2005-03-25: It's
been a good week for stargazers. Twenty years ago, we had no
idea that any star save our sun had planets around it. Now,
we know of over 130 - and what's more, we're starting to observe
them directly instead of infer their existence from gravitational wobbles.
Not many people seem to realise just how big a deal this is. All
these planets are in our neighbourhood - within a couple of hundred light years.
And we've only detected the easiest ones so far: the big and hot ones.
A hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and as many galaxies in the
universe. Even with extremely conservative extrapolation, that means planets
aren't just oddities; they're everywhere, in uncountable trillions.
Given such abundance, what are the chances of NONE of them containing
intelligent life? Near zero. In fact, I'd be prepared to bet there's something
crawling on the first planet we discover where water exists as a liquid.
We're not alone. We just can't be. 24mar2005 Cool name of the week: Al-Jazeera spokeman Jihad
Ballout. (If he says he's not on first-name terms with you, take it
as a compliment.)
15mar2005: And to think Tuesday's normally a slow news day.
(Taken on the Strand, 4pm today.)
02mar2005: Just when you think things can't get any worse: take
a look at the
Metropolitan Police's new poster campaign. Britain's slide into a police
state is now such a given that the authorities aren't even trying to hide it
any more. Effective ways to prompt someone into making a phone call? Clever copy?
Artful direction? I think not, but aesthetics aren't the issue here.
They're saying suspect everyone. Assume your neighbour's
a terrorist ringleader - after all, his door buzzer's worn out. Shop the guy
with the lockup - maybe that stripped-down Cortina's hiding plastic explosives!
Inform on White Van Man - isn't that strange two-fingered signal he gave you
a code sign?
What's so awful about these posters is that they tell you to be suspicious,
when you don't have any reason to be. The same system Nazi Germany and Soviet-era
Russia to build their empires of fear. If you suspect your neighbour, if you
feel under suspicion yourself, you'll start toeing the party line, fearful of
being different, terrified of something giving you away when you don't even have
anything to hide. (The posters even use the same colours as Hitler and Stalin.)
They're saying: we know best. Don't question, don't doubt,
just suspect them. Suspect them so we can demonstrate our value,
increase the taxes we take from your pocket, justify the most
liberty-depriving policies in a generation. Suspect everyone, of everything,
all the time. You don't need to think about it. Just suspect
them. And the copy - 'let them do the unthinkable' - places the onus squarely
on YOU if you let it pass.
Let's ignore the fact that even the Home Secretary has been forced
to release several men detained without trial, even though tens of thousands
of man-hours were focussed on their cases for years on end. Let's forget the
fact there are over two million white vans on the roads and the average Londoner
will see a hundred a day. And let's pass over the way a strip of door buzzers
says precisely NOTHING about who's living inside the walls. The suggestion has
been planted. That doorbell! That garage! That van! Wouldn't a terrorist use
something like that?
Even worse is the way you can't tell the police and government apart:
it looks like the police's journey - from being servants of the public to agents
of the state - is now complete. This poster, from the Metropolitan Police, reads
like a Blair or Bush stump speech; the jackboots are marching in tune.
But even that's not as low as this campaign goes. The worst thing of all
is the blatant sense of entitlement lurking just behind the words: the feeling
that any possible end justifies the means, and that we're expected
to shrug and accept it. The impression that it'd be ok to have a thousand young
men arrested, fingerprinted, DNA tested and locked up for the night, just because
they bought a sack of fertiliser or looked at you funny. The same self-righteous
anger that built stains on humanity like Guantanamo.
This campaign is a fucking abomination. And it's
a measure of just how low the British public has sunk that hardly a word's being
raised against them.
