Poverty 'n' that...

Regular readers will by now, I'm sure, have grown complacent of the diagonal strike in the top left corner of this blog-a-majig. The intention of putting it there four+ years ago was to get all the masses of readers to unite in making poverty history. As with most ideological woshippers of the church of the Latter day Teenager will no doubt have agreed at the time, there was no reason why foreign debt couldn't be written off alluding to wistful lofty daydreams about central African mud-huts with wifi and Mugabe scrubbing far right graffitti off the walls of the Hague in an orange jumpsuit.

However, making poverty history has fallen out of vogue recently. Limp wristed lefty student's arms swing unadorned with MPH bands; the G8 remain largely unpicketed by the group and the website itself only shows news feeds up to 2007 - and refers to the MPH movement in the past tense. This last is quite important as it means one of two things:

 1) Poverty was made history. Bono can stop clicking his fingers and Lenny Henry can stop with the tedius skits with the cast of The Office.
 2) The MPH campaign simply didn't work. Unfortunately, the ghastly truth is that *Poverty* (in spite of all its vulgar unsanitary, undemocratic, deadly connotations) is a relative term. One way or another there will always be a lowest rung of society, and if history/Marx teaches us anything it's that this lowest social strata will invariably be kept in repression to serve the means of the wealthy.

Okay, so maybe it's harsh to disparage the misty eyed dreamers who supported MPH when it was fashionable - after all - we're still talking about it now so you can't knock the public awareness it promulgated, but wrist bands alone do harrowingly little to subvert the econmic colossus that is the Western System.

Now before I was quite prepeared to accept this as the end of the story: A bastion of left wing ideology emerges from the flames of Western decadence and makes it listen to the other side of the coin - debt relief, trade justice and the exclusivity of the EU common market - then on meeting a wall of silence from Downing Street, the exponents slip quietly into their third year dissitations, and all the embers of MPH encourage now is a feeble `Keep Campaigning` half way down the home page.

However, there seems to be an intriguing twist in this tale. No, it doesn't involve the regeneration of the MPH foundation, quite the opposite, it's more of an anecdotal nail in the MPH coffin but it does go to show quite nicely how international redistribution of wealth simply doesn't work.

Let's look at the balance sheet of the mid-recession UK and any random LEDC nation in the belt running through central Africa.... Oh, I don't know, let's say: Ivory Coast. That'll do.


Ivory Coast debt: ~ $10bn, population 18m
UK debt: ~ £2,000bn (and counting), population 61m

Ivory Coast debt per capita $10,000,000,000 / 18,000,000 = $550 ( ~ $ 1 ¹/₄  USD)
UK debt per capita = $2,000,000,000,000 / 60,000,000 = £33,300 ( ~ $ 54,500 USD)

Figures provided by the internets so are obviously right

Looking very very closely at the numbers in bold you might notice that as a nation, our citizens are more in debt than those whom MPH would so staunchly have us release from the clutches of `crippling` debt. It goes with out saying that these statistics are grossly manipulated but they do prove that as a country, our exchequer is in an inexcusably disturbing state.

Indeed, if Iceland are anything to go by, we might soon be requiring the IMF to write off our debt to whatever consortium is daft enough to be wiring money to the chancellor.

Our debt has nothing to do with MPH obviously, but to me it does serve as a stark reminder that although international altruism is essential to the morality of the model of a developed country, sinking our own ship to float theirs a while longer ends up bringing everyone to ruin. In fact, if by the very act of poorer nations borrowing from the West shows that between LSE and Wall St is financially the very backbone of the world, then surely now is the time to strengthen our fiscal stance and up the revenue of third world debtors. (I'm not saying we should, that would be counter-productive, I'm saying a Trotskyite attitude to the IMF does not work - at least not in a recession).

However, I heartily embrace MPH and all that it stands for.

My criticisms as outlined are the rationale to my thoughts on MPH, but they do not define my opinion on it, or any similar NGO. In spite of overwhelming evidence that debt relief cripples economies (who may not live or die off the interest paid but certainly balance their books on the asset), and in spite of the hollow pictures painted by the socilogy student with dreads and beads - I passionately advocate the sending of aid to impoverished nations. I am passionate about advocating the ease of conflicts and develop industries in agriculture in lieu of men earning a wage as combatants. I passionately advocate free market economies and the immediate abolishment of self serving trade embargos within the EU, US and PRC. I am passionate about democracy and I beleive it is worth more reluctently shed blood than any land or faith. I am passionate about making the Unions' (whom I so despise) dreams of minimum wage, welfare state, statutory holiday and workers rights all become basic human rights internationally. I am passionate about international communication, free speech, condoms, accessible health care, and transparent governments ...

And so no matter how feeble, no matter how uncircumspect, poorly thought through, immature, superficially vogue... No matter how glib, hollow, vague, naive or doomed to fail the proponent; I am passionate about any voice in any form that shouts it's time we take a step closer to making poverty a thing of the past.

Email:

To:
Minister in charge of Department for the Education of Farming Radioactive Antelopes (DEFRA)

Subject:
Cow could you let this happen?

Message:
Dear Minister of DEFRA, Mrs Michelle Gildernew,

Let me set the scene, Mrs Michelle Gildernew. But first, good morning to you yourself. Now back to the scene scetting. It's a cold dark wintery night in November. The sheep on my two and a half acre farm are bleeting, the cocks are crowing, and the cows are mooing. Moooooo. Why do they mooo0oo? I hear you ask? Is it intrinsic to their nature to mo0o0o0o0oo? Are their moO0oos the result of peer pressure, or just inane cow speak for farting away the o-zone layer? I'll tell you the answer, Mrs Minister Michelle Gildernew. They mo000000000000o because they know that I know the secret behind milk!

Oh yes. I know it alright and I demand for something to be done about it!

My milk maid, David, pulls on the cow and milk falls out. Then he returns and it's yogert. 'Pon his next return it becomes cream, thence dubble cream.... Were this not bad enough, when he returns again it becomes butter, and finally to a selection of minature cheeses in a little mesh bag.

Demonstrably these are all the same thing. Identically the same thing. (apart from when the cow in question happens to be a calf whereupon David brings me babybel). I demand you either homogenise this milk or brand all of the above as the same banner. Might i suggest ``cow-seconds.``? Let me know immediately of your intentions or I shall contact the trades descriptions act a moment after immediately.

Kapish?

Yours sincerely

Mr Benjamin Foster
Minister for TRUTH!

John Cage: Genius? Or Mongaloid-spack-a-tron?

John Cage was a 20th century experimental composer noted for pieces that were laden with a-harmonic dischords without meter and apparently, without sense. To all but the optimistic ears his piano pieces sounded like children bashing away haplessly.

I remember learning about John Cage in GCSE music class and dismissing him offhand with deep rooted annoyance thinking him to be the antithesis of music - the orchestra's version of slicing a cow in half and displaying it in formaldehyde.

But I've grown up a bit now and I think I can appreciate his work a lot more. It doesn't all make sense to me but maybe it's not meant to.

What is arguably his most famous piece is `4 minutes 33 seconds`. A full orchestra piece in three movements where all instruments play 4'33'''s worth of rest. The idea being that the ambience of the concert hall itself comprises the music.

It's a weird notion that the absense of music can become music, some people call it theatre at best and a piss taking publicity stunt at worse - I know I certainly did when I was first introduced, but my opinions have changed somewhat. I think music is what you make of it and the jenius of Cage was that he enabled the listener to make whatever they wanted from it, free from the boundries in which the more traditional composers flourished.





Here's more of Cage pushing the musical onvelope:

Why God's worth it and why I'd be rubbish at making signs for the M11

You know me, yeah? Well remember there was that monumental phase of blog posts rambling on about `authentic faith`... It occured to me that I have a nice image of God in my head and in my heart, but I've always struggled to convey this to other people in the werld. I think that's because I communicate God by challenging what common conceptions are: the likes of which I disagree. Almost contextualising God by the pitfalls of other followers of today and through history. It would be like writing those signs for the M11 saying:

``This motorway does not stop at: Arminghall, Birmingham, Brighton, Chester, Colchester.......... Yeovil or Zimbabwe``

I think if I ever want to relate my perception of God to someone, I probably need to start thinking along the lines of what He is, rather than contextualising though eliminating the well meaning but superphelous interpositions (like hymns, flag waving, raising hands etc...) between God and man that seem so epicly disasterous to me, but probably not to anyone else.

So here are:

Captain Sir Benjamin F. McFosterson III Esq.'s Axiomatic Truths of Authentic God ™

• God is love. I once heared `the opposite of love isn't hate, but indiffernce`. If there's one thing that God does to show His love, it's everything. The Bible is an homage to God interfering in our mess ups, digressions, indiscressions and general human-ups in life. In fact the only time off the top of my immense brain when God slopes His shoulders with people is when Jesus is on the cross and says `you int 'arf forsaken me, innit` and in hindsight, that certainly comes across as quite well in our favour in the grand scheme of things. God is love, and everything that love is, everything love stands for, everything love aspires to be. He's not permiated with the charactor of love, He's actually made of the stuff. In fact, I think I might even be worshipping a divine bowl of love soup. If you can get your head around that - and I mean REALLY grasp it - then the next step is to understand that God's love is not one side of a dichotomy. God's love is not a love by the contrast of hate/indifference/people trafficking, it's more than a concept, more than an attribute, unquanitifiable, uncomprimisable, unextinguishable. God IS ... love!

• The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.
... which I suppose carries on from the Benjamatic's First Axiomatic Truth of God. My favourite parts of the Bible are where God tells people that he wants kindnesses more than burnt donkies. I don't think there's ought more Godly we can do in this world than love others as God loves us. Nor is any more required. Unfortunately I think as humans our love is based on a dichotomy - the decision to do good instead of evil. I'm not sure God has the capacity to do evil but humans do, so becoming like God is a self-brainwashing process of consciously doing what's right and learning to make that intuative and sincere. That's not to say God's judgement doesn't take into consideration each person's compulsions and volitions to love, but to paraphrase my first blog on Authentic Faith:

Authentic faith isn't the pursuit of love, it is love. Authentic Faith doesn't aspire to love, because it's only attainable by loving, and being love in the first place. Love may well be the lynch-pin to Christianity, but for Authentic Faith to occur, love must be the encompasing, defining, saturating feature of the follower. More than an attitude - as much a feature of the person as their own blood and ears. A life surrendered without comprimise.

• All we need to worship and commune with God is that which He gave us when we were born. We have everything we need right here right now.
• A heart, 
• a passion, 
• a gratitude, 
• a humility, 
• a servitude, 
• a vague and potted knowlege of who God is and what He's done, 
• a brotherhood of like minded children of God, 

And that's it. That's all it is. That's all He wants. That's all He cares about. I think God's reaction to Church bands is like my reaction to the BBC iDents... yeah - you've put a lot of work into it, but it doesn't make me love you any more than I just did a moment ago, Mr BBC, it's just padding out time to be doing more useful things. But that, is of course, just my opinion.


So there you have it: Ben's Wee List regressing a very long Bible into three neat post-modern-esque bullet points. Just what God would have wanted... Authentic Faith as defined by what it is instead of what it isn't. I still feel like it's more powerful to describe based on the contranyms between church and Authentic Faith but that's because I'm coming from a reactionary/contrary point of view, I suppose. But at the end of the day, so long as I'm better at following God than getting to J27 westbound on the M25, everyone's a winner.

Omar al-Bashir

So the toss pot dictator of Sudan is the world's first leader to be convicted by the ICC while still in office.

Firstly, the objective morality that relates to the guy who co-ordinates genocide `35,000 violent deaths` calls the arrest warrunt the first step towards a triumphant victory against tyranny and the typically This is Africa indifference to life and suffering at the expense of hypocritial `liberators`.

Since the West have had a conscious idea of morality and justice it has been serially apathetic towards the sufferings in Africa (indeed, one can't help but question whether the only reason this was reported at all was for the ramifications of the oil markets). From British Empire colonial impositions to S. African apartheid, to Rwandan genocide to Zimbabwen tyranny at the hands of Mugabe, to Sierra Leone, to Etheopian famine, Kenyan drought, civil war in Central African Repb., the AIDS epidemic in Swaziland, the current displacement camps in Chad... There's no end to the amount of inhumanity we, as aware Westerners, have to account for. I can therefore, only hope that this arrest warrent for al-Bashir will set a new precedent in deeming what we see as acecptible to go on in the world. A message to dictators everywhere that ethenic cleansing, forced mass migration, war crimes, assasinations, torture, multilation, systematic rape and all other attrocities will not be tolerated by those who hold a belief that crimes against humans are crimes against humanity.

But for all my ideology and deliberate rhetoric, I know this attitude is naive. The West will remain ambivolent to these crimes. Like the man who watches another get kicked to death by chavs, he knows it's appalling and turns his head knowing that the challenge to intervene is too heavy to burden alone and not having the courage to ralleigh support. But it's not fear of intervention that ails the superhero West this time, but a diplomatic faux pas from the ICC.

The Sudanese Government will call this arrest warrent a conspiracy by the West for oil, regurgetating the same spin the liberalists used against Bush's invasion of Iraq. They'll claim the West will try to usurp the president and in doing so, al-Bashir will denounce and discredit the ICC's ruling and live in a country convinced of their president's relative right to rule.

I think it's a shame Iraq has tarnished the moral image of the need to intervene in international `incidents`, as our militray is towards breaking point and the reputation of the UN Security Council to keep the peace is all but ruined. Should those efforts have been focused towards Mugabe's Zimbabwe (as I argued at the time!) one can't help but feel that intervening in places like Sudan might be a more viable option.

Instead the only option left to this bastion of human rights we call the West is the flacid ICC paying lip service to justice.