Enterprise Inns? Because that sort of success deserves nothing less than harassment, non-delivery of beer and exorbitant rent rises? Because the pubco realise that they can get more cash from selling on the tenancy to another landlord, who waltzing in fresh from running some All Bar One alike in Clapham and seeing the takings for the last year, will pay far more for the lease than they should. And when that landlord fails to make ends meet, well sweet pubco magically transforms to flat-building co and bob's a good'un; all money grist to the pubco mill, dividends for the shareholders, it's called maximising income, all good business practice, meanwhile a community pub, one of the few that has bucked the trend, a place to go, hang out, meet people, play music, see bands, eat food, get pissed, and still have some money in your pocket at the end of the night, a place I like to go, and I don't like fuck all, a decent boozer, in other words, that is just another bunch of numbers at the bottom of an accountant's spreadsheet, money talks, and we're all deafened.

Matty seems decidedly sanguine about the whole thing. It's not new, it's not even unusual, and nothing lasts forever, but it stings like a bastard. And I don't care, I'm gonna say it: Enterprise Inns are a bunch of cunts.

Hallo Vera! Get em in luv!

If any of you doubted the veracity of my Rosewater Ketamine account, or if any of you have ever read that far back, well doubt no longer, only nowadays it appears they import ketamine in bottles of Aloe Vera juice.

Ooops! Fuckin' Royal Mail!

Love the TV report. First the shopkeeper, saying "oh well it arrived here one day by accident so I just put it up for sale. What was I supposed to do? Send it back?" And then onto a description of ketamine: "Its effects are like a combination of cocaine, cannabis, opium, nitrous oxide and alcohol." Brilliant! Where do I get some? camera cuts to a vet Vet: Yeah, we've got loads. Yeah we snort it all day.

or you can just buy some Aloe Vera juice, I suppose.

Or maybe don't.

A novel excuse

The Telegraph has an amusing story about the novelist E.M Forester, which says that he gave up writing novels after his first homosexual experience, at the age of 38.

After suppressing his sexuality as a young man, Forster, who was known to his friends as Morgan, lost his virginity to a wounded soldier in 1917 while working for the Red Cross in Egypt.

That sexual awakening in his late 30s led to a series of romances with working class men including a tram conductor and two policemen.

After publishing A Passage to India, arguably his greatest work, in 1924, Forster spurned the novel and most creative endeavours for the rest of his life, publishing only occasional short stories, essays and plays.

Wendy Moffat, associate professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, who uncovered Forster's secret "sex diary" while researching a new biography of the novelist, said that the energy of his early years was drained by physical fulfilment.

I love the details: he lost his virginity to a wounded soldier, while working for the Red Cross? Was the soldier was just lying on the battlefield with shrapnel wounds all over him and, well, one thing led to another? Or maybe the soldier been hit by a mortar bomb, and was just blown to buggery? And then after that 'Morgan' moved on to tram conductors and (two! at the same time?) policemen. And I love the euphemism of the "energy of his early years was drained by physical fulfilment". You bet it was.

He only started at 38, so there's hope for me then. But I knew there was a good reason to keep away from the prowling gayers - too much cock saps your creative juices. Basically they're saying that E.M stopped plugging away at his novels, cos he was too busy just plugging away. It gives the homophobes a new angle: it's for your own good, we don't want you to dry up and stop being creative! Now for the first time they can say: Don't be gay, you want to be an artist, darling! So E.M wrote some classic novels, but once he discovered buggery he stopped writing, making it one of those few times that the sword is mightier than the pen. I can just imagine his Victorian father saying to him: "Now E.M, I don't think a novelist is a suitable career for you, I think you should go into banking with Ronald." And then at 38 E.M comes home and says: "Dad, I've got some good news, and some bad news." It is true to say that a lot of creativity comes out of pain, and maybe E.M was just having such a whale of a time, so to speak, that he couldn't keep churning out the middle-class rom coms, which makes you think that perhaps it's time Richard Curtis got himself down Old Compton Street.

Of course the story is probably not true, being in the Torygraph. Their website is actually quite good, if you swerve around the comment pages, ignore the gratuitious slant on the politics stories, and take a hefty pinch of salt with the Obama-is-doomed stuff, but apart from that, it is a busy site with lots of news that doesn't appear on the Guardian or Times sites. But still a story that says gaying ended famous novelist's career does seem a bit too much like moral wishful thinking on their part. And of course it doesn't occur to them that perhaps he felt that he couldn't write about the true romance of his later years because it was illegal, and that blocked his creativity much more than a bit of rough trade round the back of the Vauxhall Tavern. Or maybe he just got to 40 and got rubbish, like the aforementioned Richard Curtis. Which is a depressing thought, but marginally less depressing than the thought that sexual fulfilment will ruin your creativity.

Perils of the countryside

The terrible scenes in Cumbria, which I'm not going to make some tasteless jokes about, I don't know what sort of fuck you think I am but I am much more responsible than that, also I can't think of any, anyway, there were terrible scenes in Cumbria, where a deranged 52-year-old man went on a grudge-fuelled shooting spree, killing 12, including his twin brother, before killing himself. The nation was shocked: the Queen made a rare comment to say she was shocked; Mr Cameron said he was shocked; Such was the national shock that Corrie had to be cancelled; while Lady Gaga was so shocked she pretended to be murdered in her stage show, the little imp.

I was shocked, of course, but I was able to wonder why it is that these shooting sprees - which invariably involve some ne'er-do-well, generally with acne and halitosis, getting upset after years of mild slights and sexual failures and finally taking a military approach to recompense - why do they always happen in tiny little quiet peaceful hamlets, far far away from the tortured morass of the big cities, where, if you were to believe films like Taxi Driver or Falling Down, you'd be far more likely to encounter deranged souls just one throwaway remark from armed armageddon. And that's what I'd expect as well, despite clear messages from the likes of Agatha Christie about the true nature of the rural character. And now the evidence is in and can't be denied (and look at all the research I've done): Hungerford, Dunblane, Whitehaven, Egremont and Seascale, Columbine, of course, Blacksburg, in Virginia, Erfut and Winnenden, both in Germany, Kauhajoki in Finland, the brilliantly named Zug, in Switzerland, and so on. The list of modern day mass murder backwaters grows by the day. Admit it, you don't know a thing about any of those places, apart from that they had spree shootings. The most notable place to have had a spree shooting that I can find was Nepal's Narayanhity Royal Palace. But apart from the odd mentally masticated royal, spree shootings are a hick thing - you might get mugged, burgled, raped, ripped off, violated and generally shat on in the big city, but you can be sure as eggs is eggs you ain't gonna get spree shot in a spree shooting.

So why is this? I can venture a few ideas: because the countryside is so piss boring that mass murder is the only thing lively enough to shatter the tedium, after sheep shagging, magic mushrooms and burning out the newcomers have run their course; because in the big city if you started letting off a shotgun at all and sundry you'd probably get shot yourself by the local teenagers, mistaking you for one of their postcardcode rivals; because in actual fact the big city plays near enough constant host to shooting sprees, but they go unremarked in and amongst all the other brutality, venality, criminality, inhospitality and psychosexuality of the urban swamp; because countryside folk have a lot more guns generally, for shooting uh things; because countryside folk are just fucking weird, otherwise they'd move to the aforementioned city; because what would a rural idyll be without a shock to shatter it?

But whatever the reason, the lesson is clear - run from the hills!

The caped crusader of web2.0

Metafilter - it's a geeky web2.0 sort of thing, news, politics, computers, bitching, that sort of thing oh and saving trafficked women from meeting a grisly not-quite-doom-but-quite-doom-enough fate in a Brooklyn Russian mafia strip-joint. The call goes out over the Meta airwaves, but can the geeks and dweebs muster up the muscle to defeat their Russian foes? Can they persuade the girls that they are actually trafficked and in danger and not just on a jolly? Can they bicker amongst themselves? Can they make the webpages of Newsweek? Can they come together to save the day? Follow the action in web-real-time and find out on this week's installment of Metafilter Saves Endangered Women Of The World!!

And the moral is: Sitting in on the internet all day can be a force for good!!!

But, I hear you ask, where's the snark??

It was The Sun wot Scummed it

If you missed today's Sun well, lucky you. The newspaper which knows no shame continued its hagiographic approach to news reporting, going with the headline "Dave New World"; as stupid a headline as you are ever likely to see - quite apart from the profound inanity, what the hell does this "Dave New World" consist of? A bloke called Dave, stroking his pregnant wife's belly for the cameras (An absolutely true, unmadeup fact). That's it. That's what Dave New World consists of. What particular policies are a sign of our Dave New World? That we have someone called Dave in No10? Anything else come to mind?

The paper already made itself the laughing stock of all vaguely sentient people with its Cameron as Obama mockup on election day, nicely deconstructed by Nick Cohen:

The Sun was engaging in propaganda as insultingly stupid as anything produced by a dictatorship when it depicted David Cameron as Barack Obama – as if a decision by British voters to elect their 19th old Etonian prime minister would have been as radical and inspiring as the decision by US voters to elect their first African-American president.

But today it went even further, monumentally embarrassing itself with sycophantic soft focus drivel about the Dave New World and his missus what is preggers don't you know, cor get in son, he's got seeds you know, not just any old jaffa gawd luv our new ruler, got his very own semen he has too, a true man of the people. Fucking idiots. Has anyone at The Sun read Brave New World? It's not the literary reference I'd have gone for. The nefarious scumsheet's current derision for the general public is unsurpassed, even in its long and illustrious career of despicabletude. What makes it yet more debilitating is the shameless dressing up of cynical political calculations in robes of idealism and positivity. What accomodation do you think the Cleggeron came to over Murdoch and the BBC? But in a way the fawning is so epically over the top that it can't be simple political calculations. There's no teenager on this planet that wouldn't be mortified to be that head-over-heels with someone, let alone for everyone in the country to find out. Not a good look at all. Which makes you think: shit, surely they can't believe this drivel?

No of course they don't.

But what am I thinking of? Surely this is a Brave New Dave World after all. Having read Mentalie Phillips's latest column, I'm completely with the Cleggeroonians. Anyway who can annoy the mad monk that much has got to have something going for them.

The LibDems are broadly further to the left of Labour. That means what they stand for is not nice at all. It means they have an ideological, illiberal view of the world which undermines the moral basis of this society at every turn, replacing truth, justice and morality by ideology and the demonisation of dissent.

Off her tiny chops is the phrase that springs to mind.

Daily Mail journalist in self-hate shocker!!!!

LIZ JONES: Now I know why I hate myself

Skipping over the obvious - because you write for the Daily Mail, dear - some choice quotes which explain maybe why she writes for the Daily Mail.

Everything I do is tinged with fear. As a child, my over-protective mum was terrified I would be run over ... I always assumed I was in imminent danger of being murdered. I developed a habit of conjuring images of disaster in my head.

So, what precipitated the current crisis? It was a culmination of things. It would be easy to say I became depressed because I got divorced, or my new neighbours in Somerset took a dislike to me. But that's not it. I'm used to not being liked.

I don't think: 'Ooh, I'm a good writer, I'm successful.' I think, hundreds of times a day: 'I'm rubbish, I'm going to be fired.'

Basically, I hate myself.

Well now that a course of intensive psychoanalysis has uncovered a traumatic episode in Ms Jones's childhood (surprisingly enough not inflicted on her by illegal immigrants, or drug-addled teenagers), do we believe that perhaps she'll stop churning out hate-filled, fear-filled copy for the Daily Heil?

We can hope so, although then of course she probably really would get fired.

Happy St Racist's Day!

St George's Day. It's a funny old thing. No-one seems to know when it is, or how to celebrate it. The Irish get pissed for Paddy's Day, the Welsh cook leeks (or something), the Jocks probably get pissed as well for St Andrew's Day or possibly play golf, but what do the English do for St George's Day? Well, traditional celebrations include a Guardian article mentioning what a hilarious coincidence it is that St George, patron saint of Little England, was - wait for it - a fuckin forrina; others mark it by bemoaning the lack of a proper celebration for St George's Day; others use it as a prop to write a blog post loading a gratuitous and unfair slur of racism upon St George's Day; others seem to like dressing up; no-one appears to have thought of using it as an occasion to maybe slay a few dragons, but it's early days.

On the face of it there shouldn't be anything racist about St George's Day. St George wasn't racist, being from Turkey and all that, and the dragon he supposedly slayed and princess he saved might have been from Libya. [That article features the interesting subplot that the Emperor's wife was so impressed by George's Christian martyrdom that she too became a Christian martyr, which is a funny thing to do when you think about it.] It's only that English people are assumed to be racist, hence Englishness is, but of course that's just bad press, those thugs running around saying outrageous things just to get themselves on telly. English people are no more racist than any other set of people arbitarily grouped together to make thinking less hurty.

Things get more complicated nowadays because the downtrodden English do have a point about their culture being subservient to all the new, better, more cultural cultures that have turned up over the years. But the chalice of English culture is so poisoned by the racists that even to start arguing that point makes people think you might be a closet racist hiding behind a politically correct thesis. And what the hell is English culture anyway? Shakespeare? Blake? It's not capitalism, thought up by a Scot; it's not colonialism, despite all the guilt, cos the whole of Europe was doing that; nor slavery; it's not multiculturalism, because that would be ridiculous; I hope to God it's not morris dancing, but it may be; it's certainly sucking up to America, but that's not much of a thing. Maybe this is why the racists have colonised the day, because they're the only ones who have a clear idea of what it means to be English: small minded, thick, violent, racist, closetly homosexual, that sort of thing.

Ash Tuesday

I've had a new idea, which is that I am going to post on here once a day - this is not going to happen, but i am going to try and write something for posting as often as i am able, which is quite often at the moment. This is inspired by hearing that when you run a blog - although I more walk a blog, or possibly shuffle along a blog - it is quantity not quality that's important, a sad indictment on the world in which we live, I guess, and a very typical indictment as well.

Anyway, for my first of no doubt millions of somewhat ropey but definitely existant blog posts I wish to mildly mention the absence of planes from English skies due to the eruption of a volcano in Iceland with a name so mental it sounds like the sort of thing an alien would jibber at you after snorting far too much ketamine. Thanks to this force of nature there has been not a single contrail to mar a beautiful succession of azure skies for the last week; a curious impression that perhaps it's a bit quieter round here lately; a lessening of the global CO2 whatsit for a bit; the warm glow that comes from the likes of Mr Ryanair getting a jetplane up the backside; and the smug satisfaction that comes of being too skint to fly anywhere this easter and not getting stuck in some holiday idyll with no money and having to sleep on the beach.

There are apparently millions of people stuck on easter holidays that they don't want to be on anymore, easter having long past, and the Royal Navy are being called in to go and collect them; Dan Snow, who - I can safely say, having once subbed an interview with him and his dad - is a bit of a twat, has tried and failed to "rescue" people from the dungeons of Calais, sort of like the Scarlet Pimpernel, except not; schools are shorn of their teachers and their pupils; complete peace and quiet for the residents of far West London and similarly unbenighted places; and impending doom for airlines, oh the horror

It is difficult to have sympathy for the people stuck on holiday, although no doubt there are people conversely stuck not on holiday, and also people from nice places stuck on holiday in Britain, although you haven't heard much about them in the news. But the people on holiday, well no doubt it is awful having to stay for three weeks on Tenerife when you were getting tired of it on the fifth day, but they rather remind me of that vision of hell - which the briefest of googling has informed me is likely to be Dante's - where the gluttons have to eat cake all day, even as they puke it up, and the cokeheads have to snort coke even though their noses are bleeding profusely, and the holidaymakers have to stay making holidays even though if they get anymore sunburnt they're going to become radioactive, and anyway they spent all their money on presents on the way to the airport and now they're eking out an existence living on stale bread that the shoddy restaurants on the strip chuck out at the end of the day, and making friends with the tramps that they told the police to remove in those halycon days before the planes were grounded.

In other developments the International Air Traffic Association called for a better response, which everybody ignored (ba-dum!), and plane companies claimed that they could have flown in the ash cloud anyway what the hell was the problem you idiots, and even the officials who grounded all the flights said perhaps they shouldn't have, which makes the whole thing even funnier than it was in the first place, just as a new belch of ash from the Eijeeiufkjnfakjnfliua volcano threatens to smother Europe again.

I'm off out now to enjoy the beautiful clear skies and even possibly take a photo over London, to show my grandchildren I guess, and I hope everyone takes note of the important lesson here, which is that it is possible after all for environmental protest to stop aviation, as long as it's well targeted, media savvy and takes advantage of prevailing circumstances.

late extra: I did actually go out, although without a camera cos it was getting cloudy anyway, and I distinctly saw several planes flying north-west above London, contrails like knife scars across the sky, and this despite the news saying that Southern England airspace is not open until tomorrow. So make of that what you want. I smell conspiracy. And kerosene.

'Is he from the future?'

'No, I think he's from Swindon.'

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin.

What I especially like about this story is at the end it says: "Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell." So obviously not that secure a mental facility.

Off the buses

Some years ago I remember seeing on a billboard outside a church this slogan: “Why pray when you can worry and take drugs?” I like that slogan. It is short and pithy and, more to the point, it offers something. Compare to this weeks’s much heralded atheist advert: “There probably isn’t a God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. And make it sharpish, you weasely inadequate, because the non-God squad will be knocking on doors, making sure that you aren’t worrying, or non-God forbid, praying.” Maybe its just me but “now stop worrying and enjoy your life” seems to be the sort of thing a stern matron says to you, just before she dunks you in a freezing bath.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just that I first heard about this campaign when it was bathed in approval by Polly Toynbee, who strikes me as the classic prescriptivist liberal, going around telling people what they must do to be as self-satisfied as she is. Maybe it’s just that telling people to be stop worrying and be happy, maybe, just maybe, isn’t as helpful, considerate or constructive as it may appear, God or not.

Formulaic headline

I read this story the other day, the gist of which is how two doctors watching the grand prix suddenly realised that they might be able to learn something from the speedy, intense workings of the pitstop that they could use in the critical handover stage between surgery and intensive care. Apparently this wasn't a completely gratuitious attempt to get free Formula 1 tickets and did yield some significant improvement in patient health care. But it got me thinking that this shows how any activity, no matter how frivolous or apparently wasteful - say for example, aimlessly surfing the internet or lying on your sofa staring out of the window - could one day be transformed into a unambigiously good contribution to the future of mankind, at least one of which we are all entitled to have made before we go back to feed the trees. All I need now is someone to do the transformation, and I'm quids in.

Rolling in the Heather

I see Heather Mills has got £25m for divorcing Macca. £25m! I'd cut off my left leg for that much!

Runway success

So to the Methodist Central Hall for a rally against the proposed third runway at Heathrow. What was I, practically a lynchpin of the apatheterati, doing there amongst the angry and strident? I can only plead fraternity: I was there because a friend was on the abundant list of speakers, and I was working nearby. I remember rallies from the old days, when there was a left-wing to speak of, but this was quite a revelation. The place was full, but it was more of a Methodist congregation than a rabble awaiting rousing – well-heeled, well behaved and predominantly old. I would have been unsurprised to see Saga leafleting outside alongside the Green party. I lost count of the number of full-length coats and fur-trimmed accessories floating about, not to mention the good number of craggy visages topped with gleaming pates (and that was just the women). I wondered if it wasn't just the same left-wing protesters as used to go to rallies all those years ago, older and better off, or whether it really was the new breed of Tory protester, of the kind we first saw marching – marching! - for hunting when Blair was just out the traps. In fact this issue has a cross-party consensus – which sounds good until you remember that the last cross party consensus was for the war on Iraq, but never mind – so we had Tories and lefties and, to judge from the speaker panel, a preponderance of Liberals. Lacking any obvious markers to try and gainsay the scope of the political spectrum represented in the packed hall, I divvied up the greys by counting ties against beards, and came up with a slight leaning to the right. This was somewhat confirmed by one of the early speakers who said of the government: “I don't know who they think they are, and really I don't think they know who we are!” giving the impression that this is all a gigantic mistake which will be put right as soon as the government cottons on to the plethora of Daily Mail readers it is aggravating.

Before the speakers we were treated to a band who played the sort of MOR tune that brought to mind driving out on the M4 listening to Magic FM, so I suppose was suitable. But the lyrics were relevant, if a little gauche. The chorus even included the line “stand up to the powers that be”, something I've not heard for quite a few years. After the band finished playing the song, they quickly reprised it and tried to get everyone standing up and singing along, which was not an overwhelming success.

A lot of MPs queued up to speak with varying degrees of competence, including the Lib Dem leader, who only reinforced the idea that nowadays politicians are geared towards telly, and flounder hopelessly when asked to work a room. Many of the politicians betrayed their lack of mastery, painfully repeating the same facts and lines that previous speakers had iterated, while the crowd grew less and less keen on clapping endlessly as the evening wore on. Susan Kramer did a short speech which was memorable because she said something along the lines of: “There's a lot of people who are not here because they think nothing can be done, well now we can tell them, yes it can.” This, I think, should be said before every public meeting about anything, anywhere.

Much later we had a video message from Boris, which gave the impression that he'd just worked out how to turn the video camera on. He leant into the camera alarmingly, so that his forehead was cut off by the top of the screen, and spoke into it in a haphazard way, from a dowdy looking office with the blinds all drawn, as though he'd been using the video for much more entertaining purposes moments before. The film resembled nothing so much as a poor webcam blog made by a complete idiot, which I suppose is what it was. Boris's act of being a chump seems to have rubbed off on the other Tories; the next one to speak could hardly help himself fluffing his lines in that buffon-charm way that tries to give the idea that “hey, i'm a bit of clown, a fun guy, what possible harm can it do to give me loads of power!”

Despite most people leaving long before the epic list of speakers had been trawled through, the speakers did (generally) get better as things went on, John McDonnell particularly good and Geraldine Nicholson showing the rest what passion, humour and commitment actually look like packaged in a speech.

Speaking personally, I'm not too keen on rallies. Being a contrary type, I tend to find that if I listen to two hours of people stating one point of view, I tend to end up thinking that there must be something pretty good about the opposing view, or they wouldn't be hiding it. That's not to say that the campaign is wrong: the government have undoubtably cheated and lied their way to get this runway which only a tiny group of corporate power players want or stand to gain from. And rallies are also useful for a few other things, one being that you can tell a lot about what is going on by what people clap the loudest. What they clapped the loudest tonight was the statement that the Department of Transport are in bed with the aviation industry.

Afterwards I met a few of the campaigners I knew. Chatting to them was an middle-aged guy, the sort they used to call soap-dodgers, who looked like he'd just come from a tree camp. He made the blue-blazered security nervous. “He's not one of them activists, is he?” one asked.