OCTOBER 2007
Whatever is in the mind.......................
Class Is Still Critical
By John Pilger
September 07, 2007
ZNet Commentary
A state of parallel worlds determines almost everything we do and how we do it, everything we know and how we know it. The word that once described it, class, is unmentionable, just as imperialism used to be. Thanks to George W Bush, the latter is back in the lexicon in Britain, if not at the BBC.
Class is different. It runs too deep; it allows us to connect the present with the past and to understand the malignancies of a modern economic system based on inequity and fear. So it is seldom spoken about publicly, lest a Goldman Sachs chief executive on multimillions in pay or bonuses, or whatever they call their legalised heists, be asked how it feels to walk past office cleaners struggling on the minimum wage.
Just as elite power seeks to order other countries according to the demands of its privilege, so class remains at the root of our own society's mutations and sorrows. In recent weeks, the killing of an 11-year-old Liverpool boy and other tragedies involving children have been thoroughly tabloided. Interviewing Keith Vaz, chairman of the House of Commons home affairs select committee, one journalist wondered if "we" should go out and deal personally with our vile, mugging, stabbing, shooting youth. To this, the nodding Vaz replied that the problem was "values".
The main "value" is ruthless exclusion, such as the exile of millions of young people on vast human landfills (rubbish dumps) called housing estates, where they are forearmed with the knowledge that they are different and schools are not for them. A rigid curriculum, a system devoted to testing child-ren beyond all reason, ensures their alienation. "From the age of seven," says Shirley Franklin of the Institute of Education, "20 per cent of the nation's children are seen, and see themselves, as failures . . . Violence is an expression of hatred towards oneself and others." With the all-digital world of promise and rewards denied them, let alone a sense of belonging and esteem, they move logically to the streets and crime.
And yet, since 1995, actual crime in England and Wales has fallen by 42 per cent and violent crime by 41 per cent. No matter. The "violence of youth" is the accredited hysteria. A government led for a decade by a man whose lawless deceit helped cause the violent deaths of perhaps a million people in Iraq invented an acronym - Asbo - for a campaign against British youth, whose prospects and energy and hope were replaced by the "values" expressed by Keith Vaz and exemplified by Goldman Sachs and the current imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Take Afghanistan, where the irony is searing. In less than seven years, the Anglo-American slaughter of countless "Taliban" (people) has succeeded in spectacularly reviving an almost extinct poppy trade, so that it now supplies the demand for heroin on Britain's poorest streets, where enlightened drug rehabilitation is not considered a government "value". Parallel worlds require other elite forms of exclusion. At the Edinburgh Television Festival on 24 August, the famous BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman made a much-hyped speech "attacking" television for "betray[ing] the people we ought to be serving". What was revealing about the speech was the attitude towards ordinary viewers it betrayed. According to Paxman, "while the media and politicians feel free to criticise each other, neither has the guts to criticise the public, who are presumed never to be wrong". In fact, ordinary people are treated in much of the media as invisible or with contempt, or they are patronised. Two honourable exceptions were the GMTV presenters cited and mocked by Paxman for their humanity in standing up for an ex-soldier denied proper treatment by the National Health Service. Paxman called for a more "sophisticated" and "honest" approach that accepted the public's approval of low taxes -- taxes that are not rationed when it comes to propping up hugely profitable private finance initiatives in the Health Service or squandered on waging war, regardless of the public's objections.
Not once in his speech did Paxman refer to Iraq, nor did he tell us why Blair was never seriously challenged on that bloodbath in a broadcast interview. That the BBC had played a critical role in amplifying and echoing Blair's and Bush's lies was apparently unmentionable. The coming attack on Iran, led again by propaganda filtered through broadcasting, is from the same parallel world, also unmentionable.
The Musician Ian Pace wrote:“We have heard about the ‘liberal’ arts world. This is far too broad a generalisation; there is a huge amount of class snobbery in particular to be found amongst artists, as well as less overt racism and misogyny. My own field, contemporary classical music, is as white/male- dominated as a field could be, populated with more than a few individuals who practically believe themselves to be some superior race compared to the common herds, and this phenomenon is rarely addressed."
Parallel
universes exist - study
Sep 23 11:33 PM US/Eastern
Parallel universes really do exist, according to a
mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by
one expert as "one of the most important
developments in the history
of science".
The parallel
universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US
physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of
quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for
decades, it is claimed.
In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time
a new physical possibility is explored, the universe
splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes,
each one is played out - in its own universe.
A motorist who has a near
miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky
escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of
the same driver will have been killed. Yet another
universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in
hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.
It is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful
by many experts. But the new research from Oxford shows
that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum
conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly - and
suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at
Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was
on the right track.
Commenting in New Scientist magazine, Dr Andy Albrecht, a
physicist at the University
of California at Davis, said: "This work will go
down as one of the most important developments in the
history of science."
According to quantum
mechanics, nothing at the subatomic scale can really
be said to exist until it is observed. Until then,
particles occupy nebulous "superposition"
states, in which they can have simultaneous
"up" and "down" spins, or appear to
be in different places at the same time.
Observation appears to "nail down" a particular
state of reality, in the same way as a spinning coin can
only be said to be in a "heads" or
"tails" state once it is caught.
According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are
described by "wave functions" representing a
set of multiple "probable" states. When an
observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles
down into one of these multiple options.
The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed
mathematically that the bush-like branching structure
created by the universe splitting into parallel versions
of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum
outcomes.
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