"Over the mass of the deprived rise the castes of labor aristocracy, of praetorian army, of an all-penetrating police, with the financial oligarchy at the top".
Leon Trotsky, in his introduction to The Iron Heel by Jack London, 16 October 1937Much has been written, debated, subsequently dismissed, ignored or simply forgotten over the centuries with regard to the future of human society.
Sadly, very little of what has been written and debated has remained with us in reality as bedrock on which to build. We lose ourselves inside our self-created and self-perpetuated fantasy that everything is just fine and dandy when in fact our very survival is the essence at stake.
Immanuel Kant, in his analysis, A Critique of Pure Reason, carefully spells out the logical conclusions of capitalist society for those who care to look.
And yet those who dare to question face pograms such as the seven-year McArthy purge against 'communists' in the USA where no-one was safe from the hysteria, similar in depth and depravity to the witchhunts of the Dark Ages.
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made," wrote Kant.
We speak of our legacy to forthcoming generations yet corrupt that legacy even as we speak. We praise the words of visionaries by relegating their words into senseless icons without meaning and substance in much the same way as we despoil truth through our preconceptions of how we consider it should be.
We give reality to dogma by refusing to rise above it. We succumb to the inevitability of fate by accepting it as so.
Capitalist society has but one precept of existence. Capitalism is defined as:
an economic system driven by profit-motive and dependent on investment of private capital to provide a means of production, distribution and exchange
Dependent on private capital. It is by its very nature self-centred upon its own core - the generation of further wealth and, as such, is doomed to failure.
Honest redistribution of any wealth generated by such a system is contrary to the drive of the system itself. Capitalism ignores the basic precepts of humanity and ignores the basic precept of freedom itself. For a capitalist society to function, there must be two elements - the minority who have the capital, and the majority who have the desire to attain the regulated financial tool of society but do not possess it.
In effect, we have successfully created our own living hell but continue to pat ourselves on the back with self platitudes of how we have improved life for others in some manner. We replace the spear we have thrown into the back of our neighbour with a knife and congratulate ourselves on our magnanimity.
The signs are there. From the proliferation of electronic alarm systems to the abundance of closed circuit surveillance cameras designed to thwart those who would seek to obtain what they don't have and cannot otherwise get.
We conceal our own guilt behind the refuge of believing such people to be wrong in their desires and by classifying them as criminals.
Those who continue to doubt should look to the realities behind the rioting in Quebec.
And look also to President Bush's statements that the rioters are "not representative" of the people despite the fact that they are the people.
The logical conclusion to capitalism is clear. Stronger police forces, stronger means to keep the masses at bay from obtaining the riches of the minority - eventually leading to anarchy and civil war.
Just a thought …
FOCUS ON THE P.D.F.
I am disappointed at the prevalence of the put down factor. I see it every day, every hour, and am always bemused by the ridiculousness of its practitioners. It is such a terrible waste of time on negative energies.
Speaking as someone who has enjoyed a fair wealth and more of experience including former international fame long before I joined Newsmedianews, I find myself distressed by the destructive nature of those who continue practising the put down factor.
Those who practice it are by no means confined to any particular segment of society. And just as with any peculiarity of human behaviour, many reasoned arguments can be offered for its existence. Yet there is only one that seems to hold validity, and that is egotistical paranoia.
It is quite possibly, even probably the most destructive of all human behavioural anomalies – a throw-back to the purely instinctive days of primordial survival. It is likely that every single human being ever to have lived has been victim at some time to the put down factor.
So, just what is it? To begin, it is a lack of positive belief in oneself that results in a negative outlook. It is a blinkered vision that fails to see the bigger picture. It is a comedian who puts the world down because no-one laughs at his jokes. Yet it is also so much more.
But wait, what isn’t it? Well, it isn’t the propensity to be of help where help is really needed in the human psyche.
It isn’t having both feet on a rung of the ladder to a better life. Those you put down cannot be in a position to help you because you have already negated them. If you think you can make it all alone, think again, because you would be very wrong.
And the ghosts of all those you put down will haunt you and there will be no escape, until as the good book says, you learn to repent.
There is no sense in putting anyone down for in the end it is only ourselves we harm.
’Bye for now.
When the Victim Falls
Have you been bullied?
Blamed for something you did not do?
Suffered the consequences of undeserved blame?
If you can answer yes to any of these, then you might have been victimised.As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I've got a little list - I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed - who never would be missed!
W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) British dramatist. The MikadoThere are a great many fools in the world and I am not frightened to say it. Only a fool would wilfully ignore the existence and dangers of fools.
To victimise is to single someone out for oppressive treatment; to cheat, or to wrong. Many people fall prey to victimisation without realising it is happening to them, even though the quality of their lives can be disrupted by such circumstance. Most begin facing up to their victimisation alone — and it can be tough to convince others of their plight.
No matter how big a crowd we may be in, we all live in our own worlds and, like it or not, our individual perspectives are shaped by that fact.
Just like there are those who have not found the key to escape from hurting others, there are those who consider they hold a right to dictate to others.
In the early 1990s, a spinster passed away quietly in Cranleigh in Surrey after a short illness. As a young woman, she had taken employment as a maid with a high ranking English army officer. The employment was to last for many years and eventually the woman was 'adopted' into the officer's household.
After her death, the executor of her estate decided to call in an internationally renowned auctioneer to evaluate the estate. The house was filled to the brim with items collected by the army officer from the many locations he had served at throughout the world, including India, the Far East and South Africa, and which on his own death he'd bequeathed to the spinster.
When an auctioneer from the company arrived, the first thing he remarked upon was the two original Monet paintings, one hanging above the front door and another in the sitting room. It was the first occasion they had been recognised as original works and the auctioneer recommended they be put somewhere 'safer'.
The business of selling the estate was placed in the control of the auctioneers by the executor. When the extensive estate was later auctioned, the two Monets were not listed. There was no reference to what had become of them.
The executor, who was himself an elderly gentleman, became befuddled by this and eventually simply tried to forget about the matter. "What could I do? Its all a long time ago, what can I do now? Its best to just leave it," he told Newsmedianews, which has been able to identify the authenticity of the two vanished paintings.
The question remains if the elderly gentleman was victimised. He was certainly a victim who was unscrupulously taken advantage of, to that no-one could disagree.
Its a little like sex in a way. We have overrated sex so much in our commercialised way that we underrate its true worth, quite often until it is too late.
Likewise when we are victimised, we can begin to underrate our own value. It is worth taking a second look at the questions at the top of this page. The first step in tackling victimisation is to recognise it. We can then recognise that it is the victimisers who are the true victims.
There are those who will shudder and shy from the title of this piece yet even they live by certain rules. We all do. It is inescapable that if we are not living by someone else's rules then we are living by our own.
Mine are quite defined and include a set that state I will not expect someone to look after me and neither do I co-operate with those who expect me to look after them withour prior agreement in either case. Simple and to the point.
All things between people require the consent of agreement and in the majority of cases such consent of agreement is reached through discussion in one form or another.
At the opposite is the enforced agreement, where some tin pot dictator is laying down his or her standards for your living. Those are the Pharisees of this world and down the centuries they have worn many uniforms and many disguises. No disguise can succeed in hiding where they are coming from and their inability to grasp this simple truth despite the passing of thousands of years is a yardstick of their lack of intelligence.
The most pertinent rules are perhaps those we reason through our own logical conclusions. As I write I am reminded of the kind of person who lives under the pathetically false and ridiculous assumption of being 'tough'. No one who thinks of themself as being 'tough' is, without exception. Are you?
This attitude though real in itself but wholly false in concept, is the hallmark of the bully. It is the hallmark of someone who does not know themself but considers he or she has to be better than others just because. Where such people feel a threat towards what is in reality misguided perception to begin, then their use of force, physical or mental, is adopted in a bid to maintain their position on the pinnacle.
Sadly the pinnacle does not exist anywhere else other than in their own blinkered view.
What does all this have to do with rules? Rules are what we formulate through our own direct living experiences. We may live under someone else's rules for a time until the circumstances of our experience inform us that certain rules are not only illogical but wrong for us as an individual.
Buffalo Springfield, David Crosby, or perhaps Stephen Stills or maybe the tea girl once came out with the line 'if nobody's right, nobody's wrong'.
I leave you to form your own opinion.
Recently I read a piece by my colleague Hermit Empeysex that related to women. Firstly it reminded me that they exist and secondly, that perhaps I too should say something about them.
They say that women are behind all, but all, of men's troubles. Being that men and women share this planet in roughly equal numbers, then you might agree that is something worth considerable attention.
In the Dark Ages dozens, perhaps hundreds, even thousands of women were executed by drowning or being burned at the stake on account of their being designated as ‘witches’. In more modern times, the Afghanistan Kaliban, much in the news these days, executed women by shooting them in the head in public displays in Kabul. There can be no other description for such acts other than barbaric, sick crimes against humanity.
The question must be asked, however, as to what drives people to regard women in such a depraved manner. Most perverse or sick actions are the result of an unhealthy mind’s distorted understanding of external events.
As such, it is incumbent upon all of us to understand such action. One question that none will find appetising is simply: is there any such thing as the woman with a conscience?
The vast majority of western women have chosen to place material worth above all other values. It does not matter how much they may argue against or dispute that – it remains fact. It is a trait that is gaining pace throughout the world, particularly in countries and societies that have only recently found access to personal material gain, such as the former hard line communist states and those nations that have only recently begun to emerge from decades or even centuries of poverty.
Perhaps in bygone days women were attracted to males who proved the better providers, or perhaps the more fierce, as part of a survival instinct. Over the centuries, civilisation has dawned and progressed but in reality little has truly changed. In particular, the female trait to seek out the best provider and defender appears to remain but with a motive no longer born out of a survival instinct but one that had shifted to simple greed. To place material values above other values is to pivot upon a fulcrum of greed. The seeds of confusion are evident and lie deep within our educational values.
Where the male loses his sense of understanding of the world at large and begins to act from his own sense of confusion, then the route is set for an aggressive collision course between the sexes and the fine divide between love and hate becomes even finer, if not invisible.
Perhaps the question should not be does the woman exist with a conscience, but does anyone exist with a conscience?
The Laughter of the Universe or
Of Parasites, Plebs, Ponces and Paranoiacs
Thieves, liars, cheats, murderers and those who won't let you be who you want to be or are.
So just what then is the honesty of love? What would you say to prove your love? Thank you for being someone I was always proud to be with … ?
"..he pushed away the pain so hard he disconnected himself from the person he loved the most", goes another line from the movie What Dreams May Come.
Just what is the meaning of working with and not against someone?Children must be left to grow up, but how many adults need to accept that? Yet some adults are not there when their children need them and some cannot be there.
All of us have a job to do in life, often beyond that which we may at first be conscious of. Some of us deny ourselves the opportunity of discovering that job by denying ourselves the time to look.
Life is a conundrum of obfuscation. What we are taught to believe as we grow up is not always what we should really know and when we find different to our beliefs, then danger stalks as reason itself becomes unstable.
We can look for an anchor upon which to remain firm but how do we know that the anchor is itself secure?
The great doctrines of religions themselves contain a jumble of confused laws, morals, rights and wrongs and an impartial analysis will reveal that there is really no consistency throughout. And then, all religions differ, opening the door to conflict.
So where do we go, who do we turn to for stability in our lives? Some turn to love, some to prayer, some succumb to despair.
You may search all you like for your anchor but there is only really one. There is only one common tie that consistently holds us all together regardless of all and that is the spirit of life itself.
It is the single and only thing that without which we are nothing. It is a gift from a giver whom none of us know and as such is the marvel of all marvels.
Astonishing, isn't it, how so many of us can apparently forget this one immeasurably precious gift that is given to us and without which we are less than nothing?
Look in the mirror and ask, do I see my neighbour, my friend, my lover, my enemy, myself?
And the anchor itself? Only the self can truly know, but all of us are connected to the same indivisible yarn of life itself and when we swim in the threads of that yarn we know truth.
We also come within the influence of universal law because it is that alone which governs existence and it is that which we, as a human species unable to fully comprehend, have labelled God.
God's law reveals that ultimately the greater power will always win.
Ultimately it is up to the self alone to decide which side to take – right or wrong, good or bad.
Chakha bhai
A friend passed an interesting remark while talking of a factory worker he knew who was seeing a psychiatrist.
The worker had been feeling depressed but was unable to pinpoint the cause of his depression.
"You're suffering concatenated imagination, otherwise known as small town mentality," the psychiatrist told the factory worker.
The worker in question had an assembly line job at a computer manufacturing plant in Limerick, a job that is itself something of an Orwellian nightmare. The factory floor stretches almost as far as the eye can see, consists of 10 identical production assembly lines, is lit by banks of strip flourescent lighting and has no external windows or natural light.
Limerick is itself a relatively small city, some would regard it as a large town but for its university and cathedral status, and quite often the small town mentality is revealed. The city is in something of an isolated location on the west coast Shannon estuary and is one of just four designated cities in ireland.
My friend also works at the plant but in maintenance, so his routine is at least somewhat varied. He currently works there to fund his independent production of a rock CD, to which he is composing the lyrics and music and which will soon be featured on this site as Newsmedianews takes over publicity on completion of the CD.
"There's a smoking room where people can take a break but you know, you'd think that working in production in the factory they'd find something else to talk about when taking their break, but no.
"They talk about their jobs, and what's going on on the shop floor. It's mind numbing," he said.
"People earn enough to go out for a drink, to pay their bills and their way but by Monday have go back to the factory floor just to keep it all going," he said.
IT occurs to me that I might have become unemployable. I do not believe this has anything to do with my name.
It also occurs to me that I might have become unenjoyable. You will note that in both instances I use the word might. Nothing is fixed solid in this world though heaven knows some things can get to appear that way. Also, nothing is less enjoyable than being made to feel unenjoyable. It forces you to consider the utter selfishness of some people in this world.
I was speaking about this with my good friend Hermit Empeysex, a man I feel I can trust implicitly except when he has been drinking as that makes him forgetful of the bane.
“The laptitude of compatibility is an indivisible wage packet,” Hermit uttered after listening to my comments. I am still ruminating on his words. He is one of those gifted souls who can make a seemingly innocuous or irrelevant remark that nonetheless has all the wisdom of the sages of the ages. Still, who cares?
If you are a regular visitor to this site, or if you have explored it to any extent, you will find that the concept of care and caring plays a major role throughout. This is not the aspect of care central to carers, or someone who looks after an ill or otherwise incapacitated person. It is the central pivot of caring about what goes on in the world, from events on your own doorstep to events in far distant places.
It is the full frontal confrontation between those who consider that caring is all about battering others into submission—and those who know otherwise. Sadly there is a depressingly high number of batterers.
“The ineptitude of the conscious mind is in its ability to be swayed.”
Voltaire might have said that, if he'd thought of it. He didn't, so I did both. I was once on an express train heading south to spend two weeks at an army training camp at Lydd in Kent. The train—this was in the days of steam—entered a long tunnel and then three figures entered my carriage apartment carrying their Lee Enfield 303 WW2 rifles and they beat me half to death with the rifle butts, raining blows to my head. They'd taken me wholly by surprise and I was unable to retaliate. Just as well as I'll tell you now—I would not have stopped until I'd thrown them all from the moving train, after first giving them an even severer dose of their own violence. No-one would have missed them.
Without any disrespect to the millions who suffered under the insane tyrant, Hitler may have had something with the final solution. The only thing I believe he got wrong was the type of people he tried to exterminate.
Sadly the world is just such a battleground. We maintain it so, then wonder why it is like it is. How could it be otherwise when our predominant priorities are given over to things other than the real well being of our brothers and sisters?
I’d been living Stateside for some months. They got to know me across Boston, from my busking on the T to riding the city on my Peugeot cycle, guitar strapped to my back, amplifier on the carry-all and microphone stand strapped to the crossbar. When I chose to take them along, that is, which was whenever I thought I might be passing, say, Harvard Square or some such place.
So. There I was, living out at Revere, just a short ride from the beach. God knows how many times I rode up and down that prom. I’ve a few stories from there too, I can tell you. I think I amassed more stories in my 12 months in the US than even when I was working for a newspaper, which is saying something, believe me.
So. There I was one evening, busking away at Chinatown on the Orange line. It was a tough station to busk, but was one of my regular spots along with Government Centre, State, Downtown Crossing and a few others to boot. Each had its own atmosphere, its own mood.
I’d been playing for some time. I needed a few bucks to supplement the money I was earning at a few other jobs. Living on your own in a foreign country can be a tough cookie too. After a while I became aware of an attractive black woman close by who had skipped a couple of trains. Being evening, trains were not so regular. She stood suddenly as a train pulled in and passing me gave me a smile and dropped her gift into my open guitar case. I spotted two blue stubs of paper and paused in my song to examine them. They were two tickets to the annual Boston Music Awards. I waved a hand and called out a thank-you as the train began pulling out. She smiled back through the window.
Two tickets, priced at $38 each to the show at the Orpheum Theatre! Wow! The show was coming up the next month, in three weeks time. I wondered if perhaps she was a press agent for the theatre. I never saw her again.
I knew the theatre—in fact I knew the city of Boston remarkably well, having driven a limo around for a while, worked in removals and spent countless hours riding my bike and walking around the city, even in the depths of the cold winter of ’95/96.
Eventually the day arrived. I’d made up my mind to go to the show and took along my guitar, intending to either play somewhere near the theatre before the show or after, when the folk were leaving. The Orpheum is in a cul-de-sac, Hamilton Place, though narrow lanes leave at the side and to the rear. I walked past the entrance and around the side, then returned, thinking it was perhaps a bit early. The show wasn’t due to start for a while yet.
Then a guy in a black suit, white shirt and tie beckoned at me from the entrance. I approached. He was smiling. I guess with my long hair in a pony tail, leather coat and guitar, I looked different.
“You playing tonight?” he asked.
“I guess—maybe later,” I replied, just being honest and not smart.
“Come on in,” he said, ushering me in through the entrance. He seemed eager to please and gave me a quick tour, showing me the bar, then took me backstage to the wings. The stage was awash with equipment, it looked like it was going to be one hell of a good concert.
“You hungry,” my host asked and pointed to some stairs going down. “Just go on down and help yourself to food, it’s all laid on.”
I was starving and could smell the food, which only maddened my hunger.
Cheers, I said, and propped my guitar against some amplifiers—there was so much equipment it seemed lost—and went to the food counter.
“See ya’s later,” said my host, leaving with a smile. I guessed he’d gone back to his post at the door.
I grabbed a plate of chicken salad and tucked in. Nobody questioned me, everybody just said hello and hi. It looked like a roadie’s convention down there. After a while I headed back to my guitar, taking some coffee and the remains of my meal on the disposable plate, munching away happily and wondering where I might leave the guitar when the show got under way.
Then a young guy approached, asking me what “was I doing here?”
“I’m here to see the show. One of your staff brought me back here to show me the stage and told me to get some food”, I told him. He wasn’t happy with that, I could see.
You’re not supposed to be here, he said. Fine, I said, I’ll head out back front. At this point the newcomer, who I will call goofball, picked up my guitar and walked off with it at a fast pace down a narrow passage.
“Hey, hang on, that’s my guitar,” I called after him. He ignored me. I set off after him, calling to him to hang on. He continued to ignore me and as he approached a side fire exit I had the certain feeling that he was going to eject the guitar and me through it. I caught up with him and put a friendly but firm hand on his shoulder. Nobody walks off with my guitar. Then all hell broke loose.
I don’t know where they came from, but the next thing I knew was being roughly grabbed by several pairs of hands and being hauled off my feet. I began struggling—this wasn’t my idea of friendship, hospitality and fun. There were six of them, one held each limb and one had me by the collar and they were not being friendly. I was dragged complaining through the theatre, into the main auditorium in front of the stage and then dragged up the long central aisle as people were filtering into the theatre and taking up their seats.
I yelled at them that I was under assault and shouted to anyone who could hear to call the cops. I was unable to struggle free. Nobody seemed to pay the least mind to what was happening to me, idiots. I was dragged through the theatre and thrown roughly into the street some yards outside the main front entrance. Whoever was carrying my guitar threw it down beside me, then they were gone. I gathered myself to my senses and notice a pair of dark trousered legs close by. A cop. I got up and dusted myself off and checked my guitar, all was OK. I approached the cop.
Excuse me, you saw that officer, you’re my witness. I was just assaulted by those guys and thrown from the theatre for no good reason. He observed me and asked what I was doing in the theatre. I noticed one of the goons who had manhandled me was now watching from the theatre entrance.
I told the cop I was there to see the show and he asked if I had tickets. I drew them from my wallet and he observed the still valid press identification badge I carried with me with its expiry date of June 1997. I handed the tickets to the cop and he began examining them.
The goon in the doorway had walked up to the cop and hearing some of the conversation took the tickets from the officer’s hand, ripped them up and gave them to me, saying “now they’re no good, are they?”, before returning to the theatre door. The cop did nothing.
I reiterated that he was my witness to events and asked for his identification. His reply was to tell me that I’d have to leave. When I tried to discuss the matter, the cop—he looked like a young rookie to me—simply repeated that I would have to leave.
I said OK, where should I leave to, and he said that I must leave the jurisdiction of the theatre. I asked where that was and he stated “the end of the street”.
That’s funny, said I, I can see some businesses that have nothing to do with the theatre just here in the street. I told him that I wasn’t arguing, and started to walk slowly down the street, asking him again for his identification and explaining that I was not happy with what had occurred.
I tried again. “Could I please have your identification officer?” I asked, but instead the cop grabbed hold of me and thrust me against a wall, putting handcuffs on me with my hands behind my back. He called on his radio. In less than no time at all a prowl car zipped into the street, I was bundled in and taken to the city jail, where I was fingerprinted, asked a bunch of pretty meaningless questions and allowed a telephone call. The person I called didn’t answer and I left a message on his answer phone.
Yeah, the cop said, you can go if your friend comes and stands bail. He never did. I spent the night in the cells and the next day was hauled before the judge at Boston central court, after being given a public defender, a helpful young woman. I was granted bail in my own recognizance with the judge’s admonition that I “stay away from the theatre while on bail”.
Don’t worry, your honour, I don’t wish to go back to a place that treats people like they treated me, I told him. He laughed, banged his gavel and set a date for the return hearing the following month.
I’d accidentally overstayed my visa and had tried unsuccessfully to renew it. The cops at the station never asked me any questions concerning that aspect. When I again met up with the young public defender I put my cards fully on the table and told her that I was mad at the treatment I’d received and wished to pursue action against the theatre staff responsible. She said we could look at that later, but for now she had to work on getting me out of the jam I had landed in. I felt it was a jam I had been put in.
On the day of the hearing, the public defender told me that the prosecution had indicated a willingness to drop the case. I thought that wise of them, they had no case anyway and I would have fought. She advised me to accept their offer, to avoid complications, as she put it. I agreed, and told the judge so.
“Case dismissed. The defendant will pay $150 court costs,” I disbelievingly heard the judge state. Court costs? After the case was dismissed, meaning no charges, no guilt?
“Do you wish for time to pay, ”asked the judge. I told him I’d need at least a year, and he ordered me to pay in three months. I never paid a cent out of sheer principle. I met the public defender over coffee after the hearing and discussed options, including my status as a visitor. I was unable to pursue the matter further due to the fact that I had to leave the US for other reasons just a few months later.
Oh well. Some things are like that.
Peace.
Listening to two bar philosophers, I overheard one ask the other just what he knew about Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
When I overheard the other ask in reply: “What did Einstein know about it?” I mentally conceded that he just might have a point.
Albert was an occasional guest at the monastery in Uzbekistan where I was fortunate enough to enjoy a few relatively peaceful years living a life that didn't have to mean something. Mind you, I was only seven at the time.
When I used to sit cross-legged on the floor pretending to be inside my ergonosopheric bubble that could easily blend through from one spatial dimension to another, Albert would furrow up his brow with impossibly thin lines radiating in every conceivable direction. He'd never speak more than a barely concealed umph, or the occasional Teutonic guttural eoglock sound he'd make that forever fascinated me with its utter alien human quality.
Albert's eoglock always spurred me to think about how the realities we often take for granted today ever came about to begin with. I don't mean the complexity of the internal combustion engine or the antigravity sleds used by the ancient Egyptians to haul massive construction blocks about the place. I mean the simple things, like the age of consent; like just why it is considered rude to pick your nose in public; like who first called a pig a pig and why.
Like how we spend millions of dineroo every day on alcohol and also spend the best part of our grown lives telling young people how bad alcohol is. I like to call it the busyness of reality. Like the existence of the pub on the cross-roads in the middle of Dagenham where everyone was always a stranger but where everyone still looked curiously at everyone else as if they knew or recognised them from some place or other. I won't tell you its name or you'll end up going there for the rest of your life.
Like how people tell people they're not alone in being alone but still somehow don't seem to know what to do about it. Like how when you have two keys on your key ring, it's sod's law that your first choice is invariably the wrong one.
I was comfortable in Uzbekistan, and not just because of Albert's occasional presence. There were mountain monkeys nearby, and I'd spend hours watching them and they'd spend equal amounts of time watching me. They seemed to get disturbed if they sensed I was uneasy and that helped me to relax. Ah, the simple things.
Albert always insisted that his relativity theory, and his later Theorem on Relativity, were both utter simplicity in itself. It was that very simplicity that made it so difficult to understand, he once tried to explain to me.
As Albert was a friend of the administrator of the monastery, we heard quickly of his death. He had always worn a heavy mantle of something that might have been translated as regret above his bushy eyebrows—an almost intangible shadow of some awful realisation of which he alone knew in full and chose not to share.
We were called to cloisters to hear the news and Brother Mark took the podium.
“As you know, brothers, Brother Albert left us a short time ago.” He always called him Brother Albert.
“In accord with the traditions of our custom, I asked Brother Albert's nurse for whatever message may have left our dear brother's lips prior to his departure.
“His words, she recalls, were — ‘I thought so.’”
I wonder if he is still laughing, wherever he is now.
WHERE FREEDOM IS BUT A DIRTY WORD
Take the blabbermouth who knows it all and compare with that time worn phrase silence is golden.
Take the poor sod who blabbers about freedom but denies its very essence to the self and so ultimately to all others. Take all this and what do you have? Perhaps you don't care. Certainly the blabbermouth doesn't because blabbermouth hasn't been silent long enough to learn how. Anyway, money is too important. If you don't think our current human existence is pitiful then you don't know enough to read beyond this sentence.
If you are still reading this then you are one of two things:- a bigot, or someone with a genuine desire to progress their station in life. Hopefully you are one of the latter. It really doesn't matter except that it matters a whole lot to the rest of the world. If you don't care for yourself then you are doomed anyway.
Humour is fine with an anchor but an anchor is useless without the seabed. Aye aye, cap'n, thar she blows...
Did she do well? And what pray did she leave you anyway? Don't say that its double Dutch because the Dutch just don't know about such things, although their Swedish neighbours might. Greeks now, well they are something else, as the Romans discovered too late. That leaves us, sadly, with the messed up present.
Take Jerry Springer, a prime candidate for assassination, a creep who doesn't give a damn about anything except lining his own pocket. Pardon Jerry? Pray you don't meet up with me in a darkened alleyway. You call that crap educational? Well now, let me educate you. You are, quite simply, an arsehole, feeding off the fruits of your own misbegotten brain.
And where does that leave us, apart from still in the dark with human beings dying day by day and never knowing the meaning of simple freedom. Oh, please don't tell me otherwise. Don't even try to. This page is black and white, OK?
Get a life, someone said. I had one until you came along, said I.
My advice? Its someone else's words. "Let's all pretend, just for a moment, that we are all Gods and Goddesses".
Wouldn't it be nice?
CLIQUE MENTALITIES AND SMALL TOWN MINDS
The title has all the ingredients for a critical dirge. That's why I chose it. Still, some people really do consider that they should know the business of everybody else. Where the small town mind syndrome joins together with the clique mentality, quite often where details of a stranger are absent they are simply replaced with preconceptualised imaginings. Imagine that.
The result is an image cast in your own prejudice. You might wonder if the red neck Ku Klux Klan fascists who terrorised black people in the southern US years back truly understood just what they were doing and comprehended the brainwashed current of thought they functioned from.
Its only words. Somebody said some time ago that perhaps the railways are slowly going the way of the canals. Perhaps words too are going the same way, just as impressionism came and went in art. Images might give rise to visualisations and wonder, but words convey the root impression.
When I was ensconced in the Kurdistan monastery I saw many strange things, ranging from a fallible belief in infallibility to a mind throttling desire to escape the bonds of knowledge even knowing that to so do would destroy the very essence of being. Perhaps you really can't win. Perhaps there are no winners or losers anyway.
Some people, perhaps all of us, will constantly turn away from the things we'd rather pretend just weren't happening. What is of vital importance here is not so much the turning away but the reason behind the action—and the reason can be of multiple origin. This is not to denigrate those who turn away. Turning away can be as simple and natural as feeling guilty about picking your nose in public.
The wise person will attempt to evaluate why he or she turned away, just as they might try to evaluate why they felt guilty about a nose picking session. If something makes us feel uncomfotable within ourselves, it is essentially because we do not understand that something.
Try the suggestion for size. If it fits, good. Wear it for a while and pass it on to someone else.
In a busy world people make mistakes. In the same busy world others lambast them for those mistakes whilst somehow forgetting that they have made, and will no doubt continue making mistakes of their own.
Doors open, doors close. That's life. Sometimes the doors just fall off the hinges and nobody knows too much about that. Simplicity is the most complex of things yet complexity itself is simple.
For instance there is little point in trying to level a true playing field. It is better just to get right on down to enjoying what is there or you run the risk of remaining on the outside and never knowing what you might or might not have missed, or gained.
Runaway greed will eventually produce a thug. It is a simple and logical progression that is complex because the damage is already done before the cure can be effected. If you wonder why I say these things, it is because I am Börhd Hooligan.
In the days before I was Börhd, when I was Yaeger, I used to feel like a fully operational internal combustion engine missing its spark plugs. It was a disorientating condition, intensely exacerbated by lukewarm tea. When it came on strong I used to start trembling and I'd ooze excessive sweat from every pore. Everybody avoided me. Drinking piping hot tea at this point simply made it even worse.
A dwarf told me that it was probably due to the effect of the monolineal resonance of my name and so I became Börhd Hooligan and dropped the Yaeger Lout monicker. It brought instant cure. When through the goodness of my nature I try telling this to pyschiatrists and psychologists for no reason other than their edification, they look the other way and bar me from their surgeries and continue with their preconceived ideas of reality.
Once I almost successfully convinced a bank teller that she was really an ant. She started scurrying about through all the files and office drawers like she was just one of millions doing the same thing without really knowing any more other than for some mysterious cosmic reason it just had to be done. She believed she was an ant for nearly six months until pest control came in and fumigated the bank where she worked to rid it of cockroaches and creepy crawlies. Four days after the fumigation she realised she was still alive and not an ant after all. She never spoke to me again after that and would sidle away and insist on someone else serving me whenever I entered the bank.
After that episode I developed a curious tolerance towards even the dumbest idiots I met. Once, when I walked into the main foyer of the Wang Centre in Boston out of a curiosity to see what the inside of the public theatre's main foyer looked like, I managed to deploy the technique to perfection.
I was challenged by so-called security staff who said that the interior of the theatre — surelay a public auditorium — could not be perused by the casual visitor. Small minded people in positions of authority maintain such ridiculous attitudes day by day.
Pretending to have lost something I got down to my hands and knees and began crawling round in circles peering at the tiled floor. After a few minutes I got up and dusted my knees off and walked up to the asparagus stalks.
“It just seems to have disappeared. If you find it, give me a call would you,” I said, handing over one of my brand new press cards marked Börhd Hooligan—journalist. I never did get a call. Perhaps that was another of my own mistakes. I will continue to make them too, I guess, though heaven knows I do not set out to be a trouble to anyone except those who I must be a trouble to in order to prevent them troubling me on an even grander scale.
From there I went and sat in the bar opposite the Wang Centre, where I also happened to have a job, and was enjoying a beer and a welcome snack until a someone came in and started annoying me and then annoying someone else at the bar. Eventually and also getting angry he turned his attentions on a cop who'd come in for a coffee and who eventually walked up to Mr Trouble and by the seat of his pants threw him out into the street with the warning of being arrested if he returned. Who made the mistake here is open to question.
After many a long conversation with Judge Justin Justice, the Newsmedianews legal adviser, I came to the conclusion that claims of mistaken purpose must always be regarded with understanding beyond the causal. The division in this area between truth and vindictiveness is a fine one. There is no adequate encompassing definition of what actually constitutes a mistake. For my own understanding, I like to define it as the unwanted and not enjoyed imposition of an unintentional act by one person on the self or another.
Doors open and doors close.
What happened to the Irish Free State?
JUST as we are what we eat, so we are also at any one time the sum of our education in life. The expectations we may develop of our selves and of others will shape our portrayal of the world in which we live.
As far as global unity is concerned, the European Union concept may be a step in the right direction towards social equality and the breaking down of nationlist barriers. Yet by itself this may not be enough, expecially when the emphasis of development is toward financial.
One thing about this site is that it is prepared to examine difficult and perhaps if not controversial, then at least worrying issues that most of us might prefer to avoid. Like how our present society can be one of the most corruptive influences on our living that there is.
When you are part of it you might not notice this, or if you do, chances are you will simply ignore it. That is the effect of being within the status quo. Freedom itself has been corrupted. Yet what is freedom? Definitions vary, but most specify liberty as a root.
Liberty: noun freedom from constraint, captivity, slavery or tyranny; freedom to do as one pleases; the unrestrained enjoyment of natural rights; power of free choice; privilege; permission; free range; leisure; disposal; the bounds within which certain privileges are enjoyed.
The above descriptions are a sample of the dictionary definitions for liberty. Love is perhaps the greatest freedom there is in life, yet we seem to have second graded it beneath financial values. As a result, love itself has become a commodity of barter as opposed to a free element of life.
Women will be reluctant to admit that the material wealth of the man they marry has any bearing on their choice of partner. Truth is always a bitter pill to swallow when you are trying to avoid it. The rejection of the thought is related to its truth. Despite the advent of the so-called 'new age man' who is prepared to let the woman be the breadwinner, it is still a far more common occurence for the woman to choose her partner for the sake of the material enhancements she considers it will bring to her life. How many down and outs do you know who have loyal partners sharing their lives?
We are products of our environments no less than Bonnie and Clyde and the only way to step into a clear perspective is to escape the confines of our restrictive status quo. Those who fail to do so continue to do their own lives an injustice.
psy'chopath (path) noun someone who shows a pathological degree of specific emotional instability without specific mental disorder; someone suffering from a behavioural disorder resulting in inability to form personal relationships and in indifference to or ignorance of his or her obligations to society, often manifested by antisocial behaviour such as acts of violence, sexual perversion, etc.
We invent classifications; compartmentalise and categorise and then pass judgement according to those evaluations. In our wisdom we consider we have the yardsticks necessary to judge what we term ‘normality’, although often we admit to being uncomfortable with some of those yardsticks.
Yet such yardsticks are definitions that we as a species have specified to suit our particular requirements. They are not rooted in any other source.
It is estimated, according to the relevant yardsticks, that one in 200 people in the UK are ‘psychopathic’. In the US, the figure is one in 100.
Is the world of today really any better than the one of, say, two thousand years ago? We may have improved living conditions, medical services, transportation and communications—and technological development has vastly changed our living—but is it any better?
In developed countries, millions of people go to work each day, eking out a living for themselves whilst performing a service of some description to their communities. Do they see the fruits of their never ending labour? Have they committed themselves or been unknowingly committed to some dream of an idealistic future at the expense of their own life in the present?
Difficult questions with quite probably even more difficult answers.
Meanwhile vast portions of our cosmic spaceship Earth are falling into greater and greater disarray, whilst other portions are rife with crazed people intent on harming and often killing others. To species visiting from other parts of the galaxy, we might indeed appear insane.
Perhaps we have been at a similar juncture in history before. Civilised history is remarkably odd with its eminent omissions. Huge gaps exist in our knowledge where none should exist at all. We simply seem not to have the answers to certain factors in our not too distant development as a species. South America and North Africa and the civilisations that flourished and collapsed in those regions are examples to moot.
Ancient Indian notes indicate knowledge of space travel and a study of ancient Sanskrit by Madame Blavatsky drew astonishing similarities with modern knowledge, when the meanings of certain Sanskrit writings were examined from a western language perspective.
Any reader of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire is asked to find the genealogy tree graph within its pages. The tree shows one branch that ends in a single identity. That identity is a set of initials only, whilst all others are named individuals. What initials did you find on the tree?
Send your reply to : khHer monumental book, A Treatise of Cosmic Fire, convincingly postulated that the Sanskrit view of cosmic fire was equivalent to our modern understanding of nuclear physics. It was also a view with which Einstein is said to have concurred.
In our modern world, attention has been drawn to differing levels of Radon. Radioactivity in some localised areas, attributed to Radon gas, can be up to eight or nine times higher than the normal, or background level. Many pockets of higher radioactivity have been identified. Residential development in many countries now has to be cognisant to these differing levels, but the question of why the differing levels exist at all—and why in such definitive localised patches—has yet to be adequately answered.
A nuclear explosion would result in such patches of higher ground radioactivity, increased levels that would last for many, many years. Yet it is not accepted that we as a species might have possessed nuclear weaponry in the past. Perhaps we just do not wish to accept such a possibility, yet the ancient writings are unmistakably specific.
In 1957, as a younsgter still at junior school, I experienced a dream that puzzles me to this day. I watched a nuclear blast in the distance, saw in curious slow motion the searing while light, the approach of the shock and heat waves, then felt myself die in the unsurvivable heat, but not before I had looked down at my body and seen ‘through’ as if looking with X-ray vision.
It wasn't the dream itself that was odd. The curious thing was that in 1957 there were no movies showing the effects of a nuclear blast and very little news footage. Besides, I was not into watching news bulletins then and they certainly did not teach nuclear physics in my infants’ school, nor did they have books showing such images; although I would sit and draw spaceships with chalk on my small chalking board, engaging in telepathic battles with my friend on the other side of the classroom who would also be drawing rockets. Agterwards we’d compare drawings to see who’d ‘won’. Eventually we took to sitting next to each other so we could observe each other’s boards and play our intergalactic adventures like some cosmic chess game.
Despite this, the odd thing is that I knew at the time exactly what I was experiencing. It was only in later years, when I came across actual information about nuclear explosions, that I was able to match the two together.
Some I have spoken with have surmised that I may have somehow picked up the thoughts of someone who perished in the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. I don’t know. I have no answer to this mystery to this day, along with a good many other unresolved matters including ghosts I have met (yeah, real ghosts) and other ethereal incidents.
There are some who will go through life calling others crazy when what they really mean is that they have no comprehension of what that ‘crazy’ person is all about.
But then psychopaths are a strange breed, are they not?
Two days ago a trained US soldier on active duty in Iraq lobbed three grenades into tents housing commanding officers in a coalition desert military base where he was stationed. One serviceman was killed in the blast and a number of others injured.
A soldier was arrested in connection with the attack but little has been said or reported regarding the incident other than that it happened. One commentator in Ireland said that the media had ‘badly reported’ on the incident.
It is an incident that bears careful examination. There has been no official comment from either the White House or the Pentagon as to whether the arrested man had been acting purely on self-motives or had been acting on behalf of external influences. It is likely that nothing will be said until the conclusion of any inquiry into the matter.
Whatever the truth of the man’s actions, it is a sign of the confusion and insanity arising from the events that led to the man’s presence at all in Iraq. Can he be blamed for coming apart under the circumstances?
Of naivety, ignorance and indifference
Ralph McTell is a towering hulk of a man. His stature of over six and a half feet tall is somehow strangely incongrous to the gentle songs he became renowned for. If he ever teamed up with Mervyn Stutter they would make a truly formidable combo.
When I met Ralph back in 1993 and 1994, I was caught in in the preparations for a civilian aid convoy to central Bosnia with the aim of holding several large yuletide parties for war orphaned children. He kindly donated two copies of the London A-Z street atlas, each bearing his signature on the front cover and containing a short handwritten dedication on the inner sleeve. For the unititiated, Ralph’s most popular selling single was Streets of London, which became a global classic. The books were donated to be included in a collection of raffle prizes raising money for the Bosnia project, some details of which are also on this web site.
So how does this equate with naivety, ignorance and indifference? Read on.
Naivety is a simplistic state of mind, coupled with an often unwillingness or a simple inability to be cognizant of certain realities. A naive state will lead to ignorance, and in turn ignorance of a given situation or circumstance leads to indifference to that situation or circumstance.
So what then is the link between all of this and the Streets of London?
Well, to be honest I'm not sure. It can be funny how some things stay in your memory while others vanish. Like the time I was walking home through London having missed the last train and seen no signs of a night bus. It was a four mile walk home and I was confident. I knew London's streets well. Then somewhere near the Victoria Embankment my left leg fell off. Just like that. No warning, nothing. One minute it was there joined to my hips, the next it was lying in the gutter where it had rolled from the pavement, lying still and anonymous. Another lost leg.
I'd been about to take another stride only my leg with its comfortably shoed foot was no longer there and I pitched nose first onto the hard pavement, which didn't exactly leave me feeling like crawling the few yards to recover the detached leg.
Instead I lay there, trying to get my bearings as to why such a stupid thing would happen to me after all the nice places I’d missed and all the nice things I’d never done in London. Sometimes there just seemed no explanation.
Several dozen tourists passed, muttering under their breath with words that were foreign but could have been “poor man”, dropping a few coins or the occasional banknote in the gap where my leg should have been, before moving on by.
One very pretty long-haired mini-skirted girl picked up my detached leg and brushed it off before squatting in front of me and putting the leg next to me but on the wrong side, softly saying over and over “there there, there there” while patting me on the head like a Dulux dog. I was glad when she stood up and left, though the view up her skirt had been nice and my fascination with her spotted panties had briefly taken my mind off just why my leg might have dropped off,
When I finally managed to get up and resume my journey, it felt a bit odd using the detached leg like a walking stick, especially when I was crossing the Hungerford Bridge. People crossing in the other direction would flatten themselves up against the edge of the path until I had passed, as if I was some sort of threat. It took me several hours to make my way home, and I even had to fend off a street thug in Norwood who tried snatching my detached leg from me, probably to see what might be hidden in the lining of the shoe. It was only when I started wacking him around the head with the still soggy stump of the leg that he gave up and ran off.
It was the third leg I’d lost, though probably the least embarrassing. Once I was boarding a Thames pleasure cruiser and was about to step across the short gap between the gangplank and the deck when my leading leg fell off. The leg was already on the boat but I simply plunged down through the gap into the murky River Thames. A few weeks later I received a letter from the tour operators asking me for £2.50 - the price for a detached leg to go on the cruise up to Twickenham and back. The original ticket had still been in my hand when I fell. It had taken me several hours to get out of the water. Can you imagine trying to climb out with just one leg knowing that your missing leg is probably sitting quite happily on the boat among the pretty women and the stupid idiots rowing long boats up and down the river for no good reason at all?
The other time I didn't even notice the leg was missing for several hours, so I don't really know quite where it fell off. I'd had a good night out that evening and can only remember being woken up in a taxi by the driver demanding his fare. When I went to put my hand in my pocket for my money I discovered that my leg wasn't there.
“I'm sick and tired of that stupid bloody excuse. Everbody’s using it now. ‘Sorry, can’t pay, my leg must have fallen off somewhere’,” said the cockney driver before unceremoniously dumping me into the night street.
So you see, its all related. I still have the other two legs, preserved in formaldehyde and mounted above the fireplace. I'm only glad it was always a leg that fell off, and not my head.
Peace.
INTO THE MIRES OF PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION
"I'm just doing my job."
How many times have you heard such a phrase? How many times have you used it?
'I'm just doing my job' has often been used as a means to try to excusably disclaim responsibility.
Words of similar meaning were used by Caesar to absolve himself of the blame for Christ's execution. They were used by Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials. The outcome there was that a legal precedent was set in that 'just doing their job' did not absolve someone from incorrect or outlawed behaviour.
I have personally encountered and witnessed prejudice and discriminate practices displayed by many people in many differing walks of life, from hobos to rock stars to world international leaders. We claim to be an intelligent species, yet the disease of prejudice permeates every aspect of our daily lives.
And the target of this prejudice? Our brothers and sisters.
In societies where such prejudice is widespread and ingrained, it can be difficult to bring such matters to proper attention so that the existence of the problem might be recognised.
Victims of prejudice or discrimination are often ridiculed, abused or even killed for raising complaints of prejudice. Such abuse can be, and often is, attributable to raising complaints with people who are themselves prejudiced against the complainant to begin.
Think of the job you do, the responsibility you hold. Think of how you treat others in your life, and ask yourself if there might be some hostile prejudicial aspects in your own perceptions?
If you are honest with yourself you will find some aspect of hostile prejudice in yourself. And when you then examine that prejudice, you will also see that it is without real sense, as indeed is any hostile prejudice.
Now I'm not talking here about holding a prejudice against, say, mass murderers. Yet holding even such a prejudice as this can have negative consequence such as hampering the understanding of such people with a view towards possible future prevention.Bullies tend to congregate in groups, in which they can feed each other's prejudice and also show off to one another. Strip the bully of the group and much of the bravado leaves too. Leave the group intact and the recipe for trouble remains.
Prejudice is a vicious foe that can give rise to extreme circumstances. Where those circumstances become life threatening, often the only defence in terms of survival may be to attack.
Force is often necessary to defeat a mortal foe, although John Milton wrote that 'Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe'.
And so it is necessary to ask what gives rise to prejudice, for prejudice will remain a foe to be reckoned with unless it is treated at its source.
The Chambers Dictionary defines prejudice as "a judgement or opinion formed prematurely or without due consideration of relevant issues; prepossession or bias in favour of or against anything; unthinking hostility; injury or harm; disadvantage; a prejudgement".
Deep rooted prejudice precludes those affected by the malaise from comprehending its very cure - that of understanding. Understanding requires an exchange of dialogue and the willingness to agree to compromises.
Peace in and between nations can only ever be attained through agreed compromise. On a more individual level, people can only ever live in successful and lasting harmony when they agree to accept others and to compromise on differences.
Probably the simplest definition of the cause of prejudice would be a lack of understanding.
Most prejudice is rooted in fear or tied to a past hatred. Those suffering prejudiced states of mind must first begin to understand their own fear or past hatreds before they can begin to grasp the ignorance of prejudice itself.
It is a curious dilemma that, just as those living in societies which have not known the benefits of lasting peace will find it difficult to shed the shackles of inbred prejudice, so too those living in an environment of long established peace become at risk to blasé attitudes and so equally susceptible to the growth of prejudices.
Understanding prejudice itself is as important as understanding the targets of prejudice. The Romans threw early followers of Christianity to the lions or into the gladiator pits and did not consider they did anything wrong. They could be said to have persecuted the early Christians by ignorant wanton prejudice.
Prejudice can and often is denied. It can be deliberately denied because it better suits someone to ignore its existence.
A stranger to a particular social environment in which he or she encounters prejudice becomes isolated and vulnerable and the world can become a very harsh and lonely place for such people.
For all of the reasons stated above and probably a great many more, it is necessary, perhaps vital for all of us to ask if we ourselves hold unjustifiable hostile prejudiced feelings.
Knowledge comes to those who seek it. Knowing how to tackle prejudice within social orders requires that we must first find out how to tackle it within ourselves.Have you had an inner prejudice that you evaluated and overcame?
Have you suffered as a result of prejudice?
Tell others and help them learn from your experience?
& THE WAR OF LIFE
It is pitiful that we consider we must remind ourselves to ‘spend quality time’ with our family. But that’s the message now appearing on one of the most popular breakfast cereal packs.In a way it is like regarding our families as commodities, possessions, things. But perhaps we do that anyway. But wait a minute. Remember to spend quality time with our family?
Do we really need to remind ourselves to do that? Not that it isn’t vital and important, but why do we feel the need to remind ourselves of something so fundamental to our lives?
We obviously see something ‘wrong’ in ignoring family. Yet is it not part of the war of life?
Life is itself a destructive process. We kill to live. We destroy living things, be they animal or vegetable, to retain within ourselves the very same spark of life that we extinguish to survive by eating. Is this ‘intelligent’ existence?
What triggers the ‘intelligence’ of evolution? Where does ‘intelligence’ originate? And pray what is the true definition of ‘intelligence’?
Being intelligent, we have defined as: endowed with the faculty of reason; having or showing highly developed mental faculties; alert, bright, quick of mind; well-informed; knowing, aware;
while intelligence we define as intellectual skill or knowledge; mental brightness; information communicated; news; intelligence department.
As you can see, this is an incredibly complex issue. I must now take a short lie down to ponder where this leads. Back soon...
AND STILL
(15)
The Great Smoking Debate
July 24, 2003
As from January 2004, smoking will be outlawed in pubs, clubs, restaurants and other public facilities. The Irish Government has taken the unprecedented step of introducing the blanket ban without any real debate or the benefit of a public vote. Strange, after all it is the public who will be affected by this legislation. A recent poll on national television revealed a wide majority of people were against the ban.Just exactly how it will be policed is another matter. Bar staff I have spoken to in relation to this merely shake their heads and say it will be unworkable in practice. Some say that staff should have the right to work in a smoke free atmosphere should they so wish.
As for me, a smoker for the past 40 years, I do think it is a good move, but I am unsure about just how this legislation has been passed. There is no indication that the managers of public facilities will have the leeway to create a smoking section, which would make sense. Staff working in such sections would have to be volunteers—that is they must be given the option of working in such an environment or not.
Just like those who it is said have the right to have their civil liberties respected, i.e., not having to endure a smoke filled atmposphere, surely smokers have the same rights under civil liberties to choose to smoke in public or otherwise?
Using the argument of passive smoking is blasé and somewhat hypocritical. Customers in smoke free public facilities can leave at any time and enter the far more polluted atmosphere of the public streets, yet no-one has made moves to ban the materials and products responsible for such pollution such as cars, lorries, buses and yes, factories and even shops.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this legislation is its very exietence. It reeks of domination and control by those who consider they have the right to impose their will on others. After all, governments, at least in democratic nations, are in power by the will of the people and surely the will of the people must be given respect before any legislation that widely affects them is introduced?
Where this rule of thumb is ignored, the validity of democracy itself is flouted.
’Scuse me while I combust a fag.
Cheers!
The limp(id) sexual revolution
The 60s and 70s were designated a time of sexual revolution. Really? Looking back from the impotent year of 2003, I can only wonder. Sexual revolution?
A look at every day life passing by reveals a staggering ignorance of and a delinquent (to use a favoured expression of the late great Isaac Asimov) abuse of sexual matters.
The truth is we seem massively afraid of sex and anything to do with its actual reality as if it is something hugely taboo.
And yet we continue to allude to it in every every day walk of life: every television show, every movie, every advertisement, almost every conversation alludes to something of a sexual nature. And the key word is alludes.
Why as adults do we maintain this juvenile attitude to something that is next to our deaths the most important ingredient of living? Why have we debased sex to something no more important that a commodity that we associate with money? To get a grip on this we really do have to free our thoughts from the indoctrination that has been shovelled into us.
I have had hundreds of personal close encounters of the sexual kind and none of my fellow human creatures seemed to my mind to know the first thing about having a good time, and I mean a good time, sexually. Throw aside the Victorian repression, the cantankerous crowing of dog collared clerics and what is left? Fear seems to be the one dominant emotion that runs parallel to our view. Why?
Answering this question seems almost impossible. For a start, we all seem to hold an individual belief that we each know everything there is to know about sex. We convince ourselves that it is so. Perhaps we do so out of a fear of appearing ridiculous lest we were seen in any manner otherwise by our fellow creatures. Yet the truth again is that this charade is itself the most ridiculous of all.
Take the Internet. It surely states something of our crassness that this medium is awash with sexually inclined material.
No, this morbidity that we have assigned to our God given gift of sexuality is to my mind indisputable evidence of the madness of our adherence to material values.
Sex, that most wonderful of human experiences, generates more violence than perhaps any other single factor on the planet. It is the one human activity that truly reveals our gross ineptitude as both individuals and a species.
I intend to write more on this. In the meantime, I would be very interested in your own feedback on the issues.
Of fags, apologetic butts and Presidencies
Ireland has now taken over the Presidency of the EU for the sixth time, something that is bound to spark rounds of pub conversations as the term progresses.
Those conversations will be a little different too. For the first time in its history, the Irish government has in one fell swoop obliterated the traditional Irish pub by introducing a blanket ban on smoking in all public premises. At least, that was the idea.
The ban was designated to become effective on 26 January 2004 but so far, no specific starting date has been formally announced.
“The smoking ban is contained in Statutory Instrument No. 481 of 2003. It was notified to the European Commission the 24th day of April 2003. There was no objection to this smoking ban by the Commission or any Member State. Accordingly, on the 16th October 2003 the Minister for Health and Children signed an Order which provided that the ban would commence with effect from the 26th day of January 2004,” the Taoiseach told the Dail at the close of 2003. The legal basis for the ban on smoking having passed through the required European process, is now rock solid. It is the law and will be effective as and from its commencement date.The days of building a roll-up, or lighting a tailor made or even a cigar or pipe to puff with your pint have been relegated to history. At least for now. There is sure to be some scowling faces looming over their pint glasses and there will probably be small knots of people standing outside in the street puffing on a smoke while feeling a little like a cross between a fugitive and a social outcast.
As a smoker myself I am in two minds. One feels miffed at the fact that someone has the affront to tell me what I may or may not do on the grounds of public health while every day in the street I am forced to breathe in petroleum and other pollutants without much hope of any redress.
The other not so oddly feels that it could be a good idea—40 years of smoking a mixture of cigarettes, roll-ups, cigars and pipes has left an unmistakable toll. I have lived and worked in and visited smoke free environments—the kind of place where in fact the majority of workers would take a smoke break on the sidewalk outside their place of work, in this case in Massachusetts Avenue in Boston city centre. The ban on smoking had little if any effect on purging the habits of those who smoked.
Interestingly, Ireland has the real opportunity through its EU Presidency of forging a more pronounced relationship with its closest neighbour the UK—a country that although claiming full EU membership rights has so far resisted relinquishing its economic sovereignty in favour of the Euro.
Britain too needs to work harder at building those links and connections in a public fashion. Ireland may not be Britain's closest geographical European neighbour but a true bond of friendship exists at grassroots between the people of the two countries that is greater than the difficulties of the past. That is a reality that should not be forgotten.
Osama
Bin Laden — a man without conscience...?
Has the US
lost the plot to the $?
ERADICATING
THE CRÁIC
L:OO:KING
BEYOND THE FAMILY
Skating on
the God Excuse - BUT how thin is the ice?
Osama
Bin Laden — a man without conscience...?
It is perhaps staggering that someone with such a price on his head as Bin Laden — a man accused of and wanted for untold terrorist mayhem, murder and savagery and for spearheading the Al Qaeda network of terrorists, should still be at large in our world today.
Someone somewhere must know something. Someone somewhere is helping this individual to remain at large, albeit in secrecy. Yet this is a man who according to his hunters has openly advocated murder—openly advocated the killing of civilians in support of what he expounds as a just cause, a holy way, a jihad.
It cannot be denied that there are many of Islamic origin who have become besotted with the preachings of Bin Laden over the years. They were present in the former Yugoslavia throughout the ethnic cleansing atrocities, unaligned mercenaries who seemed more intent on fighting a war for the sake of it than for any other perceivable reason. They are no doubt still present in high numbers in Afghanistan and in Iraq and there is little doubt too that this army of chaos will have some link to most, if not all of the major terrorist activities that take place in our world.
Has the US lost the plot to the $? 
On 6th September 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers set sail in the Mayflower
from Plymouth.Sixty six days later they dropped anchor at Cape Cod,
Massachusetts and so began the colonisation from Europe of the ‘new land of the free’ — America.We will never really know just what was in the minds of those men and, later—women. What we do know from their writings is that the Pilgrim Fathers were dissatisfied and unhappy with persecution and prejudice, and believing they were living in a society that had itself taken a wrong turn, were keen to establish a new land of personal liberty and freedom.
By the time the very first new American generation reached adulthood, the purity of those noble principles was tainted by the very same problems that the Pilgrim Fathers had fled, but the ideals were enshrined down the years and later embodied in the Constitution—a blueprint for the New World in the West.
Yet it failed to prevent the wars against America’s native Indian inhabitants, which in modern times would no doubt have been termed ethnic cleansing. By the days of McCarthyism, which had its roots in the 1920s and continued through into the 40s, the New World was stomping on its own founding principles even if the Great American Dream was still widely very much alive. But just what was, or is, the Great American Dream?
“Nobody hears old people complain because people think that's all old people do. And that's because old people are gnarled and sagged and twisted into the shape of a complaint,” wrote US dramatist Edward Albee in his work The American Dream.
Rare is the youth that does not become caught up in its own folly of ignorance. The wisdom of the Pilgrim Fathers was devout for their own generation, but did it fail to allow for the future folly of ignorance?
Certainly it might be thought so from the average person’s life in the US today, where the greenbacks rule whether anyone cares to admit it or otherwise.
And yet how can we progress our world without such reliance on money? Money is said to be the root of all evil, but so is the lack of it in a world that is dominated by it. When you have it, you can easily forget its absence and likewise as easily forget those in unhappy lives.
Pondering on these issues is quite futile, I believe, but somehow pressingly necessary. We have become immune to the madness around us. The questions are without answers. The machine is so robust, so pregnant with self-propelling and self-perpetuating momentum. It has become a monster that remorselessly continues to exert influence over even those who claim to have broken free of it. What hope then for those who are born directly into its clutches?
Yet through it all weaves the unavoidable thread of preordainment. We kid ourselves that we have free choice and yes, we can choose our movements, our actions. But as individuals I do not believe we can change the occurrence of external events. But we do perhaps have the power to change some of the forces that fuel some of those external events.
America has become a land propelled by the dictates of money, energy requirements and the needs of the consumer industries. It is a land that rolls on the crest of the motion industry waves and reels on the music slipstream. It has perhaps become further from the Pilgrim Fathers’ visions than they could have imagined. It is a land that has become driven by the dollar.
And that will change, but how will the change develop? World economic experts predict that China will step into the shoes of the world’s leading economy by the year 2015 and the US will not even be in the top three.
And imagine what will happen when China’s 1.25 billion each have their own PC?
It is interesting to read the letter from Simon Gray, who believes that the US is living in what he refers to as a state of “warrior mentality”.
On his web page, Simon writes:
‘The United States exists because our immigrant ancestors risked everything to travel across the ocean with their hopes and dreams. They bought one-way tickets and left behind family and history because they believed they could have a better life in the new world. There was no going back. Whatever this was in America, it had to be better than what they left. This cannot have been a mistake to leave their homelands. It had to have been the right thing to do. After 3 generations of kids growing up with this mentality, we still believe it today. We believe that life in Europe has to be worse, in our minds, than what we have built here. We like to boast that everything we have in the United States is better than anything anywhere else.
‘If we escaped from living under a tyrannical government back in Europe, and now we live free, we may boast that we are more free than anyone else on the earth, and that people in other countries wish they lived in the United States, and had the freedoms that we have. We may not even know what life is like today back in Europe, and we don’t care; we’re Americans now. We may not even be able to list what freedoms we have that people in European countries don’t have. Doesn’t matter; our Warrior Instinct is absolute. In our minds, the United States is the best place to live in the world, regardless of whether it’s true or not.
‘But, this kind of arrogant boasting also causes bigger problems for us. We are the only country that thinks we are better than everyone else. We practice this attitude in our dealings with the rest of the world. Our American companies go into smaller countries and set up businesses that make money off the natural resources and labor of those people. And then we take the profit home. This alone is enough to make people want to attack us. But on top of that, we boast that we are better than them, and therefore somehow have the right to take what we want from other people’s countries. And if they don’t like it, then we will blow them up with our superior weapons.
‘We set ourselves up for terrorism with our primitive Warrior Instinct!
‘And then, when we are attacked, we say it was because these terrorists are jealous of how good we have things in America. Again, our short sighted arrogant Warrior Instinct sets us up for more attacks. And the more we are attacked, the more we will fight back. Because our Warrior Instinct only sees black and white, and we have to be right.
‘The only question now is, can we get beyond our Warrior Instinct to put an end to terrorism?’
Can we indeed?
ERADICATING THE CRÁIC
If heading off out to enjoy the ‘Cráic’ is the Irish colloquial for going out to enjoy the fun and have a good time, then the present Irish Government appears intent on doing more to eradicate it than all of the antisocial elements of the country combined.First there was the introduction at the end of March 2004 of the national anti-smoking legislation making it a double offence for anyone to be ‘caught’ smoking in a public premises or in the workplace, with the threat of fines hanging over the owner of the premises or employer as well as the ‘offending’ smoker. The legislation was introduced without the benefit of a public referendum or any official public consultation and the nation had a little less than a year from its inception to acclimatise to the new national law. By July dissent against the new laws had grown and one defiant Galway publican who permitted smoking in his bars was facing court proceedings.
There is now an echoing in legislative corridors of measures to impose measures that will legally limit the amount of alcohol that may be consumed in public, though just how such a measure can be introduced is something of a puzzle. Swipe cards that will record daily purchases have been discussed in tactics reminiscent of the nightmare world of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction future.
It is all a little something like the antics of a government that has lost its perception of its allegiance to its job and has become embroiled in a world of its own fantasy.
I for one have always enjoyed visiting a pub, restaurant or cafe alone or in company and enjoying a relaxing time with a drink and a smoke. I have also always ‘obeyed’ no smoking requests where such requests were made without the benefit of legal backing such as has been introduced over the years to ban smoking on aircraft or subway trains. And to be blunt, the ban on being able to have a smoke when I visit a public bar has massively impacted on my wishes to visit such places—something I have been happily doing now for the past 40 years.
Imagine then what the feelings are of visitors to Ireland—a country seen throughout the world as the place where pubs are places of relaxation and cráic and music. Can you imagine sitting to listen to a trad session in Doolin, Waterford or Dingle and being legally banned from lighting a smoke?
The banning of smoking in the workplace can be said to be a beneficial thing, but it does mean that employees who wish to smoke will find their wishes interfered with. No doubt they will also scheme ways around things too. Expanding the ban to cover recreational premises however is a Draconian move. Are we soon to see an introduction of a ban on eating beans (or eggs) in public as they can make you fart and so potentially irritate someone else or give rise to claims of endangering the health of others?
That is something of a conundrum, as anyone examining the health issues must surely agree. One of the prima facia motives behind the smoking ban is said to be the concerns regarding public health. Odd, given that our world today is still intent on using methods that are daily destroying the rain forests and ocean plankton of our planet, effects that will have a far more detrimental effect on health than a fag at a public bar.
Still, the Irish Government is not itself directly destroying the plankton and rain forests, though all governments of the world hold a share of responsibility there.
Prohibitions introduced by governments in any form are a little more than measures introduced out of genuine concern for public health. And to be honest, there are far more pressing dangers to the general public health in Ireland than the smoking of cigarettes. Traffic fumes, contaminated drinking water, industrial and commercial pollution, violent crime, the abuse of alcohol— the list really can be made extensive and is more than enough to drive you to drink and to smoke.
And the effects of alcohol prohibition in the US are well documented, including the massive social havoc it gave rise to.
Oh well, as Hermit Empeysex doesn't say, just a thought.
L:OO:KING BEYOND THE FAMILY
Looking beyond the family is not such an easy accomplishment as it appears. We are all rooted in the family. Family forms an integral part of the lives of the vast majority of us and our own lives become structured and entwined around our families in one form or another.Yet it is necessary to look beyond the family lest we blinker our vision to those who may be different. We have structured the patterns of our lives about family. We progress through life with the objective of finding a suitable partner and sooner or later, for the vast majority, parenthood and family life arrives.
Look at your life like a book. You may not know what may be contained in the still to be written pages, but you will be aware that there is a certain pattern to life’s events, even its unknown events. We become who we are, we work to earn a living, to pay for the requirements of life. For many, that includes the requirements of the family. But not all.
Skating on the God Excuse - BUT how thin is the ice?
I have always been instinctively wary—suspicious if you like—of those who would attempt to use the leverage of threats of punishment and admonishment in support of their own belief in what they see as religious 'right'.No-one—no matter who or what they may be—simply no-one alive on this earth today has any better knowledge of 'God' than anyone else. And I mean no-one. That is the confinement of life. For anyone to kid themselves otherwise is to fall victim to the fears generated by the knowledge of our mortality.
At the very best, all that any of us mere mortals has at any given stage in life is our own personal idea, tinged with the prejudices we have accumulated, of what we as individuals consider as our understanding of 'God'. There may be deeper thread of understanding within us all, but it will remain intangible, vague, and tantalisingly present but not quite within reach. Call it the echoes of the soul.
Sitting in a railway station the other day to see off some friends who were heading back to Dublin, I read through an article in the free Irish newspaper Alive. It was the first time I had encountered the newspaper and the article was credited to a 14 year-old schoolgirl. It was an account of her 'discovery of God', an awareness, she wrote, the absence of which became glaringly obvious after her discovery.
She seemed keen to point out how the absence of an acceptance of the awareness of God was responsible for so much personal confusion and unhappiness in the world. Although obviously written quite sincerely, her writing revealed a somehow sad naivety that could be applied to so much 'religious thinking' today.
She constantly referred to God as 'He', and although the perception of a spiritual reality was present in her writing it seemed that her thinking was still being led by mankind's centuries old self indoctrination.
The danger of blind faith lies in ignoring what is happening now.
"Everything is going to be OK. The 'next life/world will be better'." And so on.
In contrast, John Lennon urged us to imagine a world with 'no heaven above us', 'no hell below us' and all the people of this world 'living for today'.
Hmm. Is living for today really possible? Certainly it would seem something of an impossibility where our lives rely on profit factors, for profits are things that require tomorrows to fatten up.
Oh, I know there is always tomorrow, and I'm not suggesting ignoring tomorrow as though it didn't exist. But there is a big difference between fashioning today around the intangible reality of tomorrow and fashioning it around the here and now. It's a matter of focus.
Religion breeds fanaticism. There is not a single religion in the world that does not somewhere in its tenets uphold that it is the one 'true' religion or that it upholds the one 'true' faith. It is ridiculous and perhaps hypocritical to foster division and to then preach an acceptance of difference. That really is building upon shaky foundations.
And yet religion is something we have come to think of as 'necessary'. Many believe it is a 'sin' to ignore religious persuasion and live out their lives accordingly.
Questioning faith becomes a no-go area and even in modern times those who question faith run the risk of being seen as 'heretics'.
Then and Us
Them and us is a viewpoint based on division. We apply the divisions to friend and foe alike and, in many instances, create a foe through that division. We fail to accept difference.Wars are perpetuated on such division. Such division is visible in and across the whole of society and could even be said to be ingrained in us as the 'norm'. Indeed in a world of career and profit it is the standard yardstick of the 'norm', for such a society could not function without the idea of competition. And competition relies on division—them and us.
Just a thought...
Is it time Western business interests quit Iraq?
Or are the spoils too high?
Despite the perception by many observers in the West to understand the differences between the Muslim way of life in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan and the lifestyles of the predominantly Christian West, the West has still broadly failed to really grasp those differences and still appears intent on 'converting' those foreign lifestyles to the West's own visions of how social living ‘should be’.Such attempted conversion will not and cannot work and it is insultingly arrogant of the West to continue to act in the belief that it might.
Foreign visitors or residents, particularly those from the West, might be tolerated in many Muslim countries but it must be remembered and stressed that such people have no inalienable rights under any law to be in those countries to begin. They are simply guests.
All nations alike retain the right, agreed under international law. to admit or refuse entry to foreign nationals under the individual policies and laws of each nation, and likewise the same applies to countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan have been invaded by foreign military powers which ousted their leaderships and put in place systems that were largely under the control of the occupying military machine, itself under the overall control of the invading coalition nations.
Across much of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no real love for Western foreign business representatives and workers or the representatives of the coalition governments, who are not viewed as being there for the greater benefits of the country they are in but purely for the business interests of those they work for, and ultimately their own personal benefit.
The drive and struggles towards improving personal lifestyles is something everyone can understand, be they Muslim or otherwise. Yet it is the links to the interests of the invading coalition-member nations that is causing unrest.
Such interests are broadly mistrusted by the Muslim world, which sees similarities between the Christian-led but Empire building occupations of countries such as India and Africa. Within countries that have witnessed invasion by outside military forces and which now live under such invasion, that mistrust can only be magnified many times.
As a result, I believe that individual Western civilians who are in Afghanistan or Iraq purely because of business reasons, are in far greater danger now than prior to the coalition invasion. That danger must also apply to the representatives of the coalition governments, though the latter are generally under far better protection than civilians, most of whom have no real protection at all, as is obvious from the kidnappings and executions that have taken place
The bulk of the coalition nations that have participated in the active invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have no actual comprehension through direct experience of living under an invading and occupying military force in any terms similar to the situations within Afghanistan and Iraq, except for those countries which were invaded by the Nazi or the Japanese military. In particular, the US has never known military occupation, even though it experienced the ‘civil war’ against England, and England itself has not experienced any invasion since the days of the Roman Empire.
For any semblance of lasting internal stability that does not resemble the occupational transformation of Iraq and to perhaps a lesser degree Afghanistan, it might perhaps be necessary if not essential for western business interests to pull their staff and representatives out of both countries entirely.
Any return would then be at the invitation and with the full agreement and cooperation of whatever acting government was installed. But such action is fraught with difficulty.
To begin, there is the difficulty of relinquishing and walking away from potentially lucrative gains.
There is the difficulty of revealing the thinking behind wishing to remain.
And these are just the obvious difficulties.
But perhaps it really is time that business, individuals and governments looked seriously at exiting Iraq and Afghanistan until stability and a welcome return through invitation becomes possible, and time to honestly evaluate the probable outcome of choosing to remain or to leave.
Reflection on the Ninny
02 May 2006I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.
W. C. Fields (1880–1946) US actor. Attrib.A great many open minds should be closed for repairs.
Toledo BladeI have always found that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.
J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) British novelist and dramatist.One can only wonder if John Steinbeck had been contemplating the plentiful narrow-mindedness of people when he came up with his title Of Mice and Men.
Certainly there can be no greater impediment to human co-operation and development than the presence of narrow, or closed minds. There are those whose minds are closed through blindness and there are those whose minds are closed by choice.
It is an age old problem but curiously one that has perhaps grown in equal proportions with the broadening of world communications and the far broader and more readily available access to knowledge that was in existence even as little as just 50 years ago.
The Internet provides the astonishing resources of a global library of accumulated knowledge at the very fingertips of the user and yet conversely it is a place where small mindedness abounds in plenty.
Small mindedness has myriad root tentacles at its source yet the majority of them can be traced to a simple unwillingness, unpreparedness or inability to simply be here now.
These are very powerful words — be here now. How many of us truly are? We await our next payday to pay the bills, we await something happening next month, we await, we await. And in the meantime, as Beatle John Lennon said: "Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans".
What drives us to live outside of the now is an interesting ponderment. Importantly, the question requires an open mind if it is to be considered at any meaningful level.
Philosophising without a relevant core example is a pretentious escapade. To bring some focus to this, let's look at the world situation today. There are on-going wars in two countries, notably Iraq, and to a lesser degree perhaps now Afghanistan. These are not armchair DVD wars—real people are being horrifically mutilated or killed. They are not fighting a war out of their own choice—they are doing so based on what they have been told and taught by others.
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war
Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1960'sThere is an endless amount of controversy in the world. Controversy is simply a difference of opinion. Yet it has often been branded as something far worse, almost something sinister, something subversive. We might be seeing in the world today the creeping erosion of personal freedoms, including the freedom of self expression, to a greater extent than ever existed in the last 500 years.
There are those whose minds are closed to this reality; those who simply prefer to believe or fantasize that is it not really happening. They are unwilling to come face to face with something that appears to clash with their perceived sense of security, their perceived comfort zone. This is a mistaken and immensely dangerous fantasy for it lets the rot go unnoticed. It is quite as dangerous as ignoring a crack in the gas pipe feed into your home.
So, let’s look at the results of adopting a closed mind policy and just why it is so dangerous. A friend of mine was jailed years ago for attempting to publish something that a particular government did not wish published at the time. Publishing the information he had access to would have been an embarrassment to the government. Jailing him put him out of the way.
At the time it wasn’t difficult to do. He already had a ‘criminal record’ from previous years. Later, following his release and on hearing his story, many people chose to shut if off and to only believe that as he was a ‘criminal’ there could be no real truth to what he was telling them. They distorted the reality of the circumstances to suit their own perceptions and needs. In short, they had closed minds.
Reality may consist of many things that many people simply don’t wish to hear or think about. Shutting off to such things doesn’t make them go away. If anything, it helps propagate them.
Having a closed mind to broader perception requires that such a person will adopt a defensive position whenever anything comes along that lies outside of their permitted field of awareness. In turn, that will lead to an aggressive stand if such a person remains unwilling to attempt an understanding of what is deemed ‘foreign’ matter in his or her closed mind.
That leaves small choice if such circumstances don’t simply go away. On the one hand, the person unwilling to deal with it can figuratively walk away and hope that the issue never bothers him or her again.
There are two remaining alternatives: to continue refusing to accept the existence of the issue and accordingly build bigger barriers when it does not go away, so paving the way towards greater aggressive reaction; or .... opening the mind to the issue.
related: An issue of free speech Previous Page
Before you choose to groan at a question that comes up over and over and to which over and over nobody seems to have a clue of an answer to, wait.
We are here to make life a better experience for others, and so for ourselves.
So why do so many of us on this world work so very hard day and night at achieving the exact opposite? We don’t make life better, we don’t make life easier. Those with their heads stuck deep in the bureaucratic mire of their own and other’s misconceptions and ignorant selfishness are those who make this world a miserable place for everyone, including themselves.
... My brain hurts. Will compose more when the pain recedes ....
“IN TIMES of war few bombardiers tend to worry about whether their targets are national monuments, but they will have to think again under a treaty awaiting approval in Britain. Under the Hague Convention of 1954, which is expected to be ratified in this parliamentary cycle, countries are entitled to give a shortlist of cultural sites that are protected by international law from bombardment.
The Government has prepared a provisional list of 45 sites, but believes that the public should decide which buildings and monuments should be protected. Attackers from the 114 countries that have signed up to the convention will be notified of places listed as being “cultural heritage of the greatest importance for humanity” and must avoid them at all costs.”
The above paragraphs formed the basis to an article published by the Times. The fact that anybody could with any degree of seriousness even consider introducing agreements under the form of an international treaty to protect buildings from hostile attackers, while lives remain an acceptable loss, to my mind demonstrates the total insanity to which the human race has devolved.
December 15, 2005
The reality picture
Let’s talk reality truth now. Only those with the courage to face the reality of the truth should read on from here.I begin this story at an unusual stage, not the beginning, not the end. In 1973 a court opposite the Houses of Parliament in London sentenced me to 24 years’ imprisonment. The most serious offence with which I was charged was the theft of a car. There were other related and unrelated charges, but nothing to warrant such a monstrous sentence.
I have lost the exact detail of the various charges and sentences now—after all this took place a good many years ago—but the various terms of imprisonment were made to run concurrently and amounted to a total of four years to be served. I did appeal against conviction in one particular charge and severity of sentence in others but this was rejected out of hand by the court of appeal, which then added a further consecutive three months to my term for making what the court declared was a ‘frivolous appeal’.
At the time that all this took place, I was investigating reports relating to a prison riot that had taken place at one of the UK’s top security prisons, HMP Gartree in Leicester. My investigations uncovered facts that had been kept undisclosed by the authorities.
I have lived my life as a survivor. I have never meant to harm anyone, wished for nothing more than to be permitted to live the one life God and my parents have granted me with a modicum of happiness and with the freedom that all human beings are entitled to, regardless of who says what.
I left home before I was 17 years old, having already passed through a term at a so-called ‘approved school’, and had started my independent life by living in a caravan on a mobile home site near Donnington in Shropshire. I worked for a time, bought myself a drum kit and joined a working rock band, although this soon collapsed and I left the caravan to live on the road in an old Rover 90 car I had bought, even though I had no licence or insurance documents.
It was completely impossible to live on the pitifully meagre dole allowance of the time, I had no-one to whom I could really turn to for help and no-one who was willing to offer help to me. It wasn’t long before I was sentenced to a term in Borstal, and following that, an 18-month jail term at the age of 20, which I spent at Wormwood Scrubbs in London.
When I came out of jail, I hooked up with some London friends that I had met whilst on remand and who had been kind enough to stay in contact with me, and through them I met Eileen, the girl was would become the mother of my first child, our daughter Niko.
I stress that I lived my life as a survivor. While living with Eileen I took on a strange role. Jobs were not easy to find, but I found a few and worked as best as I could, but we were forever short of money and were going nowhere. My life bordered on a life of petty crime, despite the reality that all I sought was a ‘normal’ and happy life.
It was while I was living with Eileen and after the birth of Niko that I was approached by a national organisation and asked to investigate the ‘riot’ at Gartree jail, and was later arrested and jailed when our daughter was less than one year old.
On my release, a little over three years later, I lived alone in a large apartment in Crystal Palace, doing little more than trying to make sense of life and survive. I managed to stay clear of further involvement in crime until several relationships later and after I had moved to another part of the country.
If you have never been truly alone in your life, without friends or relatives willing to help, you will not for a moment really grasp just how difficult it can be just to survive, find a place to live, put food on your plate, warm clothes on your back.
But survive I somehow did, although by the age of 45 I had spent about nine years in captivity, sired three daughters and a son and been stepfather to three other children. Is this the hallmark of a caring society, or is it indicative of a society with its head stuck up its own arse and filled with grandiose beliefs in its own righteousness?
I studied hard and applied myself to bettering my life, and that of my struggling family and became a successful reporter with a large local newspaper publishing company. But the years of struggle and debt in reaching this goal took their toll and I lost my family and was once more alone in the world.
I found a new partner and a new job, this time as a chief reporter running a local newspaper news room and for a time life became good. But my new friend was in love with another man and after several years of living together, she decided I was no longer right for her.
For a time I continued at my job, living alone in different apartments, but the bottom was falling out of my world and it was losing its meaning. Although I enjoyed my job, I had become somewhat jaded as a reporter and could no longer find any real meaning in what I was doing.
I left the UK one evening for Ireland with a musician friend, leaving behind everything I had built up and taking just a few clothes, my guitars and my car. After just a few days, my friend decided to return to the UK, without any word of thanks for the free passage I had afforded him. I decided to stay in Ireland and exchanged my car for a camper van. By the end of six months, I had travelled over 120,000 miles around the Republic of Ireland, before I quit Ireland for the USA.
I had one friend in America, who was able to help when I became desperate and needed money for rent, but in the main I survived by busking on the subway with my guitar and by working at several jobs; in a bar opposite the Wang Centre, as a limo driver, as a removals worker, as a house painter, as a domestic cleaner, as a call centre fund raiser.
I was unable to secure a work or residency permit and I had to quit the USA. As I had no money to leave, my friend offered to purchase me a flight to any place on earth, but I could think of nowhere practical to go so she bought me a ticket back to where I had started, Ireland.
I settled in Limerick, found myself a small bedsit to live and worked for a time as a literacy tutor, before an old injury left me little choice but to register for a disability allowance. The Irish allowance was helpful and provided enough to acquire a telephone, and over a few years I conceived and developed my existing website, newsmedianews.com. funded in the main through my disability allowance and occasionally boosted by money earned from articles I worked on that were published by the national daily and Sunday news organisations.
Several projects came my way, including a brief encounter with some friends who made a CD based on Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes.
After 10 years in Limerick, my life included several projects but in the main seemed somewhat void. I had lost contact with my children and had heard nothing from them for many years. Attempts to locate them proved fruitless, until I stumbled across a report on the Internet that related to my former brother-in-law and the death of his father due to asbestosis.
Through this link I was able to re-establish contact with my family and after some prolonged contact, my ex-wife invited me to return to the family I had lived with some 16 years previously. A little over six months later, I quit the life I had built for myself in Ireland and returned to the UK, assisted by my brother-in-law who financed my return and drove me with my few belongings from Limerick to Essex.
It was a luckless move, five weeks later my former wife instructed me to leave the home, despite my having no money at all at the time and nowhere at all in the UK to aim for.
Moving out onto the street or into a homeless hostel would have brought the end to the seven years I had spent developing and building up my website. Now that might not seem that important, but to me it is everything. It has become my life. Make what you wish of that.
My ex brother-in-law, a good friend, had said I could stay at his Sussex home for a time until things ‘sorted themselves out’, but he had no telephone at his home, I had no money at all, they were at work all day, and I would have been relatively helpless to get anything organised.
I was saved from an uncertain fate when a old friend I had met in Ireland and who was now living in the UK contacted me on MSN to ask how things were with me, as I started to dismantle my system with a shuddering fear of not knowing where I would go.
I told him of my difficulties and without hesitation he offered to help and suggested that I should stay with him and his family until I was able to sort something out. I now write this piece from a desk at his home in Essex.
It is now six months from my arrival in the UK, and my incapacity allowance—the UK equivalent to the Irish disability allowance albeit of less than half the amount—has still not been put in place by those responsible.
I come back to the start of this item. I have no cash, no savings, and live at present on just £52 a week dole money, paid in lieu of my incapacity allowance but at the same rate.
I am unable to find anywhere to live. Have you ever tried to obtain accommodation with no deposit? I have approached various agencies and councils—none have offered assistance, other than an offer to place me in a salvation army hostel with rules like a Stalag camp and no access to any telephone or the Internet from your room.
So, to those of you who say ‘get yourself sorted and find a place to live’ I say, get a grip on reality and get your head out of the sand.
I will remember those who have assisted me, and will remember too those who have hindered, or who offered no help at all.
Rocking all over the status quo
History is pockmarked with those who have suffered in one way or another for daring to speak out or take a stand against the established status quo.Pockmarked, because like disfiguring disease can ravage, the lives of many such people have been scarred by the response of others. Yet many injustices have been highlighted and many set to right by the actions of those who stood against the status quo, often to their own extreme detriment.
We speak of freedom while ignoring the reality that we speak of it from within the prison walls of our social structure, and those walls are very real. The modern societies of the developed world are no longer angled towards the true value of the individual but towards the worship of the great money god that we have created and continue to pay homage to. We have each become little more than manipulated clones of the blind steamroller system we have set in motion.
The signs of ill are there and have been for some time. When a disaster occurs that claims the lives of many people, among the first issues that gain mention are references to the financial costs, and to the economic disruption etc etc. How then are we to take seriously the value of the individual in such a distorted world?
Even the acceptance of such comment is an indication of the extent to which modern society has absorbed and continues to perpetuate its own illness. Yet the status quo is an invisible illness, something accepted as the 'norm' just because it is there.
And through this there is little true scope for the ‘individual’. Sure, we pay lip service to such people, we praise them by indirect methods, we even make historical figures of them, but it becomes a far different matter when it comes down to dealing with and incorporating ‘individuals’ in our one-directional society. To begin, those who have their foundations cemented in the status quo and the benefits it affords them will almost without exception see such individuals as a threat to their security of lifestyle. There is no validity in such fear, it simply grows from inexperienced contact with the unfamiliar.
Sure too, the individual gains plenty of support providing he or she is fitting in to the acceptable status quo way of life. But once you move beyond these socially defined ‘acceptable’ borders, be prepared to venture into isolated territory.
The price of emphasis and arrogance
Ignoring the reality of what is going on in the world as to how we are developing ourselves as a species is an escapism that will produce its own straitjacket that in turn will imprison us in a concentration camp of our own making. But then perhaps we are already there.The human condition appears to be one of a state of constant expectation—though by who and of what takes a mite more banzai’d cranium particles to figure. This doesn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the scope of this piece but seemed worth the while saying anyhow.
There are those who will mumble accusingly of those whom they say exercise no sense of joviality. Such mumblers are the ones who either lack the ability to think coherently about complex and often confusing issues, or are those who are simply too lazy to address such matters, or they are those who have their greed-stained hands entwined in vested interests—interests to which they attach greater importance than the importance they afford to the true well being of others. It is all part of life’s learning process, part of the karmic wheel.
Regardless of how it is viewed, we are all nothing more than the sum of our experience, filtered by our individual ability to objectively evaluate and apply that experience. Our ability to so evaluate is again itself dependent on the sum of our individual experience at any particular point in our lives. Experience is itself a cumulative process.
Our cumulative life experience begins from the moment of birth when our internal recorders begin storing in our individual databases all that we encounter in life. That happening is itself in turn filtered by the very circumstances we are in—the type of family we are born into, our standing in life.
From the age of about four we are mostly all deliberately and compulsorily exposed to the powerful external state-operated filtering system we call our ‘education’, or schooling. How many of us enter and leave that system without ever questioning its validity or true worth? It is, after all, the way things are, the status quo—the way we have made things.
To understand this article it is not only necessary to question the validity and direction of our systems of education. It is also necessary to question the worth of the profits-driven global civilization that we have created and appear hell-bent on perpetuating.
Systems of Education
A system of education that is able to draw upon the knowledge base of the human race is a wonderful and infinitely powerful thing. Like everything else, it can and often does fall into the wrong hands, and when it does the effects can be monstrous. However, it is not the misappropriated use of the educational system that will be examined here but the validity of the ‘normal’ established educational systems as used within the societies of our world.This essay will attempt to examine three matters and their ramifications:
- What is the purpose and goal of State-administered educational systems;
- What is the purpose and goal of self-development; and
- The role of the State in the above
* note that the term ‘State’ is used in the context of democratic government.
The purpose and goal of State-administered educational systems
The purpose and goal of a State-administered educational system should first and foremost be to help endow an individual with sufficient knowledge and understanding as to enable the individual to function to the best of his or her ability in the world and to help equip the individual with sufficient knowledge to advance that ability in a safe environment and to the benefit of self and of society.The purpose and goal of self-development
The purpose and goal of self-development is similar to that of an educational system, except that the focus is on the improvement of the inner self. The ability to tend to such improvement is dependent on the level of the individual’s education, or learning in life and of course on prevalent living conditions.The role of the State in the above
The role of the State is difficult to define but is nontheless a multiple one, spanning the perpetuation of the learning process and of the safe environment. It is, obviously, shaped by the perceptions and application of government to a format that has been introduced down through the centuries. What is more difficult is defining precisely what on-going background role the State should take.The problem of the role of a State in an educational system is that government is responsible for the financial strategy of the nation and the infrastructure behind that strategy, which includes human resources. Thus the educational goal as perceived by government will include the necessity for the education of the future workforce. In turn, the focus of such education can become diverted from the needs of the individual and angled more on the needs of the State. And just who decides what is of benefit to society, and just who should work to produce such benefit?
In such circumstances, it imperative that the individual is also able to maintain a sense of personal identity independent from the demands of society.
I'm taking a break here while I try to figure out just where this goes next.
Borhd
This rock of Ages
I can recall being told when much younger that I should be grateful to live in the country that I was born in. Now don't get me wrong—I was and am, although for some years I lived outside the country of my birth. At the time I was told this I was just too young and too inexperienced to fully appreciate what was undoubtedly my very good fortune.What unsettled me at the time though was the tone and presentation of the comment. It did not seem as if it was made in good and sincere faith. It came across as more of an arrogance—a sort of hand-me-down conceited opinion. And again, being young and relatively naive, I lacked the experience to present a properly meaningful reply. Now, almost 50 years on, I feel more ready to present my response.This is no attempt at apportioning any blame, rather it is an attempt at an educational perspective. To begin, I was after all growing through my childhood years in a country that was still emerging from the darker labyrinths of the Victorian age—an emergence that was itself hindered by the social straitjacket of two global wars.And yes, I do of course feel an allegiance and a deep sense of gratitude to those men and women who risked—and lost—their lives in fighting the common enemy of fascism. But when someone begins to harp on about nationalism and allegiance to a country just for the sake of it, I must draw a line.To the critically issued comment, “this is my country”, or “this is our country”, I now offer my response—“this is my planet” or “this is our planet”.An incorrect emphasis on the application and an incorrect understanding of nationalistic perspectives can lead to feelings of superiority and to an arrogance of manner and belief.It might seem a simple statement, but it is loaded. Next week I will delve deeper into the issues.
Borhd.
Begrudge only Begrudgery
Sunday, 28 October, 2007
Some time ago I touched on the subject of begrudgery, having read through CS Hophead’s intriguing ramblings on the same. I’d like to touch on the topic again as it has become something of a joke term widely cast in Ireland today but is in fact a deeply serious and corroding condition.In our society today, it is only through the most intense and dedicated application of self-analysis that most people are able in any way to avoid becoming entrenched in and thus projecting attitudes of begrudgery.
Indeed, in most societies of the world, be they capitalist, communist, socialist or tribal; most of us are from the moment of conception bombarded with an education founded on the core principles of begrudgery. It teaches us to be better than, to go for better, to have better, to have more in order to attain a better standard.
Against concentrated exposure to such a mêlée of a backdrop, we have but little chance through normal day to day life to escape the scourge of begrudgery in our outlook. It is the way of today’s world on a very wide scale.
Relaxation is the key to overcoming begrudgery within the self. I don’t mean sitting in an easy chair reading a newspaper or watching TV, or playing golf, or skiing, scuba diving or going to the soccer match or the many other things that erroneously fall under the gamut of relaxation—for the truth is these things are entertainment.
By relaxation I mean the total relaxation of mind and body. Most people are afraid of doing and thinking nothing because when they do they suddenly find their thoughts awash with a myriad concerns, worries and problems. So they busy themselves with something to fill the deafening silence. They seek a distraction. But the very thoughts they seek to shut out are themselves part of the bigger distraction. They are really nothing more than trifling matters that have been vastly exaggerated in value and meaning.
Left alone, these matter become the garbage of the mind. If you don’t throw out the trash from your home, it continues to get bigger and bigger and will eventualy force you out if you don’t do something about it.
That is why it is vital for people to develop and practice the art of total relaxation of mind and body; relaing every muscle and letting the mind drift. Tackling the onrush of clutter that comes into the mind eventually becomes a manageable possibility and such clutter will be seen in its true value. At this point the soul, that mysterious entity behind the mind and body, can again become a beacon instead of being shrouded by garbage.
It soon becomes apparent that begrudgery is in reality no more than extreme jealousy that can drive an individual to covet the life or belongings of another to such an extent as to wish that person did not have such a lifestyle or such belongings — to begrudge, or according to the dictionary: to grudge; to envy the possession of.
The 10th commandment states: You shall not covet...anything that belongs to your neighbour. How many people today can see through the clutter within their minds to recall the ten commandments, or even one of them in full? Even the commandments themselves have been vastly simplified in modern bibles, to make them easier to understand, less thought consuming, but in fact making them less meaningful.
I am not advocating abolishment of any system. I am advocating total revolution of the mind.
And the first step in reaching that is to learn the art of total relaxation.
Borhd
Living in the police state
Friday, 2 March, 2007
You don’t need bad police to be living in a police state.You do need a subservient populace, power hungry out of control political leaders and an acquiescent press. The UK now has all three and Britain is becoming increasingly more a dictatorship than a democracy.
People are being dictated to as to how they live their lives, what they should and should not be doing and the majority of things they are ‘permitted’ to do are taxed at exorbitant levels. In almost all regional and local authorities the prevalence of the nanny state mentality can be seen. The signs are there for anyone with vision to see.
Margaret Thatcher during her reign set the wheels in motion for Britain to move down the road of becoming a police state. In 2005, an 82-year-old man was forcefully ejected from the Labour Party’s annual conference at the Brighton Centre for the crime of shouting “rubbish” when the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was speaking of Britain’s military involvement in Iraq. Another man who attempted to complain about the incident was also lifted to his feet and ejected from the conference.
As far back as the early 1990’s central government was proposing to introduce legislation that would have made it a criminal offence to publish factual information about someone from a previous time in their lives in an article that was set on more current events. Work out the implications.
We now have drink-driving laws that are so ridiculously strict that someone could be arrested and banned from driving for drinking one Pina Colada even if he or she had never before been arrested for drink driving. That same person would then in all probability be offered the ‘option’ to take a government-backed drink rehabilitation course at a cost of £130 which would lead to a 25% reduction in the length of any ban. Don’t get me wrong—I do not condone drink driving. However, the set limit of 35mg is far too rigid and too low. The argument that drink impairs a person's reactions may be valid but then so does tobacco.
The government rakes in over £33,000,000,000 in taxes from motorists. The approximate figure is based on an annual 10,000 mileage and includes licence tax and fuel duty. Now there are moves afoot to bring in tolls for many of the UK roads with the dangled carrot that licence costs will be reduced.
But by far the most ominous development over the past 20 years has been the inexorable slide towards a world best described by George Orwell in his masterpiece of a book Brave New World. It is a world in which the individual and their rights have been over trodden by those wielding power for the sake of their own power and the forceful application of their own perceived ‘rights’ of the individual.
Below is a letter sent out by a branch of Britain’s national probation service to a man in his latter 50s, who charged with a minor motoring offence, was ordered by the courts to serve 120 hours of community work. He was asked to report at a probation office regarding this matter but telephoned to say that he did not have the means or the funds to travel the 15 miles from his home to the probation office and the 15 miles back. To begin, the probation officer, a man in his 30s, responded by stating that the lack of money or means was “no excuse” and was “not an acceptable excuse to the probation service”. Two days later the letter below was sent out. Nothings has been altered but for the removal of names.
Offender manager?? Failed to attend an appointment?? Is this the UK or the Fourth Reich?
Becoming Aware of the Victim Seekers
Sunday, 3 December, 2006
The victim seekers are pathetic yet dangerous people who live amongst us mostly in disguise and in denial of their own state of mind.They come from two breeds of humanity:
* the uninformed paranoiacs
* those with a psychopathological disorderThe underlying motive is the same for both types—they consider they require a victim in the belief that victimising someone might make them feel better about themselves and so elevate themselves in their own estimation.
I will leave the psychopaths aside for the time being as their condition is a maladjusted mental disorder that is in the main beyond their unaided volition.
The uninformed paranoaic presents a different and yet an equally serious problem that, although perhaps not exposing the victim to the physical dangers of the psychopath, nonetheless can have a seriously detrimental impact upon their lives.
The extent and impact of the uninformed paranoaics’ condition is compounded by both their ignorance of their own condition and their general inability to accept that they may have a condition at all. They work within the social order and yet the result of their activity is anti-social.
The ordinary citizen whose position in life does not afford him or her any state-invested authority over other citizens and yet who demonstrates victim seeking tendencies can be tolerated, although their activity may detrimentally impact on their own family members and on others with whom they come into contact.
Victim seekers whose profession or occupation invests them with authority over others are a much more pernicious problem as their actions often create gross injustices.
Literally anyone can fall prey to becoming a victim seeker and the reasons why someone may become so can be rooted in many varied causes ranging from upbringing to a simple and perhaps forgotten experience that, for the sake of this analysis, is of much less importance than simple awareness of the existence of the victim seeker state of mind.
An example may be useful in bringing clarity to the issue. Let’s say that you know that you are entitled to a rent refund and so you contact your housing provider to get it. You receive the ‘official’ response that you are not entitled to the refund. At this point, some people might simply accept the refusal and do nothing more.
But let’s backtrack slightly. You knew that you were entitled to the refund, that wasn’t in question. What is questionable is the response you received.
The person dealing with your inquiry may well know, or could have found out, that you were in fact entitled to the refund but simply chose to ignore this fact in the wish to use the power of authority over you. In such a case, you have fallen prey to a victim seeker. If you had blithely accepted the refusal, then the victim seeker would have triumphed.
But to get to the point. Having read this far and understood what you have read, it is my sincere wish that you may now be aware enough not to fall into the trap of becoming a victim seeker yourself. If I have accomplished this one thing, then my time spent in compiling this article has not been in vain.
Borhd
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