NOVO COGNATO

Still image from the video Novo Cognato

Novo Cognato is the latest in the series of collaborative ventures by Toxic Drums.  The intention being to create audiovisual works with various artists involved.  It is early days yet but there are currently three significant AVs available, PLASTICO MUNDO, SIMULACRA of the OPPRESSED, and NOVO COGNATO, which are all produced by Ian Burden and Nik Allday.

Novo Cognato consists of visuals entitled ELECTRIC MUSE created by the experimental artist Nik Allday to accompany the album track THY KINGDOM from Ian Burden's forthcoming album.

You can stay informed of releases as they occur and other news by subscribing to this blog, following me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/sam.spruce.5817, subscribing to my YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/nikalldayyt, and/or becoming a patron of Toxic Drums at https://www.patreon.com/toxicdrums.

A GOOD DAY FOR BRITAIN

Jeremy Corbyn 62%

Owen Smith 38%

In the re-vote for the Labour Party Leadership Jeremy Corbyn won convincingly again.  It brings to my mind the efficacy of having a second Referendum regarding Britain's membership of the EU.  Those who are affectionately referred to as Brexiters who shout down the idea of a second referendum are exposed by this re-vote in the Labour Party.  There should never have been a need for a second vote, but then there is no harm in it either.  If the vote truly represents the considered opinions of the members then it will only be reaffirmed by a second vote.  For all the miscreant attempts by the media and other parties to alter the opinions of the majority of members in the Labour Party, the general impetus behind the attitude and ideas of Jeremy Corbyn remained strong.  I suspect if there were a second EU referendum that the results would be very different and there would be a resounding vote to remain in the EU.  Brexiters who strongly object to a second referendum are exposing their fear, and therefore expectation, that this would be the case.

There are many criticisms of Mr Corbyn from all quarters.  The most overriding one I encounter is his ineffectiveness.  I think this is at the core of the problem and is relevant in a far broader context across the globe.  In general, politics works on a competitive basis.  Like two boxers slugging it out in a ring and the audience cheering their preferred candidate.  There are folk committed to one and folk committed to the other and then there is the middle ground that has that horrible characteristic of swaying from one to the other depending upon which one appears to be winning at the moment.  The whole spectacle of the fight seems to distract people from any idea of what they happen to think is right or wrong.  It is an incredible mechanism for abdicating personal responsibility and seems to work in large part around the globe.  That might have been a useful attitude in Neanderthal times when one group encountered another group and they were likely to fight.  It doesn't matter whose side you're on so long as it's the winning side.

I have a hope that the inception of the internet has the potential to change that old limited consciousness.  The interconnectivity of the majority of individuals in the world allows more focus by individuals, without global influence, to talk about how they feel, what they imagine and hope for, what they want for their lives and for the world.  This has the possibility of raising the collective perspective to an overview rather than a polarised one.  It is as if the audience at the analogous boxing bout has grown so large that there are more and more people interested in organising the food, helping people find the loo, and generally having a satisfactory cooperative experience in the stadium.  This leaves the boxers fighting it out in a much less relevant and influential context.

The most significant issue for me when it comes to Jeremy Corbyn is that he precisely doesn't over focus on arguments about whether to turn left or right at this juncture or the minutia of how to achieve the objectives but rather maintains a perspective of where people wish to be going.  Sometimes it is not critical whether you do something this way or that way so long as the consequential decisions keep aiming at the right objective.  The criticism of Corbyn as ineffectual often seems to be about the minutia, the details, the immediate consequences.  But Corbyn maintains a vision.  A vision that is highly in tune with possibly the majority of people in Britain.  People want a civilised peaceful sustainable coexistence.  How to get it can be debated but what seems to happen so often, and particularly in right wing politics, is people focus on the method to the point of forgetting or ignoring the results.

I have no doubt that whether or not this JC survives the shark infested waters of politics in Britain and the world stage, the vote for his leadership has clarified and asserted the views of a majority of people that they wish for a more equitable and kinder society.

This is a good day for Britain regardless of what may come of it.  Today a loud voice was heard for a more rational, responsible, considerate, compassionate, and sustainable existence.

The existential crisis of humanity.

Altered image reproduced under Creative Commons with thanks to Nakul Chugan

I guess what astounds me most is how people turn on other people.  A long time ago I was reading about road accidents and how seriously injured people can attack the ambulance staff who are trying to save their lives.  It makes sense.  Someone is seriously injured and partially concussed and their physical body, their instincts, struggle to survive.  It is a kind of convulsive reaction to anything in their environment interfering with them.  They sometimes just lash out.  They can get very aggressive.  It makes sense when you stand back and look at it.  They seem to be in a condition which is extremely self orientated.  They are reacting to any outside influence as if it is only an object in relation to them and a potential threat.  They have a quality which is psychopathic.

One of the better qualities of people is their ability to empathise with their surroundings.  It seems a function of the brain to take in information, to model it internally, and to be able to get a sense of what it is like out there which enables them to better predict the future.  When it comes to objects this is learning and when it comes to other human beings it is called empathy.  People resonate the external world inside their neurological network and the more similar the object is to them the more they know what it 'feels' like to be that object.  Much is talked about and written about love in its many guises but in a deeply philosophical sense love is that quality of resonating in harmony with the outside world.

From my privileged position of living a post middle class existence in the UK I scan all the information I have absorbed over my lifetime and I see a world in devastating turmoil.  Not only am I in what feels like a life threatening situation of poverty and assault from other humans but I see the same pattern in the society around me with the nonsensical political ideology of austerity and Neoliberalism.  Further afield I see the same pattern of insane imperialism and aggression cascading from what can only loosely be called 'the West' across the globe.  I am not blind to the achievements of humanity and the beauty in the world.  I am not blind to the fact that even in desperate circumstance the better qualities of humanity still seem to survive against incredible odds.  But I am acutely aware of the destruction and pain cascading throughout the experience of humanity.

It seems to me at this point in time that humanity is experiencing what could best be described as a collective existential crisis.  Not so much about the actual existence or demise of humanity but rather the total incomprehension of any rhyme or reason to it all.  There are people developing incredible artificial intelligence and self controlled quadcopters, discovering gravity waves and God particles.  There are people investigating mass communication and analysing the consequences of emergent behaviour of complex systems like the internet.  There are people putting their lives on the line to protect the ecology and there are people producing the most enlightened and beautiful Art.  But there are also people continuing to build the most ridiculous store of sophisticated and incomprehensible weapons from flechette missiles to nuclear bombs which could destroy the planet.  There are hordes of people running amok raping, maiming and murdering other people.  There are numskulls pawing over complex documents trying to define deals between nations in some vain attempt to improve something for somebody.  All the while humanity is destroying its environment and on all accounts destroying itself.

Sometimes I compare my view of humanity to watching a termite colony.  These termites are doing termite stuff.  They collect food, dispose of waste, build chambers and pathways, rear new termites, defend the colony from attack or damage and generally busy themselves with everything termite.  But they build a sophisticated air conditioned termite mound whilst knowing nothing of air conditioning let alone their own dependency on the thing we call air.  They probably have no concept of air.  So there is a perspective one can take on humanity that it will just do human stuff and the bigger consequences will sort themselves out.  Without even realising it we are doing whatever we need to do and the bigger picture is outside of our comprehension but everything will be alright - so long as we continue to do human.  That does include Art, science, nuclear weapons and paedophilia.  My observations of religions and spirituality suggest this is part of how people simply accept that there is an 'out there' which they can know nothing about and so avoid being distracted by conundrums which are outside their scope of influence.

I recall an adage "If God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings." and the retort that he gave us intelligence to build aeroplanes.  It is one thing to compare our interpretation of termites with humanity but there is something significantly different; we have the self awareness to project our own sense of personal self awareness into the larger realm of humanity and conscious life in general.  We do have more complexity than termites and a more sophisticated modelling potential.  So it is just possible that we can reach outside of our subjective view into an imagined objective view of our subjective behaviour.  It is possible, at least theoretically, that humanity is capable, collectively, of seeing what humanity looks like and directing our behaviour from that perspective.  On the whole it seems to me that humanity is not doing that.  There are some people that are, but on the whole humanity is still acting subjectively 'human'.

The rapid rise of the internet and the exponentially expanding communication network between minds is possibly a central issue in the possibility of realising this greater perspective.  It is possible that humanity can apply it's wisdom and compassion, its intelligence and creativity, to the whole of the globe, the ecology, the life forms and even down to the scale of a better understanding of the individual relationships between people.  For all of the demonization of numbskulls and right wing fucknuts, for all the hatred and anger at child abusers, oligarchs, hideous dictators and terrorists, for all of the negative projections I have never encountered one real human being where it is impossible to understand that at worst they are a beautiful human being malfunctioning.

Trying to dispose of, destroy or annihilate that which we deem evil in a vain attempt to become good is a self contradictory nonsense.  We have to realise that in the pursuit of goodness we are necessarily the embodiment of what we initially perceive to be both good and evil.  We are best served by accepting and understanding that we are inherently the product of the tension between light and shadow, good and evil, subjective and objective.  Attempts to behead all evil people or hang dictators or murderers are fruitless.  The essence of humanity remains the same and more manifestations of the dichotomy will spring up in their place.  We cannot force the change of humanity to something we determine is good.  We are naive.  We don't even know what 'good' is.  But what we can do is to be good.  We need to take down the walls of secrecy in the corridors of power.  We need to include, incorporate and accommodate right wing concerns.  We need to have an environment in which the people with responsibility for others are representative of the views of the collective and not dictatorial.  We need to alter the authoritarian paradigm from power over to power within.  Somehow, to make any sense of this chaos, we need to stop the convulsive thrashing around at anything that moves and to begin to work cooperatively with what we are, not what we have been conditioned to think we should be.

We need to wake up from this subjective dream.  We need to see the matrix for what it is rather than be submerged subjectively in it.  We actually need to rise to a higher level of perception and to start acting like the benign Gods we wish existed.  We need to become the unconditional loving parents of ourselves.  This is not something any individual can do alone.  This is just an observation of a possible future.

We need to believe in ourselves.

RANTINGS OF A LUNATIC

Can I say that I am getting really pissed off at the shattering level of cognitive dissonance in our culture?  I shouldn't be surprised when I cast a broad view across the cultural landscape of our history and pay any attention to the utter bullshit emanating from what were imagined to be reasonably rational institutions and officialdom in general.  Endless assertions of justice for one party based on discriminatory utterances and prejudice toward another party.  From the authorities it is an endless barrage of the rich having the right to protect their stuff because the poor are scrounging scum.  Then there's what might be deemed the general opinions and views of sections of the poorer population like that ex-servicemen shouldn't be left homeless because they fought for Queen and country.  Currently their fighting is mostly an abhorrent evil being committed as lackeys for a pathologically psychopathic oligarchy.  On this scale of justice they are lucky to still be alive and not burning in the fires of hell.  But they are human, maybe misguided and betrayed, but human nonetheless.  On the basis of being human, not on any particular service, they should not be deprived of respect and a reasonable and dignified way to survive in this society.

What has got me somewhat distressed is the peculiar insanity over this issue of the man with the t-shirt.  Oddly I have even been accused of being anti-Semitic over this issue.  I really don't give a damn about Semitic or not Semitic, black, white or fucking purple, male, female, asexual, hermaphrodite, transgender or what the fuck people want to get all hot and bothered about.  One thing I know is I am evil.  I can wish people harm, I sometimes tread on spiders, I'm not always saintly and without blemish in my dealings with people - damn it, there are people I would burn to death in my imagination.  But I am good too.  I am emotional, friendly, excitable, creative, intelligent, thoughtful and there is much that one might call love within my repertoire.  I'm human.

So what is this problem with people constantly justifying their complaints about their personal treatment or their view of the world in terms of justifying it based on there not being anything wrong with themselves and often by basing it on prejudicial views of others?  Of course I recognise the symptoms of cognitive dissonance in me.  My anger at the moment may well be caused by an error in my current model of reality being questioned internally.  Of course every observation about the world out there is also an observation of me.  If it were so simple as inverting and/or transposing the view to simply acknowledge a definition of me there would not really be a problem.  Am I anti-Semitic?  I don't think so.  I have views on the French, the Chinese, the Jews, the Muslims, sailors, ballet dancers and any number of discernible groups or categories of humans.  There are positive and negative aspects in all those collections and the same applies to individuals including those with multiple personalities.  So why did it bother me that someone accused me of being anti-Semitic?

It turns out not to be because I am anti-Semitic but because the individual picked on a quote I referenced by David Cameron which referred to Jews.  The Jewish content (that is: DC's utterance) was entirely circumstantial and had nothing whatever to do with my point.  But for all that I said, he ignored the actual content and homed in (quite ridiculously) on the reference to Jews and deduced that I wanted to say Jews did 9/11.  This was so obviously ridiculous I had to ask myself what was upsetting me.  Then I got it.  He was ignoring my central communication and projecting his problem at me.  I would make a guess that he has a hang up about being anti-Semitic.

This particular projection of prejudice hasn't troubled me much but I was interested to notice the ripples of disturbance.  Now when I do the self reflection I realise it hurts me that I am both not heard (or seen or recognised or validated) and, even worse, misrepresented.  I clearly am hypersensitive to being reflected erroneously.  I have had this issue for a lot of my life with respect to being male.  It makes a kind of sense.  I am just a small, innocent, blond haired, blue eyed, inoffensive, very nice little boy (history).  Of course when I am talking to people as a 6 foot, slightly hairy, physically strong, male (who clearly in some cases stereotypically dominates) I don't understand why they have the reaction they do when I assert a point of view.  But it is simple prejudice.  They are, due to their upbringing and experience, already frightened of me (pre-judicially).  (Of course this is not always the case.  I am referring to the times when it is the case.)

And then I get it - I am prejudicial to other people.  I hasten to add not much (but I'm always open to other people's views) but I am.  Having been betrayed, on a level that clearly was significant to me, by both my parents I am actually wary when anyone expresses anything akin to love or friendship.  I actually don't trust people.  I don't think this can be resolved correctly by simply trusting people - that seems evidently stupid and quite an imposition on their freedom.  But there lies an interesting self reflection.  The big question for me is "Do I trust myself?"  The answer appears to me to be probably more than most but ultimately "No".  Hmm - Maybe that is something to work on.

Do I care if this world goes to hell in a hand basket?  Well yes, actually I do.  But I'm beginning to understand why.  I care because it is my world, it always was and always will be.  (That is not exclusive of all other people and every form of consciousness.)  I don't have to be in the same room or the same town as, say, my daughter, to actually care how she is.  I don't have to be in any particular place or time to care about the world which is, ultimately, me.  I care about this world and the people, animals, plants, rocks, et al.  But there is the bigger issue - do I trust it?  I think at the moment I have to leave that as an unknown.

Whatever happened to free speech?

Paul Grange's offensive t-shirt

There is a man called Paul Grange who visited a local public house sporting a t-shirt with the words "HILLSBOROUGH Gods way of helping RENTOKILL". [article in Belfast Telegraph] This caused a twitter storm and gained much media attention.  What I am seeing on Facebook is a lot of derision and disgust.  What is a little disturbing is the demonization of the man.  But even that seems within the bounds of free expression.  What seems dubious is to harass and threaten the man.  Understandable; it is, after all, a pretty ignorant, cruel and very provocative attitude to advertise on your t-shirt.

What bothers me most is the way this issue is used as a distraction from the instigators of the root problem.  Our political system needs tearing down and that's where the focus of attention should be.  Allowing the vicious, oppressive, authoritarian elite to "bring to justice" one individual, one misguided, indoctrinated pawn of the system, as if that gives them some credibility should ring alarm bells in all right minded and right hearted people.  The whole Hillsborough affair was about the insidious, deceitful, manipulative, malevolent authoritarian hierarchy literally getting away with murder.

What did happen to free speech?  It seems the frightened sheep will bustle around the hideous punitive teacher, jeering and feigning indignation in an attempt to garnish favour, whilst teacher satisfies their bloodlust by making an example of the offender.  It's like Salome's proxy request for John the Baptist's head on a plate to satisfy some other unrelated guilt.

Of course I am courting controversy to raise this issue and to question and even condemn the extreme vilification and calls for punitive "justice" of Paul Grange.  The man has a right to express his opinion.  It seems the landlord dealt with the situation quite admirably.  He was polite and asked the man to leave the pub.

I find the hue and cry seriously disturbing.  One might hate the sentiment expressed on this guys shirt but he has a right to an opinion and no one has to vote for him.  Instead, it seems, people will gain relief at his condemnation by the authority of the law and will soon be voting for politicians who are the inception, the enactment, the manifestation of the crimes that were committed at Hillsborough.  But our political system is far far worse than Hillsborough.  Our government with all its corruption is currently in the act of stealing all the resources from the people of this country, literally subjugating and enslaving them, whilst entertaining themselves driving the world to a nuclear war which may well destroy the entirety of humanity.

I know it is complex and a little difficult to handle but this issue, being so prominent in the main stream media and in the consciousness of the population, is actually a hysterical act of victim blaming and a frightening distraction from the real evils afoot.  It is, maybe inadvertently, supporting the oppressors.  It is exactly what the oligarchs want, predict, need, and foster.

Why would anyone waste time on this guy?  In a local context if I saw him I would probably tell him what I thought of the sentiment.  He might head-butt me; he looks stronger and more energetic than me.  I might end up in the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital waiting for five hours for an overworked underfunded medical service (deliberately deprived by the authorities now being called upon) to give me a stitch or two and a pain killer.

I have to give Paul Grange credit for feeling so oppressed himself that against significant social pressure and conditioning he makes such a deliberately provocative statement by way of asserting his own sense of pride and dignity.  He's daring anyone to criticise him.  Well they did and the shit hit the fan and that is reasonable.  But what really scares me the most is how this feeds into the social and cultural conditioning of this nation.  By vilifying this man to such an extreme and effectively calling on the authorities (the known warped and corrupt authorities) to act against him the people are acting out the same insanity as David Cameron can verbally make explicit on the world stage of the United Nations [Cameron's 2014 UN speech] when he said "We must be clear: to defeat the ideology of extremism we need to deal with all forms of extremism – not just violent extremism."  He went on to say "Of course there are some who will argue that this is not compatible with free speech and intellectual inquiry."  It is a very dangerous road to travel to try to silence people who are frustrated and do not accept the current consensus, the  official line, or simply don't hold the same pleasant views as yourself.  People need to express their views and if they take offensive and harmful action that is the time to intervene.

How do people call on the authority that for years vilified the Hillsborough fans to serve justice on one jerk that prints an offensive message on his t-shirt?  Those authorities are currently supporting the rape and pillage of this country by something far worse than a global Mafia style elite.  But they, in the guise of puppet politicians, will lie to you and you will vote for them.  At least Paul Grange had the guts to state his position.  But the politicians won't state their position because their intention is to sidle up to you and stab you in the back.

It is a philosophical minefield but I am currently still of the opinion that words should be met with words and not punitive action.  In my opinion the views expressed on Paul Grange's shirt are despicable and saying so should be enough.  If people want to get indignant and even hysterical and want action taken then I wish they would aim their anger up the fucking line at the hideous power structure that is destroying this country and the entire world.

WHY SO TIRED?

Yesterday, at 4 in the afternoon, I became illegal.  I can't really comprehend what that is supposed to mean.  As far as I am concerned I am a person alive on this planet.  But other people have manufactured a construct which collectively designates me as illegal.  Does that render me dead but inconveniently breathing and moving?  The potential complexity of this problem consistently leads to short hand, rough and inaccurate descriptions and conclusions.  Am I a kind of Schrödinger's cat, stuck in a sealed box, awaiting someone else's observation of my state of being?

It won't be long before I am dead.  As with all things, that is a relative description.  For some butterflies that only live for a day I might seem to have an almost endless duration ahead of me.  In geological time scales my entire life is so short it seems all but insignificant anyway.  At about 60 years old it is almost certain that I have significantly less time alive in the future than I have had in the past, and in 10 or 20 years I will most probably be dead.  So it's reasonable to view my future duration as relatively short in terms of a general human life span.

There is often a tendency to separate personal issues from global issues.  This is partly due to the need or desire to separate interdependent issues for the practical purpose of understanding and dealing with situations.  Often this has a constructive and useful result.  But there are always those boundary conditions where the separation is erroneous and so misleading it causes destructive and detrimental results.  My perception of my current personal situation maps extremely well onto my perception of the larger global and historical human situation.

The world, for humans in general, appears to be in a catastrophic mess.  The same applies to my personal life.  Every interpretation I make of my life has an equal and corresponding interpretation in the wider world.  We do this all the time as human beings.  Newtonian science enables the building of machines and we see the similarities in our personal physical construction.  This leads to paradoxical issues like the free will versus determinism debate.  We then move on to information and processing rendering artificial intelligence and encounter the problematic issue of intelligence versus consciousness.

A simplified version of my situation is that there are six sibling who have an interest in the house I currently occupy following the death of the parents who owned it.  The other five all have houses to live in and a revenue stream which maintains a reasonable lifestyle.  I have no house and a revenue stream of £50 a week which is barely even survivable.  They want to throw me out and split the money six ways.  This will do me significant harm.  There is a way of ensuring all six share the available resources such that they all have somewhere to live, they all experience an improvement to their current situation, and no one suffers unduly.  But for some reason the other five cannot understand that or simply don't give a damn about anyone else but themselves.

I have been criticised for demonising them.  I actually have far more understanding of their difficulties in comprehending the situation than they are capable of giving me credit for.  It is not as simple as "they don't give a damn"; it is more a case of their not knowing how to give a damn.  And when they attempt to give a explanation for their actions it is actually a vain attempt to justify what they know are bad or erroneous actions (by their judgement - not mine).  Their rationalisations cannot stand up to any rational questioning hence their inability to understand what a discussion is.

Two of them have actually stated that their view is that they should sell this house and buy me a house and split the rest.  Why has that clear statement of their view not influenced their choice of action?  I know why (and it's complex); there is a part of them that thinks they would like to buy me a house.  But it also attempts to maintain a reflected image of themselves as nice people.  Another suggestion from them is that they use the resources to rent a property for 6 months for me (me includes my daughter and one of their sons which complicates the issue but I am ignoring that for simplicity in the explanation).  But it seems to be what the law describes as a "bad faith offer" because all attempts to clarify it were ignored leaving us unable to agree or disagree to what they claim was an offer.  Hence the situation gets more convoluted and destructive.

Much as I could, and do, attempt to understand what is going on in more accurate detail, there is an overview which is easier to grasp.  For whatever reason, justification or interpretation I am in a vulnerable position and they, from a position of advantage, are attacking me.  That seems to satisfactorily explain why I would reasonably say that what they are doing is obscene and unforgivable.  The fact that these consequences are cascading and impacting seriously negatively on my daughter also provokes in me incredible fury at the abuse.  The fact that one of my sisters discarded her sick son into this house and is now evicting him takes it all to an incomprehensible level of demonic evil.

None of them have any actual, or immediately obvious, need to do this.  So, I ask myself, why are they doing it?  With all of my experience, knowledge, compassion and insight I come up with a central and compelling explanation.  This is the result of the injustice they experienced at the hands of their parents.  They are trying (subconsciously) to evidence the abuse that was "inside" the family but not allowed to be communicated to the wider world.  They had to "smile" and appear to be everything good as determined by our culture.  It is a charade.  It is a falsehood.  It is, by definition, an evil.  It is an attempt to pretend the world is other than it is.  It is a world out of balance.

What these fucking brainless "Christians" cannot seem to comprehend is that the fucking magical mystery tour, as they perceive it, of their fucking God Almighty IS A REALITY.  It's not magical and it doesn't have to be a mystery.  They are so terrified by the imposed judgemental crap of the misdirected authoritarian projection that they are panicked into a compulsive dance of conformity in a desperate attempt to believe something that isn't true so that they are allowed to live another day.  That pisses me off so much there are no clean and tidy ways for me to express the utter self contradictory insanity of these pretentious hypocritical lost souls.

We are all one.  Everything they do to me they do to themselves.  This applies to all of us.  This is why the whole fucking world is in such a mess.  This is possibly why Christianity has probably perpetrated more death and destruction on this planet than any of the other Abrahamic religions and possibly more than ANY other identifiable group or cultural construction.  It's a GIANT FUCKING GUILT TRIP being projected onto the world.  They are trying to hide the evidence from their own brains that they killed their own fucking God.

Metaphors you numbskulls.  There is no "right hand of God", there is no "father's house of many rooms", there is no God or Devil, these are METAPHORES.  And the same patterns can be seen in their fractal nature at all levels of human experience.  What truly disturbs me is how I believe in God - the reality.  It is a metaphor of a truth that I believe in.  But that "God" can be found in all utterances of theology, mysticism, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, quantum physics and even in the depths of the science of software theory.  It's called truth and is what love is.  Every un-rectified transgression of truth creates dark ripples which eventually coalesce in some all pervasive hideous manifestation of evil.  What the fuck is wrong with these people?

And this is why I am getting tired of this life.

We Are Cowards Because We Kill Our Children.

[For the uninitiated the situation used for this philosophical muse is that I, my dependent daughter and dependent nephew are being evicted by my sisters from my now deceased parents' house.  We all have health issues and have no resources to move in the immediate future.]

A message I get from all my sisters is this: "We are trying to save you from harm."

That may sound a little odd and it is a gross simplification but essentially the sentimental expressions are always that they are trying to help.  One claims to offer 6 months' rent to help us escape but it is a bad faith offer and she refuses to discuss it.  One offers concern but says "the others don't agree so what can I do?"  One weeps as she suggests an escape route via a dysfunctional welfare system.  One attempts to help and when that fails blames me.  So what is this "threat" this "harm" they are trying to save me from?  It appears to me the only threat of harm is coming from them.

It is fundamentally the convoluted logic of the abuser.

When I look back across our childhood I see the emotional manipulation, the serious physical violence, the rage, the terror, the austere control and it is no mystery to me why they feel the way they do.  They are the unfortunate results of abuse.  They are the broken children; the lost souls.

Even my poor mother cried out "What else can they do?" and my father's tragic last words to me were that he didn't want us thrown out as if it were a fait accompli out of his hands.

It is the guilt of the abuser.  It is the denial of the evil that is in all of us.  Only when we can accept the fundamental evil potential within is there any possibility of a moral good.  With no freewill there is no morality.  Only when we oppose our own evil can we achieve what we perceive as good.  If we are so afeared of being judged evil that we cannot allow ourselves to see our own evil then how can we possibly oppose it?  How can we possibly choose to do good?  If we were simply good people it would be no credit to us to be good because there would be no other possibility.

When my daughter was born and I cut her umbilical cord and saw this tiny miracle of creation with all the potential a human can perceive I was profoundly committed to the role in which I simply found myself - her protector - her father.  I didn't so much decide as became.  Here was a new person.  A new person who will be whoever and whatever she becomes.  It is her life not mine.  It was clear to me I was experiencing something indescribably beautiful whilst setting out on a journey that would likely not be easy.  It has proven far harder than I could have imagined.  But I think and feel a lot, and it is clear to me that if I were starving and the only way to survive was to take her food I would rather die.  The instinct to survive is at the very limit of human endurance.  It is quite conceivable (and the evidence is clear) that at the final moment most of us would kill another human being to survive.  I do not have to attain that greatest of all love that I would rather die than harm anyone, but it is a conscious decision when it comes to my daughter.

I am looking after one of my sisters' sons.  She cast him off (into her parents' house) because she could not accept the sacrifice she might have to make to look after him.  She preferred to ride off into her perceived paradise on her motorbike to live a life of material luxury with her Neanderthal controlling abusive boyfriend on the island of Guernsey.  That might sound like a harsh description but whether I judge her actions to be good or bad is not the final judgement of her - I actually understand her pain and her difficulties.  But when she instigates harm against me, my daughter and her own son in an attempt to bury the evidence of her own guilt in her own mind I will not voluntarily accept to comply.  In other words I will not harm myself, my daughter or her son in some vain attempt to avoid the harm she threatens to perpetrate.  Her problem with her guilt is her problem not mine.  I can't possibly resolve it for her because it is not mine to resolve.

All of them ran away from their parents oppression without ever confronting it.  It would seem that it is set in stone now.  It seems impossible for them to say "no" to the oppressor that lives and breathes inside them.  Why am I so lucky?  Maybe I suffered less at the hands of my parents.  But I came to terms with my fundamental and chronic betrayal of myself some 15 years ago.  Although I have always watched the world with a certain detachment and held on to the me that is within, it is only 15 years since I realised I could say "no" to any demand that I do someone else's bidding under fear of any threat.  Sure, put a gun to my head and tell me to wipe the shit off your shoe and I will do it - but I will never carry out your crime to hide your guilt from yourself.

To my sisters I would say "Grow up and own your own decisions."  If you want to throw me Ele and Mike out onto the street to get your grubby hands on some dosh then own it and do it.  But you will never get my agreement that you are right.  I will never do it for you.  And your claims that you have no other choice, your offsetting the decision by pretending it was Mummy and Daddy that wanted it, or your claims that it is financially legal are all vacuous excuses to blame other people or circumstances for your rather pathetic greed.

The truth is not that you cannot say no to the parents, or no to the money, or no to your sibling, or no to the bank, or no to the law - the truth is you cannot say no to yourself; your own hideous controlling evil self.

Another interesting corollary for this linguistic expression of the dynamics of being conscious is: do you choose to love or are you forced by fear?  Is your God benign or an oppressor?  Are you free to make your own decisions or subjugated by the threats of others as you cling to them in your own minds?

I am still utterly shocked that all this started before the parents were even dead.  The marauders pounced the instant the oppressors became weak.  It still astounds me how rapidly they seized power, as they saw it, and attacked us with such vigour.  Is it possible that their fear is so great that their ravenous desperation to get their hands on the spoils was irresistibly compulsive to the point of being psychotic?  Was it events that controlled them beyond their own ability to resist?  My much pondered conclusion is yes; they are out of control.  I cannot believe that any human could turn on their family and indeed their own child simply for material wealth.  But then I sit up and cast my weary eye across the horizon of human behaviour and history and I sadly conclude that it is all too often the case.  It is literal when I say "We sacrifice real life by complying with social contracts of oppression for our own sense of security."  We really do kill our children because we are cowards - or perhaps more accurately - we are cowards because we kill our children.

E.g. Neoliberal psychology.

I put the following paragraph in quotes to illustrate that it is a subjective expression to someone who is intentionally causing me harm.

"You are entirely convinced, to the extent you don't even consciously notice it, that I will defend myself by harming you.  On account of that your fear of me rises every time you assault me.  You are in a compulsive cycle of believing the stakes are rising and so the imperative to assault me is rising too.  You are being driven insane by your fear of being attacked as if by virtue of simply existing you will be abused.  This is the almost inevitable result of your formative experience of being born into an abusive environment."

This dynamic is self consistent.  It also illuminates the perceived need to assault the victim on the grounds that the perpetrator was assaulted and is still alive.  The false rationale including such notions as "It didn't do me any harm."

The ritualised practice of infant circumcision (or any genital mutilation) engenders a profound abstract and almost inaccessible paranoia (this is much written about in academic circles).  It is an accepted practice by mainstream Judaism (and other religions and cultures).  It is no coincidence that the self acclaimed "Jewish" State of Israel exhibits the characteristics described above on an almost incomprehensible scale.

"Au contraire!  We have an anti-Semite."  No - there is nothing anti-Semitic in what I say.  Quite apart from the fact that the term is a misnomer in the first place, the common meaning is "anti-Jewish in a negative prejudicial manner".  I have serious criticisms of all the Abrahamic religions and the consequential manifestation of behaviour.  Religions are very powerful mechanisms of psychological conformity.  It would be starkly insane not to examine them with an open mind.  My expressed observations are exactly not prejudicial because they are born of, and rely on, careful objective observations and interpretation.  There is no pre-judgement assumed or applied to any group or individual.  And, in addition to that, my observations are sympathetic to the perpetrators of abuse on the grounds that there seems no other explanation than that abuse is the consequence of abuse.  I am not going to elucidate that issue here but suffice it to say that it is self evident and self defining that "harming" children causes them to malfunction.  How could it not?  If it made them work better it wouldn't be described as "harm".  The relevant question might be whether circumcision is harmful or beneficial.  That subject has also been researched ad infinitum and the general consensus determines that in general it is harmful.  That is also my perception with all my experience and consideration of the issue.  Of course the argument remains because it is clearly a good thing from the perspective of the abuser on account of the fact it confirms their prejudicial beliefs insofar as the result is a dependent who compulsively defends their oppressor.  How the abused compulsively defend their abusers is well researched and studied if you need to know more.  It is a profound, self perpetuating, destructive, self-contradictory "survival" mechanism.

Theodor Herzl, regarded as the father of modern political Zionism, essentially takes the perspective of the injured party who has a "right to survive".  At the outset this is a perfectly reasonable position.  However, the possibly reasonable resolution is based on the premise of a presumed enemy.  The problem is that having resolved the issue the method of resolution is no longer functional because there is no longer an enemy.  It seems to follow that for the method to continue to be valid an enemy is required.  And there is an obvious and not entirely unreasonable tendency, if something produces good results, to do it again.  The method becomes a mechanism by which one believes one survives.  It is in danger of becoming compulsive.  The problem with the philosophy and the psychology of Zionism is that it requires an enemy.

Neoliberalism is essentially Liberalism out of context and to an extreme that fits the same model as described above regarding Zionism.  It seems to be one reason they work so well together even to the point of sometimes appearing indistinguishable.  The first assertion is the right for individuals to be free or "liberated" from oppression.  The entrenched defence is that if I have something you do not have the right to take it away from me.  The philosophy, the laws, the cultural paradigms and in fact the entire edifice of Neoliberalism focuses on the right of an individual to maintain the benefits of what they produce or what they do.  But it, yet again, assumes an environment that may have been the case at the outset but is changing in response to the actions within it.  It leads inevitably to power rising and concentrating in the upper echelons of the culture.  The idea that a corporation has an inalienable right to defend itself against an arbitrary pregnant woman who has no money and so "steals" a loaf of bread is obscenely out of proportion.  But that is where Neoliberalism goes.

Our economic structures reflect this same dynamic.  We live in a pyramid economy.  Yanis Varoufakis recently described the current problems in the EU, between the IMF and Greece in particular, as "Ponzi Austerity".  He is entirely correct.  The philosophy of making money by taking it from other people only works if the money is reliably circulating.  When the conceptualisation of money is formed and defined by the people who have it as a justification for their right to have it the result is a one way trip to the top.  This is the problem many don't understand when it comes to pyramid marketing.  On a local scale, where the ocean of available wealth is treated as infinite, the rationale makes sense.  But in a closed system the boundaries create a place where there are no resources to continue the process and the net result is the concentration of all that is available in the centre of the system depriving the whole of the resources to survive.  It literally eats itself like a cancer.

My sibling's behaviour (that is four sisters and a brother) of evicting myself, my daughter and my nephew from what is tragically ironically called the family home, clearly exhibit the profound error elucidated above.  They are beating a dead horse on account of their numskull interpretation which is a consequence of their abusive upbringing.  It seems no coincidence to me that in our family the youngest male died as a result of abuse and in the two female families born of my sisters it is the youngest male which has received the most damaging abuse or that as my sisters determine what to do they are currently assaulting the youngest remaining male in this family (that is me) and it is ironic that my nephew, one sisters damaged youngest male, is conveniently collateral damage because he is being assaulted by his mother who put him here in the first place.  The females, oppressed by a virulently sexist culture, abstractly perceive the father (an austere Victorian authoritarian) as the male representative of their oppression.  As is so often the case their legitimate need to destroy their oppressor combined with their conviction that "he" is indestructible (otherwise they would not be compulsively repressed by the internal construct within their psyche) turn on the easiest victim available in the outside world which too often is not the object of their problem but a place holder to vent their frustration and vengeance.  It is understandable why their attention is taken by the most vulnerable male in their vicinity.  All of this is the same construct of dynamics as described above but with emotional validity rather than money or material existence.

It may be that my subjective experience incorrectly assesses and understands the world at large.  It even raises my suspicions that my subjective experience so well matches my concerns and interpretation of human behaviour in general.  However there are a few objective observations that suggest something quite different.  The most obvious is that some of the most respected minds in our history appear to agree with me.  Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty, Naomi Kline, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud ... and the list cascades across cultures and history.  It also makes sense of how these dynamics so profoundly affect our cultures because they resonate in such a fractal manner from the whole right down to the individual experience.  My experience is subjective but my observations are objective.  The subjective and the objective are just aspects of the whole.  When people attempt to over objectify, that is to take their subjective experience out of the equation, by depersonalising their cognitive constructs and academic pronouncements, the results become sterile to the point of extremism as outlined above.

The consequences of these incredibly damaged minds operating in the world can reasonably be described as hideous, obscene, disgusting and generally evil.  To mistake this observation as a valid description of the people creating these circumstances is to both miss the point and to become just another polarised oppressor.  The people are not evil, they are grossly damaged.  Vengeance should not be wrought on them but on the consequences.  The people should simply be ignored or stopped or, if necessary, incarcerated to prevent further evil.  The consequential subjective result is that I am hurt and angry to a degree I hardly imagined possible for one human being.

Quantum Theory & The Panama Papers.

People often wonder who they should believe.
It is not a question of belief but rather how plausible and how likely.

If there is any underlying truth we are certainly never going to know it in its entirety.  As with Quantum Theory we only need a way to accurately handle the phenomena.  And, as with Quantum Theory, working out the sum of all possible "truths" gives a net result which predicts events most accurately.

So ...
• Panama Papers: 2.6 terabytes of data, containing 11.5 million documents from one law firm in one tax haven.  This is only a drop in the proverbial ocean.
• Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian and ICFJ have had this data for 8 months.  It has been stated that some of the material will remain secret.
• Top of the news is an Icelandic Prime Minister and Putin.  This accounts for a minute proportion of the information and although more information is available it is clear that a large majority of the data remains a black hole.
• Given who is handling this data it is reasonable to suppose that they would avoid releasing information damaging to themselves (or their masters).  Unless they release all the data it is not unreasonable to assume that the vast majority of the data implicates the Western governments in serious corruption and malpractice.

There is an ongoing issue of the NSA and GSCHQ tracking all communications via the internet to the point of serious concerns about "privacy".  The data collected by these organisations obviously dwarfs the Panama Papers like a mountain dwarfs a grain of sand.  So the Western governments already know far more than these papers reveal.  For brevity it is clear that the "West" has selected this 2.6 terabytes for the purpose of distraction for their own malicious ends.

Maybe they are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot (big time) if the public keep up the pressure.

Useful links:
Wikipedia: Panama Papers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers
World Economic Forum: Just how big was the Panama Papers leak?
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/the-scale-of-the-panama-papers