However science itself could never be still born and the need for better battling weapons and conditions or in the improvement of domestic appliances and tools for artistry.
It was always in the theatre of ideas that put religious ideas under suspicion, that the Inquisition and the authorities in general reacted, usually with torture and recantations, if not death.
Of course, this had changed dramatically by 1932. Here is the physicist Max Planck
“..Formerly it was only religion, especially in its doctrinal and moral systems was the object of skeptical attack. Then the iconoclast began to shatter ideals and principles that had hitherto been accepted in the province of art. Now he has invaded the temple of science. There is scarcely a scientific axiom that is not nowadays denied by somebody. And at the same time almost any nonsensical theory may be put forward in the name of science would be almost sure to find to find believers and disciples somewhere or other.” (Where is Science Going?)
Today science has become reduced to its technological achievements and those axioms pertaining to its success in the most part for popular science manuals. Whereas there are many fields in which science has become an ideological tool.
There many theories that are merely projections from known data that are now accepted as fact, these include “big bang” theory , “string theory” ,”alternative universe” ,and “dark matter” theories. These projections seek to answer unexplained questions that science by its temporal or natural limits is unable to cope with at present.
Nevertheless they have no more real existence than fairy tales.
Official science is short of answers on a few major questions, these include the twin tower collapse, the disappearance of the bees, anti-global warming theory, and in the field of economy, how to view the recession.
Science on the whole needs to reclaim itself, as a world viewpoint opposed to ideology, as a protector of global interests, that defies corporate power and its impingements on national democracies and economies including the insane investment in massive military hardware.
The inane impartiality of little garden minded scientists is a condition for global catastrophe. Science may begin at home but it must not end there.

My own memories of him, are of a charming man who had what the Spanish call “duende loosely defined as ”The ability to attract others through personal magnetism and charm” . It is defined more intricately by Lorca the famous Spanish poet. In other definitions of ”duende” there is talk of an earthiness, a gritty magic realism that may be seen in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth” about the Spanish Civil war.Peter was very much the politician of the “Stand down Maggie” generation and had met Paul Weller on many occasions. He was a member of the Anti-Nazi League in the late seventies and a ”Up the tree” protester in Pollok. He also was part of the Northern Soul movement which has and a great following in Glasgow along with his friend the DJ Rab McNamara.

Enough of Chomsky, he represents a dying breed of political bureaucrats. The left is going  the way of Christianity.  Today organised religion has lost popularity but more its sway as secular issues become bigger priorities than religious themes, the left is more pitiful in a way. The left has made organisation itself the primary task. Not telling the truth. Lenin said if he had the choice between Marxism and the truth he would choose the truth. It is strange how Party-building can lose it’s raison d’etre.
Although the subprime contagion to the world economy may re-establish an older level of class struggle, traditional socialist themes have been downgraded due to the deindustrialisation of the US and the west in general. Theory became stagnant and guru-fixated.The decline of industrial militancy and the ascendancy of economic relativism have helped make the average wage slaves  docile recipients of mass media propaganda in the imperialist countries in particular. If election results are the measure early socialists said they were.  ie the general mood of the ‘masses’. Yet this compliance with authority is patchy and it reveals itself in some polls as semi-illusionary. For example, one poll states 36% of Americans want support the impeachment of Bush for war crimes.

Lately he(Bush) has warned of World War III, if nuclear weapon production is allowed to go ahead in Iran. For two and half years, the sounds of war have been beating and Bush has promised to do something before he steps down. The goalposts have moved the nuclear issue to supplying the Iraqi resistance back to the nuclear issue plus threatening Israel.

Iran is no threat to Israel and the president of Iran has been misquoted.  It is Israel that has the policy of preemptive strikes against ‘potential’ enemies (demonised countries)such as Syria. It is little wonder the most recent peace talks have been boycotted.

Meanwhile the Iraqi resistance has held a unity conference, with twenty two Sunni and Shiite groups attending. This sort of confidence amidst UK withdrawals is surely a sign that things are far from well for the US in Iraq.

Yet Bush might ‘talk himself ‘ into this great misadventure which is bringing us closer to christian fundamentalist apocalyptic visions by meeting some of his neo-con advisers, who well may have been veered well off track by the Kennebunkport warning.  An event that by passed those who cannot countenance false flag operations to use the words of Colin Buchanan as the M.O of the oligarical shadow government. My own guess is that Bush will back down at least  in this instance.  There is much speculation. Nothing seems to be going right for Bush since the defeat of Israel in  the Lebanon, and lack of cooperation by Arabs in the latest peace initiative is still to penetrate the US Admin’s Psyche and I think it will make some play in this direction if it can.

It is beginning to look as though Bush might be pushing war with Iran so far that whoever succeeds him will be in a bad position to back down. Already we have an even nastier version of Bush in Giuliani whose foreign policy advisers are trigger happy hawks par excellence (so to speak). There is Hillary Clinton a very nasty war mongering ’Democrat’.

It is shocking that the two favorite candidates  at this moment in time are both impeachable already. If there were only such a thing as preemptive impeachment.

This wishful thought is extremely unlikely in these fearful  and irrational times.

An era despoiled by corporate greed, not only in the arena of oil but that of communication, where cell phone radiation has been introduced without proper independent safety inspection and industry guidelines that are not set in law.

Thomas Paine wrote the ”Age of Reason” in 1795 , in the turmoil of the French revolution and the American war of independence, over 300 years later we have reached the pinnacle of the “Age of Unreason”. We have come near a crossroads that tinkers with Armageddon through war and environmental crisis. Let us hope there will come a time (and we play some part in making it happen) when it will be frowned apon to use the ”embedded wow factor” that dominates economic reporting, that makes positive speculations on utterly negative details or minor ‘achievements’ and plays down crisis. This occurs with war and environmental reports too.

Reason, which was of the Zeitgeist in Paine’s time, in that it caste off feudalism and the divine rights of kings, has to be resurrected and more so the courage to apply it. The new slavishness has to be caste aside with the imagined divine rights of our war criminal leaders

The North Dakota Bee Mystery

Author: Paul AndersonThe North Dakota Bee Mystery.

It appears that North Dakota is not suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder, (The ailment that has been wiping out billions of bees throughout the planet) and if so much less than anywhere else. Here is the latest: http://www.minotdailynews.com/news/articles.asp?articleID=14972

As usual nothing has been firmly identified as the cause, and the latest hyped up possible cause: IAPV is still being tested.

However, there is a difference here between North Dakota and other US States in this matter. It comes in the question “Why put up costly cell phone towers in thinly populated areas….?” (ie. North Dakota) found in this article here.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,183237,00.html This is more evidence that cell phone radiation as a cause of CCD cannot be ruled out.

Living in the Future
A letter come blowin’ in
On an ill wind
Somethin’ ’bout me and you
Never seein’ one another again
And what I knew had come
Stars struck deaf and dumb
Like when we kissed
That taste of blood on your tongue

Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet
Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet

Woke up election day
Sky’s gunpowder and shades of grey
Beneath the dirty sun
I whistle my time away
Then just about sun down
You come walkin’ through town
Your boot heels clickin’ like
The barrel of a pistol spinnin’ round

Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet
Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet

The earth it gave away
The sea rose towards the sun
I opened up my heart to you
It got all damaged and undone
My ship Liberty sailed away
On a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates
And let the wild dogs run

Alone I limp through town
A lost cowboy at sundown
Got my monkey on a leash
Got my ear tuned to the ground
My faith’s been torn asunder
Tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound
Of somethin’ righteous goin’ under

Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet
Don’t worry, darlin’
No baby, don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future
And none of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet

Na na na na, na na na na-na
Na na na na, na na na na-na
Na na na na, na na na na-na
Na na na na, na na na na-na
Na na na na, na na na na-na
Na na na na, na na na na-na
Na na na na, na na na na-na

A Hands Off Iran and international communism campaign would truly highlight the absurd nature of your dual campaign. Regime change begins at home.

What is frustrating the political naivety that cant see that US shock and awe tactics may kill millions of Iranians.
However,HOPI still makes regime change in Iran both an imperialist and communist goal open to the charge of neo-con puppetry as it augments the cold war role of
western propaganda whose main goal is to demonise Iran and its people. A people in need of help from the West. A west which should be highlighting its own torturers and war criminals and potential war crimes.
Indeed, solidarity with the people of Iran in the war mongering nations should focus mostly on the antics of the warmongerers.
Why demonise  Iran? That is
the job of the imperialist war machine.
What is solidarity? Getting your priorities right. At a time of war beating of ones own country and its allies. I think it its  is the highest duty of communists to defend the national sovereignty of the target nation and it is more courageous to do this that than to act as cheerleader to the imperialist propaganda machine, which plays the reactionary role of underplaying the actual US threat.

Posted by erasmus on 14 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: bees, cell phone masts, Bleak Thursday, iran

The Relevance of the Irrelevant=none.

Never before in the field of world history has the Marxist left(except perhaps armed Maoists [link to letter entitled “Irrelevance”]) been so isolated from mainstream events. Marx provided a theory of human evolution which culminated in the prediction of the development of capitalism into socialism. Compared to the utopianism of Moore and Owen’s views, Marx’s theory had appeal as it championed science over wish lists or voluntarism. This appeal to reason attracted brilliant minds to the ideas of socialism, most notable of these being Lenin, the most prominent leader of the Russian Revolution. Moreover than the Russian Revolution which turned out to be a disaster for the cause of socialism apart from the limited consolation that it showed a revolutionary insurrection to be possible. Lenin produced a theory of imperialism which at least recognised that capitalist dominance of the working class was at its acutest as super exploitation of colonies.

This is a backdrop to the decline of the British empire, which led to US hegemony of the world economy. The rising unipolar world was the primary contradiction, that the left tended to miss. The focus on the nature of the Soviet Union and its place as the world revolutionary centre, tended to push the perceived role US imperialism into the background. Only practical events brought the US into any sort of focus after World War II, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Iran. All of these events have proven the left (trapped in the cold war) theoretically more backward than Lenin, who opposed the fetishizing of narrow trade union, or bread or butter issues and had no qualms in seeing all anti-imperialist forces as fundamentally progressive objectively despite supposed and actual reactionary subjective identities, by recognising the main enemy is at home.Not by saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ but by noticing that two people firing at the same enemy are practically on the same side, and perhaps should not fire at one another .

Also in the same vein, that death squads against the people are objectively on the same side as the main enemy no matter what flag they carry. The refusal of the left in the “big imperialist” countries to recognise false flag terrorism has objectively sided it with imperialism as it defends the culprits from prosecution by ignoring the need for a new investigation.It sides with the war criminals. This has undoubtedly contributed to the growing irrelevance of left ”opposition”.

Lenin also respected national sovereignty, and wrote, “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie WITHOUT ALL ITS PREJUDICES [italics in original], without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.–to imagine all this is to REPUDIATE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

The ridiculously pedantic , puritanical views of the modern left have similar origins in economism which treats workers and their possible allies as blank slates, or tabla rasa, that can be shaped into the imaginary ready made socialist man . Here the left have returned to utopianism. Marxism as presently expoused has become its opposite, another irrationalism. It is no longer a coherent entity that can provide unity around a programme, based on the vanguard formula, or democratic forms which only disguise vanguardism(including anarchism).The crucial factor for revolution is the level of political culture. In an age where Reason itself is an endangered species, we have to look at the world from a more rudimentary point of view. Not because we prefer things to be this way or that education and culture should be denied or not indeed promoted but there is what sci-fi fans might call a ”disturbance in the force”. In Marxian terms, it might be put as a serious rupture from the schemata (or eschatology) of historical materialism as a theory of evolution of society as the movement of various modes of production, from the realm of ‘necessity’ to the realm of freedom. Quite simply this is the introduction of ecological crisis into the process of human survival.

Castro, alone, on the left, seems to recognise something of the severity of what is going on! He talks of the internationalisation of genocide. Not only do we have the, nuclear threat to Iran, but the threat to the bees from what looks ever to be influenced by electronic smog as alternatives are discounted, which could spark an ecological chain reaction of extinction level proportions. We have an ever increasing intensity of power of electromagnetic waves being emitted by electronic devices which have been shown in most studies to be injurious to human health . There is a hope that the slowly unravelling economic crisis can bring people out of their slumber and think about the world more deeply.The picture is bleak but the first step must be to look, (and for the left)beyond irrelevant utopias.