Ars Notoria

What fascinates us about Science Fiction is its and inventiveness and ability to make us dream = and escape the attention seeking present and its certitudes. However, Science Fiction can also be stultifying and, at heart, nauseatingly conventional. Even the best Science Fiction can age fast and badly. However, Science Fiction when it is written by a great writer can be almost visionary.

Doris Lessing's book SHIKASTA is not perfect book and it is hard work, but the depth and breadth of its vision is daring and breath taking.

Modern Capitalism is like smoking or cars designed without any safety features. We know that smoking and poor safety features on cars have killed and maimed many millions, many innocents.

The companies that made a profit from cigarettes and unsafe cars knew that the world knew. They knew that scientists had exposed them as pushers and killers and that ordinary people also knew. Cigarette manufacturers were just playing for time.

Modern capitalism is playing for time, too. It is the cause of poverty and climate change and of nearly all the evils faced by people on this planet.

It’s very simple. This is what you get if you run a society based on greed and exploitation.

But capitalism’s number is up. The problem of climate change alone is enough to kill it. So many of us see the creeps behind the curtain for what they are. They are not gods or wizards, they are usually just incredibly rich, selfish, ruthless dodgy old white men.

Noam Chomsky, bless him, answered the question perfectly. When he was challenged with TINA, and someone said that socialism had failed and that it has no alternative to capitalism, he said that of course there was an alternative.

It was to not exploit, to not pollute, to not declare war, to not divide and rule, to not do all the things that are done to ensure the wealthy stay wealthy and get wealthier. And to do the things that socialists, and perhaps even communists, have always wanted. And what are they? Well what is humane socialism? Humane socialism, my friends, is the socialism we want it to be.

It’s a failure of the imagination.

By Phil Hall

The US military defense establishment has now admitted that UFOs are real. Let that sink in. Did the penny drop? Scientists can and must try to explain the phenomenon of UFOs, not simply attempt to debunk it. It has become crystal clear now that some UFOs are not swamp gas or weather balloons or Venus, or even drones. They’re powered craft.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2021/06/19/scientism-against-the-ufos/

We returned to California from Okinawa with a new kinesthetic understanding of what constituted a strong karate practice. We had seen hints of it from sensei Cain’s approach before we went, but three weeks of focused intensity had imprinted a sense of urgency on the students. The experience changed our view of what it meant to work hard and practice the art of karate correctly.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2021/06/21/finding-equanimity-part-iii/

Toxic, global, corporate capitalism must be called to heel.

Ruthlessness in the search for profit affects everyone badly. There are cigarette manufacturers who kill, armaments manufacturers who kill, car manufacturers who kill, chemical companies that produce opioids, oil companies that alter the climate, tech companies that produce mass surveillance software. Corporations kill, maim, or harm millions in their search for profit. Their purpose is not just to sell spicy chicken or strong coffee to passers-by.

In the darkest part of the corporate webs are the pirates and economic rapists, the evil shape shifters: Blackwater, Rentokil and Rio-Tinto Zinc. What do they call even themselves these days? Then there is organised crime. Organised crime which launders its money through these legitimate networks of businesses.

When it comes to meteorites, global warming, pandemics and the negative consequences of global corporate capitalism, we need powerful, enlightened, democratically accountable elites to take control and make rational decisions and carry out actions that are in the interests of society.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2021/05/12/the-virtues-of-good-enlightened-accountable-elitism/

Someone I know. Someone you know. The quintessence of moral failure.

There are the persistent systemic failures in whole cultures and systems of values. When religion is patriarchal it cannot claim to be universal. Societies and cultures are conveniently blind to their own failings, so that the caste system is reinforced. The mother, eager to be respectable in a traditional society, forces her child to be circumcised.

But Europe and the West as a whole is also blind to its systemic moral failings. It was Kenneth Clark who said that the Victorians did the terrible, cruel things they did around the world in the name of Malthus and Darwin. These were things that they would never have contemplated doing if they had allowed themselves to be guided by their Christian morals.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2020/05/19/social-darwinism-the-deadly-poison-at-the-heart-of-reason/

Socialists and progressive leftists need to reconnect with religion. We can't abandon spirituality to the right.

Religion can transform us into moral actors. It anchors us in history. It is co-operative and collective philanthropy. Our religion, whichever that may be, gives us access to a well spring of values. Religion is the secret skeleton key that opens up art and culture.

Theology and philosophy are intertwined like snakes on the staff of Caduceus. Our religion offers us the low hanging fruit of profound introspections carried out into the nature of life and reality by many thinkers like St Augustine, St Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

By embracing religion every chapel, church and cathedral in the world becomes yours and every mosque and temple becomes a place where your cousins go to worship.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2021/01/25/give-me-that-old-time-religion-its-good-enough-for-me-and-you/

Decades of dead-souled, dead music in zombie filled arenas headlined by people like Dylan.

Prospero in his cell busy indwelling, might have time to ponder the mystery of the myth that is Bob Dylan. He is concealed behind a dark blue velvet curtain embroidered in gold; Dylan with a megaphone standing on a stool, blown up from Minnesota.

Dylan is not a poet. Dylan is a songwriter. If you want to know who should get the plaudits for the early musical political then it is not Dylan – not in the least. It is  Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs, names that, for all his attributions, Dylan doesn’t mention quite as often as Elvis and Little Richard. Bodies that he steps over as they sink into the mud.

Of course a middle class Jewish boy from Little Hibbing, you would think, would have to be pretty stubborn to traverse the 60’s without ever being truly politicised. For Christ’s sake, how is that even possible?

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2020/06/13/the-mystery-of-apolitical-bob-dylan/

A bad native speaker teacher sees the British as we and the students as they, as ‘Johnny foreigner’.

For many years I taught Asylum Seekers. Many of them had been in the UK for quite a few years. What upset me was to come across young people who had been in the UK for the same amount of time as my own children, but who still spoke English with an accent. They made many mistakes and had trouble writing essays.

In particular, I remember one young woman. She was from Peru, a vivacious 17-year-old. She told me her family had left Peru because they had lived in an area where the Sendero Luminoso and the Army were at loggerheads. This student had arrived five years before, but her English was still weak.

I think I know how it happened.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://arsnotoria.com/2021/03/08/cultural-gatekeepers-make-for-bad-teachers/