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This is a bit of a break from the norm. For all of you who complain I write too many words, here is something totally different - a short movie. I had an idea for a comedy script, but instead of writing it up as usual, I went the whole hog and made it into a film. It stars me, with a supporting cast of me, and features a superb cameo by me.

Somewhere between this universe and the imagination of George Lucas lies a wondrous place, made up of rude astrodroids and goofball jedis. It exists in a dimension parallel to The Empire Strikes Back and parallel to our own. In the last installment, we left the story with Han and Leia arriving at Cloud City, and Luke being trained by Yoda in the swamps of Degobah…

[Luke is doing a one-handed handstand, using his Jedi powers to levitate a rock and R2-D2, whilst juggling three balls with his free hand and twirling a hula hoop around one foot.]

Yoda: Concentrate. Feel the Force flow… yes. Good. Through the force, things you will see, other places, the future, the past, old friends long gone…

Luke: (Starts to laugh) You know, I was hanging out at Tosche Station this one time with Biggs, and he saw this girl… well we thought she was a girl…

Yoda: Concentrate, I said!

Luke: I was just telling you some of the stuff I was seeing, what with the Force and all. This Force is great. I’ll never need cable TV again.

[Luke drops one of the balls he was juggling.]

Yoda: Concentrate!

Luke: Okay. But there’s a new broadcast coming through. Ugh! Somebody’s being tortured… they were in pain…

Yoda: The future you see, your friends…

Luke: (Interrupts) I don’t recognize any of them. The victims mostly have brown skins. One is being tortured by having his fingernails pulled out. He is complaining that he’s a British citizen - what’s a British citizen? Some white guys in fancy suits occasionally look in the room and then leave again. When they leave they say that they’ve seen nothing wrong whilst they were in there and keep saying how this has nothing to do with something called ‘extraordinary rendition’. Then they stick their fingers in their ears and hum to block out the sounds of the screams… and then the screams get muffled because the put a bag over the victim’s head and pour water over him - it must be like drowning… how barbaric…

Yoda: Wrong, I was. Not the future. Another universe you must be seeing. More civilized tortures, The Empire uses. Waterboarding banned, according to their Health & Safety policy. Their preferred tortures are things like putting you in a room with a loud car alarm that keeps going off. Pretty annoying, after a while, that gets.

Luke: Wait, now I’m getting something new… there’s a guy in the central bank of planet Nigeriona. He’s got a message for me personally, even though we’ve never met. Somebody rich has died… nobody to inherit his wealth… I could have it all if only I send a small up-front payment to cover the administration charges to process my claim…

[Luke gets excited, and falls to the ground. The rock and R2-D2, who he was levitating, come crashing down as well.]

Yoda: Spam! Your filters, not working they are! Concentrate!

…

[Lando is escorting Leia, Han and company to their quarters on Cloud City.]

Leia: Are you telling me that this whole city is floating on thin air?

Lando: This planet is a gas giant. (Aside to Leia) But if you want to see something really gigantic, let’s go somewhere private…

Leia: No thanks. Now tell me, it must take a tremendous amount of energy to keep a city of five million people flying in the sky?

Lando: True. It’s very difficult to keep our city flying. We’re a small outpost and not very self-sufficient. We’ve had supply problems of every kind… we’ve had labour difficulties… but recently we found a fantastic new eco-friendly source of energy. Would you like me to show you?

Han: (Laughs) You sound like a businessman, or a responsible leader…

Lando: Sure I’m responsible… it’s the price you pay… (looks at Leia and winks) for being successful.

Leia: So you’re part of the mining guild then?

Lando: No, not actually. Our operation is small enough not to be noticed, which is advantageous for everybody since our customers are anxious to avoid attracting attention to themselves.

Han: Aren’t you afraid the Empire’s going to find out about this little operation, shut you down?

Lando: It’s always been a danger, and it looms like a shadow over everything we’ve built here. But things have developed that will ensure our security. Speaking of which… here’s the city’s new eco-power plant.

[Lando opens the door to the power plant and leads the heroes inside. Inside they see cage after cage containing little creatures that look like teddy bears - Ewoks. A big mechanical hand reaches down and picks up an Ewok by the scruff of its neck. It lifts him high in the air, then throws the Ewok - which makes a long 'eeeeee' sound as it falls - into an enormous furnace.]

Han: Urgh, what are these ugly little creatures called?

Lando: Ewoks. They’re a pestilence. They ruin everything they come into contact with. We have a deal with the Empire. They round them up and we humanely dispose of them.

Leia: By chucking them into a big fire?

Lando: They burn surprisingly well. Their insides are made of a kind of stuffing that is both soft and highly flammable. They breed like wildfire, they happily eat garbage, and they have no higher brain functions, all of which makes them an excellent and sustainable source of power.

[C-3PO wanders around a corner, a little out of sight from the rest of the group. He strays too close to an Ewok cage, and it grabs C-3PO's head, pulling it clean off.]

Leia: Well, I see no problem with burning these horrible little rodents. (In the background another Ewok falls - eeeeeeee - into the furnace.) But you say you did a deal with the Empire? I’m not exactly keen on them, you know.

…

[The local Jedi masters are enjoying their regular poker game at Jedi Master Tanah Lot's house on Degobah.]

Tanah Lot: I don’t think Yoda’s ever going to join us. (He throws some chips into the pile.) Call.

Bora Bodur: (Waves his fingers towards Tanah Lot.) You don’t want to call. You want to fold.

Tanah Lot: Puh-lease. You’re Jedi mind powers are too feeble to win that way. Stop trying to cheat and get on with the game.

[With Bora Bodur's attention distracted, Master Chechen Itcha uses his powers to briefly lift Bodur's cards from the table, and get a sneak peek.]

Bora Bodur: (Noticing his cards have moved) Oi! (He grabs his cards out of the air) You can’t look at my cards.

Chechen Itcha: Why not? I could sense you were bluffing all along.

Bora Bodur: Well, I can see the future, buddy. And in the near future you’ll be walking home after I win your car, as well as all your money and the shirt off your back.

Sha-na-ram-a-lang-a-ding-dong: Can’t we just play fair for once? Why does every poker game have to be spoiled by using Jedi powers?

Chechen Itcha: You’re only saying that ‘cos you’re winning. Let’s have a look at what’s up those sleeves… (Itcha uses his mindpowers to quickly roll up the sleeves on Sha-na-ram-a-lang-a-ding-dong’s jacket. Out falls the Ace of Spades.)

Sha-na-ram-a-lang-a-ding-dong: (Acting surprised) How did that get there?

Chechen Itcha: I knew it. I sensed you must be cheating. Nobody has luck that good.

Tanah Lot: (Sad) What a shameful bunch we are. We used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, fighting for justice and freedom. Now we sit round a table, fighting amongst ourselves over a miserable game of cards. We’ve made our homes in a swamp. How did we fall so low?

Bora Bodur: It’s all the fault of Yoda. He went to kill the Emperor but then he chickened out and ran away. And why didn’t that idiot Kenobi kill Vader, when he had the chance? We could still be on Coruscant, luxuriating in the splendour of the Jedi Temple…

Tanah Lot: Come on, it sounds like some of us are getting tempted by the dark side.

Bora Bodur: Do they let you gamble for more than matchsticks on the dark side?

Tanah Lot: Yes, but…

Bora Bodur: And do they let you use your powers to become rich?

Tanah Lot: They do, but…

Bora Bodur: And if we swapped to the dark side, could we get out of this smelly swamp?

Tanah Lot: Yes, but…

Bora Bodur: But what? I say we do it.

Tanah Lot: But we’d end up slaves of the Emperor.

Bora Bodur: Better a slave in a palace than king of the swamp.

Tanah Lot: The Emperor will make us do his dishes, and clip his toenails, and maybe even wipe his bottom.

Bora Bodur: Still better than living in a swamp.

Tanah Lot: The Emperor will make us listen to lots of speeches about preserving the natural order and protecting the people and all that guff.

Bora Bodur: That’ll be no worse than listening to one of Yoda’s sermons. At least the Emperor can string together three words in the correct order.

Tanah Lot: We’ll be bored. We won’t have anyone to fight. We won’t be allowed to do diplomatic negotiation because the Emperor’s just going to kill everyone who disagrees with him. They could do the same trick they did before and get the stormtroopers to try and shoot us in the back.

Bora Bodur: I can live with that risk.

Tanah Lot: We’ll have to comply with the Empire’s environmental recycling policies. We’ll have to put our rubbish into seven separate bins. Green for compostables. Brown for glass. White for paper. Blue for plastic bottles. Yellow for other plastic. Red for tin and aluminium. Black for non-recyclable.

Bora Bodur: What’s compostables?

Tanah Lot: Garden waste, food scraps, stuff like that.

Chechen Itcha: What about cardboard? That’s compostable.

Tanah Lot: That goes in the white bin, with the paper.

Bora Bodur: Why are plastic bottles separate to other plastics?

Tanah Lot: I guess it’s not made of the same kind of plastic.

Chechen Itcha: And I bet they expect you to keep all seven bins inside your house. I prefer the recycling scheme we got here. Throw it in the swamp and let the monsters eat it all.

Bora Bodur: Okay, okay. You win. We won’t go to the dark side. That recycling guff sounds like a real bore. I bet the local authority just tosses it all into the same landfill anyway.

…

[Luke has completed his training, and Yoda hands him a certificate as a mark of his accomplishments. Obi-Wan Kenobi looks on approvingly. Luke takes a look at his certificate. His mood suddenly changes from happy to angry.]

Luke: Hey, you spelled my name wrong! It’s Sky-walker, not Ski-walker. What kind of a stupid name is Ski-walker?

Yoda: Name as stupid as Sky-walker, it is. At least you can walk on skis. Seen anyone walk on skies, have you?

Luke: At least I have a surname.

Yoda: Certificate, give me. (He grabs it out of Luke’s hand.)

Luke: What are you doing?

Yoda: Certificate, change I will. (Yoda crosses out ‘Skiwalker’ and writes in ‘Skywalker’ instead. He hands it back to Luke).

Luke: (Frowning whilst staring at his messed-up certificate.) That’s just great. I paid double the standard rate for this?

Obi-Wan: Be happy Luke. You’ve just joined the ranks of the Jedi, and in record time too. Now you can go and save your friends on Bespin.

Luke: What?!?!? Are they in danger?

Obi-Wan: Yes. Very serious danger.

Yoda: (To Luke) Ready to face Vader, you are not.

Luke: That’s not what it says on my certificate. (Luke points at the small print which states he is ready to fight Sith Lords.)

Yoda: Yourself, suit you will. But if you fight Vader and lose, refund, none, you’ll get.

Luke: Han and Leia will die if I don’t go.

Obi-Wan: You don’t know that. Even Yoda cannot see their fate.

Luke: Man, you Jedis keep changing your tune. One minute you’re seeing the future, the next you have no idea. I’m outta here…

Obi-Wan: This is a dangerous time for you, when you will be tempted by the dark side of the Force.

Luke: I can believe that. (Waves his certificate) I bet they’re more careful with spelling people’s names on the dark side.

Yoda: No. They’re not. I lost count of how many times, my name, they got wrong. “Yoga”. “Yo-yo”. Even a “Jojoba” once.

[Luke climbs the ladder to the cockpit of the X-Wing.]

Luke: I don’t care about that. (To R2-D2) R2 - fire up the converters!

Obi-Wain: Luke! Don’t give in to hate. That leads to the dark side.

Yoda: Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.

Luke: I will. And I’ll return, I promise.

R2-D2: Bleep, flurp (translates as: “You can come back if you like, but you’ll never see me back in this sh*thole.”)

[Luke's X-Wing takes off.]

Yoda: (Sighs) Told you I did, reckless is he. Now, matters are worse.

Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope.

Yoda: No. There is another.

Obi-Wan: There’s another?

Yoda: Yes. Forget to mention, did I?

Obi-Wan: You did forget! Who is it? Is it Geoff Quantumslayer, from the planet Ibanjii?

Yoda: No.

Obi-Wan: Is it Anastasia Gridfunklier, on Pakrik Minor?

Yoda: No.

Obi-Wan: (Impatient) Well, why don’t you tell me who it is then?

Yoda: It’s… me! A comeback, I was thinking of making. The moves, I’ve still got!

Obi-Wan: You stupid old frog. You can’t jump around like you used to.

Yoda: (Dejected at Obi-Wan’s dismissive attitude.) Maybe you’re right. Let Skywalker and his sister do all the work, we should.

Obi-Wan: His sister? Do you a think a girl is up to the job? There’s not many girls who got far in the Jedi ranks.

Yoda: How could they? With you and Windu chasing every bit of skirt.

Obi-Wan: Speak for yourself. I lost count of how many of your female padawans gave birth to children with green pointy ears.

Yoda: Right, you are. If given women an equal chance, maybe we’d have had the numbers to defeat the Emperor.

Obi-Wan: Still, I remember this time I was training one young filly. She was strapping, well-built (he gestures as if cupping two large breasts.) I was giving her the old mind powers, you know… ‘you will undo your bra strap… you will undo your bra strap…’ but she was having none of it. Then old Mace Windu came along, and you know what he was like, and he whispered in my ear: “On this one’s planet, they’ve got three sexes. And this one ain’t one of the two that’s compatible with the equipment you’re packing…” The bugger had found out when he’d tried to bed her the night before! (Laughs.)

Yoda: (Laughing, wiping a tear from his eye) Happy days. (Yoda turns) To home, I shall go. Maybe still playing poker, they are.

Obi-Wan: Can I come?

Yoda: I think not. Like you looking at everyone’s cards, they don’t.

Obi-Wan: Oh, go on. You know how boring it is for me, being a disembodied spirit.

Yoda: Alright. But only if you promise to tell that story about you, Windu and those identical twins from Vandor-3.

…

[Han and Leia are alone in their guest quarters on Cloud City.]

Leia: Something’s wrong here. No-one has seen or knows anything about ‘3PO. He’s been gone too long to have gotten lost.

Han: (Puts his hands on Leia’s shoulders and kisses her on the forehead.) Relax. I’ll talk to Lando and see what I can find out.

Leia: I don’t trust Lando. He’s in league with the Empire!

Han: Well, I don’t trust him either. He cheats at cards! I only beat him because I cheat more! Besides, we’ll soon be gone.

Leia: Then you’re as good as gone, aren’t you?

[Han leans across to give Leia a smooch.]

[Chewbacca enters. He is carrying a box containing the dismembered parts of C-3PO.]

Leia: (To Chewbacca) Don’t you ever knock?

Han: What happened to ‘3PO?

Chewbacca: Roar-growl (translates as: “Those Ewok rodents pulled ‘3PO to bits!”)

Han: (Laughs) Hey, you should go easy on those ugly little fuzzballs. They’re kind of like your miniature cousins. They even have a similar name. EEE-Wok. Wok-EEE.

[Chewbacca motions to rip Han's arms out of his sockets.]

Han: Hey, hey, I was just kidding!

[Lando comes in.]

Leia: Doesn’t anyone knock round here?

Lando: Sorry, am I interrupting anything?

Leia: Not really. (Aside) Not since Chewbacca interrupted already.

Lando: I’m glad to hear it. You look absolutely beautiful. You truly belong here with us among the clouds.

Leia: I think I’ll keep my feet on the ground, thank you.

Lando: Will you join me for a little refreshment? Everyone’s invited of course.

Chewbacca: Growl. (translates as “I’m parched. I could really do with a beer.”)

Han: If you’re buying, I’m drinking!

Leia: (Frowning at Han) Looks like I’ve nothing better to do either.

Lando: (Noticing C-3PO in the box) Having trouble with your droid?

Han: No. He’s the latest Lego™ model. We took him to bits so we could rebuild him as a go-kart and take him for a spin.

Lando: Robots in disguise? What will they think of next!?! This way…

[Lando leads Chewie, Han and Leia to the tea rooms.]

Lando: I’ve got a very special guest I want you to meet…

[Lando opens the doors to the tea room. Darth Vader sits at the far end of a long table, sipping tea with Boba Fett. Han pulls his blaster and starts shooting at them.]

Darth Vader: (Stands up) Mr. Solo, (raising his hand to absorb the blaster shots) I see your reputation is well-deserved. You really do shoot first.

[Vader uses his powers to make Han's blaster fly from Solo's grip, into Vader's own hand.]

Leia: What do you want?

Boba Fett: I’d like the buttered scones, please.

Darth Vader: I think she was talking to me.

Boba Fett: Oh, sorry. You go ahead and order first. I’m only eating to be sociable anyway.

Darth Vader: She’s not the waitress. She’s Princess Leia Organa. I was hoping they’d join us.

Leia: Join you!?! I’ll never side with the Empire!

Darth Vader: No, I meant join us for tea. They really brew a very good cuppa. Though it’s darn tricky to drink it through this facemask. I use a straw, see? (Vader points at the drinking straw in his teacup.)

Lando: (Holding Han back) What do you think you’re doing? You’re upsetting my new business partner. Lord Vader supplies us with Ewoks for the furnace.

Han: He’s here to get us, you fool.

Darth Vader: No I’m not. I just want Luke Skywalker. There’s no need for any hostility between any of us. Let’s just sit and talk and share some tea whilst we wait for Luke.

Boba Fett: Actually, I’m here for them. At least, I’m here for Solo. He parked in Jabba the Hutt’s space, and he didn’t pay the fine.

Darth Vader: Well, you’ll just have to wait your turn. I want to chat to Mr. Solo and Princess Leia and Chewbacca first.

Leia: What do you want with us?

Darth Vader: I don’t want anything but for us to sit down and enjoy some tea and wait for Luke Skywalker to come and rescue you. He’s on his way already. Once he arrives, you’ll be free to enjoy the remainder of your stay on Cloud City, or leave whenever you like.

Leia: That sounds too good to be true.

Darth Vader: What do you want me to do? Do you want me to torture you? To be frank, I might have done that in the old days, but now I can’t bring myself to go through all the Health & Safety paperwork that comes with it. Anyway, about the worst we can do these days is to make you listen to a car alarm going off repeatedly. It does get pretty annoying after a while.

[A waiter arrives, carrying C-3PO in the box. He hands it over to Han and Chewbacca.]

Waiter: Excuse me, gentlemen. I believe you left your droid in your quarters. Lord Vader requested that your droid join the party.

Darth Vader: (Upset to see C-3PO in bits) WHAT!!??!?! What have you done to ‘3PO? He was the first robot I ever built. ‘3PO was a gift for my mother. Now look what you’ve done to him. He’s in bits and pieces!!!

Han: Hey, it wasn’t us. It was the Ewoks.

Darth Vader: A likely story. (Picks up C-3PO’s head and speaks to it) What have they done to you? (Turns to Boba Fett) Alas, I knew him well. I built him with my own hand. (Vader gestures with his hand) Not this hand, of course. I built him with the hand I had before it got chopped off and replaced by this one. I tried to build this hand too, but I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed a hand. (Turns to Han and Chewbacca) I was just going to let you two go, but pulling old ‘3PO to bits is an outrage. I’ll make you pay for hurting my mum’s protocol droid! Guards!

[A squadron of stormtroopers come running in.]

Darth Vader: Guards, escort these two (points at Han and Chewbacca) to the car alarm chamber…

To be continued…

Herodotus has a lot to answer for. He lived during the wars between Greece and Persia in the 5th Century BC. His writings about the origins of those wars mean he is now referred to as the ‘Father of History’. Herodotus also wrote about his extensive travels, and this started another, more unfortunate trend. He did not mean to, but Herodotus unwittingly started the business of marketing aimed at tourists. Herodotus, Father of History, was also the first person to write about ‘wonders’ of the world.

A couple of hundred years later, Philo of Byzantium followed Herodotus’ precedent, and came up with what in now considered the definitive seven wonders. He was writing the progenitor of a travel guide, but just like Lonely Planet it was out of date by the time it was published. The Colossus of Rhodes, a giant bronze statue of the god Helios, had fallen over the year before. If you wanted to see the wonders now, you would come up a long way short. Apart from the Great Pyramid at Giza, none are standing. The Lighthouse of Alexandria lasted longest, but was eventually toppled by earthquakes. If you want to see the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos you had best go to the British Museum. They have some good bits that were left over after Crusaders used the rubble to build a castle. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon lasted a millennium and half a millennium respectively, which proves the adage ‘they used to build them to last’ - but not long enough. The most destructive history, however, belongs to the Temple of Artemis built near Ephesus. It was first destroyed by an arsonist, Herostratus. His motivation was pretty stupid. Herostratus destroyed the temple just so he would be famous. To serve him right, the people decided to not write down his name, so it would be forgotten. That largely worked, though by now you will have noticed that somebody cheated. The Ephesians rebuilt the temple, but then Goths went on a rampage and knocked it down again. The Ephesians were stubborn, and rebuilt the temple yet again. By this time, Christianity was changing. It had been a poor, downtrodden religion whose adherents suffered greatly from persecution. It was turning into the state religion, and it was the Christians’ turn to do the persecuting. Not content with closing the temples that worshipped the wrong gods, Saint John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, personally led a mob to pull the Temple of Artemis down. So if you ever find your house or place of work under attack from a riot, you can console yourself that the rioters are behaving just like saints.

The real reason we still talk about the wonders of the world is that they beautifully serve the purpose of sounding official enough to influence where you take your holidays, but are unofficial enough for everybody to invent their own list, or to add their own crummy tourist trap to the list. People who work in marketing for tourism always have a way of telling you that, wherever you are or wherever you have been, there is somewhere else you really must see. I once stayed in a hotel right next to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Mena House Oberoi. It was right next to the Pyramid. You walked out of the hotel and up the hill for ten minutes and you were at the Pyramid’s base. It was a short break for a few days, so we picked somewhere luxurious and ideal for the one historical monument we wanted to see. Yet, the whole time I was there, I was plagued by people suggesting I visit the pyramids - the pyramids located elsewhere in Egypt. The greatest pyramid of all, the only remaining wonder of the world from the original list, stands just a few hundred yards from your hotel balcony, but countless strangers suggest that what you really want to do is to get on a bus and go see another pyramid somewhere else. That is marketing logic for you.

Marketing logic now means there are quite a few more ‘wonders of the world’. We have ‘wonders of the modern world’, ‘wonders of the natural world’, and even ‘wonders of the underwater world’. Creating new lists of the wonders of the world is a bit like arriving at a bus stop, not wanting to join the back of the queue, so starting a new queue instead. There are so many ‘eighth wonders of the world’ that you marvel that so many people have had the cheek to consider their wonder to be eighth, and not ninth, tenth or eleventh. Being ‘eighth wonder’ is a bit like arriving at a bus stop and being prepared to queue, but only if you get to go eighth in line. Of course, if you get hundreds of wonders, then each wonder is a lot less significant than if you only have seven or eight wonders. That is how marketing logic works - you end up with hundreds of wonders, but each pretends it is in a special group of seven or eight. So here is my compilation of the wonders of the world, designed to find out how many there really are. I scoured the internet for as many lists and eighth wonders as I could find. In no particular order (except that I start with Philo’s seven) is the complete list of wonders of the world…

1. Great Pyramid of Giza
2. Hanging Gardens of Babylon
3. Statue of Zeus at Olympia
4. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
5. Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
6. Colossus of Rhodes
7. Lighthouse of Alexandria
8. Stonehenge

Okay, they are big stones, but they are pretty lame compared to the Great Pyramid

9. Colosseum
10. Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa
11. Great Wall of China

Great Wall, or great folly? If you wanted to get past it, you just got a traitor to open one of the gates…

12. Porcelain Tower of Nanjing
13. Hagia Sophia

Including the Hagia Sophia in a list of wonders shows how two-faced people can be about wonders - the Hagia Sophia was built using stones taken from the Temple of Artemis by Saint John Chrysostom’s mob!

14. Leaning Tower of Pisa

Says it all about why you should not add to the list of wonders. The Lighthouse at Alexandria was tall and straight. Building a crooked tower is no wonder, if you did not mean to!

15. Taj Mahal
16. Cairo Citadel
17. Ely Cathedral
18. Cluny Abbey
19. Channel Tunnel
20. CN Tower
21. Empire State Building
22. Golden Gate Bridge
23. Itaipu Dam
24. Delta Works/ Zuiderzee Works
25. Panama Canal
26. Petra
27. Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro
28. Machu Picchu
29. Chichen Itza
30. Potala Palace
31. Old City of Jerusalem
32. Polar ice caps

Come on! Who put this on a list of wonders? It is a lot of ice where the world is coldest. Geez. About as wondrous as my freezer when it is time for it to be defrosted.

33. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument
34. Internet

All I can say is that some people are too easily impressed. Or have no idea what the internet actually is.

35. Maya ruins

It goes from bad to worse. Could they not work out which ruins were specifically the most wondrous ones?

36. Great Migration of Serengeti and Masai Mara

We are really stretching the envelope now…

37. Grand Canyon

As voted by 100% of Americans who do not have a passport.

38. Great Barrier Reef
39. Harbour of Rio de Janeiro
40. Mount Everest
41. Aurora
42. Parícutin volcano
43. Victoria Falls

Water falls off a cliff. Okay, it is a lot of water and a big cliff, but you get my point.

44. Palau

This is where the list gets a lot of input from underwater divers, hence I have no idea whether these really are that wondrous… or even where they are (unless it says so in the name)

45. Belize Barrier Reef
46. Deep-Sea Vents
47. Galápagos Islands

What, every bit of each island is a wonder? Even the bit where they erected a portaloo so you could take a dump?

48. Lake Baikal
49. Northern Red Sea
50. SS Great Eastern
51. Bell Rock Lighthouse
52. Brooklyn Bridge

Nice bridge, but come on… a wonder of the world?

53. London sewerage system

At last, a real wonder that does not get the credit it deserves. It did the tricky job (no pun intended) of saving London from being buried in sh*t (though some might argue it was not enough).

54. First Transcontinental Railroad

I am just copying from other sites. You would think that they would come up with a more impressive title for something that was a wonder. Or at least let you know where it started and ended.

55. Hoover Dam

Named after the George W. Bush of his time.

56. Bali

I have been to Bali. I am pretty sure the average Aussie surfboarder is not thinking ‘wonder of the world’ as he drunkenly lurches from one Kuta bar to the next…

57. Angkor Wat
58. Forbidden City
59. Bagan Temples & Pagodas
60. Karnak Temple
61. Teotihuacán
62. Iguazu Falls
63. Amazon Rainforest

Many parts of the world used to be covered in forest, you know. Man chopped them down. So the Amazon Rainforest is a wonder only because it is one forest we have not chopped down yet. But we will probably level it in the end…

64. Ngorongoro Crater
65. Bora Bora
66. Cappadocia
67. Milford Sound, New Zealand
68. Natural Tunnel, in Virginia
69. Pink and White Terraces near Rotorua, New Zealand

At last, a relatively honest ‘eighth wonder’, in the sense that nobody can exploit it any longer - the terraces were destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1886.

70. Giant’s Causeway
71. Burney Falls in California

The connection between wonders and US Presidents goes on and on. This ‘wonder’ was nominated by Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps the real ‘wonder’ is why US Presidents feel entitled to determine the wonders of the world. You might think they were too busy to do a comprehensive survey…

72. Banaue Rice Terraces, Philippines

This is a better entry than most. Carved with minimal tools into steep-sided mountains, these rice terraces are visually stunning as well as an epic feat of human endeavour. Try walking up and down those mountains for a few days, and you will soon understand just what it took to make them. Of course, what makes them so amazing is also why they are less likely to make it on to most people’s list - they are bloody hard to get to, and people do not tend to list wonders if they have never seen them…

73. The Terracotta Army of Xi’an

I have to say, I was rather underwhelmed when I visited the Terracotta Army in Xi’an. Sure, there are loads of them, and it was pretty mental to make a load of statues and then to bury them, but I am not sure I would call them a wonder. If they were, than making any art in very large numbers and then burying it would also have to count as a wonder. The real wonder is that the army was buried next to an earthen pyramid that is 76 meters tall. The mind boggles at might be hidden underneath that.

74. Amber Room in the Catherine Palace
75. The monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial
76. The rock-hewn churches at Lalibela
77. The stelae of Axum
78. Sigiriya, Sri Lanka
79. Royal Palace in Amsterdam
80. Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty is only a wonder if you are impressed by fat French women who have turned a peculiar shade of green.

81. The moai statues of Easter Island
82. Palm Islands of Dubai

Expensive. Impressive. But a wonder? This wonder will soon be diluted when we realize just how many plans there are to build palm islands elsewhere in the world. This entry will seem as anachronistic as all those skyscrapers that have since been surpassed by yet more skyscrapers.

83. Sydney Opera House

It is beautiful, but the real wonder here is the same as for many other ambitious modern constructions - you wonder how they managed to make something so much smaller than originally planned whilst spending so much more than originally budgeted…

84. Thames Barrier
85. Bahá’í terraces, on Mount Carmel
86. Three Gorges Dam
87. Reliant Astrodome

If you listen to Americans for long enough, then you might end up believing that fourteen of the world’s seven wonders lie within the borders of the US.

88. West Baden Springs Hotel
89. King Kong

At least, he is the eighth wonder according to the movie. But then, King Kong does not actually exist.

90. André the Giant

André the Giant, a wrestler, was proclaimed the eighth wonder by the World Wrestling Federation. People who watch pro wrestling will believe anything.

Compared to the seven wonders, I much prefer the seven blunders per Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It is a good antidote after wading through a list of bombast.

1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle

My guess is that some of the items listed in the 90 wonders of the world owe a debt to blunders three and four on Gandhi’s list - knowledge without character and commerce without morality. Saying that, some people never learn. Gandhi wrote his list of seven blunders for his grandson. His grandson was then unable to resist temptation. He coined an eighth blunder of the world: ‘rights without responsibilities’. If he was going to make an addition, he should have gone with ‘lists without end…’

There are always quite a few news stories about porn, and this week was no different. This week’s porn stories included: a toy shop saying sorry because somebody was using one of the display laptops to look at porn; a teacher accidentally sharing some self-made porn with her pupils; and Britain’s former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, revealing she is not happy that her husband watches porn. The human fascination with porn is easy enough to understand. Porn is about sex. Humans are interested in sex. We are all here because of sex. Saying that, these stories are rather unedifying. They are not really ‘news’, in the sense they are not very informative. We all know what the world is like. Taboos are there to keep things polite, but only the naïve are ignorant of the fact that sexual urges lead to the use of porn and the use of porn can sometimes lead to embarrassment when it becomes public. If I saw porn on a laptop in a toy shop, I would mention it the nearest shop assistant, but I would not run to local newspaper to share my story. Mistakes happen. There must be some kids who have seen or heard their parents having sex but we are not planning to ban marital sex just in case. No toy shop is going to make money by erecting a big screen and putting Best of Big Booty Buttf*cks Part 7 on continual loop. In the second story, a woman made a home film of herself doing something lewd. She was pretty careless to then stick it on a DVD and give it to her pupils, but it was an accident. It was a very peculiar accident, unless the woman has delusions about being a low-end Paris Hilton. The safest conclusion is that it was an accident. The likeliest outcome is that the fathers will be taking an unusual interest in their children’s schoolwork. Finally, a woman reaches high political office, but her husband masturbates to porno flicks. Is that a news story? Of course not. Nor is the ‘revelation’ that a wife might not be keen on her husband’s auto-gratificatory habits. This is contrived step number 1 in Smith’s attempt to rebuild her reputation, trying to get sympathy as a woman/feminist/whatever who has to put up with her husband’s need to bash the bishop now and then. As a man, my sympathies are with the husband, and I entirely understand why he wants to play his pink oboe with a little accompaniment. A nagging wife will not change that instinct, no matter how much she cites Simone de Beauvoir or Andrea Dworkin whilst trying to intellectualize the reasons why porn is bad. Instead of changing the subject, she should to stick to apologizing for why she has such bad judgment to employ a member of staff (her husband), at taxpayer’s expense, who is so incompetent or greedy that he tries to gets his wank aids paid by the taxpayer too.

Nuclear weapons, in contrast to porn, get less reliable news coverage. If a ‘bad’ nation wants to have nuclear weapons, it is a big story. North Korea and Iran can starve and shoot their own people as much as they like, but the big story to Western media is that they are, or might be, striving to get the bomb. That is why you hear a lot less about the swines that govern Burma. They beat their monks and imprison their nobel laureates all the time, but have no nuclear aspirations. In contrast, everybody is pretty much relaxed about the fact that ‘good’ nations, like the US, Russia and China, have enough nuclear weapons to kill us all. And then enough to kill us all again, just to be on the safe side. And when it comes to the Israelis, we know that talking about their nukes is a bigger taboo than talking about the masturbatory habits of Jacqui Smith’s husband. The emerging story is that we have a US President who is seemingly keen to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles. We also have some Russian despots who are willing to go along with the talk so long as it does not usurp the exaggerated importance of their nation (2nd largest nuclear stockpile, but only the 8th largest economy). Plus we have some Europeans leaders happy to offer to cut their nukes too, not least because nobody has promised anything yet and because they are a bit short for cash thanks to their economic mismanagement. We found out this week that the world’s super-bullies, the governments of the USA and Russia, intend to talk about cutting nuclear weapons arsenals. It is an oddity that the power to kill countless people and devastate our planet has become part of the wallpaper of life, barely mentioned unless something comes along that threatens to shift the ‘balance’ of power (meaning from those who have more power to those who have less). Meanwhile, we never tire of hearing about pornographic peccadillos.

Some feminists, quite a few parents, and various religious folk dream of a world without pornography. Obama talks about a world without nuclear weapons, and maybe a few people take him seriously. A few more pretend to take him seriously. However, there is little effort required to imagine life without porn or nukes. First, think of this world. Then imagine this world, moving through time. Then imagine it moves back to the Dark Ages. We had a world without porn and nukes, and it was awful. People were ignorant, the world’s population fell, plague killed many, there were wars and religious intolerance, and little in terms of cultural or architectural achievement. I am not saying that the Black Death would have been cured by Hustler magazine, but there is a connection between why we have nukes and porn today, and why the world is a better place than it used to be. Science and technology changes lives. Improved knowledge of how the world works drives the improvement of humanity’s lot. With greater capability, we have greater potential to improve human lives. How we organize and manage our communities also makes a difference, but societal changes are unpredictable in terms of whether people benefit, who benefits, and by how much. In contrast, knowing how to do new things has pretty consistently meant better lives for real people. It enables us to share information, cure diseases, feed more and create material wealth. However, there will be the occasional downside - just ask any surviving First World War soldier about the merits of machine guns or mustard gas. One problem with useful knowledge is that, once it is known, it is hard to make it unknown, or to keep it restricted. That problem gets worse every year, because the individual’s ability to communicate and spread information keeps getting better. The other problem is that useful knowledge can be used to do things that some people might consider less than useful, such as broadcasting images of people’s private parts, or constructing ‘deterrents’ to war that work by guaranteeing holocaust.

Because good knowledge sometimes has bad uses, the human race often engages in a push-me-pull-you wrestling match with itself. We promote science and technology, invest in its progress, deplore and try to eliminate the bad uses that result, whilst investing yet more into those bad uses for the promise of financial gain and national security. Listening to politicians, the seeming solution to porn and nukes is the same: monitoring, control, audit, and restriction. This is nonsense. When a president, oligarch, autocrat or monarch asks for something to be monitored, controlled, audited and restricted, they mean for it to be monitored, controlled, audited and restricted by them. They do not mean for anyone else to have the power to monitor, control, audit or restrict. They especially do not mean for anyone else to have that power over them. That is the square that cannot be circled.

The debate about good versus bad uses of technology, whether it be printing presses for Playboy or D. H. Lawrence novels, whether it be communications protocols used to share this blog or pedophilia, whether it be nuclear reactions for controlled generation of electricity or uncontrolled explosions, comes down to some people trying to overrule everybody else in the debate about what is good, and what is bad. Needless to say, like Jacqui Smith and her porno-grazing husband, the people who like to say what is good and bad are likely to put their own interests, desires and needs ahead of the interests of everybody else. Whether talking about the movement of money, electronic communications, weapons controls, or censorship standards, the forward progress of ability has cast many of the world’s leaders in the role of wanting to go beyond national boundaries and ‘work together’ for the common good. The leaders of countries now find their power is usurped and undermined in an international world, where nuclear secrets, videos of riots and sexual images are increasingly easy to transmit across borders. In turn, it becomes harder and harder to stop this collective tide of information, entertainment and filth from being exploited by weaker and poorer nations, by smaller organizations, or by individuals.

The instinct of rulers, when faced with diminished power, is to respond by tightening the leash. They will work together to monitor, control, audit, and restrict more. In the process, they will put their own nation’s interests ahead of those of other nations, and put the interests of rulers above those of the people they supposedly serve. That is why you never hear US politicians talking about nuclear disarmament in Israel. Meanwhile, they rant on and on about controlling the nations they can still control, or at least try to influence. That is why Gary McKinnon, a British man with an obsession with UFOs and a gift for hacking, is being threatened with punishment for showing up the gaps in the so-called security of US intelligence. This is an individual who wanted to find out about little green men, not a foreign power infiltrating code to shutdown America’s power grid, yet the laws to punish the people are used to punish the people that can be punished, and are powerless in the face of the real threats to peace and security. As part of the price of international co-operation, the British government is once again lying down and playing dead for the sake of good relations with the US, this time by stifling parliamentary opposition about McKinnon’s extradition. What is the supposed reason why Britain’s democratically elected representatives can say nothing about this proposed brutalization of this man? What reason is there to allow American authorities to cover their arses and divert attention after they incompetently left security loopholes that even a lone hobbyist could exploit? McKinnon should not be punished. He should be put on the payroll and asked to help these buffoons tighten their security. British MPs are not allowed to speak out to defend McKinnon, because supposedly they might prejudice McKinnon’s appeal against extradition. In other words, if British MPs exercise their freedom of speech, and their parliamentary right, to say that a bad thing is happening, that might influence the judges who have to decide if McKinnon’s appeal has merit. What poppycock. And what exactly is McKinnon appealing? He is appealing that Jacqui Smith, the woman who uses taxpayer’s money to employ her husband to claim for wankfilms from the taxpayer, might have made yet another bad decision. Given Smith’s track record for blundering, that seems like a good enough argument on its own. Case closed. Excuse me if I am suspicious of whether Britain’s rulers, in trying to stop debate of McKinnon’s case, are motivated more by their own interests than by the interests of the people.

With power comes choices, and with new powers comes new choices. Human know-how is increasing, and this creates new powers and new choices. But the human instincts, human intellect and human selfishness changes a lot less rapidly than the pell-mell of new capabilities, whether they be used to make bombs or titillate base desires. It is because people do not change that new capabilities are made to serve old human pursuits. People still lust for power and they still lust for flesh. Our leaders wear modern suits, but they are essentially no different to the people who ruled throughout history. For every Charlemagne, there is a Stalin. For every Fidel Castro, a Julius Caesar. For every Nehru, a Herod. For every Alexander the Great, a George W. Bush. Our current rulers are unlikely to be wiser or better than the average over history, and even if they are, there is no guarantee that the next rulers will keep beating the averages. They will want to monitor, control, audit, and restrict for the same reasons as earlier rulers tried to do the same. New technology gives them new excuses to do so, and new capabilities to do so. The option to achieve greatness by military victory is all but gone, but will be sublimated into programs to create clubs of world leaders, jockeying for power amongst themselves, but also with greater power over their subjects. If they work together, it is harder for pesky rogue states - or rogue individuals - to circumvent their authority. That means more than changing the balance of power between nations. It also means changing the balance of power between rulers and the people they rule. Every excuse will be called upon to justify the shift, be it nuclear weapon proliferation, the war on terror, preventing prostitution, ending human trafficking, stifling pornography, protecting children, or reducing tax evasion. In some cases they will be right, and in others wrong. But if the see-saw of power sees the emergence of a club of world rulers, as some of them would seemingly like, then there will be only one force left to balance them - the common people. That might mean learning to tolerate the occasional auto-erotic faux pas, for the sake of protecting us from something far worse.

The world is absurd, of course. I am trying to re-read Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he deals head-on with the big question of whether you should or should not commit suicide in this absurd world. As essays go, the conclusion is hardly a nail biter. Camus lived all the way through from writing the first word to writing the last word, so even without reading the essay you know what his conclusion is going to be. In that sense, reading it is about as suspenseful as watching one of those US television serials where an important and popular permanent character suffers a terrible accident that threatens to kill them at the start of an episode. By the end of the show, somebody else will have devised a clever way of saving the stricken character. By the start of the next show, the temporary invalid will be back to full health and completely rehabilitated. So we know that Camus thought we should go on living and doing things, even if he also thought all the reasons for living and doing things are absurd.

I am as inclined to absurdity as the next man. In fact, probably more so, unless the next man is Sacha Baron Cohen in which case I defer to his genius for the absurd. You could regard Sacha Baron Cohen as living proof that Buddhism is in error. If a Jewish comedian leading a hillbilly audience in a sing-a-long of “Throw the Jew Down the Well” is not instant nirvana, I do not know what is. Gautama Buddhaa may have starved and meditated for many a year in order to attain enlightenment, but Baron Cohen turned enlightenment into light entertainment. But after Baron Cohen, Camus and the Supreme Buddha, I feel pretty confident of ranking myself as somebody who thinks life is absurd and its purpose is mysterious. Which, as Wittgenstein might have pointed out, does not help much when deciding what groceries to buy from the supermarket, or whether to spend my Saturday morning writing a blog or doing something which, at face value, might seem equally absurd.

Being an idealist-realist-cynic-romantic in the Humphrey Bogart vein, I often find myself doing things that I know are emotionally and intellectually right on one level, but which I feel are silly and pointless on another level. But then I console myself that Bogart was very popular, so perhaps it is okay to leave some feelings unreconciled. Instead of writing this blog, I should be filling out a form from the co-operative bank (which leads me to notice that they too have joined the cummings-esque craze for dispensing with capitals). I need to fill out the form because, in all likelihood, I will soon be the Pirate Treasurer, by which I mean I will be Treasurer of the Pirate Party UK (although more probably GB, but let us not get into that now). Assuming the role of national Treasurer for a political party has caught me by surprise as much as anyone else, not least because only a month ago I was unaware of the party’s existence. Or, to be precise, I was unaware of the party’s pre-existent intention to imminently come into existence, which hopefully it soon will. It is all the fault of the European elections, and for my web browsing habits, as I could not help myself when seeing the Swedish Pirate Party had won a sear in those elections, and I was curious to see what similar things were happening in my homeland. Perhaps if I had been working, instead of indulging one of my inter-working ‘rest’ periods, I would not have had time to find out more and hence would never have offered to be Treasurer, but I was not, so I did, and soon I will be.

On mentioning my aspiration to be Pirate Treasurer, most sane friends have commented on the name of the party. I like it, not least because of its absurdity. Check out the Electoral Commission’s register of political parties and there are no end of parties calling themselves the People’s this-and-that, National such-and-such or Independent bing-bang-bosh. No Pirate Parties though, which gives us a huge and enormous advantage in having a memorable and unique name. Of course, most people think Pirates are characters like Long John Silver or Captain Hook, which is none too helpful. Associations with Somalian hijackers of container ships are also unfortunate. Taking my queue from the absurdities of political semantics and the gay pride movement in particular, I started rationalizing to my friends that we Pirates are ‘taking back’ the name from the people who use it to oppress us.

Who were the great British pirates of history? They were people like Sir Francis Drake. He stole from the Spanish, but they were a corrupt bunch of buggers who were exploiting the natives in the Americas, so his stealing and robbing was actually a good thing. The British establishment thought of it as a kind of high-risk enterprise on the high seas. Captains were small businessmen and their crew were profit-incentivized stakeholders. So long as they stuck to stealing from Britain’s enemy, Spain, they were called privateers, not pirates. Privateering was private enterprise, not a public ill. Given that Britain was at war Spain, and that the Spanish had all the loot worth stealing, it was a win-win for Queen Elizabeth I’s government to sanction theft from its enemies, and for the thieves to be rewarded with titles and honours. Plus the pirate-privateers proved very handy when the Spanish Armada came to invade Britain, as their skillful skulduggery saved the day.

So you see, pirates are really very good to have around, when circumstances require people with a more adventurous, unorthodox, independent and rebellious streak to their nature. I do not know my mizzen mast from my poop deck, but I do know that now is the time for a few people of piratical instincts. In an absurd world, we crave money and possessions above all other things, to the point where many of us have become indentured slaves to the legal persons we created. By legal persons I am referring to the legal personage of an incorporated business. Big companies have become so important that, although they are the immaterial inventions of human minds, we owe them money, are controlled by them, and are incapable of stopping the harm they cause. When these companies behave badly, they go unpunished. They are instead rewarded with gifts of money taken from real people, because we cannot live without them any more. When these companies destroy our confidence in the fiction of money, we solve the problem with quantitative easing, a fancy name for a process where a man in the Bank of England presses a button on a computer, and hence magically increases the amount of money the Bank of England says it has. Piling absurdity upon absurdity, the legal fiction of a company can own and exploit the legal fiction of a possession, in order to extort real money from real people. These possessions are so expensive to own and exploit that real people cannot afford to own or exploit them, even though real people are needed to create them. Of course, I am talking about so-called ‘intellectual property’. At the summit of the pyramid of absurdity, the legal fiction of a company will complain about losing some of the legal fiction of money for things they did not sell and would never have sold, because real people used some ‘intellectual property’ without asking for permission or offering payment. This intellectual property is made from the same thin air as used to make money and make laws, yet to some people it is more real than the real suffering of real people all over this world. In this world, poor people suffer. They suffer because of the lack of cheap drugs, because of the premium that must be paid for intellectual property. They suffer when they are economically exploited by the wealthy nations that own all this so-called property. Now is the time for some good, old-fashioned real people to stand up to all this corrupting nonsense. If they get called pirates, so be it. Pirates are not just works of fiction. Real pirates were real heroes. We need some heroes to launch a broadside on this tyranny of legal fantasies and the deadly, dehumanizing devastation they cause.

People used to believe the world was full of spirits. I think they still do. Animism is the proto-religion where stones, the sun, the rivers and the natural world is full of spiritual life. We stopped believing stones have spirits, but whilst our intellects have developed, our instincts take longer to evolve, and lag behind. Now, our instincts tell us that everything must have a legal underpinning if it is to exist. We can barely imagine what it means for something to exist, without first knowing what its legal status is. Legality has become the immaterial fabric which supplanted spirituality. Without legality, we feel like the universe will tear itself apart, as we face an abyss of meaninglessness. The law has become our comforter, solving Camus’ problems by reducing every question to one of what the law says is right or wrong, exists or does not exist. Our ontology is a list in a law book. Our ethics are the distribution of justice in terms of penalties and compensations handed out by our courts. Our philosophy of science is to have blind faith in legal institutions.

I, like everybody else, am afflicted by the delusion that laws exist. Responsibilities tend to force you to think clearly about things, and recently I had to think clearly about the question: ‘what is a political party’? I know what a registered political party is, and recently I have been reading the laws regarding registration in order to aid the registration of the Pirate Party. But what is a political party, without registration? Does it exist? Can it do things? Can it own things? These have been questions in my mind. Now, I feel quite stupid and ashamed for wondering about such silly things. My first good answer was to think that political parties are unincorporated associations. In short, they are not separate legal persons from their members, but they are governed by an agreement between its members. That answer is a good and correct answer, and befits someone like me with professional training. But really that answer is a fancy way of saying a political party is something that a group of people decide to do collectively. Suddenly all the mystique disappears, and I am confronted with the crushing banality that comes hand-in-hand with absurdity. If a group of people decide to do something, they decide to do something. Everything else is detail. The same is true whether we talk about political parties, or governments, or laws. Everything comes back to us all making collective decisions. The greatest trick played on mankind was convincing mankind that something greater than mankind exists. I blame animism, or whatever instinct causes us to ascribe causes to non-existent powers. All we have done, in our clever, modern way, is to transplant that fantasy to laws and business and money and government and all the other human inventions that we allowed to become our masters when they should always have remained our servants.

Pirates were not immoral people. Obeying the law and doing the morally right thing are not the same. Sometimes they coincide, at other times they are in opposition. Real pirates often ran their ships in very democratic fashion, as might be expected when you realize that there is no greater legal force that will hunt down and punish the mutineers if they get fed up with the captain and throw him overboard. Pirates were often lawbreakers, unless their actions were convenient to the lawmakers and hence they were rebranded as privateers. Sometimes breaking the law is necessary, to do the right thing. It turns out that now, increasingly, the law is bad, and needs to be changed. However, it is upheld by corrupt people who profit from the law. Just like slave traders and slave owners saw no advantage from prohibiting slavery, our corrupt rulers and corrupt business leaders see no advantage in changing the thoroughly rotten way our world economy controls and exploits us. Did you notice my slip up in my last sentence? Again, I was caught by the delusion that the law is real. Slavery cannot be prohibited because there is no thing in the real world which you can point at and say “this is what it means for a man to own another man”. Slavery can only be repealed. There were corrupt and unjust laws that said one man could buy, sell, and own another man. We stopped using those laws. We stopped following them. We stopped accepting them. We did away with a bad fiction that had terrible consequences for real people. We need to do the same again, to our companies, to our markets, to our money, and to our property. We must reform these legal fictions so they serve people, instead of enslaving them. Pirates were free, in a very true sense of the word. We need that sense of pirate freedom to liberate us all. The alternative, as Camus might have pointed out, is to imbibe the anesthesia served to us by all our legal fictions, and sleepwalk our way to our deaths.

I have been listening to the BBC Reith Lectures recently. In them, Professor Michael Sandel talks on the theme of ‘A New Politics of the Common Good’. He raises good questions, but often stops short of giving good answers. Such is the problem of unpacking a complicated topic of how to live a good life, when there are evidently many competing interests in what is good, and who gets what. One lecture, however, had particular relevant for my personal struggles with the absurdity of the intangible forces that now seemingly govern all human life. Amongst other things Sandel’s lecture discussed marriage, and the legal fight for same-sex marriages. Once again, law was the final arbiter of what was right, and what was wrong. In Sandel’s example, the lawyers looked at the purpose of marriage, and hence the purpose of a same-sex marriage and concluded that the purposes were sufficiently common that having the same sex should not be a barrier to marriage. It would be tempting to pick through the legal arguments, and I am convinced that many people have. However, there is a flaw in that approach. Whatever the lawyers argue, they are prisoners to the flawed method they use. Either they follow legal principles to a logical conclusion, or they do not. If they follow legal principles to a logical conclusion, they are prisoners of an irrational system, that starts from arbitrary first principles that were never agreed, and may not be shared by real people. People married before there was a law for marriage. In history, laws followed behaviour. What people did came first, and laws to govern what they did came later. It is only in recent times that we seriously expect laws to determine behaviour. Now we pass laws without caring about people, and use the power of the state and enforcement to make people change to suit the laws. Whatever the original purpose of marriage, nobody was thinking ahead and trying to devise principles to be followed by lawyers in centuries to come. They were just acting on their instincts to settle down with a companion. So lawyers can expand upon the law in a rational way, but they have no point of view on the essential irrationality that underpins it. If, on the other hand, lawyers do not follow legal principles to a logical conclusion, they are arbitrary, and their arbitrary decisions are in no way superior to any other arbitrary decisions. Whilst we let them pontificate on what is marriage, we forget that we, as ordinary people, determine what our human relations really are. The laws that surround us are a cage of our own making, with the lawyers playing the part of well-paid gaolers.

The instincts to marry, whether between a man and a woman, a man and a man, and a woman and a woman, are particular to the individuals whilst universal to our species. Legal arguments serve no great benefit other than to demand changes not in how the married people see each other, but in how everyone else sees them. They too are falling prey to the delusion that law binds and controls everything, and everybody. Of course they are right that law binds and controls, but only in as much as we accept and condone the law. Its power to bind has a limit, and when tightened too far, it snaps, and loses all force. The law can bind but it must be elastic too, and fit the shape of the people it binds.

If the law works as it should, then principles are followed to a conclusion. In this regard, the outcome of the law is as predictable as Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. What beguiles are the many steps between. Lawyers walk each step to see where the conclusion lies. But this is folly. This is artifice, and no person thinks in the way that a lawyer pretends to. Either their conclusions are morally right, or they are morally wrong. Either same-sex marriage is morally right, or morally wrong. Either enforcing intellectual property is morally right, or morally wrong. Either the recent actions of bank are morally right, or morally wrong. Legality is a confusion, treading a rational path from an irrational starting point, and feigning surprise when it reaches its destination. It pretends to travel aimlessly, with no idea of where it wants to go and no idea of where it will end up. We, as people, can see if we arrived where we wanted. Just like pirates, we all navigate and all must take responsibility for where life takes us. The wind may buffet us, and the sea may swell, but we are the ultimate masters of our own fates. It is not satisfactory to play the part of the lawyer, reach the end of a journey, discover we are in a bad place, and say we went the right way but must have started from the wrong place. We must pick our destinations and our destinies, and not let blind justice take us on a journey that leads to the reward of wrongs and punishment of what is good.

So now, in this absurd world, I am set to be a Pirate Treasurer, and I will using one of those horrid banks to manage our horrid money and change those horrid laws. I will be managing legal fiction upon legal fiction in a quest to change some other legal fictions. Worst of all, I will be making myself even more subject to the law than before, as I will be have to pay heed to all those laws about party finance (you know, the laws that mainstream parties pay lip service to, then diligently work around). I do not have a cutlass or a parrot, but I do have a calculator and an understanding of double-entry bookkeeping. With them I intend to wage war on the corrupt businesses, rulers, and laws of our land. The Pirate Party stands for reform. Our chances our slim. Our enemies are numerous and powerful. Yet I gladly set sail under the Pirate flag. It is as an absurd world. If it lacks reason, I must compensate by giving it reason. Camus would have understood. Baron Cohen probably understands (if anybody knows his number, ask him to join us). Buddha doubtless was thinking along similar lines to me whilst he sat under his banyan tree. And those other legends of absurdity, Monty Python, got there before I did. I may have a serious intent to scuttle corruption, but I might as well enjoy the process too. This clip is from Terry Gilliam’s The Crimson Permanent Assurance. “Oh, it’s fun to charter an accountant, and sail the accountant-sea…” As Pirate Treasurer, I will be adopting that as my signature tune.