No War In Ba Sing Se

At times, when the world is a dumpster fire, it can feel like focusing on something that isn't the dumpster fire is a little bit like insisting there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Two competing drives: one to not be dragged down by the soul-sucking quagmire of shit that is the bad news, one to not turn away from it and let it slide.

Not an easy balancing act.

I am of course a huge proponent of the fact that we contain multitudes. That it is possible to be aware of and think about multiple things at once. Like when a news story pops up, and the immediate response is "They're just using X to distract you from Y", well - they may be hoping that is what will happen, but fact is, most people don't forget X just because they are absorbing Y.

The event I covered last week - the explosion at the docks in Beirut - didn't make us forget that they still haven't locked up the cops that killed Breonna Taylor.

But while we can think about multiple things at once, it's hard to write a piece that covers a multitude of situations that are occurring, and not feel like there might be something else that one is missing.

The exam results, for one.

Where the Coronavirus pandemic has absolutely shit-showed the education system for a while - like really knocked the crap out of it - kids haven't been able to take their exams. Given that our system as it exists doesn't take very much into account in terms of delays, the government decided in its wisdom to let the Office of Qualifications (Ofqual) throw together an algorithm to sort out who deserved what grade.

Ofqual were offered assistance by the Royal Society of Statistics - the kind of people that would be quite good at analysing and utilising significant swathes of data - but wouldn't accept the assistance unless the RSS signed a Non Disclosure Agreement.

And thus, over a third of A Level students awaiting their grades to get them into University found that they had been marked down - substantially in a lot of cases - from every prediction that they had been given, and thus, denied their shot at higher education because the computer said no.

Notably, there was a significant statistical trend toward these downgraded marks happening in low-income areas.

The government dismissed any concerns as to their short-selling literally hundreds of thousands of teenagers, because why would they give a fuck? Everyone in Eton got the grades they wanted.

Lets face it, the system wasn't great in the first place, but to fuck it up this badly and then just wash your hands of it is a disgrace.

At the same time as our government fails our youth, some people are angry that we haven't sent out the navy to blow up innocent people in the channel, legally seeking asylum.

This, of course, is very useful to certain members of the government. There's a certain hard core of people in this country that have zero empathy toward foreigners of any kind, and if the government can be seen to be hating refugees as much as they do, then they can rely on the support of that hard core. The fact that they can just suspend their feelings toward the people, actual people, desperately trying to find somewhere safe to live, desperate enough that they would take an unsafe boat across the Channel to a country that seems to hate them, is indicative of a deeper problem.

The landslide of shit isn't constrained to this side of the Atlantic, obviously. Protests against racial injustice continue, and while a hundred tiny platitudes are made by people that aren't being asked to make them, the actual changes demanded aren't being made.

Then there is the ongoing war against an actual democratic election.

It is, of course, just like Donald Trump to torpedo a lifeline service for millions of people - even a significant percentage of his voter base - because it is a means by which people can vote. When your tactic to win the election is to prevent people from voting, you know that you've messed up.

It's working, though. The US Postal Service has had its Postmaster General replaced with an individual that seems to be determined to run it into the ground, and by their direction, postboxes in Blue-voting neighbourhoods in Red states are being removed, and the entire service is being slowed down by various measures.

And he ADMITTED it, that this was his plan... because, well... what can anyone do about it?

There were more fraudulent signatures on the paperwork that got Kanye West registered on voter forms than there were fraudulent votes in the entire 2016 election, but... you know.

If you are seeing a common thread behind this landslide of shit, you are right to.

Also the ice caps are melting because of us and a virus is killing us because a significant chunk of the population don't like masks and don't think it's real.

So... picking out one of those for a deep dive feels like I am ignoring the others. And picking out none of them feels like I am ignoring the entire world.

What a shit time to be a thinker.

And I've been looking for the little bright moments in amongst this torrent of fecal matter, and they are... few and far between. And often they only exist because the shitty situation necessitated them in the first place. But they DO exist.

The government - and not just the government - are so hostile to the presence of refugees on our shores that when celebrities and individuals express sympathy towards them, they're immediately attacked for it. Told they are Virtue Signalling - something I have spoken about before. That they are just trying to look good without doing anything about it. "Have you housed any refugees, Gary?" he was asked by a galaxy-brain Twitter user. "Not yet," he replied - accompanied by his paperwork for actually doing that very thing.

Despite the carnage of an overwhelmingly undergraded A Level crop this year, Oxford University College is honouring all of the offers that it made, regardless of the probably fallacious results sent out by Ofqual.

A study involving Cambridge university, an Estonian university and several Swedish university groups has found a protein that could prevent Alzheimer's.

Ben Shapiro, right-wing munchkin, is getting his ass royally roasted after deciding to take a swing at successful hip hop musicians. It seems he doesn't believe that vaginas can self-lubricate, if sufficiently stimulated. I suppose the abstinence method of sex education has its flaws. His poor wife.

We're still here, life still carries on, and with every day that we have, we can try and make things better. Not just for ourselves, either.

I suppose that is the takeaway.

Yes, there is a war in Ba Sing Se - but there's cabbages, too.

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Cause, Effect, Regret

As a child I was raised to take responsibility for my actions, something that I take quite seriously today.

No doubt every last one of you reading this blog will be aware of the refugee crisis which has only just gripped the world's media, despite being in the offing for years.

War Of The Worlds - the original 1898 story by H.G. Wells (and thus the musical), not the movies or the radio play - does a wonderful job of detailing the fear, the panic, the hopelessness and the madness of those running for their very lives. Not just running out of the house, or down the street - running without knowing an end goal, running in absolute terror away from certain doom.

Nobody does this on a whim, or by choice. It's totally against human nature to abandon everything that one has built, everything one owns that can't be carried. Also, in this day and age, one can't escape knowing that wherever they end up, they will invariably be treated poorly by at least a proportion of the local population - but even this mistreatment and malignity can't be worse than what they would face if they stayed.

In War Of The Worlds, the cause is very much an external problem - in the biggest way. Martian war machines intent on extinction. A warning from the author about war - wars of extermination, total war, war on an industrial scale. Herbert George was so devastatingly prescient, that 16 years before the First World War and over 40 years before the second, he was already speaking of the terror that would come with such mechanised destruction.

Today, though - today we can't blame invaders from outer space.

The Defence Security and Equipment International exhibition (DSEI for short) is hosted every two years at the Excel Centre in London, in September. It originated from the British Army Exhibition and the British Navy Exhibition, which (after running separately since 1976) were combined in 1993; in 1999 it was privatised.

DSEI is, essentially, one of the world's biggest arms fairs. The scale of the technology and hardware on offer is immense, and includes such articles as "suicide" drones and self-guiding bullets. Armaments of all shapes and sizes line the metaphorical shelves of the exhibition, and a significant proportion of those shopping are from established Middle Eastern governments.

Here and there, one can find indications that those who organise DSEI hope that their goods won't be used for internal repression - though at least once, a couple of companies have been thrown out for setting up stands with electric batons and metal shackles, which have an uncertain usage in a military non-internal fashion. This also seems to imply that it's perfectly okay to deploy an Accuracy International AX50 long-range anti-materiel rifle against anyone outside of your own borders, but shooting your own people with it is a big no-no.

DSEI is only one of the many arms fairs that occur the world over. A quick search reveals over a dozen more. It is reckoned by the SIPRI military expenditure database that the value of the arms trade is over $1.5 trillion a year. To put that in perspective, $1.5 trillion is:

• More than Australia's $1.44 trillion GDP, making the arms trade the twelfth biggest economy on earth (just behind Canada at $1.77 trillion).
• Enough to build a thousand top-of-the-line 862 bed hospitals like the Parkland Memorial hospital in Dallas TX.
• Greater than the estimated value of the entire Premiere League, given each club's individual purchase value as a whole.
• Enough to buy the 4 biggest cruise liners on earth (Allure Of The Seas, Oasis Of The Seas, Anthem Of The Seas and Quantum Of The Seas) 300 times over.
• Over two million average London houses - or over five million average UK houses outside of the capital.
• Sufficient to give every single refugee in the world (60 million approximately) an average UK lifestyle for a year, with change.

That's quite a lot of money.

Am I drawing a connection between the highly valuable nature of arms sales and the current crisis? Well, yes, actually. I genuinely am. The arms industry makes itself fat off the willingness of nations to make war, and refugees flee crisis - crisis such as their nation being attacked by an unrelenting enemy.

Am I suggesting that IS buys all its weapons from DSEI? Not at all. Assad's regime, however - I'd be very surprised to find no guns in their hands that were tendered at a global arms fair. I might also imply that various groups the world over have armed organisations like IS with weapons that they would acquire from the companies selling at events like the DSEI. Remember in Rambo 3, wherein the CIA were selling/giving weapons to the ever-so-brave Afghan mujaheddin in order to combat the evil Russians?

Of course, those US-made Stinger missiles - so crucial for bringing down the Russian HIND helicopters that dominated the Afghan battlefield - got turned on the benefactors when the mujaheddin became the bad guys...

...in short, rich governments with access to weapons have a habit of arming people, either by selling them or through some kind of political deal. Those people, well. They go on to do what they want. Sometimes what they want is evaporating Palmyra and  killing people indiscriminately.

So when good old Ronnie Reagan was talking about trickle-down economics - which has proven to be an excuse to make rich people richer and poor people poorer - perhaps he was talking about how the consequences of our actions will trickle back down to us.

We made money. We made money buying and selling weapons. Weapons are being used to fuel a massed panic flight from the levant; and now, those refugees have turned up in the kind of countries that sell those weapons.

This is the literal trickling down of the investments made in the eighties. Much like the financial crisis of the past decade - this is the seed we have sown, the bed we have made. Or at least, the bed that was made by those making the money selling the weapons and deregulating the financial sector.

As a child I was taught to take responsibility for my actions - to give credit where it is due, and criticism where it is needed. If we as a civilised nation were to profit from the wars and military brutality that has been so endemic across the world in the past three decades, then we as a civilised nation have to shoulder the burdens of those consequences. It's the only decent thing to do.

Of course, the true victory of the profiteers is now, they have a lot of other people singing their same song. Public opinion is on their side, at least in the UK, and that's a fact that actually makes me feel slightly ashamed.

The most successful squadron in the Battle of Britain was Polish. They defended OUR homeland, when we took them in from THEIR homeland after it was invaded. They fought to the death, literally, to defend us. At the end of the war, we hung our heads in shame, and let the Soviets take their homeland away.

I like to think we're better than that, now.

(Of course it bears mention that after WW2 ended we took in record numbers of refugees, and vastly increased public spending despite being in a time of austerity, and we did alright - but that's a factoid that most are happy to ignore.)