call it now you gutless swine

So it's elections season again, huh? That is, when najib finally grows a pair of balls and calls it without bankrupting the country first. If there's one thing that makes us better than the sultan-worshipping morons the papers portray us to be, it's that we're straight, down-to-earth people. So i'm calling it like it is. The past few months have been like living in a dream-like trance. I can't wait for them to dissolve parliament and go cast my vote. So the prime minister has the prerogative to call the general elections when he feels like it? And meanwhile time stops for the rest of the world? Call it now, call it now, call it now, you putrefying pile of cat shit.

screw this

I bought 4 shooter's magazines for my dad today at a certain leading bookstore chain and paid the full price for my purchase. Then when i checked my bag later, i found 5, not 4 magazines. In there was a 124-page, glossy magazine priced at RM15 which i had not bought and which the cashier had casually slipped into my plastic bag with little old me unawares. Courtesy of Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, no less. It's title? NAJIB - NATION ON HIS MIND, PEOPLE IN HIS HEART (see pic).

15 bucks and they're giving this away for free 'cos no one will fork out 15 bucks to read any that this glossy slick publication has to show for our beloved prime minister? Man, the government must be really, really, really desperate.

As for me, i checked my receipt and sure enough, i wasn't billed RM15 for this unwanted piece of gloss which i can't find no practical use for other than to stuff a worn-out shoe (if i had a worn-out shoe that i still wanted to use). Look here Limkokwing,  I get oodles of government propaganda everyday in the newspapers and i don't need any more, ok?

Populism Plague

by Radzuan Halim (published in The Edge Malaysia the week of August 20-August 26, 2012 under the writer's regular weekly column "Radzuan's Reasons" and reproduced here without permission)

Today must borrow nothing of tomorrow - German proverb

The noted New York Times columnist David Brooks recently lamented on the state of the democracies of the US and Europe. He said, "Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it ... many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements ... they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay. (As a result) governments have made promises they cannot afford to fulfil."

Brooks was referring to the rise of populist pressure from voters and the readiness of leaders to accede to their demands. The result has been chronic government deficits in the US, Europe, Japan, India and Malaysia too.

At a talk given by a retired senior Malaysian politician, I asked him for his views on the populism affecting our country, proof of which lay in our persistent government deficits, subsidised fuel and commodities, pressure to forgive National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) loans and doing away with quit rent and assessment.

His reply was: "That is democracy; you make promises and the other party makes counter-promises. Let the voters decide."

At the time i was quite taken aback by his dismissive reply. But if Brooks is correct, then that is the way of all democracies - doomed to financial insolvency and disaster brought about by the worst in human nature (wanting goodies without paying for them) and the willingness and readiness of leaders to pander to the irresponsible wishes of voters.

We can all agree that national finances do vary from family finances in that for national finances, we do not have to maintain surpluses every year. When the economy is in recession, it is appropriate to have a small deficit so as to activate the economy by building some needed infrastructure. But when the economy is enjoying good growth, it is necessary to maintain surpluses so that debts can be reduced and the government's coffers replenished. 

Such alternating between surplus and deficit in government finances was what we had practised in the decades up to 1997, the last year in which we achieved a federal government surplus (of 2.5% of GDP). During the years of good commodity prices and steady inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI), we achieved surpluses. However, from 1998 onwards, it has been only deficits. Why is that?

The answer lies in what Brooks said. In the new millenium, we have had more competitive politics. There has been endless campaigning, particularly since 2008, and like all political campaigning, it invariably boils down to promises to tax less, waive charges, cancel proposed new taxes and spend, spend, spend. 

The much-considered Goods and Services Tax (GST), which was proposed at least 15 years ago, was resuscitated four years ago and is still under study. The GST is much needed to diversify our tax base, to provide a new source of revenue and to modernise financial record-keeping and transparency throughout the economy. However, due to populist pressure or the perceived view that it is too unpopular, this much-needed tax has been kept in abeyance once again and not even mentioned of late.

I can think of a long list of issues relating to the prudence versus populist divide. For these issues, the economic impact on government revenue and spending is clear - deficit improving or deficit worsening. Sad to say, many politicians invariably succumb to the populist strain.

PTPTN

On May 22, there was a celebrated debate between the shining political stars of the "new-generation" ruling coalition and the opporsition - Khairy Jamaluddin and Rafizi Ramli respectively. The debate brought up several important issues relating to PTPTN and raised some fresh perspectives.

In my view, however, the arguments and orientations of both debaters were imbued with populist sentiments. The public had been caught unawares that PTPTN disbursement up to now had reached RM44.2 billion and growing at a phenomenal rate. From a pruent taxpayer's perspective, I would venture the following questions in respect of the student loan fund.

First, how is it that the PTPTN loan fund was allowed to grow so big without public or parliamentary scrutiny? For such a huge allocation, there had to be strict evaluation and supervision of the agency's management and corporate practices.

Second, the loan fund had unwittingly emerged as a major souce of funding for many private sector educational institutions. In fact, many private institutions survive mainly on the funds disbursed by PTPTN. Such dependence is not healthy as it leads to possible corrupt relationships as well as insufficient supervision of the quality of education provided.

Third, it was revealed that a significant proportion of the PTPTN disbursement had been going towards students' living expenses. Surely, the living cost of PTPTN students should be the responsibility of their parents? And the living costs of very poor students should be taken care of by welfare bodies or scholarship schemes, not loan schemes. It seems that some families are utilising PTPTN loans to supplement their income.

Fourth, PTPTN seems to exercise a potentially unhealthy policy of forgiving loans once a borrower obtains first class honours or similar academic achievements. Such forgiveness now totals RM475 million. Of course therfe are worthy students deserving a better deal, but forgiving a loan would seem to be outside PTPTN's jurisdiction. Very good students should have access to scholarship schemes issued by other bodies, not PTPTN. Further more, there are many contentious issues to consider when determining what constuitutes "first class" - the quality of the institution issuing the degree, the quality of the faculty itself, whether the student took easier options and so on.

The point is that the public should not be overly dependent upon political arguments and considerations when evaluating programmes like PTPTN. It is indeed difficult to wean politicans off populist appeals. With the rise in populist tendencies, one must widen one's horizon to seek out non-partisan studies and perspectives.

GST

This "stuck" tax proposal had been referred to above. Wioll politicians from either side of the divide ever support it? If the nation is governed by political sentiment and the need to win votes, such a tax will never be passed. So what happens to national interests in tapping new revenue sources, diversifying the tax base and instilling international confidence in our financials? Obviously, the country needs a new form of consensus when it comes to taking bitter economic medicine like imposing a new tax. We just cannot depend upon traditional populist politicking to ensure financial prudence.

SUBSIDY 

Much has been written about fuel, food and water subsidies and i need not elaborate here. Subsidies are the converse of VAT. Due to the faulty design of the subsidy structure, the nation has inadvertently fallen into the trap of giving subsidies "to make up for world market price changes" instead of "fixed ringgit allocations approved by Parliament". Under the present system, as world prices of fuel or sugar increase, the subsidies or government allocations automatically increase. Quite apart from the legality of such a budgetary procurement practice, it is simply imprudent for the government to issue blank cheques to power producers, motorists and consumers. The proper practice is to allocate a fixed ringgit sum for whatever products to be subsidised. these allocations cannot be exceeded until and unless new allocations are passed by Parliament.

PENSION AND MEDICAL COMMITMENT LIABILITIES OF THE GOVERNMENT

I have yet to study this issue in detail. However, observations lead me to the conclusion that we have a major issue on our hands. There are some well-established facts to build upon. First, the number of public servants is large, very large in fact for a country and economy of our size. Consequently, the wage bill for the public sector is very high. So are the numbers enjoying and will be enjoying pensions.

Second, pension payments are indexed to current salaries, so as salaries increased, pension entitlements are also enhanced. 

Third, pension eligibility for elected federal and state representatives and the senate is only three years. Such a short eligibility period should not have been granted in the first place. 

Fourth, medical benefits are extended to virtually all retired civil servants, spouses and their young children. 

Fifth, medical costs have increased astronomically due to medical advancement and a change in the nature of ailments.

Sixth, both medical and pension burdens are liable to "explode" due to the longer life expectancies of retired civil servants and their spouses. Previously, it was unusual to find people living into their 80s. Now, many are reaching their 90s.

There are two financial issues related to pension-cum-medical liabilities. First, these liabilities are largely non-funded, meaning there is little by way of a sinking fund ear-amrked for the payment obligation as it falls due. Second, these liabilities are not fully accounted for in the statistics used in the calculation of government deficits and the all-important deficit-to-GDP ratio.

ACTIVITIES DESERVING OF HIGHER TAXATION 

In the old days, we used to have development tax, excess profit tax and estate duty tax. While Australia, tyhe UK, France, Japan, Indonesia and many other countries have been looking for new ways to increase their tax base, in Malaysia, we have been doing away with several taxes while taking many residents out of the existing tax net. In Indonesia, there is an exit tax of IRD150,000 (about RM50) on every person exiting the country. Australia has passed a higher mining tax (to take advantage of miners' record profits) and is imposing a new carbon tax. Both France and the UK have implemented or are introducing higher income and sales taxes.

It is high time that the country considered new taxes and increased the rates on existing ones. We need to introduce new and incerased taxes on selected sectors/activities and backed by good reasons. New/increased taxes can be considered for palm oil, banking, gaming and cigarettes. For palm oil, the government missed out on a potentially huge revenue source when crude oil prices increased from a low of RM2,000 per tonne in 2009 to RM3,400 recently.

As for the banks, we have seen them earn record profits largely due to the deposit rates being kept low by the authorities. The extra-high profits earned at the expense of depositors should have been suitably taxed. As for gaming, these are basically profits in the nature of bounty since only a few lucky permit holders are allowed to operate legally in an activity otherwise deemed unlawful under the general law. The government's offtake from gaming is much too low and an increase is warranted.

Take a look at what gaming operators pay to the revenue authorities of the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. As for cigarettes, we need not introduce taxes that go as high as those in the UK or Australia, but a low tax does not provide sufficient deterrence  and does not take into account the high medical costs to employers and to the Health Ministry for all the ill-effects caused by smoking. In tandem with higher taxes on cigarettes, the government must find better ways to combat cigarette smuggling, which has reached crisis levels.

Well, all said and done, what do we do about the populist plague? The problem is so broad and intractable as to cause mayhem even in old democracies like the US, France and the UK. Furthermore, it is no use pleading to the opposition because those not in power are also fighting on a platform of lower fuel prices, forgiving PTPTN loans, subsidising water bills and wanting to reduce quit rent and assessment.

The situation is almost like the fairytale lesson of "belling the cat". We know the problem and what should be done, but who is to do it and how? I have three suggestions. First and foremost, the public must be clear in its mind that financial populism - trying to get benefits without paying for them, reducing taxes, avoiding taxes, stopping charges/fees - will destroy our economy and country. Our currency will be devalued, deposits will leave the banks, capital will flee the country and other untold horrors will unfold.

Second, the public should not seek freebies from the government or simply oppose new or higher taxes. At the same time, the public should demand greater accountability in the selection of projects, choice of suppliers and costing. We should not be impressed by off-the-cuff approvals of spending and waivers of charges since such impulsive approvals reflct lack of prudent decision-making.

Third, broad financial policies and targets for taxes, operational expenditure, subsidies and big ticket projects should be determined in a multi-partisan manner so as to minimise their appeal to populism. Such multi-partisan commissions can be ad hoc or institutionalised as a sort of privy council to advise the king. Such a body would lay out the limits to various deficit measures, examine government accounting practices and set out broad policies on taxation and spending targets.

The studies, conclusions and pronouncements of such a body would contribute to a reduction in the populism currently besetting the country. There will be less opportunity and less need for the ruling government to resort to populist appeal since braod deficit limits would have been laid out over the long term. In this way, citizenry need not worry about all those terrible prospects associated with sustained government deficits.

(Radzuan Halim, a former merchant banker, teaches MBA and law students)

The Riots

By Charles Bukowski

the riots


I've watched this city burn twice
in my lifetime
and the most notable thing
was the arrival of the
politicians in the
aftermath
proclaiming the wrongs of
the system
and demanding new
policies toward and for the
poor.


nothing was corrected last
time.
nothing will be corrected this
time.


the poor will remain poor.
the unemployed will remain
so.
the homeless will remain
homeless


and the politicians,
fat upon the land, will live
very well.

5/5/1992

Things NOT to do when you are holidaying in Malaysia

Just a quick note of advice to all foreign friends who perchance to visit our fair shores. Never Ever give THE BIRD (ie. your third middle finger) to locals, especially locals of the blue blood variety. This is an extremely offensive gesture which will lead to your being physically assaulted and punished in all manner of violence until you have come to know your place. The denizens of Malaysia, especially our blue bloods, will countenance not receiving THE BIRD from foreigners. You have been warned.

Shhhhhh! we're trying to watch the movie!

While watching "A Simple Life" with my wife at a local cineplex, i was talking to my wife and asking her questions about the movie which was in Cantonese. My wife explained to me what certain cantonese phrases meant and as she did so, i heard a "SHHHHHHHHHH!" loudly from the couple seated to our left. I hadn't realized that we were speaking loudly but that seemed to be the case with the couple. After a while, the couple moved a few rows in front (the cinema was lightly seated) but not before the man complained loudly: "it's as if they bought the whole cinema!" After that i only spoke to my wife in hushed tones and kept all my replies to her in minimalist-fashion like. But we were exonerated of our crimes as another group of movie-goers to the right of us spoke just as loud and sometimes you could hear their cellphones ringing too. I noticed that when the movie ended and the lights were on, the complaining couple walked off very quickly. Maybe they were disgusted with us or they were fearful of further conflict?

Proton - will we ever let it die in peace?

The Star, Thursday 1st March, 2012 - National carmaker Proton Holdings Bhd plunged deeper into the red with a net loss of RM88.2 mil for its third quarter (Q3) ended Dec 31, 2011, compared to RM68.1 million recorded in the previous corresponding quarter. Revenue declined to RM1.43 bil from RM1.83 bil previously.

Now this is getting old and tired. Just like the man who championed it. We never had a comparative advantage in making cars but we dived headlong into it, nonetheless. Power windows that don't work, cars that break down in the highway and clog up traffic, high import duties making better quality imported cars out of reach of most working class Malaysians and all manner of madness ensued. One man and his obsession with cars and his impossible dream overrode the wishes of ordinary folks for good quality affordable cars. Now after almost 3 decades of folly, pride still reigns supreme over common sense and honesty. Will someone tell the leaders of this country that there is a limit to madness and stupidity?

Asking the Big Questions

IT will be metaphysics - that place where science and religions truly meet - that gives us the big answers, writes biologist Colin Tudge. (pic)

The present view of life, or at least the view that informs the policies of the most powerful governments, is hard-nosed, no-nonsense, stripped to the bone - and rooted in science. All of which would be fine, and just what the world needs, if only the politicians, bankers and corporate bosses who run the world really understood what science is, and what it isn't; what it can do and what it cannot.

The version of science that prevails and, alas, is often encouraged by the scientists themselves in the interests of making a living is crude in the extreme. And then, in turn, this crude and ultra-materialist science is co-opted to the cause of an even cruder economic dogma known as neo-liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human beings are made most happy by material goods, and that progress means more stuff.

The piles of money thus generated are used in part to support more of the same kind of science, and so it goes on, round and round, in a positive feedback loop. As the merry-go-round continues, the world falls apart and humanity grows more desperate; the poor obviously so, the rich looking over their shoulders.

But science doesn't have to be like this. When science first began in the Middle Ages, and through the 17th century when it began to come into its own, it was conceived as an exercise in metaphysics; an aspect of scientific discourse that has, over these past few hundred years, gone missing.

As Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies at The George Washington University, Washington DC, observes, the loss of metaphysics from the western psyche "is most directly responsible for our modern predicament".

Because science, stripped of its metaphysical context, has encouraged us to treat other people, our fellow creatures, and even the Earth itself, with what amounts to contempt. And it has caused us to horribly overreach.

In his now almost 15-year old TV  documentary Man and Nature, Professor Nasr summarised beautifully what metaphysics actually is: "the science of the Real, of the origin and end of things, of the Absolute and, in its light, the relative". And crucially: "It can only be obtained through intellectual intuition and not simply through ratiocination. It thus differs from philosophy as it is usually understood".

Metaphysics does not necessarily or exclusively belong to religion, but in practice it seems to: and the great founders of modern Western science - Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Robert Boyle, John Ray (all Christians) - were deeply devout albeit in a huge variety of ways; and so too were their medieval predecessors, both Christian and Muslim. All these great thinkers saw their science in the same way that the composer J.S.Bach, some decades later, saw his music: all was for the glory of God.

The early scientists practised science so that they, and the world, could appreciate God's works more fully. For them, science was an act of worship. Certainly they thought that their science could be useful. Newton, for example, was financed for a time by the admiralty because astronomy, obviously, could improve navigation. But, even knowing that their science might have practical application, they surely would not have supposed as their modern successors have that they could understand the universe so exhaustively that they could take over the world. The scientists of old sought to work more harmoniously and fruitfully with Nature, which they took to mean with God. They did not presume to usurp.

So, what changed? A whole succession of events, is the answer. Firstly, in the 18th century, came the Enlightenment: the supreme age of rationalism. It began to seem to thinkers at that time that all facts could be known, and - guided by the inexorable logic of mathematics - that, simply by applying the power of reason, all could be understood. To be sure, the greatest thinkers of the 18th century, including David Hume and Immanuel Kant, warned that rationality itself, and indeed the human mind, has its limits.

There is a limit, of course, to what we can understand, and there are flaws in the methods by which we seek that understanding. However, the message that emerged from the Enlightenment was quite the opposite. Omniscience, it seemed, was within our close grasp, and rationality - straight thinking: empirical observation and math - would be the way to achieve it. Thus theology, and religion in general, began to seem embarrassingly old-fashioned.

And as the 18th century rationalist zeal continued, the 19th century brought a lot more change in  similar vein. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the rise of modern earth sciences and, in particular, of modern palaeontology, both of which threw serious doubts on the bible's Creation story in Genesis: suggesting, at the very least, that this account, if taken literally, was hard to square with the now known facts on the ground.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection has often been blamed for the loss of faith in the 19th century, but the truth is that this trend was gathering momentum well before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Indeed, the theme ran right through 19th-century literature and philosophy, from Dostoyevsky to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.

The 19th century also brought the rise and rise of big-time engineering, from the bridges of Isambard Kingdom Brunel to the steam locomotive and the towering skyscrapers of Chicago, and by the end of that century, the rise, too, of industrial chemistry. It began to seem, to many, that humanity really could and would finally control the world - that God really was now redundant.

Finally, towards the end of the 19th century came the rise of positivism: basically, the belief that we could understand everything we needed to understand and that was possible to understand, and that we could achieve this simply by observation; by reasoning and maths - in other words, by science. Science, it was fondly supposed back then, provided certainty and would prove its assertions.

In the early 20th century, the logical positivists went further, insisting that any assertion that could not be proved was literal nonsense. Since they accepted the assumption that science could prove its theories, and nothing else could, they believed this meant science alone should be taken seriously. Metaphysics, though, does not ask questions of a kind that can be answered with certainty, and with proofs; and so it was that metaphysics went right out the window and right out of people's heads.

The behaviourists, too, contrived to explain the psychology of animals and of human beings as simply a series of reflexes. Physicists and biologists alike provided more and more detailed knowledge of the workings of the universe, down to and including the structure and modus operandi of DNA.

By the 1970s, we had "genetic engineering" - the transfer of DNA between different individuals that could be of quite different species - and so it to seem that we human beings really could control life itself, even create brand-new life forms to order.

GMOs - genetically modified organisms, notably in the form of GM crops such as maize and soya - began being presented as "the saviours" of the world, as if we would all starve without them (this being a key theme of The Future of Food and Farming, the latest report by Professor Sir John Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser).

But the 20th century also, for those who cared to listen, sowed huge seeds of doubt. The physicists showed that the universe is innately unpredictable. The fundamental particles of which it is composed behave randomly to a significant extent.

And so even if we could really understand the universe (which we cannot), we could never with any accuracy predict its behaviour. Science philosopher Sir Karl Popper pointed out that in reality science does not prove anything beyond all doubt. At best, it can simply disprove what is impossible. All its theories are provisional.

Kurt Godel, the Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher, showed us that all mathematical statements that are not simply matters of definition (as in 2 + 2 = 4) contain some component that itself cannot be proved, which means they, too, to some extent are all arbitrary and that math is not the great unequivocal arbiter of truth that it was once taken to be.

Specifically, the late 20th century naturalists and psychologists showed that the psychology of animals cannot sensibly be described in behaviourist terms - essentially as a string of reflexes: in particular, Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, is now writing of the politics of animals, and the empathy that exists between them.  And that the once simple thinking behind genetic engineering - the notion that if we fiddle with DNA we can turn out new organisms in order - is now known to be extraordinarily naive, because the relationship between individual genes and the form and behaviour of the whole animal or plant is far from simple.

The British biologist Sir Peter Medawar summarised this pretty well when he pointed out that science is nothing more or less than "the art of the soluble". That is, scientists address only those questions they think they have a reasonable chance of answering. And they appear to provide such certain answers only because they take such care to tailor the questions.

In the end, science, like all human understanding, is just narrative: a story that we tell ourselves. What we call "truth" in science is just the story that we happen to find the most convincing. Clearly, the notion that science can make us omniscience is nonsense. The greater and even more dangerous idea that we might achieve omnipotence is an even bigger nonsense.

So, what do we do now?

We need to acknowledge that the past 300 years, from the Enlightenment onwards, has largely been a diversion. Perhaps this was necessary - to show us the limits of rationality, which includes the limits of science. But now it should be obvious that this particular party is well and truly over. We need to return to an earlier position. We need to reinstate the concept of metaphysics.

Metaphysics asks the very biggest questions, including questions of values, which scientists are so careful not to address because they are not "soluble" by the methods of science.

Rational thinking is of course vital to serious inquiry, but it is not sufficient. If we don't want to limit our understanding to what we can see and measure and stub our toes on, we have to employ ways of thinking that are not, strictly, those of ratiocination. In practice, this means we must cultivate our intuitions.

Intuition is a broad-brush term, like "mind", and "consciousness", but it's none the worse for that. It means, broadly, what we feel in our bones to be true. Thus, intuition includes everything from our reflex fear of heights to our more specific fears of spiders or snakes, and includes our intuitive feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye: an intuitive feel, that is, for transcendence.

Specifically, the idea of transcendence is that the universe isn't just "stuff", with spaces in between. The universe itself is mindful. THe elusive term "spirituality" means just this: a feeling of being directly in touch with the mind of the universe. It isn't simply a hormone-induced dreaminess occasioned by sunsets and Schubert, but truly a feeling for transcendence.

Intuition and, specifically, the intuitive feeling for transcendence - for a reality behind what can be directly seen and measured - is, as i see it, the raw material of religion. Religion is not blind intuition, but the general feeling for transcendence which becomes embedded in a grand, all-embracing narrative. The task of religion is to cultivate intuition.

In theology, intuition and ratiocination are in perpetual dialogue, each testing and drawing on the strengths of the other. In Christianity we can see this in the New Testament with Thomas, the disciple who expressed his doubts because what he was asked to believe seemed to offend his reason. Faith is what we achieve when we decide, rationally, to trust our intuition.

Scientists themselves of course rely on their intuition, as all of us must. The history of science is littered with stories of scientists who suddenly see, in a flash - not quite out of the blue but more or less - what is the case. My own favourite example is that of the Nobel Prize winning cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock, who, sitting under a tree (trees seem good for intuition) suddenly perceived that genes may move around within the genome - the beginnings of the "jumping gene". She said it took her half a second to realise this and 3 hours to explain it to her colleagues. In this she was one up on Einstein who said that he perceived relativity in a flash and then spent the rest of his life explaining it.

Scientists must use their intuition, too, to tell them what is true. The math alone doesn't reveal the truth. It merely suggests possibilities. Most famously, the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prizewinner Paul Dirac said he judged the truth of an equation by its beauty. As Keats put the matter, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...that is all ye need to know". Indeed, the greatest scientists, like the greatest poets, are the most intuitive.

Science, properly conceived - including its limitations - is wonderful. I love it. I have spent my life on it. But it should be seen as Newton and Ray saw it: not as a means to take the world by the neck and bend it to our will, but as the means by which to admire the world and everything in it as fully as we are able.

Science in its standard form is just an exercise in applied materialism: the world and our fellow creatures are reduced to a resource, to be turned into commodities, to be sold for money.

Anyone who prevents us from doing this - who stands in the way of "progress" - is conceived as the enemy, and pushed aside, with the help of more science. The whole process is vile.

Religion is also conceived as the enemy, and indeed the people who stand in our materialist path are often dismissed as religious fanatics. Unfortunately, there are religious fanatics who respond by dismissing all science. The resulting spat makes for good television if you like that sort of thing, and it engages some of the world's best-paid "intellectuals", but it is nonsense nonetheless and unworthy of us all.

In truth, when science and religion are properly conceived, we can see that they belong together. They are not merely equal-but-separate. Religions properly conceived attempt to provide a complete narrative, a complete account of the world, and so should embrace the more limited agenda of science.

When science is embedded within its religious matrix the two together are the stuff of metaphysics, seeking to understand what the world is really like and where we belong within it, and what, therefore, our attitude should be towards it.

We might appropriately end with a quote from Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."

(Source: Resurgence magazine, Sept/Oct 2011)

Howl

By Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

Howl

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night