Toxic Drums

What I had for breakfast!

2012-02-23T02:53:00.000Z

An alternative read for the politically sensitive as a response to Mr Dinner's blog.

When I woke up this morning you were on my my my what the £µ¢∇ is going on here? The interface has shifted and the baby is drinking wine from its mothers bladder. She really shouldn't have drunk so much at lunch time. These middle class goddesses are glueless cod balls of fatty excrement. Mustafa Fag was eating shreddies and they weren't his wife's when the old bill arrived and arrested all the white men. Nag Nag Nag. There is a Crack Down in the matrix and the shattered glass is splintering the collective conscious charade. Way back in the 1980's Richard H Kirk said of Red Mecca "It's not called that by coincidence. We weren't referencing the fucking Mecca Ballroom in Nottingham!" It was clear even then to the more observant that there was an Islamic revolution in the making. But the emperor has beautiful new clothes. Aldous Huxley knew what was going on in the 1930's and the education system has been grinding away at the corn since. The combine harvester was Ken Kesey's metaphorical vehicle expressed through the Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to describe the relentless, all pervading, harvesting and grinding down of the population on all fronts. George Orwell's thinkpol are already here. I have no time since breakfast to explain the whole damn edifice but it is a heinous construct and it is coming down. My brain is numb. I need more drugs. Where's my doctor? Religion is a crime and we are not to speak out about it for fear of the wrath of God. Fear lust thou rabid mortals. Surrealism and Dada have been consumed, ingested, digested, degraded, decomposed, mutated, reformed, and incorporated into the ethereal Soylent Green to sustain the relentless terror-formation of the oppressor's simulacra. Freedom of speech was once regarded as sacrosanct. No more my friends. No more do you possess freedom of thought let alone speech. I have to be politically correct because I carry adverts on my blog and web site and I want their money. And anyway there aren't enough intelligent people out there who can understand what is being expressed. "Nobody's going to sink this ship because they've got a fear of drowning." A line from a sadly lost song from a late 1970's post punk northern industrial band called Graph. So if you want "What I had for breakfast." go read the Ichthys Fish or Anorexia in an insane culture. I'm fading out and have to go to a funeral soon. I wonder who's it will be.

... oh, and could you please pass the butter?

Protecting Our Children

2012-02-10T20:12:00.000Z

Episode 1: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't

This documentary was broadcast by the BBC on Monday 30 January 2012. The short summary on the BBC website says:

Follows Bristol's child protection teams over the course of a year to see frontline work first-hand and explore how the crises of the last decade have had an impact on their ability to safeguard children.

Newly-qualified Susanne is working with a 'low risk' family. But even the most straightforward situations often develop into something more ominous.

Her first case is to help a family with their three-year-old son Toby, who has learning difficulties. His parents need support and advice about how to improve their parenting, as well as the conditions of their small flat. However, father Mike's hostility towards Susanne means she can't help the family in the way she would like.

It seems a fair commentary on the essential substance of the documentary. But what is the real problem? There are two polarised perspectives here. Either one can see the parents as failing in their role as parents or one can see the social workers failing in their role. It is clear that the social workers see the situation from the first perspective. It is also clear that the impartial documentary is from their point of view too. The devastating problem is the inherent prejudice.

At the beginning of the documentary Susanne claims that social work is the most hated profession in the country. She's wrong. There was a survey done some years ago and Doctor's receptionists topped the bill. Estate Agents came in a close second. Susanne could be accused of over dramatisation and paranoia (She probably would be if the boot was on the other foot). One problem with paranoia is that it leads to pre-emptive assault. She is already laying down the foundation for a disastrous outcome by her own expectations. And early on in the documentary Mike says "You're here to split the family up. Let's get it straight... You're out to do one thing Susanne and I know you're out to do one thing... and I'll repeat it now with the camera, you're out to wreck us." Well history proved that he was right. So we start the documentary with a social worker who has already been proved to be wrong and a father who is honest and clear in his communication and actually factually correct.

This documentary is clearly judgemental. The parents are fat, stupid and dirty, and much as the well educated, well spoken, well trained, intelligent, responsible social workers try, they can't make the parents behave the way they think they should. It is clear that there is a problem and that the child is not experiencing a level of well being that this society would like. Most viewers of the program will feel that the child's circumstances could be dramatically improved. Most viewers will do what most people do and imagine themselves in the position of the parents. Most viewers, because this program was broadcast into houses with enough money to have a television, will imagine they would clean up the mess, they wouldn't let the dog shit on the carpet, they would tidy up the kitchen and they would generally do a better job than the fat stupid parents. It is easy being prejudicial. It is self serving and very satisfying. But what is the consequence? The child was put up for adoption and the parents' lives were devastated. God only knows how the child will feel in years to come when he finds out what happened? But the good bit is that he seemed clearly happier away from his parents. So the viewer is left feeling that the social workers have an almost impossible job to do and the viewer would not like to have to do it but, tough though the decisions were, they did the right thing for the child. So the viewer comes away with a heavy heart and wishing things weren't like this but glad that at least the Children Services are there to do the dirty work and help the dear children. So, unbeknownst to the viewer, they are giving themselves an almost subconscious pat on the back for being so compassionate. Smug, self satisfied, supercilious, sanctimonious hypocritical viewers. Just what Aunty (the BBC) wants.

So consider these questions: What did the social workers do to help the parents? What did they do to help the child have a better relationship with his parents? What did they do about addressing the underlying problems? What did they do to give the parents a support? What did they do about the dignity and self respect of the parents?

Unfortunately the answer is not just "nothing" it is far worse; They assaulted the parents with a sense of superiority. They judged the parents negatively. They patronised the parents and brought the full force of the institutionalised judgemental, oppressive and destructive powers of our culture down on them. They stole the parents' child like any good child catcher would do. They had no respect for the parents. They had no compassion for their lives. They had no concept of the bigger picture. In fact they were remarkably un-Christian for a bunch of self satisfied jerks. I only bring Christianity into this because the UK regards itself as a Christian society with Christian values and the actions of the social services must appear to be in line with the Christian moral paradigms. You can hear them bleat "...but we were only trying to help.", "...we only want what is best for the child."

An aside: There is somewhere in the region of 50,000 social workers in England so maybe 80,000 in the UK. This is not including support staff so it is at least of the right order. The average salary is around the £25k mark. Many receive less and a few receive significantly more but again it is in the right order. So the pay handed out to social workers is in the region of £2,000,000,000 per annum. That's a fashionable two billion pounds. Unemployment in the UK stands at about 2.5 million. So if all the social workers were put out of work and the money handed out to the unemployed (now including the 80,000 ex-social workers) that would amount to £775 each per year. Not proving what I would have wanted it to prove.

What the self orientated social workers don't understand is that they have a job, they have a pension, they have a house and even a home to live in. They are treated with respect on the high street as civilised 'citizens'. They are afforded a sense of security and self respect in their 'conforming' life style. They are fundamentally psychologically secure. The people they 'visit' have probably had none of that all of their lives. The people who are in most need of the services provided by the democratic government and funded by the tax payer are exactly the people who have been abused, ostracised, marginalised and even criminalised by the culture. They are the least educated in our society. They are the poorest in society. The unconscious arrogance of the social services simply oozed out of the television set.

The summary of the program says "However, father Mike's hostility towards Susanne means she can't help the family in the way she would like." Am I the only person who can see the cruel arrogance of that? If the social services were seriously trying to help the disadvantaged people that sentence simply couldn't be said. First of all the reference to Mike's hostility assumes it is ill-founded as if there is something 'wrong' with him. It was not ill founded at all; Susanne's attitude was superior and she clearly regarded these people as inferior. Mike was actually extremely tolerant of her condescending and judgemental attitude, but he quite reasonably, and with a damn site more honesty than Susanne ever exhibited, stated that he didn't like her and couldn't work with her because she was simply out to take their child away. His hostility was a very restrained and understandable response to the circumstances. But the sentence goes on to say that [poor] Susanne couldn't help the family the way SHE wanted to. Whatever happened to the idea of helping them they way THEY wanted to be helped? So Susanne (representing 'us' the civilised viewers), poor thing, couldn't get what SHE wanted which was to be a really nice, kind, compassionate, helpful person (needing her father's approval to survive - you know that Freudian stuff). That is what I mean by arrogance. The parents clearly needed help and seemed perfectly willing and able to respond to serious help if it were available. But the social services wanted to dictate how they should behave and frankly it was unreasonable in their state of poverty and with their lack of education and social skills. Net result - justified child theft. And the wonderful thing about that is that the social workers all get paid, the tax payer feels they are getting value for money, and the social services funding gets a boost for another child purloined. Unfortunately the reality is that they are parasites getting fat (metaphorically) preying on the poor.

The Telegraph's review: Protecting Our Children: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t, BBC Two, review is as naively arrogant as the BBC's documentary. It claims "This first episode focuses on nervous trainee Susanne..." immediately putting her in the 'sympathy' chair and a few sentences later says "He’s [the son] also extremely aggressive – but when we witness obstinate Mike arguing with Susanne and the rest of the team, it’s not difficult to see how he has acquired that particular trait." totally writing off Mike as an unreasonable and positively aggressive person. But the child was angry and demonstrative (understandably) and Mike, the father, was not aggressive. He never once threatened any of the social workers or television crew and only once mildly threatened his son but not even to the level of the euphemistic "appropriate discipline" (smacking) currently being debated in the UK and being supported by the more (arrogant, rich) right wing conservatives. What the Telegraph is referring to is his audacity at daring to say what he thought and to state that the Social Services were out to wreck the family. A fair observation and one he has a perfect right to express. It is only a threat in so far as it threatens to expose the hidden agenda. What the social workers are trying to achieve is an immoral objective; They do not want it questioned. The writer for the Telegraph (Isabel Mohan) has obviously succumbed to the authoritarian control of her parents and schooling because she interprets Mike's statements as 'aggressive'.

This documentary, unfortunately, is prejudicial and does nothing to advance an understanding of the complexity of the problems in our society. It only bolsters the sanctimonious justification for institutionalise child abuse to appease the middle class conscience.

More reading around this subject:
'Child protection' wreaks havoc on a loving family once again
A judge attacks my 'one-sided' child protection stories - but it cuts both ways
Children Services Abuse
TV review: Protecting Our Children: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't

Get another job

2012-02-06T10:35:00.000Z

People who enjoy what they do for a living recognise that they are fortunate. People who work for a living and criticise people who are unemployed clearly hate their own job. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise. "You should work for a living instead of leaching off society." Well wouldn't they work for a living if it were so much better? So my question is this: Why spend your time as a human being doing what you hate? Is it perhaps because you are kowtowing to the bullies? Is it because you have been emotionally bludgeoned into doing other people's dirty work? Is it because you are really a snivelling wimp wiping the bottom of the bully? Do you get compensatory pleasure from feeling "richer" than other people. Do you revel in the privilege of having more benefits than other people. Are you basically greedy? Greed being that horrible compulsive need for "more" than others. It is a comparative thing and simply gives one a feeling of being superior but really it hides the cringe-worthy depths to which you will descend to save your sorry arse from the bullies. In fact you become one of the very people you hate.

So there are different ways people respond to their circumstances. People who are in work, earning a living, and reasonably content with their circumstances, are not heavily critical of people who are unfortunate enough to be out of work. But the people who work to bolster their own self image, which is evidently in need of some support, have no choice but to view others who are out of work as somehow deficient because that is what they would regard themselves as if they didn't work. People who bolster their own self image, as opposed to improving it, by being judgemental about others are perhaps the worst scum of the Earth. They are the little Hitlers that support the oppressive hierarchy and require people to be less fortunate than them to make sense of it all. They are simply sacrificing their own self respect and dignity to survive. They are self contradictory, malfunctioning, biological waste that has sold its soul to the proverbial devil.

(I wonder if this counts as being judgemental?)

Kaboom

2012-02-06T04:21:00.000Z

This image is from http://www.nukefix.org/weapon.html which has lots of interesting info about the effects of nuclear weapons.

Just watched an interesting animation of the timeline of all atomic explosions from 1945 to 1998 by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. Food for thought!

Check out the Death Toll Counter for a different perspective on death and destruction.

Smack Smack Splat!

2012-02-05T16:09:00.000Z

What the Fµ¢∇? How £µ¢kïÑg Neanderthal can these humans be. Now I haven't spelt the word "fuck" (oops) because people don't like stuff like that on web pages. Well some do and some don't. But the pretentious and manipulative attitude is to be shocked and horrified at such expletives. Admittedly it doesn't do well in scientific theories and educational papers and there is a reason. Expletives are emotional expressions. Very rarely is the "F" word used to communicate the act of fornication in itself or of sexual intercourse in a loving marriage (there's an oxymoron for you). So it is not informative or precise enough to use expletives when trying to explain detailed information in an educational context.

There is a reason for this. Expletives assume a meaning, they don't describe it. Expletives are typically part of "patterned" behaviour. They are quick and robust ways of conveying assumed attitudes and beliefs. They are culturally context sensitive. For example "What is that paper doing on your desk?" is a simple question but "What the £µ¢k is that paper doing on your desk?" suggests it shouldn't be there.

A little aside; I once said to my 5 year old daughter "What (with a silent £µ¢k) is that doing on the floor?" It was clear to me what I meant. I was saying it shouldn't be there, I was accusing her of leaving it there and I was effectively saying "Pick it up." She, not accustomed to all the assumed crap, simply looked at it, looked up at me and said, with a smile, "Sitting there." I got it. I was not asking the question but was rather forcing (or trying to force) her to "know" what I "know". It is part of how prejudice works. Saying something like "Anybody with a grain of sense knows hitting children is wrong." is manipulative and tricky. In order to have an opposing view, that hitting children is not wrong, one has to deal with the projected logical corollary that you, therefore, don't have a grain of sense. If that were the case then your opposing view would be invalid anyway. That explains how these assumed perspectives are projected but expletives do it in an even less explicit way.

There is no question, as I have explained in another blog page, that hitting children is not a good idea. But some people can't get their head outside of the blame culture, and because they have experience of when hitting a child seemed to them the best thing to do at the time they can't accept that in general it is not a good idea. But sometimes we do things that are not ideal. So if hitting children is wrong then the person doing the hitting must be punished according to our blame culture. Hence you get laws which have ridiculous consequences. If you are going to have rules of law without justice then a law stating that hitting people is wrong is simply divisive. It is controllers trying to unfairly impose their will on other people. Personally I think it is a fine law to say that bashing children around is not legal. I think it is primitive and paradoxical to have laws stating that you can't even touch another person let alone hit them so long as they are an adult but that it is perfectly legal to bash children. However, if, as a consequence of this you legitimise an authority kidnapping children, breaking up families, and psychologically abusing people then you have got it all wrong and out of proportion.

I suspect that, in line with the good old Judaic tradition we might consider the approach of an eye for an eye in this case. So if there is a legal case to answer where a parent is accused of hitting a child then the same punishment should be applied to the parent. That makes it proportionally more reasonable. If you think that to save your child from being run over by a bus your best action was to hit them then you would presumably be quite willing to accept an equal hit (in your child's interest of course). But if you were the sort to regularly punch your child would you be willing to receive a punch every time you did it? Oh, and just to keep things in proportion the punch should be proportionally in scale. In other words if you punch a child with a mass one sixth of your body weight with the force of a four pound bag of wet sugar at a speed of 15 miles per hour you should be hit with 24 pound bag of wet sugar at a speed of 90 miles per hour. Oh, and you get to keep the kid as well :)

A recent poll suggested that 33% of Conservatives smack their children, 26% of Labour supporters smack their children and only 15% of Liberal Democrats smack their children. I regard Conservatives as self satisfied sanctimonious control freaks. I regard Labour supporters as treacherous to their own cause because they actually support the status quo of the hierarchy and I regard Liberal Democrats as having good ideas but not having the ability to either understand their own ideas or to do anything constructive about them. So I guess these figures make complete sense to me.

I find it interesting that the perception of "hitting children" is usually within the context of less sophisticated or lower class people. But it is the Conservatives (the upper/middle class political arena) which wants more of it.

And to finish off with an almost unrelated joke: What goes "TAP TAP SPLAT!"? Answer: A blind man crossing the road. And a variation on the theme: What goes "SLAP SLAP SPLAT!"? Answer: (the clean one) A parent chastising their offspring before they are run over by the bus.

Bashing kids about is a good idea!

2012-01-29T14:51:00.000Z

When I was a wee sapling I told folk I was from Mars. There was a simple reason: I didn't want to "belong" to the human race. But it had another consequence. I could look at humans as an alien race. I could look at them with more compassion in a detached way.

David Lammy, former Labour Education Minister, has said that the law against hitting children should be repealed because it led to the London riots in 2011. See the Daily Mail's "Smacking ban led to riots".

Not only do I find the article funny I find it amazing reading the comments. The Daily Mail, Mr Lammy and most of the comment writers are so Neanderthal. These poor humans don't seem to be able to connect three logical thoughts. So often in these over simplified debates they can only deal with two ideas at a time. The fact is that hitting children should be illegal. It is not right to hit children.

I'll say that again: It is not right to hit children.

So what do you do if your child has grasped an electric fire which was not earthed and you can't grab them because you will get stuck to them? You hit them to knock them away from the fire. Ok so this is not a brilliant example but there are cases where you might hit a child to save them from harm. So hitting children is right! That's what these politicians, law makers, and probably 90% of the commentators don't get. It is not a simple case of "hitting children" being right or wrong. But all other things being equal it is true to say that simply "hitting children" is not a sensible, humane, beneficial, compassionate, productive, practical or even rational thing to do in general.

So if we start from basic principles it seems clear that hitting children is not a good idea. Mr Lammy goes on to say that parents are "no longer sovereign in their own homes" and that they live under constant fear that social workers will take away their children if they chastise them.

UH!? What?

Is it only me that sees the complete lunacy of that? If cuffing a child for stamping on another child's foot justifies the draconian Children Services stealing the child then it seems to me there is something very wrong. But it is because we live in this mind numbing authoritarian blame culture. There is no need to take any offensive action against a parent that smacks a child. But that doesn't equate to establishing in law that it is perfectly fine to smack children.

We are obsessed with trying to make rules that make us perfect. Well - that is not quite it. What is really going on is that some people want power over other people. The way they achieve it is to criticise others and justify their offensive action because the other person is 'to blame'. But what needs to happen is that the authorities start to act under the same rules as the ones they are pretending to try to uphold. They could start by being honest and accountable. But they are not.

If you want to see how the Children Services measure up to their own criticisms of other people check out the Children Services Abuse section on Toxic Drums. They are appallingly self contradictory. They clearly imagine themselves to be above the law. They are incredibly abusive and apparently not accountable.

Another funny thing about this article in the Daily Mail is that Mr Lammy is black (well to be correct he is sort of a dark shade of brown) and he quite reasonably makes the amusing point that the law specifies that any force that causes 'reddening of the skin' is prohibited. He goes on to point out the irrelevance of that to black (or brown) children. I can see South Park making a meal out of that. Black people should be allowed to hit children and middle class white people should not. Simples!

What I wish is that folk would stop this stupid attempt to justify abuse against others. The Children Services should be there to assist in difficult situations. They have all the potential of being a really benign organisation improving the social conditions in this country for children. But instead they are employed to go around terrorising both parents and children in some Gaddafi style attempt to keep order. And we know where that ends up!

Au Contraire!

2012-01-23T19:46:00.000Z

Q: What's the connection between Harold Shipman, Mark E Smith, a Practice Nurse, Stephen Mallinder, God, Bob Dylan and an East German Rabbit?
A: They all appear on this page.

I had a friend phone me about my blog on the Practice Nurse. She asked why I hadn't mentioned Harold Shipman to the nurse. Now you may not know this but Harold Shipman is regarded as one of history's worst murderers. He is the ONLY British doctor ever to be found guilty of murdering his patients and it is conservatively estimated that he killed at least 218 of them.

I was talking to my teenage daughter and mentioned that this friend had called and mentioned Harold Shipman. My daughter asked who Harold Shipman was and I explained that he had murdered hundreds of his patients. A gleeful smile spread across her face as she announced with delight "Oh good - I have another hero."

Au Contraire!

The general cultural perception is that: a) Harold Shipman is a bad man and b) that there is something wrong with my daughter that she could be instantly impressed by him. But there is something going on here of which most people seem blissfully unaware. We are NOT living in a benign culture!

The trouble seems to be that most people are not living up to what might be called a personal morality but rather a collective perceived morality. They are desperately trying to get the approval of the culture. Humans are working collectively to define themselves as what they wish they were. So the culture assumes hitting people is nasty and not desirable whereas being all sentimental about sweet babies is positively admirable. There is nothing wrong with that on the surface but dig a little deeper and it soon becomes evident that the higher up the hierarchy you ascend the more ruthless people become in defending the collective ego and its self perception that it is "good". It only takes a cursory glance around to see that the large institutions like the banks, the legal profession, the pharmaceutical industry, the NHS and the Children Services are all psychopathic in their defence of their image. It only takes a little personal experience to realise that they collectively apply a morality to control the individual whilst not complying with that morality themselves.

The thing about my daughter is she sees this with a clarity that is beyond me. She already knows what the false charade is about. She is like the astronauts who saw the earth as a whole majestically delicate perfect living entity floating in space for the first time. She sees the duality of the collective conscious and unconscious of humanity. She already knows that the institutionalised judgemental view is perverted for its own benefit, and sees through the facade to the inner workings of society. She knows that if Harold Shipman was killing his patients that hundreds more are doing it and probably with a more convoluted and perverse deception. What she is elated about seems to be that he did what hundreds are trying to pretend they would never do. It is, perhaps, the sanctimonious hypocritical attitude that promotes (or demotes) the likes of Harold Shipman to an extreme as if he were an aberrant exception in order to elevate themselves that she sees instantly and with clarity. It takes philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and spiritual people years of their lives and generations to understand the world of humanity. But my daughter sees it with no need for an explanation or any justification or excuses. She knows what is going on like most of us cannot imagine.

It is possibly the human honesty in Shipman that resonates for her. For any Christians reading this blog just recall that your elevation of a man to a God in the name of Jesus was the one to make clear to the religious hierarchy that tax collectors and prostitutes were equally God's creation. It was He who was crucified for loving ALL people. He understood that externalising "evil" was an offense against humanity and, in your terms, God.

Now on the subject of Harold Shipman it was The Fall who produced the controversial track "What About Us?" which was a interesting angle on the Harold Shipman issue. The song is about an East German rabbit that emigrates to the UK for better grazing. It starts of...

Bah ba ba ba ba ba ba ba bah
Well - Oh yeah - Wha wha yeah yeah yabah yaah (or something like that)

I am a rabbit from East Germany
I was very happy

It goes on...
Then I moved to Great Britain
I became an immigrant
I could frolic around all night
Eat all the green grass
I was so happy
Bah ba ba ba ba ba ba ba bah

The rabbit found himself...
By a rubbish receptacle
I saw a newspaper
I was not very happy
There was a man
He was dishing out drugs
He was a doctor
Dishing out Drugs
To all the ladies

I said"What about us?" Shipman
"What about us?" Shipman
"What about us?" Shipman
"What about us?" Shipman
"What about us?" Shipman
"What about us?" Shipman
etc...

I couldn't decipher all the lyrics in the time available and couldn't find them on the internet. But that should give you the gist of it. I met Mark E Smith once in Cabaret Voltaire's factory studio. That's not Factory Records where I got viciously assaulted by a bunch of Manchurian thugs but rather Cabaret Voltaire's studio which was housed in an almost derelict old factory in Sheffield. Mark E Smith is one of a few people I have ever met who have struck me as intensely human. He is one of those people you just know is how people are meant to be. Unassuming, inquisitive, kind, thoughtful, creative, friendly and somehow your life is enhanced simply by his existence. Mal (Stephen Mallinder of CV) and Judd (another Steven) of Clock DVA were of the same mould. But I digress as I name drop but want to give credit where it is due.

Here's a couple of renditions of "What About Us?" and a glimpse of Mark E Smith getting an award which shows his eccentric take on life and normality.

"What About Us?" by The Fall live at Leeds Festival 2006

The Fall Diesel U Music Awards 2005 (Mark E Smith)

This is the best audio version of "What About Us?" I can find on the internet and it is good. It seems to be legal and free but I can't find a way to embed it so you'll have to go to the WE7 radio web site which seems a reasonable place. Here is: WHAT ABOUT US on WE7.

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours." Bob Dylan said that.
"We are not who we wish we were but we need to be who we are or there is no real reality available to us." I said that.

Thanks to Wakefield Prison for the fair use mug shot of Harold.

Child Tax Credits: Student Definition

2012-01-23T04:26:00.000Z

What qualifies a child as a student for Child Tax Credits purposes?
What is the definition of a student for Child Tax Credits?
What is the government definition of Higher Education and Further Education for a child between 16 and 20 so that the parent or carer can claim Child Tax Credits?

Those were the questions I was struggling with and I have heard a number of different definitions.

I did some searching around and I found the HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) web site and eventually found the Tax Credit calculator. You can use this HMRC Tax Credit calculator to get an idea of what you might be entitled to. There are two aspects to Tax Credits: yourself and your children. If your income is low you can qualify for Working Tax Credits and if you have children you can be entitled to Child Tax Credits as well.

There is a slightly difficult area when the child reaches the age of 16 and one major issue for many people is understanding if their child meets the criteria for Child Tax Credits. I won't go into details here but if you have a child between the age of 16 and 20 who is still in education and your income is low you may be entitled to Child Tax Credits to help in these financially catastrophic times.

The salient point I was looking for was the precise definition of a student. I used the calculator and on one page it asked the question:

Is this child in full time education or on an approved training course? (You only need to answer this question if this child is aged 16 to 19 or if this child is aged 19 to 20 and was enrolled, accepted for or started full-time education or approved training before they turned 19.)

And there were links to helpful information for full time education and approved training course. This information gave the definition required as follows:

Full-time Education

A young person aged 16 and under 20 is classed as being in full-time education if they are studying

• at school or college, or a similar recognised establishment
• for a qualification up to and including A level, NVQ level 3 or Scottish national qualifications at higher or advanced higher level or equivalent. This does not include studying for a university degree or similar qualification
• for at least 12 hours a week during normal term time, not including meal breaks or time spent on unsupervised study.

A young person aged 19 must have enrolled, been accepted for or started full-time education before they turned 19.

A young person will still count as being in full-time education in any week where

• as part of the curriculum, they are on holiday or preparing for exams
• they are away from school or college due to sickness or ill-health but are intending to return to that course of education
• they have ended one course of education but have registered for a further course starting in the following term, and the only reason for not currently studying is that they are waiting for that course to start.

Approved Training Course

An approved training course is one of the following and is not provided through a contract of employment.

• England - Entry to Employment, Foundation Learning Programmes or Programme Led Apprenticeships
• Scotland - Get Ready for Work Skillseekers or Modern Apprenticeships
• Wales - Skillbuild, Skillbuild+ or Foundation Modern Apprenticeships
• Northern Ireland - Programme Led Apprenticeships (Apprenticeships NI), Jobskills, or Training for Success: Professional and Technical Training.

If your child is 19 years old, they must have enrolled, been accepted for or started approved training before they turned 19.

So there you have it.

You can find out more from the Child Tax Credit Calculator at:http://taxcredits.hmrc.gov.uk/Qualify/DIQHousehold.aspx

And thanks to Fredler Brave for the picture of students.

Videos Keep Freezing Browser

2012-01-20T21:56:00.000Z

If you have a Windows XP computer or Windows 7 you might find YouTube frequently causes the computer to crash or your computer freezes. Sometimes the video continues playing but the browser freezes. You might ask yourself "Why does my computer freeze?" Well I was having this problem and I found out why my computer freezes!

Image by Andreas Tille

Strictly speaking it was only the browser and not the computer that was locking up and not responding. It was happening more and more as I used YouTube. I searched the internet for a solution but found endless "problem pages" with hundreds of people asking why their computers locked up or froze when watching videos but no useful answers. I hate these "forum like" sites that elicit questions from users only to offer no answers but hundreds of adverts.

But I persisted and I came across a useful bit of software provided by Microsoft which analyses the codecs on your cvomputer to inform you of any possible clashes or problems. Codecs are bits of software that facilitate digital video streaming in Windows and various media players. The software executable is called MicrosoftFixit.Codec.Run.exe and you can download it from: http://support.microsoft.com/mats/video_freezes_or_crashes/en-us. The reason I mention this is because you don't always know if you can trust downloads nowadays and I have checked this out extensively and used it on my own computer with complete success.

The software checks all the codecs and informs you of any clashes. You then get the option to disable ones with a problem. This is always a bit worrying since you don't usually know enough about what is going on inside your machine to feel confident about disabling or deleting system stuff. But the information I got from the software was pretty straightforward. It told me there was a conflict problem with a particular codec installed by RealPlayer. Given that RealPlayer are getting more pushy I don't use their software if I can help it so I was happy to let this software disable RealPlayer's codec. I have had no more freezing videos. Problem solved! That easy once you have a reliable source.

So if your videos keep freezing your browser causing it to hang up you might want to visit http://support.microsoft.com/mats/video_freezes_or_crashes/en-us and download the MicrosoftFixit.Codec.Run.exe program. Running it to see if anything is wrong doesn't change anything on your computer and you always get the option to fix the problem only if you want.

The Notched Stick

2012-01-20T08:52:00.000Z

I couldn't find a legally available picture of a notch on a stick for this article so I settled for this picture of the Washington Monument by David Iliff (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Human beings regard their knowledge as rather extensive and generally think they are very intelligent. There is a vast volume of literature on every subject one could think of. The British Library which is the biggest library in the world in terms of items held has over 14 million books. The USA's Library of Congress which is the biggest library in terms of shelf space has over 30 million books. Along with all the other documents, manuscripts, patents, newspaper and so on the total number of words held is stupendous.

Pretty well the sum total of human knowledge is held in written form.

Computers have a way of representing words. The most common way is to represent each letter by a number and to hold that number as a binary digit. Which reminds me of a t-shirt a friend has which says:
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary and those who don't.
But I digress. Any sequence of words can be represented by a number which is a sequence of digits. If the decimal point is placed at the beginning of the sequence then that number is a fraction. So, for example the sequence of digits 521 can be represented with a decimal point at the beginning making it 0.521. If you take a stick and make a notch in it at exactly 0.521 of its length you can give it to someone else who could carefully measure that position of the notch and decode the number. So any sequence of letters could be represented by a notch on a stick. In theory you could take all the literature ever written and create a number. Admittedly it would be a very big number but a number all the same. This could then be turned into a fraction and represented by a notch on a stick.

So:
All human knowledge can be represented by a notch on a stick!

Thank you Wikipedia

2012-01-18T21:00:00.000Z

Wikipedia has taken the unprecedented decision to black out all English language content of its web site for 24 hours to raise awareness of SOPA and PIPA.

If you are reading this during the blackout you can view the site by adding ?banner=none to the url. Try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=none for example. You can also disable your browser from running JavaScript and then you can view the website perfectly fine.

In this oppressive, hierarchical, control freak world we live in, there are too many jerks who think they are important and know what's best for everyone else. Their methods have been proven consistently throughout history to benefit no one but themselves and actually to cause a great deal of harm to the majority of nice folk.

Those sanctimonious dictatorial prats waltzing around the halls of power in their clean cut suits pontificating to all and sundry about the moral values that need to be maintained are nothing more than vicious little bullies. They are self-serving opinionated bastards. They are no better than Colonel Gaddafi and his security forces or the Nazis or Fascists. The only difference is that they are fooling enough people at the moment to avoid having to use open violence.

But their need for control is insatiable. They continually erode the hard won acknowledgement of real human values. They are relentless in their attempts to define and control the world and how it works. Ironically King Canute sat on the beach to make the point that he was not all powerful. He has been entirely misrepresented by control freaks. It is ironic because they (the control freaks) actually think they have more power than they actually have and try to illustrate that they understand the limitations of their power by ridiculing Canute. It is a little like the ancient Turks who religiously put mistakes in their rugs because only God could make a perfect rug. The irony is missed on control freaks

These rather intellectually stunted testosterone driven gnomes relentlessly interfere with perfectly good principles in their egocentric attempts to prove themselves "good" by making new laws to protect individuals from harm. But the only individuals they "protect" are themselves and their cronies from being hoist by their own values.

I have a hard time believing the utter ridiculousness of laws which profess to protect liberty but are clearly quite the opposite. I have spent too much of my valuable life troubled by, and wondering about, these issues. The conclusion to date is that people in power are grossly stupid and that they succeed insofar as they manage to dull the minds of so many people that they get away with it.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are the two issues which are currently scheduled for debate in America and which have given rise to Wikipedia's 24 hour blackout. I have read around the subject and both these proposed laws essentially turn things on their heads. If you consider the premise that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty these laws do just the reverse. If, for example, someone leaves a comment on my blog with a link to a site which is linked to a site (presumably ad infinitum) which has content which is simply believed in good faith (woolly phraseology) by some authority to be in breach of any law then I am, by association, assumed to be guilty and my website can simply be shut down until I can prove in a court of law that the final offending material is not in fact illegal. These proposed laws are simply broad brush legalised censorship. They are intellectually contradictory (they would make the activities of the White House illegal but - hey - what's new?), pretentiously complicated and basically bullies giving themselves a sense of legitimacy.

I personally object strongly to the American Administration making utterly brainless and bad laws like SOPA and PIPA and I don't even live in the USA.

Freedom is not only freedom to do what the hierarchy demands. To have a free society one has to accept that sometimes some people will do things you don't like or agree with. The thing is you have to deal with those occasions when they arise and not make laws to prohibit anything that might be undesirable. And it is very important to prevent the bullies and the bad guys from making the laws. It is essential that the control freaks do not alter the laws for their benefit. It is what happened in Germany prior to the Second World War and precipitated the holocaust and it is currently happening in the USA, the UK, many countries in Europe and God knows where else.

By the way - the holocaust never happened!

Woops! Don't link to my web site now or you might be taken down.

Three Phone Calls

2012-01-17T22:26:00.001Z

Today, Tuesday 17 January 2012, I have had a day slightly more interesting than most. The key feature being three telephone calls. That is how interesting my life is!

Getting tired between three phone calls!

The first call was from an Indian scamster. (That's Scamster not Hampster.) These calls are getting more and more frequent and are funny except they probably cause a lot of harm too. The second was from a friend of a friend who seems to need telephone support at the moment. The third and last was from a practice nurse with a hidden agenda. All three calls left me feeling like the proverbial cat that had been at the cream. No - more like a lion that had gorged on a fat, freshly killed wildebeest (or was it a gnu?).

Here are the three calls:

1. The Indian enevtvwr phone scam.
2. The feigned sympathy call.
3. The practice nurse with an agenda.

EVENTVWR

2012-01-17T22:19:00.000Z

The Indian enevtvwr phone scam.

The Scam

Many people will have experienced the Indian telephone virus scam. It starts with a telephone call and an Indian technical expert telling you s/he has information that your computer is infected with a virus. He then tells you to press the "Windows" key (the one with the flag on it) and the "R" key. This, of course, opens the "Run" window where you can type commands into the operating system. There are various different scams that they use but a typical one is to ask you to type "eventvwr" which runs the Micro$oft Windows Event Viewer. This shows a list of logged events and typically is full of error messages. The error messages are quite normal and Windows generates a lot of them as it tests all sorts of things. They are meant to be there and are only interesting if you are very technical and want to know detailed information about what sequences of operations Windows is executing. (Another use I have discovered is to detect if anyone has switched your computer on whilst you were away.) But...

To the uninitiated this can look like a lot of frightening error messages and presumably the scammer then goes on to frighten you and to suggest there is something wrong with your computer. They may suggest you have a virus or a bug or a Trojan or a worm or some other dastardly infection. They will then get you to hand control of your computer to them and they will download all your data which will likely contain bank accounts, passwords, credit card details and all sorts of very useful information for what is called "identity theft".

There is little more that needs explaining here except to say they can do a lot of damage and get away with a degree of serious profit.

The Conversation

I just received one such phone call and was very entertained to keep the guy going for a while. I kept asking him to spell things again and again and then declared, with feigned horror, that the box had disappeared and we had to go through the process again. I did enquire as to how much he was paid and suggested he told his boss to put his finger up his rear orifice. He queried the word "office" and so I spelt it very slowly with the phonetic alphabet (which I learnt during my time as a seaman (not a sperm); O for Oscar, R for Romeo, I for India, at which point he asked me if I liked India... F for Foxtrot, I for India (the same silly joke), C for Charlie and E for Echo. A moment later another voice, speaking much better English, announced "Hello this is Peter." He went on to say "Do you see in the top right hand corner of your screen that I am fu<*ing your mother and your daughter." Well I had to laugh. I said if he could see my mother he wouldn't be so proud of his claim. The abuse got more and more basic and obscene and I laughed more and more. I had clearly got under his skin. This went on for a while with comments going back and forth until I said to him that I understood he was only trying to make a living and I wished him well in the future and hoped he could find a better way to do it. The torrent of abuse that was flowing quite rapidly evaporated and he said that he had not sworn at me but that he had done it because I had been rude to [whoever] and in no time at all we were having a civilised conversation. It was brief, to the point, he apologised and we both wished each other well and said goodbye.

The Philosophical Point

It is all well and good for us civilised people to satisfy our egos that we are really nice and morally good people. It is a sad fact that a lot of that is precisely collective Freudian projection. I have discovered that this civilised world of ours is not so civilised after all. The Joker's quote from The Dark Night: "When the chips are down, these uh, these 'civilized people', they'll eat each other." comes to mind. We are living in an aggressive, competitive, oppressive, controlling hierarchy akin to the ancient Egyptian slave culture. We are wage slaves (well those of you who are lucky enough to have a wage). The financially well off are controlling the environment and like a game of musical chairs it doesn't work if you supply enough chairs. They require poor people and they manipulate the situation to achieve that. And poor doesn't just mean hard up it means at the bottom of the pile life is as bad as it gets and death is the only reprieve. They need that threat to force others to comply with their wishes. So we pretend we live in a democracy and we pretend we care about other people, we pretend we have a National Health System and a Social Security system, we pretend we have a just and reasonable legal system and we pretend to offer an education to our children, but all these things still require compliance for their own financial survival and very well being. Notice the salaries of the people who are at the top of these systems and check up the actual facts behind the production and distribution of health or the facts behind the education system or the legal system and you will soon discover that if they don't get their way they are ruthless in the extreme. So we here in the "West" are some of the richest humans on the planet and we need poor countries to be under our control and doing our biding. The poor folk in India are in an unacceptable state of human deprivation but they have the internet. Humans have the potential to be intelligent and the message is spreading far and wide even more so than when the printing press was invented. Some people get the idea that the people who are squeezing them to death have no right to do that and eventually, combined with their instinct to survive, they resort to the same tactics they feel are used against them. Deception and trickery to obtain income to survive seem the only option short of suffering in silence and losing their life. It is perfectly understandable that they would resort to "ripping people off" just as the hierarchy are doing to them. And when you think about it, if you are going to succeed, you have to pick on people who are weaker than you, just as the hierarchy do. So I get it. (Unlike the Prime Minister Baboon Cameroon who makes the same claim.) If you want to see how sincere these kind and helpful organisations like the Children Services really are, then check out their behaviour and how they "handle" a complaint at the Toxic Drums "Children Services Abuse" section.

We live in an abusive controlling culture that strips people of self responsibility and infects them with a charade of a "moral framework" that perpetuates the power mongers control. Think about our education system for example. It is an inhumane mechanism of brainwashing. Kids are not really provided with useful information for themselves but rather they are taught lessons that are useful for the controllers. Studies amply illustrate that what kids really learn at school is how to kowtow to the bosses. Of course if you do this better than the next chap you will be rewarded better and so the hierarchy supports itself. Until people start taking personal responsibility for their lives the human race is destined to failure. People in this culture regard themselves as good because they do what they are told and they regard what the politicians do in their name abroad as not their personal responsibility but it is.

Untill you are willing to do something about stopping the disgusting deception and abhorrent behaviour of the politicians you can't complain when the little guys in another country simply want to steel some of your dosh. Let me correct that: You can complain but with no moral legitimacy.

For lots more information on this scam and many others see Zyra's Phone Virus Scam page.

FEIGNED SYMPATHY

2012-01-17T21:59:00.000Z

The title of this post is a bit misleading but then so is feigning despair. This is the second interesting phone call I had today. I have a friend of a friend who has taken to phoning me a lot. She is very distressed. Her life is in ruins and she is alcoholic. She doesn't know me or my name and I don't know who she is so I am talking about this in confidence because it is the behaviour of humans that I am interested in.

Initially she is very distressed and wants someone to talk to. I am perfectly happy to be that person whilst I have the spare time. But it doesn't take her long to start trying to get me to support her views so that she feels stronger in asserting them over others. That description is brief and seemingly heartless but it is what is going on.

She does have some very significant damage as a result of events in her life. The problem is that in order to "comply" with the cultural framework that she conformed to as a child in order to survive she cannot allow herself to "feel" the pain. I think this can be said of most people to some degree.

So she perceives events around her now as being devastating and unjust. She doesn't understand why people are so cruel. She feels ashamed and disgusted with herself for her laziness, her alcoholism, her inability to ever wash or clean her teeth and generally is so harsh in her judgement of herself that she is destroying her life.

She phones me up saying she has had her benefits stopped and she is beside herself with fear and distress. I make the mistake of suggesting that they don't have the right to stop her benefits and she should write to them to that effect. At this point she coldly announces that she has to go to bed and puts the phone down... but it didn't go down. I was left hanging on to the phone listening to her shouting and screaming at her husband.

But I know what is going on and it is extraordinarily difficult. Many of us (probably most) are brought up in a judgemental controlling environment. We are assured that if we comply we will be alright. The more intelligent of us begin to realise that there is something self-contradictory about the moral structure. It doesn't take a lot of "intelligence" to realise that beating a child with a stick to teach them that beating people is "bad" is fundamentally and inescapably contradictory.

However, if we were fool enough to "play the game" in order to survive then we are necessarily treating ourselves the same way. Some people simply take on board the compliance mantle and become authoritarian gits, some simply accept the mistake of landing in a pile of shit and some are mortally offended at the shit that we have been placed in for someone else's benefit.

At this point it becomes war. An internal war. To do anything about the injustice one must survive and to survive one must "play the game". so we begin to hate ourselves. It is brinkmanship in the extreme. Can we comply enough to survive whilst retaining our internal self respect. Can we be compassionate enough to ourselves to forgive us for "playing the game" to survive. Are we risking becoming like "them" and once we can survive we will continue to "play" the same game. It is hell in here.

My friend of a friend is currently trying to get me to support her view that "they" are bad and should be condemned in the same way she feels they have unjustly condemned her. So all I can do is listen and sympathise but it won't be long now before she threatens me with her own suicide. I have no problem with that because I respect her right to make her own decisions about her own life. Unsympathetic though that would seem to the more "sentimental" amongst us it is because at the moment she is trying to solicit me to be on her oppressors side. She is trying to get me to agree with her judgemental attitude. She is feigning her distress to achieve a goal. She is externalising her feelings and can see no other way because she has to behave this way to survive. The lessons were learnt at a very impressionably age and there is only one way out: to feel the pain. But she won't do that for a while yet.

What a convoluted bunch of psycho-biological-blobs we are.

THE PRACTICE NURSE

2012-01-17T21:39:00.000Z

My third interesting phone call on 17 January was from the practice nurse. It was a very interesting conversation that dipped into the depths of the screwed up psychology of our tragic culture.

The phone rang and I answered it. I was playing Go at the time and my brain was not capable of making decisions outside of the game. It was the nurse from the doctor's practice and she wanted to speak with my daughter. I said she was not available exactly now but would be in a few minutes. The nurse said she would call back. I got to finish my game (and won). I knew what the call was about because the doctor said that my daughter's vaccinations didn't seem up to date and a nurse would call to make an appointment to discuss what was required. The doctor, a nice guy, made it clear to my daughter that they could offer the vaccinations and it was entirely her decision as to what she wanted to do about them. I spoke with said daughter and she didn't want to talk to the nurse because (it's a long history but she can't cope with oppressive, controlling, officious, authoritarian control freaks) she was nervous on the phone. I said I would deal with it.

The phone rang and I said that unfortunately daughter was not available after all. The nurse pointed out that she really needed to talk to her and suggested making an appointment for her to go into the surgery. I thought this was a good idea and said so. She tried to ascertain a good time and when I said any time she moved on to asking me why daughter had not had all her vaccinations? I asked which vaccinations she had not had. She told me that she needed them all. I asked her what she meant by all and asked which one's she had had. She said that she couldn't tell me because their records were not complete. So I asked her what she meant by that. She pointed out that she had only had x and y according to the records. I then asked her again which vaccinations she was suggesting and she started by saying that according to the Health Protection Agency she was required to have MMR which was necessary and I interrupted saying "Excuse me. We all know that is not necessary but do carry on." At this point she started quoting stuff and telling me that she was a qualified nurse and that my daughter's health was her primary concern etcetera. I listened and that was fine and when she had finished I suggested we could start with the list of vaccinations that she was suggesting were required given what are on the (incomplete) record. She told me that she couldn't carry on with this phone call because she couldn't deal with people like me. I asked her what she meant by "people like me" and she started angrily explaining that she was the practice nurse and fully qualified and that the doctor had told her to give said daughter her vaccinations and she was going to terminate the call. I said it seemed as if she was upset and she "agreed" (?) that I had upset her. I pointed out that I had not intended to upset her and I had only asked reasonable questions but I understood if she felt she could not deal with this phone call at this time. I went on to suggest that I contact the surgery at another time to deal with the issue of vaccinations.

That felt positively satisfactory to me. The lady was clearly distressed. Her intention was to lure the young girl into the surgery under the pretext of "discussing" vaccinations while in fact holding three bulging hypodermic needles behind her back and ready to pounce on her victim. She did not get an easy ride and in fact her subconscious motives were in danger of being revealed by the rational questions so she felt threatened. She was clearly perturbed, obviously angry, evidently distressed and simply couldn't cope. She will have nightmares about it and I am delighted.

What a funny convoluted world we live in.

Google Analytics Content Overview problem

2012-01-16T05:58:00.000Z

Google are a dangerous force to reckon with nowadays. They started out as a good company but I think ideas, institutions, corporations and all manner of virtual objects or systems develop along the same lines of survival as Darwinian evolution. Google seem to think they do everything so "right" that there is no real need to actually communicate with their "users". (Telling phrase that: "users". Sounds like drug addiction.) The Christians thought they were so good they even embarked on an Inquisition to do good in the world and look what that turned into. People and institutions that think they are so good are maintaining a Freudian "ego" that suits them for the purposes of survival. That is a primary problem with bringing children up with a judgemental controlling moral framework. They need to get their parents approval and "being good" achieves just that. So they have to "be good" to survive and it becomes a compulsion. A compulsion so strong they will kill to maintain their constructed or conditioned self image. Have you ever heard any government justifying slaughtering loads of foreigners on moral grounds? And guess what? In the end the cannon fodder go along with it believing they are fighting for justice and peace.

So what has this got to do with Google? Well Google are isolated from their victims with the idea that they service so many billions of individuals that it is impractical to deal with them individually. So they are perceiving people as their commodity. Of course they will do things that "appear" to be good and the worst of it is that they will believe it themselves; That is the purpose of it. So they are now defining the morality of the communication network that is the internet. Like any "thing" they need to survive so they will "do good" when it keeps them alive and they will do harm when they interpret a situation as being bad. A simple example being that they cancelled my account because I mistakenly typed a voucher code in and it was meant for "new users" and I had used them before. It seems they have analysed this behaviour as malicious so they stop the account and keep the outstanding money. It is annoying but I don't care much because I found another way around it. The important thing is that they define what is good and bad with no investigation or trial just their own broad-brush analysis.

Now they have changed the Google Analytics interface. Of course everyone is going to have to change to it. At the moment they allow you to use the old version but it will be terminated like a euthanasia subject one day. The trouble is that although they do their market research they still design it for their own advantage. It is on such a large scale and affects so many people that it actually defines the way certain business is conducted. And can you communicate with them over this? No! You can tell them what you think but it is a one way conversation. They get the info for their use and you get nothing.

Anyway - what brought me to this blog was that I just sent them another "comment" from the Google Analytics Content Overview page:

Are you going to fix this problem with long URLs causing the page to fit the screen width instead of the browser width?

Google had a saying once: "Do no evil." Methinks your lack of contactability is the beginnings of a very evil force in the world. You might think you are a nice chap working for a nice company but bear in mind they (Google) are running the show now, and like any nice evolved life form it will survive at any cost.

But it would be nice if you could fix this problem on my way to your corporate digestive system.

Hikikomori (or school refusal)

2012-01-16T00:46:00.001Z

Hikikomori - that is a nice word. What the hell does it mean? Well if you look it up on Wikipedia you will find it is about the same thing as "School Refusal".

I read an article by Jenn Ashworth (a British Author) yesterday. It was titled "Why I refused to go to school" and began with the sentence: "Who wants to be locked into a room with 30 people dressed just like them, to be startled by a bell every 35 minutes, to queue for lunch for 40 minutes and be made to stand outside in the cold twice a day?' Jenn Ashworth most definitely did not…"

It is worth a read and basically it is Jenn explaining her childhood and how she simply refused to go to school. Jenn makes a perfectly understandable case for a child not wanting to go to school. She compares schools with prisons (which she has worked in) and suggests no adult would volunteer for that. She also revisited Larches House which was a place she was sent to try to "help" her get back into school. The head teacher at Larches said "Phobics and refusers aren't lumped in with the naughty kids any more." and there lies the problem for me.

Although Jenn explains her reasons and understands why she didn't want to attend school she doesn't address the burning issue that when she was young she was regarded as "naughty". This appalling culture, which professes to abhor bullying, repeatedly threatened her mother with prison if she didn't "make" her child go to school. Bullying by proxy; The sophisticated way to do it.

Unfortunately the corollary of Jenn's missive is that when you finally understand what it is like to be another person their actions make sense and you drop the negative judgemental interpretation. They used to shoot "cowards" who ran away from a battle in this country until they realised people were shell shocked.

Schools are state controlled indoctrination machines. They are primarily inhuman and separate the child from the already dysfunctional nuclear family at an age that is shameful. And they do it by law. Any child who is acting as a healthy human being will resist school like a pig would an abattoir if it knew what it was. Why do we criticise children for their creative perception and their deeply human understanding? Why do we persist in perceiving children as somehow "wrong" when they show traits that we know in our hearts, we agree with? Why do we have to "invent" mental conditions or illnesses (like ODD) to excuse the fundamentally "human" behaviour of children? The sooner we stop complying with the cultural oppression by proxy the sooner the human race can get on with living in happy harmony with its environment.

A cautionary note to any parents reading this; Don't bully your children because you are afraid of what the state will do to you. That makes you part of the hierarchy of oppression. We rate people like Albert Einstein as super human and yet he hated school and explains why with good reason. At the age of 7 he threw a chair at a teacher. He said that schools are designed to stop people thinking, that conformity is the worst enemy of creativeness. Why don't we actually listen to the people we regard as great. But that goes for Christianity as well so what the hell; Maybe we are a lost cause anyway so we might as well continue to rape the planet and abuse our children.

A New Year's Resolution

2012-01-14T21:55:00.000Z

I don't know how I am going to do this but I have decided I will have a New Year's Resolution after all. It is actually the 14 January 2012 but what the hell. If you give up after the first failure what hope is there? I'm a destitute man in an attic whose life has been destroyed by cultural prejudice, abuse and oppression. Sometimes I write what is on my mind and sometimes I write stuff that I have thought out. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But I get despondent and don't write for days. I did keep a diary once and, on rereading it, even I can see how tedious and boring it can get reading it. So I decided I will write a blog entry, no matter what, each day.

I will try to be kind to myself and forgive me if I fail but I will try to catch up. I will try to make at least one interesting entry per day. I will even "think" about it sometimes. Maybe it will evolve into a really interesting blog. Maybe I will find my true purpose in life. But a lot of it will be straight from the heart.

Fundamentally we live in an "inside out" world. That will take a lot of explaining but Freud began to understand it. We are, to some extent, living in a subconscious world. We think we "understand" what is going on but at every turn we find "the universe" or "reality" is not behaving quite as we expect. In Jungian terms this is possibly the subconscious conflicts revealing themselves.

I have a little pet theory (I have many of those) which is about "Inside Out People". That could be my second blog. Inside Out People are those contradictory, controlling, authoritarian, self opinionated gits that many of us encounter every day. They are stunningly un-empathetic. They even seem to have no genuine feelings. They certainly suffer a lack of rational logical analytical thought. They seem to work on the principle of saying stuff to get results regardless of its relationship to truth or reality. So why are they "Inside Out"?

Take two people, say P1 and P2, and P1 says to P2 "There were these three people in a room..." What happens in side P2's head? Half way through the statement P2 has formed an idea of three abstract objects that have human qualities. A bit like an artist's manikin - sexless, size-less, colourless - mere blobs representing these "three people". During the second part of the phrase they are suddenly encased in four walls. The room has no defining features except that it is "a room". Now P1 says "...and the mother says to her daughter..." and suddenly two of the manikins become female and one is adult and the other is, provisionally, smaller. The last figure takes on the possibility that it is male and maybe the husband, but it might be another child or someone else altogether.

So we form models of reality inside our heads. Inside Out People think the model IS reality and non-inside out people think the stuff outside, that is adjusting their world view, IS reality. I am of the opinion that the stuff out there is reality. I regard my experience to date to suggest that I am an object experiencing effects from "out there".

To keep this to a few simple examples Inside Out People will typically say things like "It doesn't hurt." when sticking a needle into a child's arm and they cry. They will say things like "Don't be clever!" when a child questions them with some valid point. They have opinions about people which have no real substantial meaning like laziness, rudeness, obstinacy, or that they are "spoilt". Inside Out People are working on the basis that the model inside their head is reality and when a signal is received that conflicts with their current model they criticise the world out there claiming IT is wrong. Non-Inside Out People have a different response to the same situations. They will say sorry to the child or something factual like "I know it does but it won't take long." They will think about the question the child puts to them if it is a valid point. All those "bad" attributes like laziness are thought about. They wonder "why" this particular person doesn't actually want to do the thing in question. People who are the right way out readjust their inner model according to the new information coming in.

This idea of Inside Out People is simplified here. Of course we all use both methods to varying degrees. But in the normal hubbub of daily life some people are acting more Inside Out than others. They are not terribly helpful when it comes to adapting to a changing world and generally the worst cases float to the top of the hierarchy and generally make it very difficult for a lot of other people beneath them.

There! That's the first blog of my New year's Resolution.

Tim Minchin censored for taking Mickey out of lizards.

2011-12-23T01:21:00.000Z

Tim Minchin wrote a song which was recorded and scheduled to be aired on 23 December. But for some funny reason it was axed from the show. Apparently it took the Mickey out of Woody Allen and lizards. You can read more about it on the MailOnline website. But it is definitely worth a view and here it is for your personal delight...

Just thinking numbers.

2011-12-23T00:50:00.000Z

I saw one of my comments with a url like:
www.blur -blur.com/pagename.html#lf_comment=9683676

So I was wondering: if you wanted to give each comment ever posted on the internet by a human a unique identifier how long would the url have to be?

I like to make sure I encompass every reasonable possibility and I wondered how many humans had ever lived. According to the Population Reference Bureaux the rather whimsical calculation results in the figure 107,602,707,791.

So there have been about one hundred thousand million so far. If every one of them lived for 80 years and left a message every second of their lives (a task that is highly improbable - like impossible) how many messages would there be so far?

One person would leave 60 messages per minute and 60 times that every hour which is 3,600. Multiply that by 24 to get the number of messages per day and it comes to 86,400. Multiply that by 365.25 to get the number of messages per year (the .25 accounts for leap years) and you get 316,677,600 messages by one person per year. Multiply that by 80 to get how many messages each person leaves in their life time and it comes to 25,334,208,000. That's twenty five thousand million messages per person and there have been 107,602,707,791 people. So multiply those two figures together and you get the total number of messages left by this hypothetical hyperactive human race. It comes to the not so staggering 2,726,029,380,540,414,528,000 which is 22 digits long.

If you used alphanumeric characters (that is a to z and 0 to 9) you could represent it with 15 characters. Just 15 individual characters to uniquely identify every message in that hypothetical population.

e.g. the url would look something like:
www.blur -blur.com/pagename.html#lf_comment=9f68gjw369746fx

It was just a thought. Nothing too profound has emerged yet. But I keep thinking these weird thinks (like the death toll counter). Hope you have a happy Easter. Bye.

Creating a level playing field for the disabled.

2011-12-22T16:09:00.000Z

In the House of Commons the issue of giving disabled children an advantage in exams was raised. To give a simple example: a dyslexic person may be given 25% extra time to complete an exam. That all seems very reasonable on the surface. But I am shocked. I am shocked that these people, apparently clear headed thoughtful rational people, are discussing this issue and assuming it makes sense. But it doesn't.

Underlying the discussion are certain assumptions that block out reality. Of course it seems nice and equitable for a benevolent society to give support to disadvantaged people. If we assume the system is fair in the first place it makes sense that someone who takes longer to read the questions and who finds it harder to actually write the answer than the "average" child should be given a more level playing field.

But consider this for a moment. Dyslexic children are subnormal dunces. They are lazy and deserve what they get. It's a sort of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thing. I don't want to get into a moral discussion because looking after disabled people is an affront to the very process of the evolution of a fit, healthy and happy society. By looking after disabled people and the old and infirm we are wasting resources and damaging the long term survival of the human race.

Does that sound a little eugenic? The science of eugenics originated at the beginning of the 20th century and has always been controversial. The Nazis made it politically undesirable using it as justification for their policies of racial hygiene.

The point is that the whole education system and the actual practical purpose of the schooling system and the exam system is precisely to give moral justification to a few people having significant advantage over the rest of the population. If you need to give people you perceive as being subnormal in some way (of course through no fault of their own) an advantage who are you actually serving? Not them. You are maintaining a false perception that some humans are naturally superior to others and that entitles them to social advantage. It doesn't. If you actually apply the assumed morals then people with natural advantage should work harder for society with equal benefits and facility to survive. The morality is that if one person naturally has twice the energy of another then they should do twice the work for the same return. But our culture has this on its head. The consequence (revealed in a recent poll) is that 55% of the English population consider that poor people deserve what they get because they are lazy. This is so immoral that it beggars belief.

It is one thing to believe that being better (physically or mentally) gives one a natural advantage but to wrap the justification for abuse in a tissue of moral claptrap is a heinous duplicity and perhaps one of the worst human crimes.

Making yourself feel benign for your own satisfaction by giving a patronizing advantage to people you perceive as less fortunate is also very anti-Christian. It is part of the cancerous self consumption that is devouring and destroying this culture.

The answer is to provide an education which encompasses all the varied talents that humans exhibit. Rarely, if ever, is there a human who does not "deserve" to live from the outset. The exam system, if such a thing should exist at all, should find the talents that exist not define them and class people on a hierarchical scale.

Say I naturally like driving. I am good at it. If there is someone who doesn't like driving much it makes sense that I should do the driving. I get to enjoy it. But the person in the passenger seat is not me. If I were in the passenger seat I would be less happy. But the passenger is a more intellectual person and loves map reading. They get to enjoy themselves doing the map reading. I wouldn't enjoy that. They wouldn't enjoy driving. So the right people are doing the right things and the system works well. If, however, you judge the situation from the assumed position of a driver and that 'driving' was more 'valuable' than map reading you might be tempted to award more privilege to 'drivers'. The consequence would be that drivers get rewarded more than map-readers. This becomes ridiculous when you consider that the drivers are now getting disproportionate advantage because they love driving AND get paid more. This can (and does) lead to a lot of miserable and resentful map-readers. It also leads to mixed motives and aspirations. People who are naturally good at map reading forgo their natural talents and try to do well at 'driving' for the privileges it affords them. What you get is manipulative competition and a whole lot of crap drivers. This may all sound a little topsy-turvy but that is the ridiculous nature of our culture.

Bankers do not really 'deserve' the advantages they get. The only reason people accept the way things are is because they feel they are disadvantaged and their only hope is to conform and maybe they will win. Humanity has simply got to stop this perverted crap. Humanity, you and me, have got to stop supporting the 'benign' oppressive paradigms of our culture.

The "Occupy" movement is fundamentally about this; Even if a lot of people involved can't quite get it sorted in their heads. We cannot carry on with the escalating inequality because it is destroying life and the planet. We have to get away from this primitive judgemental attitude.

Jim Kong Dead is ill

2011-12-19T23:43:00.000Z

Or was that Kim Jong Il is dead? Anyway some North Korean monkey apparently died and all the people in the country are crying. Thousands of them are all lined up crying and wailing because their dear leader is dead. It is a pitiful sight. It is the human race at its most insane. Well not quite - but pretty insane. It is a tragic example of the effects of a benign dictator. They all think they need him because he made them entirely dependent upon him. The only way to do that is to have a lot of people suffer and the rest benefit so that they dare not dissent. What a horrid bunch these humans can be. There is not a lot to say really. Any sane human can see the pure lunacy of it. I think Harry Potter should be made compulsory viewing in North Korea.

So in memory of all the people that have died at his miserable hands I have made this beautiful picture of Kum Jill Jong or whatever his memorable name is.

Anyway I am tired and have to go to bed whilst millions of people in North Korea die in pain. Yawn... night night.

Top selling items on AMAZON!

2011-12-19T19:31:00.000Z

Now if anyone is interested the best selling items on Amazon UK today are:

I can't really review The Inbetweeners Movie because I haven't seen it or even heard of it. Just goes to show how well connected I am. The IMDb (Internet Movie Database) has it rated at 7.5 out of 10. So that's not so hot. It is all about four socially troubled 18 year olds (Will, Simon, Jay and Neil) from the south of England going to Malia (a small town on the north coast of Crete (that's Greece for those who didn't know (and it's very warm and beautiful))) on holiday. It seems to be a totally slapstick farce and not worth the toxic material it is cut on.

Now Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 I can recommend because I have seen it. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (part 2) has a rating of 8.2 on the IMDb and, given the respect I have for the voters' views on the IMDb, I guess it is a reasonable rating except for the fact that The Inbetweeners Movie has a rating of 7.5 which is exactly 1.9 higher than it should be at 5.6. So those 1.9 should go to Harry Potter which would give it a rating of 10.1 which is a little over the odds but it'll do. Good old Voldemort split himself into Horcruxes to extend his living spacetime and Harry, Ron and Hermione (pronounced her-my-on-eeeeee not herm-e-own) are on a desperate quest to locate and destroy all the horcruxes in an attempt to kill "He who shall not be named" Lord whatsisface. It is the eighth and final film in the Harry Potter film series. So you'll just have to go watch the other seven first if you haven't seen them.

Then there is the complete series of Frozen Planet which is a very beautiful nature documentary series made (partly) by the BBC and featuring David Attenborough as the narrator. In his inimitable way David makes this a profound and awesome production and it is generally very highly rated by critics - except for the scandalous bit about the polar bear. It has an unusual and quite amazing rating on the IMDb of 9.5 so this can be seriously recommend.

Harry Potter - The Complete 8-Film Collection is a must for anyone to have in their movie collection. A mega film series of a mega book series by a mega novelist. And, in my humble opinion, a brilliant insight into the utter lunacy of Christianity and the monstrous control freaks who run it and think they are so self-important to the point of elevating themselves to spiritual beings in the Universe doing God's will - Oops I'm getting carried away. But the series is brilliant by any measure. The collection contains the eight films; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (rated 7.2 on IMDb), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (7.2), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (7.7), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (7.5), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (7.3), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (7.3), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (7.6) and finally Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (8.2). Together the IMDb ratings are from 1,162,350 viewers so that is quite a lot of people and the average rating for the series comes out at 7.5. Total run time about 18 hours 49 minutes. That is serious value for money. Go buy it now!

Finally there is Bridesmaids. Lowest rating on IMDb at 7.0 so I am not going to comment on that!

David Cameron rips into the Archbishop!

2011-12-17T15:51:00.000Z

"Someone chuck me a dead man on a stick. I can do this better than the Archbishop of Canterbury. Just call me Pope David."

It appears David "Baboon" Cameroon has really lost the plot and decided to give the Archbishop of Canterbury a few lessons in theology. He declared Britain a "Christian Cunt Tree" and implied that Dr Rowan Williams was a wishy-washy liberal toot by "sympathising" with rioters and criticising the government for ripping off the poor.

In a speech on Friday 15 December 2011 David Cameron blamed the Archbishop for failing to "stand up and defend" the morals taught by the Bible. David is as likely to have read the bible as he is to have read the Conservative manifesto. His policies are directly contrary to that manifesto and his ideas of morality are based as much on the bible as Sharia law is based on Buddhism.

David Cameron is way out of his depth and is beginning to sound more like a wishy-washy Hitler every day. He also accused the Archbishop of "fuelling" terrorism and went on to say "... just as it is legitimate for religious leaders to make political comments, he [the Archbishop] shouldn’t be surprised when I respond."

He went on to say "The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today. Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend." Er... like ripping off the poor and kowtowing to the bankers David? Ooooh good morals. I remember reading that bit in the bible... or was it Mein Kampf?

What does David Cameron know of moral codes and values? For him the moral of his story is "Lie through your teeth, become Prime Minister and get fcuking rich." and values are how to rip people off with BOGOF offers in Tesco.

New Title: Dr Pope David Adolf Rowing Baboon Cameroon.

What a wally!

You can read all about it on the Mail Online in an article entitled "Speak up for Christianity, Cameron tells Archbishop: PM calls on the Church to defend 'values and moral code' of the Bible."

Japanese Whale Hunt

2011-12-16T15:22:00.000Z

Did you donate to the Fukushima disaster?

Do you know where your money went?

Do you want to pay for expensive security ships to defend the Japanese whaling fleet?

SIGN THE PETITION at Avaaz

And why is the Japanese government subsidising the whale hunt for about 1000 minke whales for meat this year. Why are they paying a possible £20 million from the earthquake recovery fund for security to defend themselves against environmentalists like Sea Shepherd? Why are they subsidising the hunt to the tune of £4 million every year anyway? Why, when they have a stockpile of whale meat, are they paying all this money to catch 1000 more whales. They don't seem to be doing any scientific research which is the only legal reason for killing whales. What on earth are they up to? This year it is estimated that the Japanese tax payer is contributing about £24,000 per whale caught. Is there some corruption behind the scenes?

But the Japanese whaling industry is on its last legs. Whaling has become less economically viable recently and it seems as if they just do it to prove a point. It seems unlikely it will continue for many years apart from the fact that they are killing all the whales. Most Japanese folk are quite nice. Like in most countries the population are a decent bunch. But those pretentious kowtowing hypocritical low-bowing politicians are a bunch of deceitful self-interested vicious gits. There I go getting mad again. But they are such horrible liars. They go in front of the press and say all sorts of words that sound as if they give a damn. But they really don't. People in power are so unbelievably treacherous.

If people in power are so dreadful that leaves us with a problem I guess. It seems anarchy is the only way. But whales are pretty anarchistic and look what happens to them.

Anyway - what you have to do is go sign the petition at Avaaz

Liege shooting

2011-12-14T10:35:00.000Z

Yet another apparently insane mass murder. Just after midday on 13 December 2011, and quite suddenly in the bustling Christmas market in Liege in Belgium, there was a series of explosions. A rogue killer by the name of Nordine Amrani had simply decided to throw multiple grenades into a crowded shopping area and to start shooting indiscriminately. Over one hundred people were seriously injured and at least six killed.

Why?

Many people will have many opinions and most people will find this a frightening and very upsetting event. Most people will look to the individual and on discovering that he was a convicted criminal and a hoarder of small arms will put it down to a crazy and rather nasty individual. On discovering that he had earlier lured a cleaning woman into his house and killed her they may conclude that this man was possibly insane, definitely horrible and it is a jolly good thing that he's dead. They will also feel that there needs to be more security and more police and that the laws and punishments should be increased in scope and severity.

But it is also a fact that this human being was a product of a culture.

There is no doubt that people affected by his aberrant behaviour are seriously injured emotionally and some physically. There has been a lot of damage caused to a lot of humans. But why does one human end up doing something like this?

It seems to be an inevitable consequence of our rather selfish, consumer based, capitalistic, blame orientated, competitive and punitive culture. We can be a rather unpleasant bunch of humans sometimes. Individuals who are disadvantaged and consequently suffer humiliation, abuse and prejudice find they have nowhere to turn. People claim that lots of people suffer hardship and even abuse but this is no excuse. They also comment that most people who suffer injustice do not resort to this kind of behaviour. This line of thinking seems only to be attempting to 'justify' the judgemental attitude towards an individual. But the judgemental attitude doesn't help in understanding or preventing this sort of thing.

Appalling though this shooting is there needs to be more effort in our culture to accommodate all people. As the austerity measures escalate in this collapsing culture and impending financial crisis the people at the bottom of the pile are suffering more and more. If there are already some who see no other way forward than to kill indiscriminately I am afraid we will see more and more of this in the next few years.

The tricky thing is that it is not simply down to the law makers or the people in authority who try to do their best to prevent this kind of mayhem. Much as I dislike police in principle there were some incredibly brave and selfless police officers who were willing to run straight into danger in Liege to attempt to stop the killing. A very significant part of changing our culture is the attitudes of all of us. When children fall out and argue or fight in school they should not be treated as if "wrong" or "bad" they should be accommodated. Intervene to stop the damage but find out why the children felt aggrieved. Give all parties full respect. It seems that very often a "shooter" has suffered from ostracism and exclusion. It seems a common factor in many apparently insane and indiscriminate killings that the perpetrator feels they are 'outside' of the culture. Their very act of attacking 'people' in the culture seems to indicate that it was not their choice and that it was forced upon them and they resent it.

By all means dislike or even hate the guy. But don't forget we are still manufacturing them in our schools.

And by the way - austerity measures should start at the TOP not at the bottom. It simply makes sense.

TESCO do it again! 0.25p per kg of rice.

2011-11-29T08:46:00.001Z

How do they do it? Last week they sold me a 4 kilogram bag of long grain rice for 4p. This week they sold me six 4 kilogram bags of rice for 6p. Not 6p each but 1p each! That's 0.25p per kilogram. (It should have been 0.1p per kilogram but I didn't argue the point when the man told me his till wouldn't process that.) Unbelievable though it may seem I have written it up on the Toxic Drums web site where you can see the receipt for yourself.

I guess it is a kind Universe sometimes. My life is an utter wreck and my financial situation (if it can be called that) is disastrous. But 10 days ago Tesco excelled - well the Universe did because I don't suppose Tesco meant to. And then I visited them last night and they dropped the price even more. I am now looking forward to shopping in Tesco next week to see what amazing bargains they can come up with next.

Swedish Embarrassment

2011-11-28T20:07:00.001Z

The poor old Swedish people are being seriously embarrassed by their journalists, politicians and legal beagles. Given that the origins of the Swedish case against Julian Assange were so questionable that the charges were dropped by a senior prosecutor it was a mystery when one of Sweden's three Directors of Public Prosecution, Marianne Ny, reopened the case declaring "I want to make it clear that I have not been put under any kind of pressure, political or otherwise."

Given that there has been this dreadful media circus, this witch hunt, this gory assault and prolonged lynch mob hysteria against Julian Assange for over a year, it now appears the Swedish press and television are not satisfied and are dutifully dancing to their puppet masters tune and playing to the gallery by instigating one smear campaign after another against Julian Assange. The web site Sweden vs. Assange (which is worth a browse) has just published an article Media climate in Sweden which paints a very dark and frightening picture for those of us concerned with real human justice.

To get an idea of the rather sordid, petty and perverse origins of the case see Reuters' Special Report: STD fears sparked case against WikiLeaks boss.

We will wait to see if Julian Assange is conveniently shipped off to the USA after his unhappy and probably unjust forced visit to Sweden. Personally - I don't trust these people.

Public Sector Strikes - Wednesday 30 November 2011

2011-11-28T18:28:00.000Z

The Great Pension Swindle!

There is a lot of rhetoric flying around over the proposed strike on Wednesday by public sector workers. The central issue is pensions and retirement for public sector workers. We all know there is economic upheaval around the globe and we all have to "tighten our belts". The UK is in serious financial difficulties and that needs to be turned around. It will inevitably mean less, not more, for the majority of people. So why are these people causing all this disruption at a crisis point when we need them to be pulling their weight, putting their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grind stone?

Brendan Barber, the head of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), said it was 'unlikely' there was anything the Government could say to persuade him to call off Wednesday’s action.

Francis Maude, a Cabinet Office Minister, said the 'irresponsible' strikes would inflict huge damage on Britain's economy.

Dave Prentis, the leader of Unison, said the mass walkout will definitely go ahead and could be the biggest since 1926.

David Cameron, one of Britain's Prime Ministers, says that it is irresponsible to go ahead with the strike when talks are still ongoing.

So are these strikes a good idea? Surely they will cost the country millions of pounds and push it closer to the precipice of disaster. There are lots of people who fear the breakdown of our society who would bend to the oppressors and do their bidding just to get a momentary reprieve from the pain.

Does anyone recall how we got into this mess with the pensions in the first place? Does anyone recall that it was a crime far bigger than the Brink's-MAT Robbery or the Great Train Robbery. It was a deception by government officials on a scale that warrants permanent jail sentences for the perpetrators.

The equation was simple: Put a percentage of your earnings into savings to cover your retirement. This is the benefit of working as a group. This is the benefit of 'government' organising welfare. One person can't reasonably predict their "working life" versus their "retirement" and so can only guess at the proportion of salary required for a pension. But statistically it can be calculated very accurately. Even if it is a bit wrong the adjustments are very small.

So with the pronounced plan of putting some of the National Insurance contributions into "pension" investments the government effectively "authorised" this scam. But they did NOT put the money into investment plans. Sure they put some there. But the majority of pensions being paid soon became a direct transfer from the earning population to the pensioners. This suited government officials because there was more coming in than they were paying out.

It was fraudulent and it was theft. When this was exposed in the 1980's it was essentially ignored with distraction, argument and obfuscation. It was 'covered up' with a new worrying perception that, given the changing demographics, there was a crisis looming. This provided more unscrupulous government officials with moralistic and fear mongering mechanisms for taking yet MORE dosh from the population, but they still didn't act responsibly with respect to the current population and their 'pension' savings. So as the whole world including the Middle East, Europe and America descend into the abyss that is their own making, the power mongers are still trying to 'take advantage' of the situation for their own benefit.

That is what these strikes are about! Sure there are militant Trades Unionists who revel in the opportunity for a fight. But that is the current way of these humans. Thank God (you know: that oppressor's myth) that some of the dogs of war are fighting at the helm of the majority. Thank goodness they are on the right side. They may be morally sound and they may not, but that is not the issue at hand. The issue is that it is time to say "NO" to these perverse and manipulative, self serving politicians. It is time to say NO to the corruption. It is time to recognise that we are in a mess and continuing with the illusions set up by the abusers is not a way to resolve the problem.

As for David Cameron's expressed view that 'the strike is irresponsible when there are still discussions being held' he is simply continuing the illusion. To turn it on its authoritarian, bigoted and hypocritical head, the fact is, Mr Cameron, you have had ample opportunity to do something responsible. You have had extensive and repeated stays of execution to get your act together. You are now simply prevaricating and threatening and getting, frankly, desperate. You had the chance to sort this out. You had another chance to sort this out. You even had more chances to sort it out, but instead you chose to side with your financial oppressors, your paymasters. You chose to be a fawning parasite. You chose to be a sycophant. You chose which side you were on and it's the wrong one.

So the strikes must go ahead! The people of this country must understand that the Occupy movement is profound and inescapable. The people must take responsibility for their actions. They must ensure that the 'elected government' IS 'representing' them and not dictating to them. Whilst we live in this illusion of democracy we are only kidding ourselves if we defer decisions to a group of people whose interests are clearly oppositional to the general population.

The government has to be kept under control. The government should be controlled by the people - not the other way round. The damage caused by the strike will be a small price to pay compared with the critical and terminal damage being done by this government. Austerity measures MUST start at the top of the pile of corruption.

Tesco sell rice at 1p

2011-11-20T01:12:00.001Z

Yes they do indeed sell rice at 1p per kilogram. Not to everybody. But to me they did sell a 4 kilogram bag of rice for just 4p!

Why? Because they had made a mistake on their weight comparison in the (very) small print on the shelf label. It clearly said (when I had my glasses on) 1.0p per kg.

I have put a page up about it on the Toxic Drums web site and included the receipt for those doubting Thomases amongst you.

Kurt Vonnegut censorship.

2011-10-26T16:48:00.000+01:00

It now seems I must read Cat's Cradle! This is a book that Kurt is famous for, as well as many others. I started looking into this guy when I read a small 'blog' on Ralph STEADman's web site. Ralph STEADman points out, with some disgust: "Now, Hardly 3 years after his death, some wretched, asinine School Board in a place ominously called Republic, Missouri- has voted to ban Kurt's personal first masterpiece, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE" Slaughterhouse Five is the shortened title of a book Kurt Wrote about his experiences in World War II. The full title is "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace."

Ralph is quite correctly horrified at the fascist attitude in banning this book.

A lovely quote from Kurt "The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected".

A problem with secrecy.

2011-10-14T10:34:00.000+01:00

There is a problem with the issue of secrecy and the national scandal of phone hacking as a good example. Lots of people express their different views and there even seems to be a consensus opinion that people's privacy should be protected. But that actually confuses the issue and is leading people into another more severe problem.

People do not have some inalienable right to secrecy. If that is established it is the people with a motive to be secretive who will be protected. In fact that is the way it is and the scandal is more likely to give the devious manipulators more power and control over others. But the issue is mixed up with the reasonable expectation that 'private' information should not be broadcast when it will be abused and cause undue harm to the subject. It is not 'privacy' that is sacrosanct but rather the abuse of information that should be dealt with. For example, if I were a politician and I dropped a brick on my foot this morning causing me to swear and someone published the fact that I swore in a national newspaper, what could be the problem? If that information were used to inappropriately suggest I was an undesirable type who was not fit to hold a public position and I lost my job, it is not the fact of it being broadcast that 'caused' the injustice. It would be the inappropriate and unfair actions taken by someone else based on an inaccurate and prejudicial interpretation of the facts. Obviously the motive for the broadcasting has to be questioned too.

During the early days of the Libyan uprising I was pleased to hear one interviewee give his name and point out that he disagreed with all the secrecy where individuals remained anonymous when they spoke out against the government because, as he pointed out, it is the secrecy that is colluding with the perpetrators of the crime. The secrecy is, in fact, giving power to the abuser.

Just because it is a difficult problem is not justification to 'opt' for one solution which happens to be wrong. Just because one can't solve the problem doesn't mean a quick guess is right. Behind all of this is a lack of personal responsibility.

Hang Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani

2011-09-29T19:46:00.000+01:00

The Iranian hierarchy want to hang this guy for apostasy. e.g. The Washington Post: Christian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani faces potential execution or New Statesman: The trial and punishment of Yousef Nadarkhani.

I really don't understand the problem here. The guy should hang. Surely it is that simple. He was born of an Islamic family and, although I don't understand Islam, it seems clear that they are right in all things because they have a direct link to God or Allah through that chap Mohamed. His words are interpreted by the strictest and most devoted scholars and young Yousef Nadarkhani quite clearly chose the dark side (it's in his name for goodness sake: Na-DARK-hani) which is an anathema to Allah and he should be terminated. Doesn't that all make sense?

Well doesn't it?

When are these human beings going to understand that these major religions are nothing more than anaesthetics for people who can't deal with the reality of their existence. Like alcohol they get rid of the difficult issues and make life seem all rosy. It becomes quite clear through the rose tinted spectacles of religion that the stuff out there in the real world which upsets them is not meant to be there. It doesn't fit their desired interpretation of reality. Being egocentric, obviously the world out there (reality) needs to be changed to put things right. What sort of mind numbing stupidity is that. The problem with addictions, like alcoholism and religion, is that once people have run away from experiencing the real world they are less capable of meeting the next challenge.

The irony of Islam is that it is God's will. God made everything and this is the way he wants it. He wants different religions fighting each other and committing contradictory heinous crimes against each other in his name. Isn't that obvious too? To suggest the Iranian hierarchy, whoever they may be, should be merciful and apply a little clemency to the situation and should let him off with a lesser sentence is surely in the face of Allah. The suggestion is that mercy is a 'good' thing. How could it be if it resulted in the direct opposition of a benign God? So is it that the non-Muslims are begging the Muslims to just go along with their grubby immoral ways to appease them? It is so contradictory it beggars belief. What sort of a religion would it be if it just cow-towed to any pleading from the satanic side of things? What sort of a religion would it be if it didn't stand up for what it believed in?

The whole thing is a complete farce. The Iranians are playing games and trying to frighten people. They get two birds with one stone because they get to intimidate their population and they get all this fearful reaction from abroad. Religions are abusive. Please try to understand that. There is no more sense in "Christians" begging for clemency than in Iranians begging to be allowed to kill non-believers. I was brought up as a Christian and I completely get all the 'good' ideas touted by it. But people have got to rise above that oppressive control mechanism and realise that cow-towing to any religion is all part of supporting the oppression of control freaks over the rest of humanity. Religious freedom is an oxymoron. Get used to it!

And just before I go - They make me very angry. Both sides! The Iranian hierarchy are evidently ruthless oppressors and the people who oppose them are woolly minded. Killing someone because you don't like them is not acceptable. There is no point in beating about the bush (that one that had the two birds in it that Iran killed) and making feeble attempts to appease oppressors with tactical diplomacy. Try following that trite advice dished out by the anti-drug-abuse folk "Just say No!"

Iran: NO! In yer face NO! You are out of order and you are evil by your own definition! Thank you and good night.
(P.S. Yousef is a twit anyway for being a Christian.)

A LIGHTER TAKE ON THINGS

Free Speech for Hamsters
(or 'the Rod of Righteous Retribution')

Patients four times more likely to die in UK than in the US

2011-09-29T07:26:00.000+01:00

I was lying in bed at about 5:15 British Summer Time listening to the news on the BBC's Radio 4. "... a report shows that patients in the UK are four times more likely to die after an emergency operation in the UK than in the US". Unfortunately it got me thinking. So I tried to find this "report" on the internet. Eventually I found it by locating an article posted about 4 hours ago on the BBC News web site entitled "Emergency surgery patients lives at risk, say surgeons" by Dominic Hughes. The report by The Royal College of Surgeons of England and the department of Health to which this news article refers is available on the RCS website at http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/publications/docs/higher-risk-surgical-patient/. Specifically it says "... one study reported that risk-adjusted mortality rates were as much as four times higher in the UK than in the US." So it is a tenuous, if not false claim, by the BBC, that the RCS claims that this is true. But the essence of the message is clearly true. Lack of correct care results in more deaths.

So what do I care about this? Well I am getting really fed up living on this planet with what appears to be a moronic life form. Yes HUMANS! I was brought up with the view that our culture is somehow at the leading edge of all things good that humanity has achieved... but it has never quite felt like that. I live in someone else's attic. My father's as it happens. I am supposed to be grateful. But the real reason I live there in squalor is 'lack of care'. I call it a lack of love. It is care in the sense that they don't care. I am not looking for some 'care' that I expect someone to provide as if it costs them time energy and money; As if there is some service they are supposed to be providing but are failing to do so. No! What I mean is they "don't care"; They think they do, but they are mixing things up. And they are mixing things up in a way that I think is so destructive it is fit to be called evil. It is a kind of ignorance and an ignorance based on fear. These people are so screwed up by a judgemental, punitive, upbringing that they have lost the ability to be 'human' and to think for themselves. What happens is, they are compulsively defending themselves from any accusation that they are 'unkind', cruel', nasty, 'rude', lazy', 'inconsiderate' or any number of ridiculous negative constructs by moralistic judgemental adults in authority. They are so afraid that they might be 'blamed' and punished that they are emotionally compelled to 'act' in a way that can't be blamed. They are transfixed on themselves and what they experience as their own survival. They are not living their own life they are living up to a set of external values projected at them in their early years. They are 'conforming' and 'doing the right thing' according to their perceived cultural environment.

What this report from the RCS is saying is that when patients are cared for as individuals and respected as unique with their own set of conditions and responded to appropriately they have a better survival rate. What the report seems to fail to do is identify what the root cause of the problem is. In fact it goes one stage further and makes the mistake of recommending procedures which would (in theory alone) improve the well being of patients. But the procedures they recommend would be implemented in a paranoid environment and simply make the people carrying out the procedure MORE worried that they might not be getting it right.

The reason it bothers me particularly is because my health is declining seriously and I put it down to my the abusive upbringing. Given that I was emotionally tenderised like a piece of steak in my childhood I was then unduly vulnerable to the vagaries of an abusive culture. By a set of unfortunate circumstances I have ended up destitute and from there the situation gets worse. The consequences to my health are quite real and measurable. There are so many studies which show the relationship between anxiety and poor health that it beggars belief that the majority of health professionals don't get it. But the reason they don't get it is because they are desperate conformists.

To put it simply; People who care and do research because they are interested and concerned can see clearly that there is a problem and in many cases can identify actual physical correlates. I don't need to research this subject and list reams of studies, books (like The Biology of Love which I highly recommend) and research papers to illustrate my point; It is clear in the general culture that psychology, counselling, biology, neuroscience and all the leading edge research conclude that our emotional condition is "REAL" and has a direct bearing on our physical health. But people who are concerned to hold down a local respectable job like a doctor who earns a rather sickening salary for their 40 odd hours and who is far more concerned with what they look like than what they achieve, they cannot see the relationship because it is a risk to their security. They can't 'prove' it. What they are concerned to do is to 'prove' that they did the tests, they carried out the right procedure by the book, that they didn't do anything wrong. They are incapable of seeing what is staring them in the face; They need to actually care about their patients. They really do. Failing that they are just inhuman artefacts carrying out the bidding of a psychopathic and parasitic institution called the National Health Service for their own pathetic survival.

It should be made illegal to abuse children. What? "It is!" I hear you say? No, unfortunately it is not illegal . Extreme physical or sexual abuse which is not hidden well enough is illegal but the law is not working well on that account. But common or garden abuse like humiliating children in the classroom, blaming your own children for your own failings, labelling them as morally bad and destroying their lives if they don't conform to the standards you are terrified to counter are all serious abuse and are leading to the collapse of the human race.

It saddens me to hear this sort of report on the radio because from my perspective it sounds as if people care. It sounds as if some people out there realise that abusive, careless behaviour has real undesirable consequences. It sounds as if things might change. But I am fifty something and it feels as if they just get worse. But then I am living in a very hostile environment and in a cultural abyss somewhere in the backwaters of in Britain. So maybe somewhere out there it is getting better.

How to set your Facebook url.

2011-09-25T20:45:00.000+01:00

If you have ever tried to link to your own Facebook account you may have encountered a small problem locating the url to your personal page. You can locate the unique url for your own home page on Facebook by clicking your username or avatar and the web address appears in the browser address bar.

If your name is Nik Allday your Facebook url might be www.facebook.com/nikallday or, if you are less fortunate it might be something horrible like www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1632672560. The trouble with the second case is that it is eminently forgettable and prone to errors if you try to write it down.

You can personalise your Facebook url by assigning a unique username to it.

In trying to find out how to do this many people resort to searching Google with phrases like "how to get a facebook username", "how do i get my facebook url", "personalize your facebook url" or "facebook page url". They look for "custom facebook page" or "facebook address" and most of the results do not answer their question correctly.

This is how to personalise your Facebook web address.
Log in to your Facebook account and then open a new tab or browser and go to http://www.facebook.com/username/.

Simples!

You can locate this information through the Facebook help pages too.

Unfortunately if you name is John Smith the obvious username is probably taken and you will have to opt for something dreadful like johnsmith1632672560 which is about as bad as the original naked php parameter.

If you found this helpful (or not even) please comment with your suggestions as to what I should set my username as. I want samspruce but that has gone; So has toxicdrums. Options I consider possible are samspruce3 toxicdrums1 samanthaspruce, samualspruce samthetree, samsprucethetree. But none are satisfactory. So which do you think is best or do you have any other ideas?

But I don't want to leave it as http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1632672560

What a mug!

2011-09-24T17:29:00.000+01:00

Having created the rich aesthetic textures Sam applied them to a bunch of mugs. He was tempted to buy them himself but can't afford them. So, instead, he decided to offer then to the public in the hope that it enhances their life and brings in a little dosh to enhance his.

Keep your eye on this store as it might just be expanding its incredible range of objets d'art. And you wouldn't want to miss out. Take a look around by clicking one of the mugs below. You don't actually have to buy anything.

Make a personalized gift at Zazzle.

Mousemats by Sam Spruce

2011-09-24T04:41:00.001+01:00

I decided to have a go at creating some abstract texture designs for Zazzle products. I am reluctant to describe how these images were made because it all starts with cling film. I have a thing about cling film. A love hate relationship I suppose. Maybe a fetish but now I am getting carried away.

I tried various ways to scan cling film on the scanner. I tried laying it flat, crumpling it to various degrees and wrapping things like blue tack with it. Having got some interesting base images I set about tampering with them using PainShop Pro and some of it's more interesting features.

Apart from the "Toxic Drums" mouse mat the other mats featured below are some of the results of my experimenting. What is good about Zazzle is that you can make post cards, greeting cards, posters, mugs and all sorts featuring the designs. I like mouse mats because they are relatively cheap as an art form and relatively incidental. But they add quality to your desktop and enhance your environment.

Shop other personalized gifts from Zazzle.

Please feel free to visit the store by clicking on the products above and even create your own product like a fridge magnet or an iPad case. I enjoy doing this so if I sell some I might be encouraged to produce more.

Clapham Junction Speaker (London Riots 2011)

2011-08-15T12:45:00.000+01:00

There's nothing I can say more than this guy. He's angry and he's right. There's no amount of sanctimonious supercilious judgemental crap that invalidates his point.

Wandsworth eviction.

2011-08-13T13:24:00.001+01:00

The decline of ~~Britain~~ humanity.

So Wandsworth council decide to evict a mother of boy who was charged but not convicted of something in connection with the riots in Clapham Junction. Well I am fed up with all these self righteous, smug, arrogant, angry fascist pigs.

I have spent many years on this planet and in the UK. I have been well educated and at times have had a very middle class life. I have endlessly listened to judgemental comments and condemnations from supercilious people.

FACT: In British law you are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
FACT: You can't be punished twice for the same crime.
FACT: You can't blame someone for someone else's crime.
FACT: You can't punish someone for someone else's crime.
FACT: Even people who do bad things need somewhere to live.

This is sanctimonious, bigoted, judgemental bullying in the extreme. Get real you mindless gits. Deal with the real problem. Deal with the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and it cannot work in the long run.

It is laughable that we regard the concept of the whipping boy for the prince as ridiculous but we do it ourselves. It is pathetic that we understand that making scapegoats is avoiding the problem, unjust and makes things worse but we still do it. But the mob that is "Britain" is baying for blood in the most primitive and obscene way. And the public in their sorry state of fear are going along with it with the most appalling enthusiasm.

Bring back the ducking stool for God's sake - Why not? It would be simpler.

And as a thought to consider: Why not apply the same judgement to the people in authority who are continually damaging innocent people's lives by their illegal behaviour and ruthless greed? Is it perhaps because the people of this country are basically cowards who find it easier to doff their caps and mutter "Yes sir" to save their own sorry skins.

And David Cameron might be the first to be judged for his illegal behaviour in inciting this terrorism. He is in a position of responsibility and has no right to encourage and support this illegitimate action by Wandsworth council. But the mob will, of course, side with him in the hope that some security may be afforded to them by their unquestioning allegiance to the hierarchy.

The rioters behaviour is not nice but the public's response is disgusting and nihilistic in the extreme.

Who's biting whose bottom?

2011-08-10T08:32:00.000+01:00

There seems to be this stupid idea floating around commentators on the riots that the looting and arson have got nothing to do with the austerity measures. How wrong can these people be? Obviously the people doing the rioting are the disaffected and they were probably never thinking of going to college and they are somewhat criminal and their personal 'motive' has nothing to do with a deep understanding of the political situation and the cuts themselves. But the only reason this state of affairs has arisen such that large numbers of young people are so disaffected that they don't see themselves as belonging to the culture is directly caused by the same attitude which has given rise to the austerity measures.

Do people really think that these hooligans are a sort of blight sent by God. A surprising amount of people who God just arbitrarily created evil. Can people not think a little further than the end of their nose. I guess I am being a little extreme because I do understand that when people are afraid and in the midst of a problem they cannot afford to 'consider the other chap'. But the commentators are not in the midst of the crisis they are sitting in posh television studios and have nice secure middle class lives. They surely can see that Britain is in decline and to increase the cutting of pensions, benefits, education and police is going to make things worse. What do people imagine 'worse' means? Consider what animals do when they are trapped. Of course the dregs of society are going to take advantage of the situation. Of course their behaviour is extremely wrong and undesirable. Of course it is disruptive and criminal. It is so obvious it is almost worrying that the commentators don't seem to get it.

I really hate to say that what Ed Miliband said made sense. He said that the criminality has to be dealt with and order and security need to be restored but after that there are some very complex underlying issues that need to be addressed. I don't like the guy and after all he is a politician but at least the words he said on this occasion made sense.

Whilst I am paying compliments I will add that police have acted incredibly well. I know that some would want them to rush in and bash the hooligans and I can empathise with that sentiment. However I believe that had they acted in a more heavy handed way that the situation would have got far worse. Let's hope the politicians don't start getting heavy handed because that is my biggest fear. I could almost imagine that these riots have been orchestrated behind the scenes by political individuals who want excuses to increase the authoritarian control of the population.

A last point worth making is that it may seem I am glad the rioting has occurred and in some significant way I am. I am not pleased about anyone's individual bad experience and I would want things to be sorted with less pain. But it seems clear to me that the pain being perpetrated by the people at the top on the people at the bottom is unacceptable and getting worse. Without these riots nothing was being done about the abject poverty experienced by millions in this country. The whole Islamophobia and cultural diversity failure issues are fuelled by poverty as are so many other unsatisfactory consequences. The people in power must start treating ALL of the population with the same human respect as they treat the privileged echelons. Britain is collapsing into an 'us and them' culture and it is both unacceptable and unsustainable. These disturbances are at least causing people to wake up a bit and begin to see the damage being caused. Although the people who have had their businesses bunt and their expensive shops looted are suffering and I am sorry for them, the scale of suffering caused by these riots is minuscule compared to the lives being ruined every day and the pain and suffering being brought about by this ridiculous approach of the government to take money from the poorest in society and to feed billions of pounds to the richest. I wonder how the poorest millions in Britain feel when they see a sad executive in his smart suit looking at his burnt out business and wondering if the insurance will cover the loss. A princess who has lost her diamond ring has exactly the same legitimacy in being distressed about it as a poor person who has lost their teddy bear. The executive in the suit is understandably very distressed about the destruction in front of him and I am not trying to suggest he should not be seriously upset. But I am pointing out that there are millions who live with more than that level of distress every day because they have no opportunities, no money and no hope. Unfortunately if the people at the top will not take the people at the bottom seriously they will, eventually, get their bottoms bitten.

Double Standards

2011-08-09T14:02:00.000+01:00

I have just read an article on Al Jazeera and it is nice to see the leaders of the three main political parties in Britain are all still capable of towing the same line in bull-shit.

David Cameron said "We will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain's streets. Scenes of people attacking police officers and fire crews, this is criminality, pure and simple, this has to be confronted and defeated."

Nick Clegg said "It was needless, opportunistic theft and violence, nothing more, nothing less. It is completely unacceptable."

Ed Miliband tweeted "Shocked by scenes in parts of London and Birmingham. We need strong police response to restore calm and for communities to work together."

BULL-SHIT!

The tragedy, it seems, is that people who happily take on board the authoritarian paradigm are inherently incapable of realising what I am talking about. The fact that I suggest these remarks are bull-shit is erroneously interpreted by them as meaning I am in agreement with what they see as "the enemy".

How can I explain this? Most people seem not to like algebra. It is a consequence of bad teaching in school. But let me try a bit of literal algebra. Think of an archetypal bad guy. In this case a 'hoodie' who opportunistically loots and sets fire to buildings. An unpleasant individual who is unkind, rude, violent and doesn't give a damn about other people. Not a nice sort. Okay. So have you got that little model sorted in your head. Let us call it BadGuy. So a lot of the population have this little definition in their heads. On their televisions they see people (let's call them hoodies) acting in a way which fits this 'model', this algebraic representation of a 'thing'. They quite erroneously think the person on their television screen is a BadGuy. They don't really understand that the BadGuy is in their head, they think it is 'out there'. It is a kind of Freudian projection. There is no doubt that the hoodie is acting 'like' the BadGuy but there is a difference.

Now let's think of the political leaders (and all sorts of other people in positions of power and influence) and consider where they are coming from. Take a simple situation with man A and man B (more algebra). Man A gives an apple to man B who looks hungry. So man A is a "GoodGuy". Man B snatches the apple, utters some obscenities and hits man A. He quite clearly fits the BadGuy description. The politicians use this algebraic model to define the world and they call the hoodies BadGuys and the rest of the law abiding innocent citizens going about their legitimate business GoodGuys. It seems to make sense to get rid of the BadGuys. Then all that is left is us GoodGuys. Simples! But there is a glaring contradiction. The politicians are not GoodGuys. Take a look at the rules in the country. Take a look at the game of musical chairs being played with people's jobs and their ability to simply survive in this culture. Look at the unjust laws governing the little people's finances and the big boys' finances. Look at the behaviour of the banks. Look at the disgusting and irresponsible behaviour of the oil companies. Look at the lies perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry. When the industrial scale rip off including credit card scams, consumerism, consumption etc starts to creak at the edges what is the authorities' response? Squeeze even harder. Take money from the support mechanism in society to bail out the otherwise bankrupt bankers. The authorities' behaviour is not that of the GoodGuy. But the morality, the simple algebraic equation, is brought to bear on the detail of the situation. It is too easy to see the 'hoodie' as equal to or equivalent to the BadGuy. Out comes the moralising and the apparently legitimate judgement that the BadGuys must be stopped. (Out comes the rod of righteous retribution! - See the light entertainment below.) When I object to this stance a common mistake is to think I am agreeing that the BadGuys behaviour is good. No - BadGuy behaviour is decidedly undesirable. My problem is that it is the authorities' BadGuy behaviour that is both unacceptable and has given rise to the hoodies' behaviour which looks very like a BadGuy.

INTERVAL OF LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

Free Speech for Hamsters
(or 'the Rod of Righteous Retribution')

In simple terms the problem starts with the rules in the country. The problem is that the people at the top are acting like cruel psychopaths. (N.B. I said 'cruel' psychopaths - there is nothing wrong with being a psychopath per se.) It is not an 'excuse' for the behaviour of the looters but it is an observation that you would expect something like this to happen if you continue to abuse the population.

So the leaders' comments are bull-shit because they are continuing the deception by suggesting that the solution to the problem is to be more forceful, judgemental and punitive against the 'consequences' of the rich and powerful's abusive behaviour. There is a moral judgement being applied by one set of people against another set. This morality is applied to the hoodies by a group of people who are not applying it to themselves. Simply put you can abuse and cheat other people until they lash out and then claim that they are acting immorally. Double Standards!

Here's the BIG QUESTION. If there is something wrong with the hoodies' behaviour can anyone out there tell me WHAT is wrong with it? Because, in a Socratic kind of way, in answering that question, you might just encounter that the problem with abusive behaviour is precisely that it degrades the whole situation. The problem with abusive treatment of other people is that it causes aberrant behaviour and the problem with aberrant behaviour is that it is uncomfortable and not conducive to sustainable life. What people imagine is wrong with the hoodies' behaviour is that it will destroy our culture and our reasonable comfort. YES! That is what is wrong with abusive behaviour. The hoodies are the evidence of the abusive behaviour of the politicians, the bankers, the rich and powerful and indeed the priests, vicars, imams, rabbis, teachers, doctors, judges and the list cascades throughout the culture. If you abuse people they act erroneously otherwise there would be no meaning in the idea of abuse. If abuse had no consequence what would it be called abuse for?

So the politicians need to say "Yes, this is unacceptable and we must do something about it." but what they must do about it is to start to dismantle the self-contradictory, deceptive and immoral state of the country. People in positions of power MUST act reasonably and fairly toward the community. It is no good occasionally having an 'expenses' scandal, or a 'phone hacking' scandal, or an 'abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib' scandal and sending a few scapegoats to jail. This is allowing the bad behaviour to continue so long as you don't get caught. The whole culture of acceptable abuse MUST STOP. There was never any excuse to bail out the bankers. There is no excuse for the amazingly self destructive 'austerity measures' imposed on the poor. This is perverse, self contradictory behaviour and it must STOP.

But the politicians will continue to 'blame' the hoodies for their own corrupt behaviour and the frightened population will continue to bleat in agreement with the punitive actions against them. And the churches and the synagogues and the mosques will all see an increase in attendance and there will be more mutterings of prayers to some fictional benign oppressor. But the abuse will continue until Allah, in his infinite wisdom, will bring about the destruction of the abusive culture. And lest my little humour here is misinterpreted by some fascist Muslims he'll get you too (and the Christians and the Jews).

Having a riot of a time!

2011-08-09T00:38:00.000+01:00

Oh how delightful. Riots in Tottenham on Saturday night and more riots on Sunday. Then, as if to put the icing on the cake, on Monday night there are riots in Croydon, Hackney, Clapham, Lewisham, Peckham, Bromley, Catford and who knows where else. In Croydon there is a massive fire involving a furniture store and a pub and other fires have been lit. Then it turns out there is unrest in Birmingham and Leeds as well with reports of a man being shot in Leeds.

There are serious questions as to what happened on Saturday when Mark Duggan was shot. The police seem to be uncertain about their story. It sound as if they are hedging their bets until they feel they cannot be proved wrong in whatever story they invent. But there is something very suspicious emerging.

In Peckham a PriMark has been looted along with many other shops. It is not limited to males, the girls are also doing the free 'shopping' too.

In Clapham Junction Currys was ransacked with people taking suitcases of stolen goods away from the store.

Why are people asking "Why?" Do they really believe the illusion of the financial system, of the consumer culture, of the wealthy abusing the population and the charade of democracy? It is like trying to understand the Middle East in terms of religion or 9/11. It is the crumbling of an unsustainable oppressive system.

Sally Leivseley, a security expert, was interviewed on Al Jazeera and was saying that the police need better communications and systems in place to be quicker than the youths.

The Interior Minister, Theresa May, said there should be no doubt that everybody responsible for the trouble will be caught and will face justice. She said there was no excuse for violence and thuggery.

Tony Sewell was interviewed on Al Jazeera. He sounded confident as if he knew what he is talking about but he really doesn't understand what is behind these riots. He is a director of Generating Genius, a charity helping youngsters in poor communities. He thinks there should be more 'authority' to keep these youngsters under control.

Mike Hardy the director of the Institute Of Community Cohesion was interviewed and he was the first person who seems to make sense. He understands that this behaviour is the consequence of seriously disaffected groups of people. He sees this in a much larger time scale. It is the erosion of our culture. There are more and more people growing up who in no way feel they belong to the society they live in. They are deprived, sidelined, without hope and what do they care?

Most discussions on the subject of these riots are still anchored in the supposed values of the previous 100 years. Theresa May's comments about there being no excuse for violence and thuggery is simply appalling. What was our government doing in Iraq? What are they doing in Afghanistan? What are they thinking of when they bail out the rich bankers with billions of pounds stolen from the poor in society. They hock the youngster's future by 'lending' them the money to get educated. It is just a way of keeping the social services from having to pay them as unemployed. The joke is that by the time they should be paying the loans back the economy won't sustain it either. They renege on their deals with pensions, they cut every benefit they can lay their hands on. The Children Services are apparently being funded to the tune of £7,000 per week for every child they can kidnap. The 'authorities' are the thugs! What the hell did they think would happen if they kept lying through their teeth about 'values' and morals' that they assumed everyone else was bound by but somehow didn't apply to them?

Someone said this is a sad day for everyone. NO. Not for me. I love it. It wasn't so long ago I was a relatively well off middle class, well educated, employed, family man. But our culture got hold of me and I have been lied to and cheated by every 'authority' I have encountered. They seem to think their little bit of corruption doesn't matter as they push it all under the carpet. But now there is a lot of debris under the carpet. So much that it only takes an excuse like Mark Duggan to get shot and the carpet starts heaving.

Toxic Drums has been saying for some time now that this would happen. Unfortunately it will only go on for a few more nights. But the problem is still there and like a smouldering volcano it will erupt. The prediction is in about 3 years time. It would be possible to address the problems and to stop the revolution occurring but the authorities are still as blind as ever and they will think they are winning by being more draconian. But all they will be doing is making the situation worse.

These riots will prove to be the excuse to 'toughen up'. They will be used to bring in more laws violating human rights and dignity. They will increase the police's powers and overall there will be less justice. Since it is fundamentally the lack of justice that is behind these riots you can see the situation can only get worse. Why am I pleased? Because I have gone from okay to near destitute in seven years because of the self serving authoritarian monsters who are running our culture. The majority of people are still believing in those projected values and the worse things get the more they will become judgemental, punitive and vengeful.

So all I can say is carry on being judgemental, carry on thinking these youths are out of hand, criminal, nasty, selfish and lawless. Think of as many negative attributes as you can to lay on them to make yourselves feel good. Because the more we condemn them the less we realise it is 'our' problem. It is not 'them'. It is the culture that allows the rich and powerful, the privileged and the control freaks to lives like a cancer off the back of the oppressed. The more condemning and superior judgemental crap that emerges the sooner the real revolution will occur.

Our culture is collapsing and if a lot of people in positions of power and influence don't understand that, then there is nothing they will be able to do about it. And it is not just the people at the top that matter. It is all of us. People must stop supporting the oppressors. People must stop tolerating the inequality and the injustice of this culture. The banks, the petroleum companies, the pharmaceuticals, the politicians, the police, the social services, all of them must be held to account. They must not be allowed to continue getting away with the abuse. If you support the authorities in their injustice because it makes you feel safer at the moment take a look at your history books. This kind of abuse cannot continue as if it works in the long run. There will always be a revolution in the end.

There are too many disaffected people in our culture. They see the wealthy and the powerful as the enemy and they really don't care anymore. I am very close to agreeing with them.

What I want to see is less of the punitive judgemental crap in our culture and for the 'austerity measures' (code for rip off the poor and keep the rich happy) to be seen for what they are and not to be accepted. I want people to make their voices heard that the politicians and the rich and powerful do not own the ground the rest of us walk on. We are all humans on this planet and we all have to cooperate. The pollution of the planet must stop. The poverty inflicted as a device of control must stop. The lies and deception perpetrated by companies for their own benefit must stop. We have to stop swallowing the bullshit.

So: For the time being I am delighted that the country is sinking into hell. If I really thought the revolution had started I would probably be ecstatic because it would mean the end of this perverse culture was close at hand. But sadly the majority of the population will carry on as normal muttering condemnation of the naughty people whilst they wend their way to work for their particular oppressor.

Just a thought before I go. We are like ants. We do what we do. These riots are NOT 'them'. These riots are what 'we' are fermenting in our corrupt and inhumane culture.

Viewing JavaScript Output.

2011-08-07T22:39:00.000+01:00

A problem I encountered recently was how to actually see the HTML output by JavaScript. The trouble with producing HTML code from JavaScript is that when you view the source of the rendered page you only get to see the original JavaScript.

For example: Can you see what is wrong with this JavaScript?

<script type="text/javascript">
  //<!--
  var SquaresAcross=16;
  var SquaresDown=16;
  document.writeln("<table width=\"100%\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\">");
  for (i=0; i<(SquaresAcross*SquaresDown); i++)
    {
    if ((i%SquaresDown)==0) {document.writeln(" <tr>")};
    document.writeln("   <td width=\"34\" height=\"34\"> <img src=\"pics/maze/maze-11.gif\" alt=\"s"+i+"\" name=\"s"+i+"\" width=\"34\" height=\"34\" id=\"s"+i+"\" /> </td>");
    if ((i%SquaresDown)==(SquaresDown-1)) {document.writeln("  </tr>")};
    }
  document.writeln("</table>");
  //-->
</script>

Is it going to produce the right HTML code? And if it doesn't but still runs can you see, from the output, what the problem might be? It would be so convenient to see the HTML it produces but if you load the page into a browser and view the source all you get is the original JavaScript.

There is a solution!

Load the page into a browser and save it to your hard disk. Then load the saved version into a browser and 'View Source'. Hey presto! (Or even Ali Bongo if you like.) The HTML output is in the source for the page.

A useful little tip and more is explained at Toxic Drums: View JavaScript Output

Also... If you want to know how to get HTML code in your Blogger post (like the above example) the simple solution is to go to Simple Bits where you can simply put your code into the processor and it spews out the code required for Blogger. You can work out how to do it after that.

Amazing insanity!

2011-08-06T17:00:00.000+01:00

Just to make sure no one is in any doubt this web site is utterly insane. Here is an example of the insanity that is Toxic Drums. http://www.toxicdrums.com/amazing-insanity.html. This is what I spend my insane time doing. Please send as many complaints as possible to Sam from the contact page.

Is Lamb a Faux Pas?

2011-08-03T06:17:00.000+01:00

Whew! Thank goodness for that. Or should it be Thank God! Oops... I mean Thank Allah (may all his camels have ice cream for breakfast). At last someone has got the courage to stand up for what's right. We have been waiting for this for years, nay, generations. In this country we have been trying to get things right with Christianity. Christ was a good egg of sorts but somehow he seems to have lost the plot. For all his peace loving ways the upshot was death by crucifixion. These Muslim geezers have a more practical and efficacious approach. Say it like it is. Down with all non-believers! They have the courage to make posters and enforce sane, reasonable, moral standards for the benefit of the poor degenerate population. Where would we be without their guidance, nay, enforcement of their moral code. Well we might be suffering from drug crazed orgies and hangovers, God forbid. At least they are brave enough to sexually mutilate young girls for life. Women are such a threat after all and you have to be brave to do that. I love Muslims. There is something quite special about them. Somehow they must be handpicked by Allah and injected with some superior sacred insight and knowledge because they evidently know something that the rest of humanity couldn't know without their enforcement. They understand the utter profundity of telling the truth. They understand that no matter how distasteful it might appear to the unbelievers the truth is that the truth is not true. It is evidently a spiritually profound reality that the way to love and peace is through hatred and violence. I can see it now. Someone terrifies me with threats of violence and to avoid the pain so that I can remain alive and free I submit to their will and become subservient to them for my freedom. Oh how liberating it is when you realise the truth for the first time. Thank you Anjem Choudary and all your faithful followers in the UK for enlightening me. I love you and I'll never go against your wishes. You are always welcome in my home and I promise I will stop drinking and smoking and fornicating and... (is wanking allowed?).

Hooray for Islam. Hooray for Muslims. Hooray for the Qur'an. (Am I safe now?... please.)

All about Pat Condell.

WTC Crosstrovercy

2011-07-28T04:34:00.000+01:00

These humans they really can be funny. I don't mean that disrespectfully you understand. Some of my best friends are human.

A group of atheists in America , the American Atheists, have filed a lawsuit against, amongst others, the City of New York objecting to the installation in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum of the symbolic cross from the site of Ground Zero. The cross is made from a couple of girders found in the rubble of the twin tower collapse. It was erected on the Ground Zero site in 2006 and was moved to its new permanent home on Saturday 23 July 2011.

What has actually happened is that the real God, that is the God of Numerology and other related profundities (may all his camels have baby camels), has tried to give us a clue in the very date humans decided to have the World Trade Center disaster. The date, in English, 11 September 2001, is represented by the funny Americans as 9/11. The reason for this is that the 9 represents the Islamic crescent. It is curved like the crescent but notice the profound perversion as it is curled in on itself at the top. The 11 represents the Christian cross. It is broken into its constituent parts of two planks. The slash between the two numerical symbols represents destruction, hence the name of the symbol 'slash'. It's what you do to break, deface, or disfigure something. So from numerological meaning to linguistic representation it reads "Perverse Islam destroys broken Christianity". I thought it was so obvious at the time that I didn't realise how many humans had not got it.

There is more profundity in the event. For example, the fact that the buildings were called the World Trade Center was not a coincidence. The powers that exist (may all their fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them), in their infinite wisdom, caused humans to call them that because the acronym WTC actually represents the vast array of religious beliefs by randomly picking three (the holy number) namely Wiccan, Taoism and Catholicism. It is so obvious.

Memes hey? Some people dismiss memes as ethereal or not real. Simply ideas and not connected to the real physical world. But thoughts are, like speed and gravity, exactly the 'real world'. You can't pick up a piece of speed and cut it in half. Well you can actually but let's not go there; That's just different meanings of words. And anyway you might just cut it with one bit slightly bigger than the other depending upon who you are sharing it with. Oh heck, just thinking about speed and I've started writing faster. You'd better speed up your reading to keep up with me. Yo! Here I go. The thing about memes is that they are the emergent behaviour of the complex neurological networks which are our brains. It all happens with real molecules in the real world. The effects that we perceive are assimilated into conceptual analogies of the world as we know it. It is all a complex feedback model. But memes are real and they could not affect the real world if they were not real themselves. Speed kills people as we know. In different ways but it does. Speed is real, gravity is real and memes are real. Religions are memes. They are ways of interpreting the world and they are old and clunky. They are inaccurate and past their use by date. They might be a way for a small group of cowards to avoid facing their fears but with the scale of complex intercommunication in the world today they can no longer claim innocence of their erroneous nature and the damage they do.

I fully accept that folk can try out any interpretation of reality they choose. But what is not reasonable is for one group to utilise the collective resources for their own set of beliefs without due respect for other people's point of view. It just ain't fair. If they forcibly do it then it is called oppression and oppression is abuse. (If they are Muslims it's called terrorism.) America is not Christian. There are Christians in America but there are also Taoists, Wiccans and Catholics, as the WTC was meant to illustrate. This is partly what a 'secular' society is supposed to be about. Whether it is right or wrong the original American Constitution is specifically and intentionally secular.

It is one thing to inadvertently put a cross up at Ground Zero because you think it is a nice idea but it is another to forcibly persist when it is made clear how contradictory and offensive it is to other people. There are numerous (numerology again!) solutions to this issue but just arguing for the cross to remain there to play for time so that the reality is that it remains there is offensive action against others and is a crime that should be redressed with compensation. So for every day that it remains the City of New York should be fined a huge sum of money. Money being their true religion, if it 'cost' them, they would soon remove it.

I would also like to ask the people who favour ideas like Christianity how they think it makes sense to honour an omnipotent God who killed 2,752 humans? Just a question.

And I found this image (on the left) on the Mail Online web site (I'm not pinching it because it is fair use as part of our cultural heritage and I am only questioning its content and I'm giving the original huge picture credit and the Mail Online and providing a link to the original!). I wonder if anyone can explain the two tennis balls placed at the base of the cross (enlarged, without symbollock meaning, by me underneath the original photo). Are they some sort of mystical symbol representing Christ's testicles? I don't mean to be rude but I was just wondering if this is some sort of reference to the testosteronal nature of Christianity. Is it because God is male? Are they the God's bollocks?

Hey ho! What a funny bunch they really are. You can't help loving them though because they are so cute (not the bollocks - the humans).

Amy Winehouse - what can you say?

2011-07-27T15:18:00.000+01:00

As you get older sometimes it seems that God has worked everything out too well. Amy Winehouse tragically died on Saturday 23 July 2011. I first saw Amy Winehouse on the Jools Holland Hootenanny show in 2006 singing Monkey Man. It is one of those performances that exude talent and authenticity. There was something about her performance, her 'devil may care' attitude, her writhing gestures and her raw nakedness hinted at in her clothing but so evident in her soul that I knew this lady was something special. I've adored her ever since.

Amy Winehouse - Monkey Man

Jools Holland is a mega faceted musical talent and guru; He rated her as having 'one of the best voices of anybody of all time'. I don't know about that but she was one of the most talented artists I have ever encountered. She is up there with the likes of Syd Barrett and Vincent van Gough for pure raw honest personal humanity. Of course it was as likely as not that she would burn and die. She did and it is part of the raw tragedy of real life. Somehow, though, it makes life worth living. I for one am really glad I encountered just a small part of her genius. Of course I am sad to see her go and I think on it a lot. But maybe, when enough talent has died, I really won't care so much about leaving this place after all.

Here's a few other best performances available by Amy Winehouse on You Tube worth putting in your conceptual essence:

Amy Winehouse - Rehab

Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good

Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game

The Tribal Chief.

2011-07-26T20:39:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time there was a chief of a small tribe in a village way out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Africa. The chief lived in a grand grass house and ruled benignly over his tribe. He had an old throne carved from local stone and it had been in the family for many years. One day a visiting chief brought him a gift of a brand new iron throne. There was great celebration and the next day the chief installed the new throne and put the old one in the loft. He was sitting quietly contemplating on his plush new throne when there was an almighty crash as the old throne fell through the roof and squashed the chief killing him dead on the spot.

The moral of the story: Don't stow thrones in grass houses.

Death and destruction on the roads.

2011-07-26T13:01:00.000+01:00

As I have said before - what has the title got to do with the content?

As one delves the mysterious depths of officialdom one find the most remarkable monsters from the deep. On the surface the clear waters of the tropical lagoon gently reflect the sunlight and all seems well. But lurking just beneath the surface there are a myriad of dangers. To the unwary the scene seems harmonious and at one with the universe but predatory creatures patrol the waters seeking easy targets and nourishment for their own survival. The deeper you go the weirder and more alien the life forms become. The same seems true of the Children Services in Britain.

I have encountered many stories of intimidation, cruelty and child abduction by officialdom. Like many people I happily imagine that they are the exception. But my own experience is suggesting that although the serious incidents may be rare they are enabled because of the mode of action of the social services.

I recall many years ago working out why the two policemen had planted cannabis on me. It was a cruel and relatively insignificant event but why would they be so arbitrarily unkind? If you like drugs there is a way to be involved with a degree of impunity. Join the security forces. Join the police and join the drug squad. Then you get to meet all the pushers and you get some degree of power and control and a reasonable supply of illicit drugs for your own recreation. So when you are tasked to attend the Reading pop festival as an undercover cop you get paid to do what thousands pay for. You get to go to the pop festival. You also have the added benefit of a free supply of drugs from pushers who you effectively blackmail. Part of the deal is that you don't shop them. So how can you go back after the weekend and tell your chief inspector that you couldn't find any drug users at a major pop festival? You don't. You simply use some of your superfluous supply to plant on innocent victims and arrest them. Your superintendent is pleased with your haul and you get to go next year too.

I knew a psychopathic murderer once. He was a very nice bloke. Seriously folks, he was. But there was something amiss. Now the funny thing about humans is that they are multifaceted and diverse. This bloke, the psychopath (and I've known a few who don't kill), was afraid. He wouldn't admit it (like so many of us) and so he became 'brave'. One way, he divulged to me, was that 'out there' there are monsters and so what you do is become a monster. That way you are the monster and you no longer have to be afraid. Neat little trick. Philosophically a little suspect but neat all the same. I tried it once until I scared someone and felt sorry for them. I soon realised it wasn't for me.

Now if you are afraid of authority one thing you can do is to join an authoritarian organisation. If you feel, perhaps, that someone should have rescued you from your parents, you may feel all sympathetic for all those kids who have oppressive parents and you may want to rescue them. Wow! Become a social worker and work for the Children Services. How very benign you must look to yourself. But how could you possibly survive if you couldn't locate those children who need rescuing? You wouldn't keep your job for long if all the poor and degenerate families that you visited happened to be law abiding and reasonable parents. You wouldn't feel satisfied in yourself either because you might just have to face up to your own problems. So it is simple and it is called prejudice. Those lower class people are cruel to their children. It is so easy to find fault with people in general and it is probably even easier to find fault with parents. But as that little chap Jesus suggested, perhaps the one with no guilt should cast the first stone. Let's just forget about him for a moment or we wouldn't get any bloody stones thrown. And anyway how would we save the children then?

I have a take on unemployment that I sometimes explain. If there are 100 people and 80 jobs then 20 people will be unemployed. Those 20 people are not going to be the sharpest tools in the box. So when prats come along and try to assert that it is their fault because they are not sharp that they don't have a job they are simply, and conveniently, missing the point. Incidentally people like that should be given a lobotomy and put at the end of the job queue.

So having joined the Children Services for all the right reasons you find yourself conveniently supplied with a list of families to investigate by malicious and vindictive reports from nasty resentful people. There may even be some legitimate concern. But the point is that you get to visit a lot of people who have some faults. All you have to do is concentrate on the faults and one way or another you will expose some very distasteful traits. In some cases (not all because that would be just silly) you find justification for nicking the kids. It's that simple. Once you have nicked them though you do have to defend your position. It is not going to look good if you keep saying "Oops sorry" and handing the kids back. Thereby lies the collusive culture in the Children Services. And necessarily it spreads through the other services like the police and the judges. They cannot be seen to be wrong because just look at what happens to people who are wrong.

They are not only their own worst enemy but more importantly they are societies worst enemies.

I came across the case recently of a couple who had their 5 year old child taken from them. In the course of the fiasco of the arrest the mother also had a miscarriage. According to some that could be deemed murder. But the issue of the abducted child is where the focus remains and so the murder of the unborn just sinks into oblivion. The case was reported by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph on 18 Jul 2009 entitled 'Evil destruction' of a happy family. The way I came across this is interesting because I was on the BASW (British Association of Social Workers) web site looking into some Children Services workers who happen not to be on the 'regulated' membership list of this private limited company posing as a professional regulatory body. I was browsing around when I found an article entitled BASW condemns Sunday Telegraph's discrediting of child protection social workers. This little article was full of pompous indignation. But on reading it all I could glean was an arrogant condemnation of an irresponsible journalist who had dared to suggest there was anything wrong with the social services. There was no rational argument and no counter evidence, just supercilious, self-serving, high and mighty condemnation and an over bloated smug assertion of the good work of the social services. It sounded guilty to me. So I looked into it a bit more and came across the aforementioned article by Christopher Booker. But to my surprise, this was not the article to which the BASW referred. That article had been written several years ago. So I tried to find the referenced article. I thought a good way would be to look up a quote from the article on the internet. In the BASW article it states "BASW condemned Christopher Brooker’s article, in which he claimed that 'children are torn from their parents with no good reason'. A senior BASW official called the piece "irresponsible" and "simply untrue." (they have misspelled the journalists name). So I cut and pasted the phrase "children are torn from their parents with no good reason" and put it into a famous search engine. To my surprise out of the only five pages returned four were from the BASW web site and the last one was another web site reporting on the content of the BASW web site. The plot thickens. So I went to the Daily Telegraph and searched through Christopher Booker's latest articles. There I found one entitled "Child protection system tears two more families apart". I read the article. So the BASW have misquoted Booker. But I will leave that alone for the time being because it is possibly an insignificant misquote. Worth noting though that they misspelled the name of the child and misquoted her. But the article read perfectly well. The journalism seemed responsible and is severely questioning the authorities in a right and proper way. So what are BASW so afraid of? With no more ado I will simply point out that these are the tactics of Colonel Gaddafi's security forces. Work it out for yourself.

Advice for the Prime Minister: Austerity measure number 1: Dismantle one of the most expensive internal security bureaus you operate, namely the Children Services Directorate; Prosperity measure number 1: Fund parenting groups across the country at a fraction of the cost of the Children Services Directorate. Result = Wealthier country with healthier kids growing up in it! Simples - you prat.

Page Numbers in Micro$oft Word

2011-07-24T21:31:00.000+01:00

Having struggled for hours trying to get Page X of Y in my footer in Word 2007 I eventually appear to have succeeded. So for my use and for anyone else with this problem I am putting the solution on this blog.

Search terms to help me find this page when I want it:
Page numbering in Word.
Page X of Y
Page numbers in headers and footers.
Page 1 of 2

First off I want to say how bloody annoying Micro$oft are getting. "VERY!" There - that's sorted.

I fully understand that issues like page numbering are difficult to implement (not that difficult actually) and that explaining the subtleties is deemed beyond the intelligence of most Word users (that may be true) but it is reasonable to explain the basics as well as the endless list of "If you want it orange go to this selection and select that drop down and click 'Orange Page Number' and click 'Ok'", "If you want a big page number go to footers and select esoteric option and select the 'Size' option and on the 'Size' option select the 'Big' tab and select 'Page Number'.", "If you are writing to your mother ..." etc. They seem to escalate the concept of thinking what you might want in particular and then creating that particular thing. Whatever happened to generic solutions. What happened to giving the 'user' control. Well it is actually because Micro$oft are co-dependent. They need you to be dependent on them. So they foster your dependency. In the long run it is destructive and I hate them for it.

This is not an in depth study of fields in Word but I did discover that you can type:
{ PAGE } of { NUMPAGES }

BUT...
You don't actually 'type' that. You have to create the curly parenthesis as a field by pressing Ctrl F9. Then you type 'PAGE' (without the single quotes) or 'NUMPAGE' inside the curly brackets.

Of course things are never simple with Word and I found that this does work in footers and headers but when I tried it in the document body it didn't seem to update automatically.

For more info see:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/numbering/pagenumbering.htm

Anders Behring Breivik attacks Norway

2011-07-23T06:41:00.002+01:00

Devastation in Norway on 22 July 2011. Death and destruction wrought by bomb blast in Oslo and shooting on the island of Utøya. At least 87 people killed and many more injured. It all appears to be a Rambo style attack by one 32 year old man called Anders Behring Breivik.

It seems he planted a bomb in a government building in the Norwegian capital Oslo. He then travelled south to the island of Utøya where there was a Labour Party youth camp taking place. He placed several bombs around the island and, dressed as a police officer, he began indiscriminately shooting people, killing at least 80 and injuring many more.

So what was Anders Behring Breivik's problem. That, I don't know, but his behaviour sounds like one of two things. Either he was effectively ostracised by his culture and felt the only way to get recognition was by some extreme act or he was entirely screwed up by his parents. It sounds to me like an understandable extreme attempt to break a double bind. I will bet that psychologists will speculate that he was a paranoid schizophrenic thereby adding to the general prejudice against this condition. But if they do I hope they pay equal homage to the fact that he was a conservative Christian conformist. And he greatly admired Winston Churchill. Let's have some more reasonable prejudice come out of this one please. And as for Obama's remarks about terrorism I just think the man is attempting to catch a lift on any passing bandwagon. I will be very surprised if this event turns out to have anything to do with the concept of terrorism being referred to by old matey Barack Hussein.

Norway tends to keep itself to itself and can afford to. It is one of the richest nations on earth per head of population and sits on the north west edge of the continent of Europe. Most famous perhaps for its fjords Norway also shows signs of being a forward looking and rather sensible country. When oil was discovered in the North Sea in the late 1960s Norway had a large stake in it. So, incidentally did Britain. Britain has squandered the wealth but Norway has been very careful with it. The two main things it did was to invest in the infrastructure of the country thereby laying the foundations for long term stability and security and it invested a large proportion of the money in a multitude of countries and industries around the globe. The reasoning behind this being that whichever way the world economics go Norway will always have some safe investments. The politics is a mixture of conservative with a small 'c' and socialism. They are a kind of soft 'Big Brother' state. Their taxes are relatively high and the average wage is relatively high. So overall the wealth of the population is more evenly spread than most places and the general standard of living is good. The Norwegians themselves are mostly a pleasant easy going bunch. Having spent much time in Norway there is an undercurrent of parochial authoritarianism. You wouldn't notice it at first glance but the Norwegians are proud of their way of life and do not happily tolerate dissent. Given that they are reasonably comfortable they can also afford to be quite nice. Even I'm nice when I'm well off.

But don't worry folks. With the onset of the apocalypse you can expect more and more of these bizarre and apparently indiscriminate events as the western world descends into hell.

Me? I'm just catching band wagons too. Maybe I should write to Mr Obama about my problems. He might be interested. He could send me one million quid and I'd be happy.

I know David Cameron is busy.

2011-07-22T12:51:00.000+01:00

Much as I appreciate that David Cameron is busy I did decide that, as the Prime Minister, he really should know what is going on in the country. Even though sometimes you would be forgiven for thinking he didn't. He really can't be blamed for not knowing what is going on if no one is willing to tell him.

Incidentally Sam lets me, Dave, write in his blog sometimes. I'm Dave Hook as opposed to Dave Cameroon. I explain this because when you look at the letter to the Prime Minister you would be forgiven for wondering who wrote it since it says it is from Dave (me). Of course Dave is a pseudonym because we like to maintain privacy at this web site and really don't like all this phone hacking invasion of privacy stuff (like fuck) (SHIT! who said that?) because we like to get truly ensconced in the murky collusion of secrecy here. No - it's not like that - you don't understand. Hell, who does understand? ME actually! Since you ask!

So I wrote to the Prime Minister. I wrote to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, too. And to Graham Stuart MP and John Hemming MP and my local MP. You see I'm a bit bothered by the disgusting behaviour of the Children Services in my town. In fact given the amount of manipulative criticism that I have suffered in my relatively short life of less than 100 years I am fed up with prats and dick-heads making my life impossible. So the fact that even the Home Office doesn't seem to know whether it is the 'Children's Services' or the 'Children Services' gets right up my nose. The Children Services don't seem to know what they are called either. Can you believe that? Well unfortunately knowing the calibre of the people who work there it would be surprising if they did know the name of the organisation they worked for. Most of them know their own names though. It is, in fact, the Children Services. I conclude this because it is within the Children Services Directorate and because it is a similar organisation to the Adult Services but for a different category of human. No one has a problem with the Children Services Directorate and no one has a problem with Adult Services. They don't accidentally call it the Adult's Services. One reason for that is it starts of as Adult Services and if they try to say Adult's Services they get a problem with an impending lisp which they rapidly reject. So it remains the Adult Services. Children Services, however, seems to give them a problem. One issue is that 'Adult' is singular and 'Children' is plural. If it were the Adults Services would they get confused and refer to it as the Adults Services, the Adults' Services and the Adult's Services on different occasions. Probably!

Well I had to go out and on my return this is looking remarkably anal. But the point is that they literally don't even know what they are called. They have been seriously offensive to us and had I not stopped them who knows how far it might have gone. Having stopped them, however, it seems the 'seriousness' of their offence doesn't warrant concern. Well that might be their opinion but it is not mine. The way I see it is that they are abusive and most of their victims are unable to confront them or stand up to them so I am going to do it. They are quite funny in some ways because had they simply acted like normal human beings and apologised for their rudeness in the first place (well the umpteenth place actually but who's counting) I would have accepted it. But they have continued to add insult to injury with amazing resilience. Even to the point of 8 months down the line when the Ombudsman has been involved I sent them a complaint and requested a response in two working days, pointing out that it was their statutory obligation, they simply didn't respond. Oh golly what a wheeze. Well they might not thing it is such a jolly jape when they get a letter from the Prime Minister's Office asking them what's going on. Cos I don't expect David will deal with the letter himself. He has a lot of things to be dealing with at the moment notwithstanding the mischievous journalists.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

2011-07-20T14:21:00.000+01:00

I think I am suffering from PTSD. That's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not that most people would need that spelling out nowadays. It is becoming a common phrase. They used to shoot cowards. It is only recently that the British Government pardoned 306 soldiers "shot at dawn" for desertion and cowardice during the First World War. All of these men were suffering from various conditions from Shell Shock to PTSD. There are various arguments for and against such a pardon but the arguments against are simply primitive and disgusting. Freudian projection is probably the most general explanation of this phenomenon. Strong brave people wouldn't shoot people who are afraid. In fact the irony is that the 'justification' for war is so often claimed to be the protection of the innocent and supporting high moral values. But weak people project the 'unacceptable' qualities onto others to protect their own egos. The frightening thing is that they are probably unconscious of this act. They genuinely believe that those whining scum are weak and pathetic cowards. Oh how easily the words flow from my mouth. I can be so condemning of weak, feeble, pathetic cowardly individuals. It's easy because I was brought up in a culture of 'blame' and authoritarian judgemental attitude. And actually I hate them with a vengeance. I might get over it when I resolve the PTSD but applying 'their' values to them is my only way of holding onto any sanity whilst I try to make sense, not only of the world out there, but the world inside me too.

Of course it is not them that have cause my PTSD directly. It is the culture that has allowed the crimes against me and my daughter to succeed. It is because we live in a festering cowardly blame culture that the malevolent vindictive cruelty of the ex could find traction and leverage. Anyone who has been falsely accused of something and the mud has stuck in some seriously detrimental way will understand. Anyone who has experienced prejudice will understand. What amazes me is how the academics and the philosophers and any freethinking people all understand to a significant degree what is going on but the politicians, the media, the police (now there's a fine collection of corrupt two-faced hackers), the judges, teachers, priests, social services - STOP! The list is too long - but the people 'in charge' so rarely seem to get it. The pretentious judgmental authoritarian control freaks just don't get it. They are so self-contradictory. They stand up for 'justice' and dish out injustice. They construct a killing machine to go to war to 'stop violence'. Teachers tell kids 'don't be clever!' Oh the irony of it all.

Gordon Turnbull is a Consultant Psychiatrist in Trauma at Capio Nightingale Hospitals, London. He has recently written a book called "Trauma: From Lockerbie to 7/7: How trauma affects our minds and how we fight back" which on all accounts is worth a read. I won't be reading it because I can't afford it. So go buy a copy read it and send me the second hand volume (You can contact me HERE and I'll give you my details). If you do I will read it and give it my most severe analysis. I would be interested to know if the man really understands what is going on. From an interview with him that I heard on Radio 4 I suspect he is at least half way there. His work with PTSD patients on all accounts has a good success rate. It seems that the prevailing view of mental illness is that it is incurable. It is not my view and it seems it is not Professor Turnbull's either.

PTSD in my view is the condition of an emotionally unresolved experience. When we experience stuff it gets into our neurological network and we find ways of incorporating it into our being. One part of that process is experienced by us as 'emotion'. The emotional experience is part of the 'healing' process. The end result, if all is well, is that we 'understand' the world out there. We make sense of our experience. It is all part of the learning process that enables us to successfully engage with 'reality' But sometimes, for one reason or another, the emotional processing is interrupted or doesn't resolve. PTSD seems to be a consequence of something so traumatic that it takes more emotional resolution than we are given time or circumstances to handle. But unlike some other ways of 'dealing' with trauma it is not suppressed to the point of perverting our comprehension of reality. So it sits in a sort of no-man's-land between repression and understanding. That is where the symptoms are visible. Not dealing with it will result in a malfunctioning human. And there are many of those littered about the place. Dealing with it will give a deeper understanding of life. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Unfortunately the quote is misused in a trite way too often but when calamity occurs it is often the case that either it kills you or you learn and become a little stronger. Bones that get broken become stronger. This is not a way to become strong though. Although going by some parental attitude you might think so.

That's it. That's the end of this post. Not the end of the post traumatic stress. If it seems a bit unresolved, incomplete, or aimless well that is the nature of PTSD! So I have got it - SEE!

What I wish

2011-07-19T14:28:00.003+01:00

So often people wish for nice things. Not me though.

As life starts out for many people they have hopes and dreams. So long as they can develop reasonably well they might maintain hope and so be able to wish for nice things. But when your life has been destroyed by relentless nastiness and there is finally no hope left what are you going to do? I suppose I do 'wish' for nice things but I am so angry with the destruction wrought by so many people that I am very distressed, angry and resentful. I guess that makes me a bitter and twisted individual. But without people like me how could all those sanctimonious pretentious selfish gits satisfy themselves that they are so wonderful. And there, perhaps, lies the answer. They require people like me to feel good about themselves. They create despair and destruction around them just to feel not so bad. They are negative entities in the universe. Like dark matter they seem invisible and make up the majority of everything. They selfishly get on with their lives kidding themselves with feigned innocence. They are the sort who go to church and whisper nice things to their all powerful joker called God. "Please God save all the starving children around the world. Please God save all the poor people in the war." But they leave church feeling that they have proved that they care and buy themselves an ice cream and go home to their nice house and keep the tax they pay invisible by pretending they are being responsible citizens. They even pervert that by imagining that they are hard done by having to pay the tax. That makes them feel a little better. "I suffer as well. I have to pay all that tax." But where does the tax go? A lot of it goes to the rich folk running the war for profit and manipulating the economics of the world to maintain poverty, starvation and disease. But they plead "What can I do about it?" They are sad pathetic individuals and are fodder for the oppressors.

I think I will start a really constructive project. I will set out on a last attempt to communicate something of worth. I will rip the negative constructs apart and leave them in shreds. I will invalidate the self contradictory philosophical edifices used by these morons and leave them naked and vulnerable. I will make them suffer indefinitely. I will tear down their temples and rebuild them in three days - Hang on - is this sounding a bit like Christianity? I've been infected. That is what God is all about. Which God? I hear you cry. Well I don't actually because I don't think many people will get what I am talking about. The point being that the God of Judaism was replaced by Christ. He tore down their metaphorical temples and brought 'humanity' and 'love' into reality instead of the fictionalising of it in the 'spiritual' world only to leave reality bereft of it. He made it clear that goodness and love were actually really here in the material world. But that was too much for folk to cope with so they stuffed it back into the spiritual world and constructed a church called Christianity where they could whisper nice things to their fantasy God again.

I was brought up as a Christian. I really tried to understand what they were going on about. I did understand a lot of it. But somehow the complex jigsaw just didn't connect in the middle. Thousands of tiny parts all linked together nicely but there was always something wrong. Eventually I began to understand what it was. They fictionalise goodness. They fictionalise love. They become the very thing they hate the most. Meaningless blobs in the universe that do nothing but harm. They are a cancer. They have destroyed the hope in life. They are so afraid that they might be meaningless that they have become death. Christianity, along with Islam and Judaism are little more than perverse panic by millions of pathetic lost bits of sentient life in the universe. Thank God they are going to end up as a jumble of decomposing biology and finally become simple molecules roaming free in the universe once more.

Just in case there is any doubt in the readers mind I do not like pretentious religious gits. They deserve the worst their God has to offer. And if I could do anything to help I would. But I have been successfully disarmed and imprisoned by their imposed poverty. I would advise them not to let me escape because my vengeance would be unstoppable. If I escape I will dedicate my life to destroying their culture of cruelty and greed.

Hacking whistleblower found dead (cough cough peep plonk).

2011-07-18T21:42:00.002+01:00

John Yates has now resigned. What is that about? These people don't resign because there is gossip and distraction. They resign in an attempt to escape justice. So how deeply was he involved in the illegal conspiratorial machinations of the subculture of control freaks including politicians, journalists and the police. How deep and how dark are these murky waters? What sort of mafia style control is going on. Soon people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that these people have a public image and a private reality. They construct their public image. You do have to be naive to imagine that the police are as they appear. They are not mastermind criminals, they start off seeing the profession as having advantages and they possibly even believe in the good intentions. But remember the mafia are very Roman Catholic. They think they believe in a benign God. They just think someone has got to enforce control to maintain the stability. They do this by judging people and controlling all those they believe are lesser humans than them. The police do this. It has been clearly illustrated with numerous investigations. Politicians are about the same except they are gullible twits. And the media are the people who really hold the puppet strings. In fact a good analogy is that the puppets are the politicians, the police are the strings and the media are the puppet masters.

And just to keep the story alive Sean Hoare has been found dead at his home in Watford. Sean Hoare worked for the News of the World and claimed Andy Coulson was not only aware that phone hacking was going on but he was actively promoting it. Sean Hoare left the News of the World under a bit of a cloud because of his drinking and drug habits. I suspect he just overdid it in celebration at the escalating phone hacking scandal. But it makes for more gossip and speculation.

Do you swallow?

2011-07-18T12:04:00.000+01:00

How much guff spewing forth from politicians, police, & media are the public going to swallow before they choke to death?

Apparently recent surveys indicate 14% of the folk think politicians tell the truth, 19% think journalists tell the truth and 63% believe the police tell the truth. How gullible is the general public?

I've just been listening to John Humphrys interviewing Boris Johnson over the resignation of the Chief of Police Paul Stephenson over the phone hacking scandal. I've never heard Boris Johnson sounding so unsure of himself. He is normally a blustering, rather naive, straight forward guy. Well he likes to wear that disguise. But with the internet around, and so much information not only recorded but readily available to check and correlate, the old school tactic of convenient memory loss is losing its effectiveness. He was struggling to defend the police chief and indeed himself. The trouble is that these people have been used to getting away with saying whatever seems plausible at the time to deflect criticism or fudge the issue. But more and more they are being held to account for their previous contradictory statements.

My irony is that I don't really care much about phone hacking. I don't think it is half as bad as the 'shock horror' everyone seems so pleased to express. The irony for me is that the people who are getting caught up in this affair are the ones who need to defend their secret communications because they are up to no good. I don't get secrecy. The only secrets I have found acceptable are things like surprise parties. The trouble with secrecy is it is all part of the mechanism of control. When you do the philosophical dissection of it all you soon realise that the only reason for keeping secrets is to stop others using information illegitimately but the very act of trying to hide the information becomes a kind of collusion with the illegitimate pursuits. After all, we are all human and we do what humans do. What exactly are we pretending to be, such that the 'truth' can be used against us.

This murky business of the phone hacking scandal is getting all the corrupt folk rushing around in a panic. It is spreading like wild fire through the police, the media and politics. A contractual arrangement between Neil Wallis and the metropolitan police existed where he was paid £1,000 per day for 'consultation'. Andy Coulson, who was arrested over the phone hacking affair, was employed by David Cameron. John Yates, the current assistant commissioner of the metropolitan police, is about to be investigated. Rebekah Brooks has been arrested too. Of course she was metaphorically in bed with David Cameron but can you be charged with metaphorical adultery? And the question David might ask is does she swallow? She appears to expect everyone else to. The whole affair is a complete mess. A bunch of compulsive liars. But will the culture of arrogance and assumed impunity, control and manipulation, greed and corruption, actually get addressed and sorted? With the impending financial collapse of the Western World I doubt it. At the end of the day, as the Joker so aptly put it in The Dark Knight "When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other."

What is wrong with the world?

2011-07-17T10:01:00.000+01:00

We all have our own take on this life and what reality is all about. We have a fair idea what the folk around us think too. None of us are the same but in the main we have similar ideas. But the further afield you go both in space and time the wider the gap becomes in our conceptualisation of reality. The indigenous tribes of America, that we like to call Indians, had their take on things and the Aborigines in Australia had their view. Then there are the cultural divides like the ancient Egyptians and the Romans. And there are those most dreadful of all; the religions.

Throughout human history and all around the world there are some constants with human beings and they are not too dissimilar to animals as well. Fundamental harmony with the environment. Balance, equilibrium, sustainability and love. Love is a funny thing. We seem to have screwed it up right royally in our culture. We have two fundamental problems with love. We mix it up with dependency and then get married and fuck up our children. And we try so hard to get the approval of our elders and aspire to appear loving and good. When the focus of attention is on not being accused of being bad then the focus of attention is on yourself and not others. Then we become the very thing we are trying so hard to avoid. We become evil.

Take a good look around at all the different aspects of your reality. The vicious unforgiving perversion of the economic system, the ruthless irresponsible raping of planet Earth in the name of industrial progress, the wars and destruction, the aspirations of science, art and literature, and one can go on forever finding different aspects to look at. But take a look at the whole and ask yourself if it looks sustainable and good.

I've got a lot of studious history behind me. I have studied Art and Computing. I'm an armchair philosopher and I hate economics. The thing that is consistent in my history is I like jigsaw puzzle pieces to fit together. I get a little sidetracked by detail. When I get suspicious that something doesn't intuitively seem quite right I rarely agree to consign it to my "I believe" part of my brain. It remains a thing that still needs confirming before the edifice of which it is a part can be believed. It's a tough job and it seems to confuse many people. But when you examine religion in detail it is self evidently a load of bollocks. When you start examining any aspect of our financial system in detail it becomes clear it is illogical and fallacious. When you look at industrial progress and the advancement of technology you soon realise it is unsustainable. It is not that one can't be spiritual or that a form of financial exchange can't work or invention and creativity are not beneficial but something is wrong with the actual manifestation of these things in the real world.

The problem is a fundamental misconception of reality. Humans create a kind of model in their minds of what they think the world out there is like. Starting from that very complex system of molecules called a foetus we absorb experience and the effects flow around inside the system setting up responses. It is all about learning and surviving. What has happened with humans as opposed to other animals is they have moved one big step forward in their complexity. I guess you can put it down to things like language because the intercommunication between these systems, these individuals, has extended to the larger collection of humans. The problem is whether the big blob (a large collection of humans) comprehends reality correctly. The evidence is at least that it is having a hard time of it. The internet is perhaps a fundamental requirement in making the interconnections faster, more connected and therefore enabling a more correct model of reality to be formed inside the system.

Behind it all is a thing called love. What is love? Well old Joe Ratzinger reckons it is truth. And so do I. For all the use of the word love very few people could actually definitively grasp what it is. We talk about it and we know what we mean at the time but the word love does not so much define something as refer to something quite intangible and unknowable. Love is always harmonious. Love is always right. Love is empathetic and nurturing. Love is friendly and supportive. Love is positive and beneficial. Love is what our heart recognises as right. And as so many people and philosophies have asserted, love is the only way.

So what is love? Well whatever it is one thing is for sure; Those things which stand against it and oppose it are negative and detrimental. So take a look around at your world again and ask yourself if the petroleum industry is pro or anti life. Does the economic system have anything to do with love? Do the authoritarian attitudes of religious dogma have any harmony with love. The glaring fact is that we, collectively and individually, keep allowing a whole load of crap to go on because we are afraid and can't see a viable alternative. It is neither possible nor necessary for you or me to stop the crap. What is necessary though is that we don't give it credence. Don't keep supporting one politician because you are more afraid of the other one. Don't keep supporting the police because you are afraid of criminals. Don't keep supporting war because you are afraid of terrorists. Don't keep supporting religion because you are afraid to be alone. Don't keep supporting what you suspect is simply the lesser of two evils because the evil gits are laughing behind the scenes and that is the way they maintain power over you. That is the way they pervert reality and run the world. And it will never work. As they say "It will all end in tears".

Do not accept bullshit from authoritarian sycophants. Take a look at Dave's complaint to the Children Services. Ok they didn't do much wrong but that is still no excuse. Dave is fighting for all the people who cannot fight back and consequently do suffer greatly for this kind of abuse by official organisations. Stop the abuse of our world now. Give up going along with bullshit. You'll be glad you did.

End of rant!

Lithuanians get high on Vodka in Boston.

2011-07-15T22:19:00.000+01:00

What have Andy Warhol and Boston got in common?

Well it appears that Boston in England is trying to claim its fame one way or another. Yes, there is a Boston in little old England. Boston, which is a small town in the county of Lincolnshire in England in the United Kingdom (or Great Britain as it is sometimes known), is in fact the eponym of the more famous Boston Massachusetts. Boston in the UK has been around for a good number of years and sports the tallest parish church tower in England. It's a whopping 272 feet (and 6 inches) high. It was because some of the Pilgrim Fathers were imprisoned in Boston prior to leaving for the New World that they strangely decided to call a settlement in what is now Massachusetts by the same name. But I digress.

Boston has been trying to be famous for years. Some long time ago it was the most significant port in the country but that was partly down to the Romans. Boston is surrounded by a lot of reclaimed land but that is down to the Dutch. Now, however, it can claim fame as the only place to blow up an illegal vodka factory in the UK! But, unfortunately, that is down to the Lithuanians (and it cost them five lives).

Bostonians, rather like many Americans, are quite parochial. I was a little amused by the Mayor's remarks when she reportedly said "I am sorry that it had to happen in our town." Perhaps she was thinking it would have been better in Skegness. According to Andy Warhol "... everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well I guess it is a start for a whole town to get 15 minutes of fame. At a population of about 60,000 that's 15 milliseconds each. According to Lou Reed and John Cale "There's only one good thing about a small town. You know that you want to get out." Well five Lithuanians did.

Sorry to be so disrespectful but sometimes fame is like that. If I blew myself up in a vodka factory I would want someone to make jokes about it. It's a cruel world. Go buy the album, it's worth it: Songs for Drella by Lou Reed & John Cale. "Drella" being an amalgamation or coadjunct of Dracula and Cinderella which was a pet name of theirs for Andy Warhol. The album Songs for Drella is a kind of obituary, eulogy or tribute to Andy Warhol. (He's dead too.) All excessive profits will go to the Lithuanian vodka fund to rebuild the factory.

Links:
Boston Explosion
Five Dead in Huge Fireball

Sliding down the Greecy Pole

2011-06-22T00:21:00.000+01:00

How has the human race become so stupid? I have been watching the Greek Parliament "Vote of Confidence". So they won the vote with 155 to 129. This means the Greek Prime Minister can go ahead with the austerity measures in order to satisfy the IMF and World Bank so that they get some more money. What is going on? These people are pretending to be rational and discussing issues with a firm belief that they are being sophisticated and clever and important. They seem to think that these words and ideas control reality and if they can construct ideas that are too big and complicated to prove wrong they are somehow sorting the situation out. But we have run our course in this civilisation.

To start with the whole idea of austerity measures is a joke. When the economy is straining because the rich people have borrowed too much you simply can't get it back by taking it from the poor. They are poor you see. They are not the one's with the money. All that will happen is the greedy folk at the top are buying more time. What are they buying it with? The blood of the poor in the future.

I am going to stick my neck out now. There is going to be another blood bath in Europe. Consider Greece's position. They are not being given enough money to invigorate or stimulate the economy. They are being given just enough to get themselves into more trouble. In 6 to 18 months they will be in the same situation except they will have an estimated 70,000 less companies to make money and they will owe more. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This money business is not about the money it is about control. So Greece should do what the Icelandic people did and say "NO! Enough is enough, we're out of the Euro, you can stuff your Economic Community and we will trade with other nations on our own terms thank you. As for anything you say we owe you it was always a deception and a scam an so we simply don't owe it to you."

What is fundamentally wrong is that we have allowed the psychopathic qualities of humanity to become the institutions and businesses. We are not acting like humans. All it would take to get Europe out of the current catastrophic collapse would be for humans to start acting humanely. Don't accept the bullshit from the politicians. Don't accept the bullshit from the bosses. Don't accept the bullshit from the legal beagles. Stop accepting nonsense spewing from their orifices. I hear the utter nonsense nearly every day.

There was the case of the man fined £100 for getting off a train one station too early. It was stated that the contract on the ticket clearly stated that this would be the case. Although many observers were sympathetic to the unfairness it was still deemed that he should have read the contract. And they all went away nodding and shaking their heads. The reason they get stalled there is because if they question the substantiality of the 'written contract' it could undermine everything they are hanging on to like their house, their car, etc. So they reluctantly agree that the man should have read the contract. Then let the railway company employers read the contract to each and every customer and see how economically viable that is. IT ISN'T! It is a con. They are ripping off other people. If our economy is based on trickery and selfishness it simply cannot work in the end. And the 'end' is fast approaching.

I'm fed up with it all. I'm lucky because I have no money left, no job, no house, no pension and pretty well no health. So I have nothing left to lose. If you lot don't stop pissing around condemning other people and supporting the bullies your time will come too.

Sod the fucking lot of you! You are stupid and siding with your own executioners. Do you really think they will look after you when the chips are down. Not a chance. Poverty will be for the majority and God help those thieving rich bastards. They are currently laughing all the way to the bank where they are expecting, in Greece, to pick up some more lovely bonuses from their financial tranche supplied by Germany for them provided they continue to oppress the Greek people until the country is on its knees. Germany is invading that country financially. Wait and see if I'm wrong. They did it to the Poles militarily and they are doing it to Greece financially.

Don't get me wrong - It's not that the Germans are worse than the rest. They are just winning. You shouldn't have agreed to the game!

German bean sprouts and other stuff.

2011-06-05T20:50:00.000+01:00

Stir fry bean sprouts and cool cucumbers fight it out in a battle of words with serious financial consequences. Stirring up trouble the bean sprout producer has tried to offset its own failures on the super cool cucumber nation of Spain. Germany tried to distract world attention from the possibility that any blame could be attached to their country when a serious outbreak of extra strong e-coli began about a month ago... in Germany. They rapidly blamed Spanish cucumbers for the problem. Spanish vegetable growers lost their international markets and lost millions of pounds worth of trade. The whole of Europe was soon dragged into this vegetable blame game with tomatoes and lettuces having their good names tarnished too. Vladimir the crusader took advantage of the dispute to kick the victims whilst they were down and to promote his own vegetable products for his own benefit by banning all European vegetables from Russia.

Now it turns out the most likely source of the e-coli is German bean sprouts. And what are the Germans going to do about the financial devastation across Europe? As likely as not they are dead chuffed about this because they are effectively attempting an economic invasion and occupation of Europe already and this is just more grist for the mill as far as they are concerned. They revel in dictating terms for the Greek government when they simply authorise billions of pounds from other people's pockets to bail out the Greek economy. They have effectively bought Greece and they are in the process of doing it with Portugal and Spain.

The irony of the terms imposed on Greece by Germany is that it is German political philosophy that they are prescribing. The whole idea that austerity measures can work is a joke. Well actually that is not true. We have to figure out a lot more about the convoluted way of thinking and expressing views to get a grip on this. But it is related to the Freudian notion of projection. Irony strikes again as Freud was a German but, of course, he was also a Jew.

Projection is the process of an ego rejecting a perception by externalising it onto other people or psyches. To say that austerity measures work may well be true, for the Germans, because if Greece suffers and collapses the Germans have one more victim to use and abuse for their own benefit. It works. But it does not work in the way the phrase implies and that is for the long term benefit of the Greeks. Well, yet again that is perhaps true because behind the reference to the long term benefit for the Greeks is the notion that if they get up and are in some way "equal" to Germany then there is the veiled threat from Germany that it will do them no good because Germany will simply knock them down. It is all based in the competitive paradigm that life is a battle and the strongest survives (and precisely not the rest).

When George Orwell coined the phrase doublespeak I suspect he was only half way to the terrible truth. The truth is that people endlessly manufacture this kind of communication without realising they are doing it. It is based in what I call inside-out people. People have a model of the world in their heads and compare this with the information coming in from outside. For people who are the right way when they experience a discrepancy between the two they adjust the model in their head to more accurately reflect the information from outside. People who are "inside out" think that the model in their head is reality (like children assume they are simply perceiving things as they are) and if there is a discrepancy they assume there is something wrong "out there". This leads to a judgemental, negative and authoritarian attitude. So from the German's point of view (given the philosophical paradigm is inside out) it is successful for the Greeks to suffer severe austerity measures. No amount of research, investigation or evidence will alter this perception because anything that doesn't bolster their own view is simply wrong.

Barack Obama seeks Nick Griffin at BNP rally.

2011-05-26T07:24:00.000+01:00

And why should the title and picture have anything to do with the content. This is politics!

The Patriot Act

It is actually the USA PATRIOT Act and stands for (can you believe the fun and games these people entertain) Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. What a lot of fun. I bet those guys are good at crosswords. So why piss about with a very serious subject like this. It is because to call it what it is would be too obvious and revealing. It is Increased Detection Intended to Oppose Terrorism by Legally Authorised Waffle. Oops that acronymizes to IDIOT LAW. What the IDIOT LAW does is to increase powers by law enforcement agencies to detain, deport, and spy on anyone. Admittedly it is qualified by saying anyone suspected of "terrorism-related acts". Wanking? Maybe. Millions of little half people are destroyed and with the perverse justification given by legal beagles it is not too far-fetched to imagine they could construct a convoluted obfuscation of intellectual spaghetti to justify that one. When they vote on whether to extend the Patriot Act for another four years they are expected to vote on it without being able to examine it because, for security reasons you understand, some of it remains secret. Now that really is democracy working well. I'm not too bothered about this because bullies will be bullies and there is little in the short term you can do about that but what does worry me is that lovely man Barack Obama. He is so nice. He is so good looking, so fit, so suave and sophisticated, intelligent, charming and, damn it, he's also of Irish decent!

I listened to his speech at to the UK Parliament at Westminster Hall and I lapped up every word of it. 98% of it was thoroughly agreeable. The problem is, as we all know, liars, the best of them, are very hard to detect. And you are not going to become President of America if you are a crap liar. It's not that I am so cynical as to imagine that everything he says must be a lie but he, like so many politicians, says what he believes is the good stuff that other people, and even possibly himself, want to believe. But you cannot uphold freedom and democracy with clandestine phone tapping and voting on invisible laws. On the one hand they support, even promote whistle blowing but when someone does it to them they scream in rage that he should be assassinated. That's what I mean by lying.

I believe in free speech and you won't catch me booing and jeering at Nick Griffin. You don't find me going along with the hysterical applause at the killing of Osama bin Laden. I listen to what Nick Griffin has to say and give it some consideration. An awful lot of what he says is good stuff. A lot makes sense and a lot of it I don't happen to agree is a good approach to running a country. I listen to Obama and most of what he says makes sense. But it is not philosophically consistent and I don't happen to believe him on the grounds of the evidence so far. I listen to what the Pope says and read his speeches and his philosophy and I heartily agree with most of what he says but it is still bullshit because he doesn't believe it. He might wish it were true but that is where we depart. I believe all people are equal - he doesn't.

Spain is just another one.

2011-05-22T23:47:00.000+01:00

When I was at school I did not understand how Christian moralist teachers and the rest of them could tell children that pushing people around was immoral and to enforce compliance they would use corporal punishment. That along with other contradictory values, lying and threats (which is terrorism). It really did confuse me and I think I am still confused. Weird since I also think I can see what is going on. But this seems to be a far deeper problem. Let me see if I can put this briefly. I know I am in a trap but in spite of that I remain in it. So what do I have to do to unglue myself?

Having said that I am left looking at the world at large and I see the utter charade of the monitory system, the blatant farce of the democratic system, the overt contradictions over values like freedom of the press, the right to peacefully protest etc, and the current unsustainable course we are on.

Then there are the protests in Spain. I can't name all the other protests in America, Britain, France, Greece, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen but it is all part of the same thing in my view. I was watching a report on Al Jazeera about the protests in Spain and they provided a few sound bites from people in the protest. I can't recall the quotes verbatim but two which were interestingly both from women were effectively: "This is happening all over the world. It is a global revolution." and "I am not political this is a conscience issue. It is about how we want to live and where we want to get to."

I think the current model of leaders ruling by effective trickery and forceful control has to be over. I've said it before but failing that what else is there? There is no future this way. So it ends. The hope is that most of humanity can transform to a better more empathetic, supportive model of operation.

And do I care. Not so much now. I am in pain, depressed, and someone has bashed my car. I have no money to repair it and when it finally gives up that is it. I walk. Since my legs are failing me I don't see how I get to the "local" Tesco to carry the food back. Hopefully the process of starvation will put me in a trance like state of numbness so that I can die without too much distress. But I can't do that because my daughter needs me for a few years yet. So I remain so distressed I cannot sleep which is killing me. I told you I was in a trap. No amount of forcing myself to go for walks, cut down on the smoking, finding things to do, seems to slow down the relentless decline. And I have "armchair" studied psychology, counselling, sociology etc and I really do conclude that it is the result of my sociopathic father and his subservient hysterical vindictive wife.

Why am I taking this all the way from world affairs to a personal diatribe of misery? I guess because I see the world's population in the same trap. One might argue this is my subjective interpretation which could reasonably be called bias. I sit and wonder if it is bias or if it is resonant insight. I know it is not simply bias because I have always seen this dilemma. I know that when I have been out of this personal tar pit (that I slipped back into three years ago) things were looking better for me but I could still see the inherent catastrophe in the world. So I think I am just more bitter and angry than I might be if I weren't trapped myself.

Curiouser and curiouser!

2011-05-22T23:46:00.000+01:00

So there has been a significant attack on the military navy air base in Karachi by the Taliban. It is interesting that they are still calling them terrorists. I thought when soldiers attacked soldiers it was called war and that is all sanitized and decent civilised behaviour with rules and codes of conduct. It is not terrorism. It couldn't be terrorism or the US and the UK would simply be terrorists and that couldn't possibly be the case because they are committed to defeating terrorism wherever it exists.

I have a little thought going on in my head and it is about who knew about Osama living in Pakistan. Knowing how furtive and clandestine the US (and all other governments) are I wonder if Osama was "in hiding" by some agreement such that the "war" against terror could continue. I am wondering if the US didn't break that little agreement by killing him. For me this goes a long way to making more sense of all the different reactions from various countries especially Pakistan's reactions. Had they not known Osama was there I think they would have shown more signs of surprise and more acceptance that their allies had found him. Had they known he was there but be hiding that information from the US their reaction would have been a bit more ballistic. If they knew that he was there and that the US knew he was there and they were all keeping it a secret they would be stuck in an impossible dilemma. Surprise and agreement would have to be feigned and, er, um, anger at the transgression of sovereign territory would have to be feigned too. Of course the Taliban would be furious at the double crossing Americans and would thrash about knowing that the Pakistanis were fools to have believed the US enough to not have hidden him better. But, like all of us, the anger really reveals their anger at themselves. And the Americans. What about them? If they thought the Pakistani's seriously didn't know about this guy would they have popped in and killed him like that? Was the risk of Pakistan's reaction just a tad too great? It just doesn't feel right. But if they were treacherously ratting on the secret agreement then they would have confidence that Pakistan couldn't have a strong aggressive response. Because they are tainted with guilt too. Yes this is looking more plausible all the time. Hence Pakistan waving it's fist around in feigned anger by saying it won't tolerate anything like this again.

Chocolate

2011-05-22T11:30:00.000+01:00

You can buy chocolate on the internet from any of these places. I have munched my way through quite a lot of chocolate this morning. I couldn't sleep. That is very common. I got one hour of sleep. So I remembered I had some chocolate and wondered if it might help. It sometimes does. But it didn't. I just got fatter. That's a laugh. I am like a shriveled stick with veins. And they hurt. The veins that is. Which reminds me; Sam (the tree) is very ill. He's losing all his leaves. So I thought I would write more and more pages on the web site and on this blog if necessary mentioning chocolate in an attempt to get more traffic through my affiliate links to chocolate. Maybe this is a bit of over kill. I spoke to my father this morning. That corpse that moves. Well he started it. He said "Good morning" in his arrogant way. So I said, somewhat sarcastically "You're bright and cheerful this morning." "As I usually am." he replied. He's a bloody liar. Anyway I decided to pursue this a bit further. There was menace in my soul. "Do you believe in free will?" I asked. He had to ask what I meant. "You know: Free will. Like we have choices." "It depends what you mean." I am gasping with frustration at this point. But I continued and referred to the long standing philosophical quandary of free will and determinism. He said he didn't know what I was talking about. I will remind the reader that he is an arrogant pretentious pseudo-intellectual pillock of society. So I asked him if he knew what logic was. He said he'd heard of it but couldn't say exactly what it was. I wanted to hit him at this stage. Anyway I explained that the question of free will and determinism is basically whether we have free choice or is everything determined in a Newtonian clockwork cause-effect kind of way. "We are all products of our circumstances." he said. What a bastard. He is playing games. Effectively because I can't see it. He is moralistic and judgmental and Anglican. He is horribly condescending and sanctimonious. He is arrogant in the extreme. And now he says we are all products of our environment because if he admits we have choice he admits we have culpability and he knows I will blame him for his cruel behaviour. (In retaliation for all the blame and culpability he constantly heaps on me.) He might then get another mug of coffee all over his right wing newspaper. I am exaggerating my frustration because I am too exhausted to care really but he went on to say "I have been very lucky really." At this point I realise he is coming back with an attack. he goes on to say that if he hadn't been so lucky I wouldn't have existed. I had to point out that was really nice for him and not so nice for me. I left. That bastard. He acts all innocent to the point I almost believe he doesn't realise what he is doing. But the evidence is in my face. So I will have to plot something more devastating. Don't forget the chocolate :)

(You can buy love hearts too!)

<-- Read the message on the can! It's amazing how many people miss it :(

Children Services Abuse

2011-05-19T06:30:00.000+01:00

We get our allotted time on this planet and I have had way more than half of mine. I feel as if I am in the early evening of my life although I am so exhausted I might just fall asleep a bit early. On reflection I see a strange convoluted feedback entanglement of intercommunication between humans. Oppression! It may just be my bag but the likes of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest all illustrate an undercurrent in the human psyche which disturbs me.

I was brought up on a diet of deception and lies, emotional manipulation and brutality. I really struggled to understand it and my overall conclusion is that when humans are abused it screws up their ability to perceive reality correctly (or at least functionally successfully). There is a lovely book called Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart which does an incredible job of almost inducing a paradigm shift as you read it. But primarily it indicates on an intellectual level the convolutions of our cultural perception. It is a must read for the thinking/feeling human. Then there is the extensive research and insight provided by Arthur Janov in his book The Biology of Love which illustrates that what we call emotions and thoughts are all driven by the underlying biology. So mess with the underlying biology of the neurological system and it is messed up. It doesn't work at its best.

There is also a lovely book by Dr Seuss that has been turned into an equally lovely film called Horton Hears A Who! where Horton repeatedly asserts that "a person's a person, no matter how small".

Whether there is a moral angle to this or not is not my concern but humanity has the capacity to mimic what it is like to be another person. Oppression rather perverts that and although people want to appear as if they are thinking about the other they are doing it out of the need to survive other people's moral judgement and the consequence is a kind of inside out-ness. They think they are talking about the other and they sound as if they are talking about the other but they are really talking about themselves. All of that is for another dissertation but the point of this post is to raise the issue of abuse.

Abuse is abuse no matter how small.

By ignoring, belittling, dismissing or even tolerating abuse it cascades. Like the slag heap collapse at Aberfan in 1966. The slag is constantly slipping. Thousands of little slips, hundreds of bigger chains of slippage until eventually one tiny slip triggers another which triggers another and the whole slag heap comes down in a torrent of death and destruction smothering the school and killing 116 children.

Every time a teacher is abusive to a child it is part of the bigger groundswell. All abuse is abuse no matter how small. My friend Dave (you know - that friend of a friend), a single parent, and his only daughter have had a tough time of things for many years. Their life is a wreck because of other people's abuse. Just because his wonderful daughter became ill with appendicitis a cascade of abuse was set in motion and the effect on them was far worse than it might have been because they were already weakened by years of abuse. It could be called the last straw. But Dave has had enough and he has decided to make a mountain out of this mole hill (because it is all part of the mountain) and he wants to expose the dreadful behaviour of the Children Services and their part in this cascading abuse that is our culture.

In themselves the manipulation, the prejudice, the lies, intimidation and abuse by the Children Services might be small compared with the security forces in Libya but to Dave and his daughter they are significant and damaging. The only way to stop the disasters of abuse across the globe is to stop all abuse when it is still nugget sized and manageable.

Toxic Drums has decided to host, a duly redacted (nice fashionable phrase), account of this encounter with the Children Services under the title "Children Services Abuse". Some of it is very detailed and indulgent but sometimes needs to be in order to dissect the minutia of what is going wrong. Some of it is more entertaining, harsh or even amusing in places like the angry letter to the Manager or the damning letter to the complaints department. The introduction is a good place to get the gist of what this is about.

Although the dates and names and places are all falsified (for the time being) they are consistent and the situation is currently evolving. Of course it will be kept up to date with each new evolution of events. What I would appreciate is any viral spread of this article. Post it, Facebook it, Twitter it, just link to it. I want it to get to the right people and to find the people who are also concerned with this subject either in particular or in general. I want to make a noise and to seriously ruffle someone's feathers. I am angry!

I welcome any kind comments, criticisms or contacts with reciprocal love and warmth but unkind remarks will be returned like shattered glass through cyberspace to slice your virtual jugular.

Please keep in touch ;)

Integrated Children's System (ICS

2011-05-18T15:24:00.000+01:00

The Integrated Children's System (ICS) is a piece of information technology (IT) developed to assist in the social welfare of children in the UK. It is a great idea and a great fiasco but it is still in place. A government report deemed the system "not fit for purpose" in 2008. Either on a common sense level or on a scientific interpersonal neurobiological level it is a malicious and dangerous piece of sprawling technology which only benefits Social Workers, the police, other quangos and of course the elite software development entrepreneurs. Read more at Toxic Drums ICS.
(God that was boring!)

You just broke your child. Congratulations

2011-05-16T15:27:00.000+01:00

I just don't know how to put it all together. I keep finding these really important things and I don't know where to put them. I want to write a web site as big as the internet but I can't. I want to organise it so that it begins to make sense but I can't. I used to be organised but fate or fortune has shattered and decimated my life and now I live in a mess that I can't believe. Some time ago a really nice person sent me the following link. I kept it thinking I'd do something with it when I got organised. I'm not organised so here it is in the middle of nowhere. But then maybe that is where we are. The Middle of nowhere. Where is that anyway?

The link: You just broke your child. Congratulations.

The link is to Single Dad Laughing. Single Dad Laughing is Dan's blog. Dan is Noah's dad. His sentiments are very aligned with mine. He just seems to have achieved more and I applaud him. But what is so important for me is that I wonder, like Dan, why more people don't seem to get it. I feel small and broken but look out world when I get big again!

Jesse Ventura

2011-05-14T18:25:00.000+01:00

Respectable, strong, charismatic, intelligent, wrestler, actor, politician and conspiracy theorist.

Jesse Ventura is a person worth knowing. Formally one of those cuddly seals (the US navy ones that don't easily get clubbed to death) this guy is most famous perhaps for his professional wrestling persona Jesse "The Body" Ventura. He went on to act in films, write books, be Mayor of Brooklyn Park, Governor of Minnesota and is now involved in the vague Conspiracy Theorist stuff. I say vague because a lot of it is guff, some of it is double bluff by authorities and underneath it all are some very serious questions that need answers. More about him on Toxic Drums along with other interesting people.

HAARP is a very secret and potentially devastating project by the US government. This is Jesse's take on it:

Where to put your iPad

2011-05-14T06:39:00.001+01:00

Given that the Apple brand has recently topped the brand value charts at about $153 billion it is nice to reflect on places you can keep your $153 billion worth of brand. I was writing a page about Jesse Ventura (which might appear on Toxic Drums web site soon) when I was nonchalantly browsing my alternate personalities on facebook and I came across this video. It is sweet, delicious, and pure nectar from heaven. Thank you Allah for making such treasures for us here on Earth. P.S. Allah, could you let people know that you don't really exist. I think you and God could have a little get together and perhaps take your iPad from your favourite place and do us all a favour. It's about time. Enjoy!

This little blog is dedicated to Aimee Bowen of TALK TØ ANIMALS because I think she'll like it.

Colonel Gaddafi talks from the grave.

2011-05-13T20:50:00.000+01:00

What a prat! Sorry I didn't mean to say that. I am supposed to be a serious and respectable commentator on world events. The right honourable, worshipful, Muamamamamamar Gaddafi (what is that name anyway it sounds like a cow giving birth) has made a very short audio tape to assure folk that he is alive and well. (See Gaddafi Taunts NATO in Audio Recording.) He says he is in a place where they can't kill him and lives in the hearts of millions. Sounds dead to me. He always was dead from the neck up maybe he's talking from the other orifice available to him. Like the shirt though.

Fukushima Melts (again)

2011-05-13T19:03:00.001+01:00

"Fukushima Melt" A delicious new chocolate that doesn't melt in the mouth. This chocolate melts in the box before you even open it. A new nuclear powered chocolate that will melt through the bottom of the box and any flimsy shelving and will creep across the floor and deliver the chocolate to wherever you least want it. This modern advanced chocolate is the result of research done in the Fukushima plant in Japan. Leading the world in nuclear derivatives Fukushima is also famous for its tsunami milk shakes and earthquake jelly.

That was the fictitious bit but you can buy delicious chocolates from Melt in the UK, the Chocolate Trading Company in the UK and Europe and even Vosges Haut-Chocolat in the US. Or check out Toxic Drums extensive array of places to buy sweets and chocolates around the world at the Chocolate, Sweets and Candy page.

Now for the serious bit...

The disaster at Fukushima continues to get worse. Now it is reported that the fuel rods in reactor three have melted causing serious leakage of highly radioactive water. Although this disaster is dreadful in itself my concern is that these kinds of things are entirely predictable given the culture of competition and greed that is drowning the world. Ever since I was a child I couldn't understand the contradictory messages from the authorities. When I was a child it was my parents and the teachers. It was often put down to me being silly or fussing about little things that don't matter. But what I couldn't understand then and I still don't understand now is why, for example, our government can say one thing and be doing something entirely different and the debate distracts anyone from actually being responsible and doing something about it.

There is a view that it is not the thing that you do that is wrong but rather it is getting caught that is wrong. With our punitive culture this is necessarily the result. Being found out causes bad consequences to you and not being found out doesn't. It is so obvious that I wonder about the sentient capacity of humanity. Bullying is regarded as not acceptable in schools and yet they attempt to eradicate it by the teachers bullying instead. What a ridiculously stupid thing to be doing.

There is a really simple and obvious solution to bullying. Pay attention to both parties. Give these new(ish) humans some serious respect. Pay attention to them, listen to their view. Don't do the very thing you object to but do the thing you pretend to know is right. Don't try to judge and condemn and punish. This is so evidently non-productive it is laughable. I had the intuition when I was young, I have the personal experience now and there is also an abundance of research to prove it. Stop this ridiculous punitive bullshit and start believing in humanity. If making mistakes is such a bad thing the people who succeed in our culture are the ones who make the least mistakes. This is so backward and self-destructive. This is not creative. This can only lead to the people with the most influence being the least connected and sensitive humans available. This applies to politics, science, industry and business. If the focus of attention is on not getting caught making a mistake then the focus of attention is not on doing things creatively and well. Of course there will be some limited temporary benefits. But like beating a donkey, it works to start with but soon all you have is a corpse.

The emperor is not actually wearing any clothes. For God's sake wake up humanity.

Fukushima melts

2011-05-12T18:51:00.000+01:00

"Fukushima Melt" A delicious new chocolate that doesn't melt in the mouth. This chocolate melts in the box before you even open it. A new nuclear powered chocolate that will melt through the bottom of the box and any flimsy shelving and will creep across the floor and deliver the chocolate to wherever you least want it. This modern advanced chocolate is the result of research done in the Fukushima plant in Japan. Leading the world in nuclear derivatives Fukushima is also famous for its tsunami milk shakes and earthquake jelly.

That was the fictitious bit but you can buy delicious chocolates from Melt in the UK, The Chocolate Trading Company in the UK and Europe and even Vosges Haut-Chocolat in the US. Or check out Toxic Drums extensive array of places to buy sweets and chocolates around the world at the Chocolate, Sweets and Candy page.

Now for the serious bit...

The disaster at Fukushima continues to get worse. Now it is reported that the fuel rods in one reactor have melted causing serious leakage of highly radioactive water. Although this disaster is dreadful in itself my concern is that these kinds of things are entirely predictable given the culture of competition and greed that is drowning the world. Ever since I was a child I couldn't understand the contradictory messages from the authorities. When I was a child it was my parents and the teachers. It was often put down to me being silly or fussing about little things that don't matter. But what I couldn't understand then and I still don't understand now is why, for example, our government can say one thing and be doing something entirely different and the debate distracts anyone from actually being responsible and doing something about it.

There is a view that it is not the thing that you do that is wrong but rather it is getting caught that is wrong. With our punitive culture this is necessarily the result. Being found out causes bad consequences to you and not being found out doesn't. It is so obvious that I wonder about the sentient capacity of humanity. Bullying is regarded as not acceptable in schools and yet they attempt to eradicate it by the teachers bullying instead. What a ridiculously stupid thing to be doing.

There is a really simple and obvious solution to bullying. Pay attention to both parties. Give these new(ish) humans some serious respect. Pay attention to them, listen to their view. Don't do the very thing you object to but do the thing you pretend to know is right. Don't try to judge and condemn and punish. This is so evidently non-productive it is laughable. I had the intuition when I was young, I have the personal experience now and there is also an abundance of research to prove it. Stop this ridiculous punitive bullshit and start believing in humanity. If making mistakes is such a bad thing the people who succeed in our culture are the ones who make the least mistakes. This is so backward and self-destructive. This is not creative. This can only lead to the people with the most influence being the least connected and sensitive humans available. This applies to politics, science, industry and business. If the focus of attention is on not getting caught making a mistake then the focus of attention is not on doing things creatively and well. Of course there will be some limited temporary benefits. But like beating a donkey, it works to start with but soon all you have is a corpse.

The emperor is not actually wearing any clothes. For God's sake wake up humanity.

Bloody blogging

2011-05-09T17:39:00.001+01:00

My life is so random I couldn't make it consistent if I tried. What is consistency anyway? Dada. I found an interesting band called TALK TØ ANIMALS http://talktoanimals.bandcamp.com/ through some serendipitous connection on the internet and liked the stuff. It is psycho pop industrial candy pepper. What? You want official genres? I would say "Fuck off" but I don't swear on my blog in case the morality police come and torture me and sever my intravenous internet connection. I have also spent the last hour listening to Pere Ubu at http://ubuprojex.net/ it's good. That is a short blog.

My Brother the Islamist

2011-05-06T15:51:00.002+01:00

"My Brother the Islamist" is a documentary made by Rob Leech in 2010 about his stepbrother. His step brother who was called Rich converted to Islam, under the now infamous Anjem Choudary, and took the name Salahuddin.

General opinion of the film: It is worth watching. It is thought provoking and entertaining. Quite funny in parts and quite scary in others. It's what I call factional fict. Or was that fictional fact. It is about factual people who have fictional ideas that they think are factual and fictionalise fact and factualise fiction.

It's a weird film because it is presented by a softly spoken 'normal' English guy and he presents the weirdness and anomalies of his step brother as if this is Islam. By the end of the film I imagine a lot of people will think that the prejudices that abound about Islam are reasonable. This is perhaps a little prejudicial itself. On watching the film and hearing the announcements of Salahuddin my reaction was to do a bit of investigating. He claims, for example, that "The worst of the Muslims is better than the best of the Kafir (or Kuffar). That is a fact. That's why the Kafir will burn in hell for eternity." Well this sounds a little severe since Kafir is a term which in common usage suggests any non-Muslim. However it actually refers to any non monotheists. So Christians and Jews are not Kafir. It is said to be a non-pejorative word. In that case, given that we are all at liberty to hold our own beliefs, it seems reasonable that he is expressing the view that, translated into Christian terms, is simply saying that Jesus is the only way to heaven. if you don't believe in God you can't go to heaven. As far as I am concerned these things are perfectly fine analogies for discussing one's understanding of the dynamics of life. But taken literally they are arbitrary nonsense. There is no God. There is no heaven. These are not demonstrable realities they are inventions by humans to try to explain their experience. The problems only begin to arise when some people not only think they are real but need to get other people to agree with them as if to confirm their belief. Now taking what Salahuddin actually said it appears to me that he is simply a psychological disaster. He is insecure and needs to condemn other people to make himself feel okay. It is clear that whatever "literal" justification or excuses can be made for his remarks that he was actually just being offensive to anyone who doesn't agree with him. He has sold out because in order to feel secure he has ascribed to someone else's dogma. Now he goes around like a foot soldier with a sense of identity and a courage born of a perceived higher power than himself. He's okay. And all these other Kafir are not. Personally I wouldn't stop him saying the stuff that he says but I do disagree with him and I think he attempts to foster negative feelings in other people. My response to him is that he is a poor broken boy who has grown up and got mad. (I blame the parents.) He is arrogant, sanctimonious, judgemental and a bit of a control freak. So what? You get those types in all religions. What has that got to do with Islam. During the violent and tragic troubles in Libya at the moment there are thousands of Libyans escaping to Tunisia. The Tunisians are taking these people into their houses and looking after them. These are mostly Muslims. I doubt you would see this level of personal kindness in many Christian countries. It is not about the religion it is about people. I dislike all religions because the proverbial crap floats to the top. Salahuddin is, in my opinion, a misguided and prejudicial character. His views are only expressed through his beliefs they are not the defining beliefs of Muslims. On that basis I think the film is possibly as guilty of propagating prejudice as it tries to suggest Islam is.

My own view, for what it is worth, is that all Abrahamic religions are an abdication of responsibility and result in the very opposite of what they profess to believe in. I find them appalling aberrations of what could otherwise be sensitive, insightful, powerful, creative and beautiful sentient life in the universe. They fictionalise goodness and expel it from reality. They, in words from the Bhagavad Gita, made famous by Oppenheimer, "have become death and the destroyer of worlds". So don't get me wrong I do not like Islam. I don't like Christianity and I don't like Judaism. I am clear about that. It doesn't mean that a lot of people who in my opinion mistakenly think they believe in these religions aren't very kind, loving people.

This film however is a little insidious in the way it tries to define Islam by looking at the worst of Salahuddin. It polarises and engenders fear and hatred. But it does it less openly than its opponent. Doing the Toxic Drums psychoanalysis and visionary divination to predict the future I will say that you can expect to see a lot more of the tragic case of Salahuddin as he becomes more emboldened and compulsively addicted to his own fame. He is in effect creating his own glorious end.

I would like to add that I have nothing personal against Salahuddin (cough cough - sorry I have a frog in my throat) but I did find it amusing that he was walking down a street in Weymouth in the summer complaining about random people saying "You see the culture has become even more homosexual ... you see young men dressed like women or whatever nowadays." and he is wearing a dress. He can't even make his mind up because under his dress he is wearing trousers. Since we are apparently comfortable stereotyping all and sundry willy-nilly that makes me wonder about him.

Gosh I am outspoken. Get back in yer box Sam.

What was Obama watching in the Situation room?

2011-05-06T04:04:00.000+01:00

Here is the now famous picture of President Barack Hussein Obama II in the Situation Room of the White House on 1 May 2011 watching the live action film of the US Navy Seals assault on Osama bin Laden's residence in Pakistan. Apparently the Seals had web cams strapped to their heads and live images were relayed back to the Whitehouse so that Obama could watch Osama killed in real time. Also present at this historic and momentous occasion were Vice President Joe Biden, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (burping after too much coke), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Counter-Terrorism chief John Brennan.

Toxic drums has irrefutable evidence and indeed undeniable proof that this is a sham. Toxic Drums has used its advanced cyber enhancement applications to reveal the true content of the video. By enlarging and re-rendering the reflections in various objects around the room exclusive images of what they were really watching have been uncovered.

It transpires they were actually watching a pirated version of V For Vendetta directed by James McTeigue and starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman.

Below is one frame taken from an enlarged and enhanced reflection from President Obama's left eye. It clearly shows a reflection of V in his tell-tale Guy Fawkes mask made even more famous by the internet meme Anonymous. Anonymous are perhaps best known for their involvement in the cyber attacks, known as Operation Payback, on the terrorist groups Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa when they tried to silence the WikiLeaks voice of freedom back in December 2010.

You can clearly see the truth for yourself and we have no reason here to make up fictitious stories to fool the public. There is no underlying agenda like making money from Google Ads. We are not in the business of treating the public as saps, goofs or gullible idiots. We respect our visitors and would not lie to them on moral grounds as well as the fact that we have no hidden agenda. It is really really true. President Obama and Hilary Clinton were watching V For Vendetta and you heard it first on Toxic Drums. We also have pictures proving that they had pizza before the film but we are not going to reveal those because it might offend gnomes and anyway we have chucked the evidence in the fish tank out of respect. We are now going to invade Iran. Woops - Did I type that out loud? Was the keyboard on?

A fishy end to the bin Laden saga.

2011-05-05T03:30:00.000+01:00

Fish

Buy From Art.com

Obama says "We had done extensive DNA tests and were sure this was Osama bin Laden. " This is going from bad to worse. The more utter bull-s#!t they spew out in their attempt to cover one lie up with another is getting ridiculous. I sometimes despair at humanity. Why? Because I am one and I know how easily we are fooled. But please, Jo Public, don't "believe" this stuff just because you don't have an alternative explanation. This stuff coming from the US about the alleged killing of bin Laden is insubstantial, unverifiable, contradictory and hardly feasible. History clearly indicates that these kinds of events are rarely what they are purported to be at the time. Why does the American Administration rely (sadly with some substantial evidence) on the gullibility of the people of the world?

They claim to have flown into Pakistan un-challenged, attacked a building right next door to the main Pakistan military academy, shot a few people including Osama who was armed (and then in another report was not armed) and they flew off with the body, dumped it in the sea with respect for Islamic beliefs (eh?) and are sure it was him because they did DNA tests. Where and when did they get these tests done?

What I see is a bunch of powerful individuals concocting a scenario which suits their agenda. For me it is irrelevant whether bin Laden was in that house and whether they killed him or not. What is clear is that they are not being honest. This is a concoction full of contradictions and fudges. Given our observation of history it is clear what is going on. This is a stage show and the question should be "why?". Why are they doing this. What are they up to? I have some experience of pathological liars and the truth is floating like an invisible ether in the projection of the deception. I can't see it because it is complex and I am not a political animal. Actually I hate all these political manoeuvrings. My only reason for being interested is because I am stuck in an attic, ill and watching all this bad behaviour on my computer. I am close to destitute because of bad behaviour of other human beings. It makes me mad to see how acceptable it appears to be to the common folk. So many people just swallow it whole because they are caught up in the slavery of consumerism and oppression. So long as they believe the projected reality they don't get troubled at work and they get to take their wages home to feather their own measly nest with reality shows, trash and political magic shows to distract them from the pain.

I've said things like this before and I'll say it again; this is a fiction being fed to the population. I don't know what they think they are doing but two things are sure: We will discover it was a lie in the end, and we will discover that it conveniently justified some otherwise unjustifiable action in the future. I am waiting to see if this ultimately leads to an attack on Iran. Why? I don't know. But they wanted to get into Afghanistan and Iraq and then Iran. That was a plan before they started putting pressure on Afghanistan (previously their friends) and instigated the alliance between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Funny how soon after that the World Trade Center came down and if you didn't know otherwise you wouldn't understand. When the World Trade Center towers were attacked in an unbelievable sequence of events that were clearly interruptible it was odd how blind eyes and confusion appeared all over the place and the planes crashed into the towers. Almost before the towers came down it was apparently obviously the work of Osama bin Laden. It didn't take long for that to turn into an excuse to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

They claim they won't show images because they don't want to fuel propaganda and retaliation. That is simply rubbish. If it suited them otherwise they would say that they wanted to set an example or to quash suggestions that it was not true. It is as if they are suggesting that they are pandering to the enemies feelings. It is counter to their professed stance on these matters.

It appears that the bin Laden story has come to a very fishy end.

Vote YES to Alternative Voting

2011-05-04T16:28:00.000+01:00

Politics evolves. It has to if you want a better life. If you reckon living under our supposed democratic system is better than living under a dictatorship then keep it powered by voting. It has become increasingly clear that our system of democracy has some significant flaws. I frequently hear people expressing the view that they don't want to vote because they are only really given the choice to vote for one of two parties where they don't agree with either. It is a complicated issue which involves money, publicity, power and influence. But there is no doubt that to get a better representation of what the collective population think is an improvement.

There are arguments that people who vote for extreme parties are extreme and it is not helpful to add weight to their second choice. But this is the wrong way of thinking about it. The point is that if the reality is that a large percentage of people are left wing and a few are right wing then to ignore or eliminate the legitimate views of the right wing can only be unjust and lead to a perceived need to be more extreme by the right wing. Our current system polarises and causes dissent and extremism. We are in danger of going down the road that only "acceptable" views are tolerated. But democracy has as a fundamental ideal that everyone's views matter. It is important to temper policies according to the collective views of all of the population. First past the post politics leads to division and intolerance.

The Alternative Vote system is far from perfect but it is a definite improvement on the current one.

If the country votes to keep the current system the result will be that the "NO" to AV side will consider the question of electoral reform dead and we are stuck in a system that will not bring good fortune and evolution in the long run. If the "YES" to AV side wins there will be no doubt in politician's minds that the country wants electoral reforms and there will be added impetus to continue improving the way our democracy works.

The current system encourages lies and deception. As Tony Blair said in his pre election speech back in 1997 "We know we are right so we will say whatever it takes to get into power." That might be paraphrasing him but I recall being shocked at the implications. When the fight is between two parties then it is about winning and not about policies and responding to the public's views. When politicians are faced with the very real prospect that they might not get into power simply because they belong to the strongest party of two they become more receptive to the collective views of their constituencies. Politicians are forced to become more responsible and representative.

There are emotive arguments put forward in favour of saying NO to AV. There are fear mongers suggesting things could be worse. But there are very little rational and sensible arguments put forward. It appears that the thinking people are fully aware that AV is a step in the right direction.

DO NOT LET THIS OPPORTUNITY PASS by havering (not a word but it sounds right - I suspect it is a merger of hesitating and wavering). SAY YES TO AV because we must have change to stop this Orwellian decline into authoritarian control by deception. Moderates and extremists alike will benefit from a more representative voting system. Next on the agenda is proportional voting but let's take it one step at a time.

I can't really emphasise strongly enough that we don't want this opportunity to pass because the British public are getting lethargic and uninterested in politics because they don't feel their voice is heard anyway. If you want your views taken into account and to have more effect then you simply must vote YES to Alternative Voting.

There is no alternative to voting YES to Alternative Voting. Alternatively you might take the alternative route and vote no and leave the future with no alternative but the current decline into no alternative politics. Got that?

VOTE YES

Thank you and goodnight.