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The recent death of Amy Winehouse has brought about a division between those people who really don't give a shit, believed it was a matter of time, and that she was a fool for squandering chances others would love to have...and those that thought her a genius, a tragic artist and delicate flower, an immense talent, crushed by the weight of celebrity and cursed with an addictive personality.

Some visual clues might help to clear this up.

This is talented:

This is a moron:

It gets no simpler. The gig she was fucking up for 20,000 people was her 'comeback' show and I think she displayed her ability to come back all too well. If you can't get it together for that, then you can't get it together. If you don't respect your fans that have stumped up their hard-earned money for a ticket, transport, food and drink and possibly a place to stay, and if you disregard the way they've looked forward to your gig for months, then you don't deserve to have those fans.

Addiction may be a chemical thing, it may be learned behaviour. It may be attention-seeking or response-seeking behaviour. The thing that needs to be forgotten, is that she was an addict.

For many though, this is the point. She was an addict and as such, couldn't help it.

She was an addict, clearly, but the help was there if she wanted it. If she didn't want it, then she's a moron. And why, with all the things she had going for her would she not want it?

Many other addicts may not even know where to go for help. Amy could have checked into the finest establishments, best equipped to deal with her demons. Many other addicts have nothing to look forward to when clean, indeed it was probably the lack of things to look forward to that put them there. Amy was a pop star, loved by millions, earning millions. She had plenty to live for and look forward to. If she couldn't see the good in those things she was...yep, a moron.

If she decided those things weren't enough or that she didn't like the pressures of fame and being in the public eye, then she could have stepped away from it. Given time, people would stop wondering when the new album was coming out, she could have negotiated her way out of her contract, and got a 9 -5 in McDonald's and lived happily ever after.

My point is she had choices, and she chose the one that led her to the 27 club. All the grievers out there who are feeling sorry for her, need to recognise that she made that choice. With all the other variables, she made the dumbest choice she could have. This makes her something beginning with 'm'.

Russell Brand has had the gaul to label Winehouse a genius. What a remarkably daft thing to do. Fleming was a genius. Feynman was a genius. Darwin was a genius. If we're talking music, Mozart was a genius, Bach and Beethoven the same. Modern day musicians that fit the term genius are Tim Smith, Frank Zappa, and Johan Johannson. Though I'd probably argue that writing songs isn't the behaviour of a genius anyway. You can be very, very good at it but genius? Doesn't fit well with me.

Thanks to our obsession with celebrity in the West, and the 27 club, Winehouse will become a legend in the music industry, and revered more and more as time goes by. Never has grief and attention been so misplaced.

Vasili Arkhipov. Stanislav Petrov. Are you familiar with these names? Perhaps so, but probably not. Without these two people, you would not be here today. I would not be here today. In fact its fair to say most things wouldn't be. In the early 60's, Arkhipov was part of a Russian submarine crew, patrolling waters near Cuba. They found themselves surrounded by American subs dropping depth charges in order to force the Russian sub to surface. The Russian captain forgot about this tactic and assumed they were under attack. Since they were underwater and unable to contact Moscow, the captain believed war had broken out. He moved to fire nuclear torpedoes. The only way he could do so was if the three highest ranking sailors agreed. Two did, Arkhipov didn't. Arkhipov saved the world.

Stanislav Petrov was in charge of a monitoring station in Russia in the early 80's. The station detected an incoming missile, then four more. Petrov decided it was a glitch in the machine and not a thermo-nuclear attack. He was right, and once again the launch of nuclear weapons was avoided. Petrov saved the world.

These two remain ignored or forgotten by many people. Yet we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. Arkhipov died in 1999. Where was the coverage? Is he labelled as genius? Did they call it a waste? Chances are, you didn't even hear about it. We hold the moronic in high regard, and ignore the people that have enabled us to even be here.

Martin Amis once wrote a very good short story that was kind of a dig at our culture's recent obsession with putting the dire forward as divine. He switched the literary world on its head, by putting poets earning millions and flying around the world on private jets, and having Hollywood script writers struggling for work and being disrespected by the poets. His point is a good one. Poetry is far more beautiful than the latest Michael Bay film, but the poets usually write part-time and hold down a day job, while the idiots churning out the popcorn munching bilge get paid a fortune for clunky, predictable dialogue and rehashed story lines. We value the mindless over the mesmeric.

Though the cause of her death remains - as I write at least - unclear, the fact remains that she was spotted buying drugs in Camden at 10:30pm the night before her body was found. No-one was there forcing her hand. She chose to do it. She could have as easily selected a different choice, and that is of going to the very rehab she sang about. I struggle to see then, how I can possibly place any sympathy her way. I struggle to see how anybody can. Making records should not place her above any other person that dies from drug or alcohol abuse. In fact with her options and reasons to live, she should probably be placed well below them.

...And You Will Know This By The Tale Of Dread

A Tale of Dread is perhaps better known as poetic justice. Or, for the desperately hip amongst you, karma.

In tales of dread, a protagonist - usually not a very nice person - experiences retribution for their despicable behaviour, and this retribution is usually very fitting. So, for example, if they manufactured cars they knew were unsafe but ignored these dangers in pursuit of a fast buck, a tale of dread would no doubt end with them getting knocked down by a car. The very model that they refused to enforce safety features on. Its like a cruel irony, then. Or not so cruel, depending on the character and your idea of an eye for an eye.

Tales of dread are common in fiction, and sure, why not. Its good to read about people getting their comeuppance. It gives us hope and a sense of justice being dished up.

In life however, we seek the same thing.

Christians would turn to God for this cosmic sense of fair play. The Bible is riddled with stories of characters getting their rewards or punishments for doing or betraying God's work. Look to Adam and Eve for starters. Of all the fruit, on all the trees, they have to eat from that one. So God kicked their ass. And, if you buy into that stuff, we're all still paying the price for it.

Many people seem to want to believe in Karma for their serving of poetic justice. Now, I've spoken about Karma on here before, http://stevefarcue.blogspot.com/2010/12/feeling-karma.html

The true notion of Karma, is that of a sort of cosmic bank account, where your actions throughout life are logged and at the end of it, if you've been good you'll be reincarnated into a good life, and if you've been bad you'll be reincarnated into third world poverty. If someone tells you they believe in Karma but not reincarnation, you are allowed to tell them they're full of shit. You can't have one without the other.

Actually, if someone says they believe in Karma you're also allowed to tell them they're full of shit. Think about it. Who's logging this information? Who's keeping track of you? Who's so damn interested in what you're doing? Who says what's good and bad? Sometimes acts that have good intentions turn out horribly, so where does that fit in?

The need to believe that bad people get punished and good people get rewarded can be linked into something that's ingrained in us from a very early age. That is, the sense of what's fair.

We're taught to share, either through parenting or schooling, and we're taught to be concerned for each other...to some degree at least. We have a need to see the good rewarded and the bad punished, it helps us to believe the world is all right, and that if we keep ticking along trying our best to avoid being evil then the universe / God / Karma will see us right.

To this end, and despite me labelling them as bullshit, there is a need for adults to believe in some fairy tale sense of justice. Though we may be tempted to do evil things every day, to steal or lie to get ahead, we turn to tales of dread to make us think. Think that if we carry out these thoughts, we may well end up drenched in an ironical revenge. We wish to believe that it is in the nature of things that wrongs will be righted. Whichever method of cosmic police force you wish to believe in, the very fact that you do believe in it, prohibits you from doing a great number of things for fear of the consequences.

For me, living on this planet in the milky way, in a universe billions of light years across, I really don't believe there's anyone, or anything, that's keeping an eye on us. There's talk of asking the universe for things (Mr. Noel Edmonds, take a bow you plank), but that means giving the universe a conscious mind. A thing that has an idea of justice (remarkably similar to yours and no doubt completely different to someone on the other side of the world), and the means to carry out that justice as a lesson to others. The universe is a vacuum. It consists of...quite literally...nothing. Or at least, things we can't explain such as Dark Matter. To give the universe cognition is to behave like someone who is insane. Look at any random object and attribute an identity to it, and you run the risk of being carted off by men with big butterfly nets.

A sense of justice could be seen as completely subjective, and for every man a hippy might consider to be evil (polluting the planet, not being aware of a carbon footprint, slaughtering baby ducks to build a bridge), others might praise his tenacity and vision, and not least his business sense, for he may well provide jobs and a wage for people previously unemployed.

So it would be up to you to decide, and not some diabolical agency enforcing cosmic justice. Reading tales of dread to kids when they are impressionable is a fantastic idea, as it gives them a moral foothold as they grow into adults. But, once there, they need to discover that the right thing to do should be done for its own sake, and not the need to please the karmic boogeyman.

Lie-ing. Down.

My friend Lucy convinced me to watch the Fox show 'Lie To Me', starring the ever fabulous Tim Roth. Whilst the show is Hollywoodised - which is a word I've just made up - its main character, Cal Lightman, is based on a real person. That person is called Paul Ekman, and he discovered something called Micro Expressions.

Ekman maintains that Micro Expressions give away real feelings that are being hidden, and that...with the proper training...you can spot these expressions and discover what people are really thinking. Ekman has produced many fine examples of such behaviour, and I'm certainly not about to argue with the man. He is a professor of psychology after all. And, in order to prove his whole theory about micro expressions wasn't cultural, he went and spent some time with tribal people in the ass-end of nowhere to prove that these expressions are universal and somehow inherent within all of us regardless of our geographical upbringing.

So far, so scientific. In Lie To Me, Tim Roth's team are experts on body language and other forms of unconscious communication. Once upon a time, I was obsessed with such a thing. I read and believed the bullshit notion that communication is only 10% verbal and 90% body language. Its the same bullshit statistic as you only use 10% of your brain. Absolute garbage.

If I made an open body language gesture to you, if I smiled using both my zygomaticus major AND my orbicularis occuli, yet I said something antagonistic, chances are you'd still be as pissed as if I hadn't bothered with all that facial muscle movement.

Sure, body language is important, but its not as important as some would like to make out.

Now then, in the context of lying, body language really comes into its own. I have read many a pop-psychology book on lie detection and 'Tells'. Tells are any piece of body language that portrays what you're really feeling, despite what you might be saying. I can now share some of this information with you, which means you don't have to spend the money or the time on it...like I did.

We'll begin with the NLP'ers. NLP, or Neuro- Linguistic Programming, is a 'hot topic' in psychology. Some believe it to be bullshit, others believe it to be a very important step in mental health. I won't go into the whole movement now, just the lie detector bits. Take a look at this:

These are what's known as 'Eye Accessing Cues', and in the field of NLP, they can assist with therapy. They can also be used to catch out those pesky liars. The idea is, you establish a base line, so you ask a normal question that someone has to think about, for instance "What colour is the front door of your house?" Sure you know it, but its not information at the front of your mind at the moment. So, you go into your brain to access it. You'll therefore, according to the chart above, move your eyes up and to my right. You're visually remembering your front door. Now I know that you concur with the chart, I can say "What did you get up to last night?". If you spin me a story about just going to the pub, you can probably just reel that off, so I'd ask "Who was with you?". Now you'll need to make up some names if you're lying, or remember them if you're telling the truth. If you look up and to the right, I'll know you're searching for factual information, up and to the left, and you're making it up. Left to lie.

Good innit? If only it was reliable. It isn't, and its dangerous to think it is. Accusing someone of lying on the strength of this chart is a daft thing to do. Use the chart as a guide, but employ other techniques too. For instance, a good one - and you have to be deep into accusatory mode here - is to ask the person what they did, and then ask you to tell them the same thing again, but backwards. So they start with the last thing they did and work back to the first. For a liar who has constructed his story, it will be extremely difficult. For someone telling the truth, it will be hard, but entirely possible. And I got that little doozy from a book called 'What Every Body Is Saying' which was written by an FBI Counter-Intelligence Agent. He didn't scare me with his words.

Despite all these 'tricks', if I can call them that, in my experience the best way to spot a lie is to find a pattern break. An example of this would be....let's take that thing that everyone seems to believe in but is more bullshit: that people never look you in the eye when they're lying. If anything, because this rumour has gotten so out of hand, people are more likely to begin and maintain eye contact with you because they want to convince you that they're telling the truth.

If however, they've spent the rest of the conversation looking away from you whilst explaining other things and then give you eye contact on something important, they've broken their pattern. This should immediately get your lie detector going.

It could be that they really want you to believe them, but a pattern break is important. Derren Brown uses pattern breaks to induce hypnosis, albeit a form of waking hypnosis. Watch some of his early specials and you'll see him shake hands with people, then grab their wrist with his other hand. At the same time, he'll give his hypnotic speech. This works because a hand shake is a common thing with unwritten rules. You know how to do it, and you know what to expect. When something unexpected happens (the wrist grab), your brain panics and struggles for an answer. It opens up for direction, and the direction you get is Derren's instructions. Its like he's hacked his way into your brain, and for a split second he gets to control you. Powerful stuff.

Anyway, for me the thing with the pattern break indicates the best way of detecting a lie. That is, to let your unconscious do it for you. You know when someone's lying. You can feel it. You feel uneasy about what they're saying but don't know why. Its because your unconscious has detected a pattern break, an obvious one, and its nagging at you asking for an answer. If you're actively seeking a pattern break, you'll find one, and again you could end up wrongfully accusing someone.

Being lied to is never very pleasant, but I'd argue that its important for human beings to learn to lie, and to put that into practice. Life would be so much more complicated if we all told the truth about everything. Imagine it, if your partner asked you if they looked alright before you went out for the night, and you had to sit there and explain all the ways in which - in your opinion - they didn't look alright. Not only would they be upset, but you'd have to justify everything you're saying, you'd never get out the fucking door. So, you employ heuristics, you go for the path of least resistance.

- Do I look alright?

- Yeah you look great.

Open, step, gone. I suppose this is what's known as a 'white lie', and these are good things to save people's feelings and your time. The white lie's older brother is a bastard, and he can hurt when he's around. I don't believe in fate, destiny, or karma, but I believe that the truth always comes out. Given a long enough time line, and the fallibility of humans, the truth will always make an appearance. I find comfort in that. The ability to detect a lie can be good for you, but you'll only ever keep it to yourself, because people will deny things until they're blue in the face. Your accusations will only ever be met with more and more denial. Is it worth it?

You'll know when someone is lying to you, you then have to decide whether or not to accept that information or to just keep going and hope that things will get better. Here, you could well be lying to yourself. Spot that one if you can. They could be lying for a good reason, a reason its best you're not aware of. It was kind of disheartening to invest time and energy into this lie detection malarkey, only to then come to the conclusion that we're all good lie detectors, we just have to make ourselves aware of it. To then conclude that even if we spot a lie perhaps we shouldn't say anything makes things even worse. Its good to have these skills though. They work alright for Cal Lightman.

Optimist Prime

My friend Dave once challenged me to write an optimistic blog. I suppose this is it.

The funny thing - to me anyway - is that I've been turned into an optimist on some things simply because everyone else seems hell-bent on being a pessimist about them. Its part of my contrarian make-up I suppose.

Still, I believe I'm right on this, otherwise I wouldn't waste my time blogging it.

Inspired (or pissed off by) a person who will remain nameless yet is linked to me on Facebook, I feel the need to address the notion that, as a species, we're heading for calamity / oblivion / certain doom.

Whether it be our dependence on something finite - namely oil, or global warming, over-population, freak weather occurrences, nuclear war, or even an asteroid striking the earth, certain people feel compelled to ruin everyone's good mood by pointing out that the good times have been and gone, and we must knuckle down and prepare for the worst.

The worst is subjective of course, and such thoughts come only from a white idiot living in a western culture. And I say this because to me, such thoughts can only be entertained because a person's life is so good. To a starving individual living in third world conditions, whether or not we're prepared for the financial meltdown that will come from lack of oil is slightly lower on the priorities list - and certainly not 'the worst' in their eyes compared to where the fuck is the next meal coming from TODAY.

Its almost like people look round in a panic when they realise they're okay. That life is okay, and thanks to the systems put in place and the love of those around them, it will pretty much always be okay. Its common for pessimists to look for the bad when everything is good.

So let's start with an amazing quote by a chap called Thomas Babington Macaulay. He said, "On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?".

Brilliant. Think about his point. There are many things that could upset the boat and throw us all overboard, but coulds are all around us. You could get knocked down tomorrow, or you could live until you're 100. Which 'could' do you prepare for? You probably, like me, indeed like all of us, prepare for a little of both. So bad things could happen, but if history is our guide, we'll only ever improve our lot. And not just our lot either, the lives of those less fortunate than us here in the west. Its not that things can only get better, its that things are great and getting better all the time for us lucky ones here.

The species known as human beings are fucking incredible. They are ingenious. They've developed all sorts, from the Wunderbra to space travel. Whatever comes our way, we will invent our way out of it. Its what we do. Its why we've got this far and, even though this view makes me remarkably unpopular, its what separates us from the animals. They've evolved to suit their surroundings, we create our surroundings. We also cheat evolution. Every time you have sex using a prophylactic, you're cheating an evolutionary drive. Every time you fly on holiday, you're saying "Evolution, we can't wait around for you to develop humans with wings, we'll do it ourselves". We're smart enough to do this.

We've also fucked up. Developing nuclear weapons, giving ourselves the ability to blow ourselves to oblivion may not be seen as a smart move. I think it is. I think we have become the very Gods we used to worship. The problem is not with the design and development of the weapons, but rather with the people who control them. That's for another blog though.

There's also people who think we're damaging this world beyond repair. Any alarmist news story will tell you that there's a number of species being wiped out. We are making species extinct with our lust for destroying the planet. Factually, only 1% of ALL species are alive right now. The other 99% are already extinct. We didn't wipe them out, because we couldn't have, because we weren't around. Mother Nature did it instead. But how many environmentalists want to have a go at Mother Nature? None of them, because she knows what she's doing. Let her do it then.

A catastrophic incident, such as an asteroid striking the earth or the volcano in Yellowstone Park erupting (its past due for an eruption, which would spew enough ash into the atmosphere to block out the sun and...well, in a nut shell, kill us all. And they're worried about you driving a 2 litre car because it 'pollutes the atmosphere'?), is something that you really cannot do much about. But maybe, one day and hopefully pretty soon, some smart arse will invent a preventative measure to things such as this. We can do it. We have the technology.

At the start of the 20th Century, some idiot claimed that everything that could be invented, has been invented. We were supreme, there was nowhere else to go. How wrong can one person be? Things have come along since then that have blown minds, made living easier, and saved countless lives. We're at the start of the 21st Century now, and you can bet your life savings (not much of a gamble for me) that the same thing will happen again. A citizen of England in 1901 could not have conceived the idea of the iPod. Not a chance. It would be Martian technology to them. Here we are and its commonplace. Think of what's in store for us, and our grandchildren.

It will be amazing. And the best thing of all, your grandchildren will be around to see it, experience it, and love it, regardless of what the doom-mongerers say.