A day in the life

So what sort of a day has it been for you?  Who me?  Yes; You!

I went to bed at about three in the morning and my little heart would not stop pounding.  Unfortunately it was not because I had some beautiful nubile lying next to me but because there is something wrong with my physical manifestation in this world we imagine is reality.  I know what is wrong but knowing what is wrong doesn't mean I know everything.  What is wrong is too many years of intolerable stress.  My body is finally giving way.

I am a little mystified that people can dismiss anxiety as an emotional condition without realising it is a physical condition.  The general view of the medical profession is that there is a difference between physical illnesses and mental illnesses.  That is not unreasonable because we are masters at the art of differentiating things.  It can be useful to recognise the stock on the railway as engines and carriages.  But the problem arises when the medical profession get in the engine instead of the carriages - no - that is not what I meant to say.  The problem arises when the medical profession treat the two conditions as if they are unrelated aspects of the body.  The sickening irony is that we all know that emotions have physical correlates.  It is well documented that, like smoking is statistically bad for your health, so too is stress.  But because of the differences in the consequences of stress across the population no one seems to attribute any actual cause/effect relationship between heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and a number of other common consequences to any particular stress or anxiety.  They talk about these things as if they are disabling in so far as they prevent people working efficiently or enjoying life but they don't connect the physical damage in the system to the emotional state.  I really don't know how they do it because it is so obvious.  Children actually understand this better than adults.  When you upset a child it hurts them and they recognise that as the same type of feeling they get when they fall over and bang their knee.  But for some reason by the time folk are into their second decade of life they begin to separate the two types of pain and give valid credence to one and invalid credence to the other.  Of course the more intelligent people understand that emotions are utterly important.

But to keep things simple I did not feel well and it is because my body is collapsing under the strain.  But I eventually fell asleep, in spite of my heart trying to break out of my chest, only to awake two hours later with a tightening pain in my middle.  It feels like my lungs are burning and my xiphoid process is about to explode.  What was that?  Your xiphoid process?  What's that?  Well thanks to the internet I have just found out.  I have wondered for years why that knobbly bit at the bottom of my sternum has varying qualities.  Sometimes it is larger and firmer and other times it is soft and almost seems not to exist.  Sometimes it doesn't mind being touched or lightly pressed and other times if feels as if it would explode if you pressed it too hard.  I am still wondering why it has all these varying qualities but that aside it appears to be called the xiphoid process.  On reading about it on Wikipedia and finding out that a condition called Xiphoidalgia exists which causes a lot of the symptoms that I experience the hypochondriac in me glances from side to side and wonders if, in fact, I am suffering from Xiphoidalgia but that the doctors have neither the experience nor the wit to diagnose it correctly.

So there I was, anyway, at five in the morning feeling weird and not well.  I lay there hoping the pain would subside but it seemed to be getting progressively worse.  My legs were very painful too and to describe what they felt like is hard.  If you filled them with glue and wrapped them tightly in warm cloth that might get some way to describe it.  Eventually I thought struggling out of bed and walking around might help.  I did that and things still got slowly worse.  I decided it was not serious enough to call the emergency service but I determined to phone the doctor as soon as the surgery opened in the hope of getting an appointment today.  Well I fell asleep waiting but I did get to phone them quite early and got an appointment.

It was a new doctor - new to me that is - and he was very interested in all my symptoms.  He wondered what might be wrong and suggested a gastro-intestinal endoscopy, a ultrasound scan for gallstones and other stuff, a stool sample to test for Helicobacter pylori and a 24 hour heart monitor.  I did explain that some money and a safe place to live would help but unfortunately I can't get that on the NHS.  In fact, it appears, I can't get that in Britain.

So I returned home - if one can call it home - and lay down to see if I might recover.  I was very tired but the anxiety makes sleeping almost impossible sometimes.  The next thing to do was to take my daughter to see the Gruppenführer at the SS or, as it is euphemistically called now, the Department of Work and Pensions or DWP.  We did attend an examination at the sorting shed or medical centre as they like to call it.  There is nothing 'medical' about it at all.  It is administered by an organisation called ATOS and is an abomination.

They basically shovel people into work related activities that highly trained medical doctors have deemed too ill to work.  It is too complicated to describe the insidious way it works but it is disgusting.  If you are interested there are several campaigns against this inhumanity for example the Black Triangle Campaign and there is a petition on the governments own web site by Christopher Gare "To Investigate the DWP and connected MPs for corporate manslaughter. In relation to the WCA & Atos Healthcare".  It goes on to point out "We have seen deaths rise of people on sickness benefit from 310 in 2010 to 10,600 in 9 months of 2011."  The petition is open until 1 November 2013.  But enough of that - we are living in a declining civilisation and anyone who doesn't understand that is part of the problem.  Oops I'm getting all emotional - that'll probably kill me.  We went and did that and the lady we saw was remarkably nice for a Gruppenführer.  But the information she gave us was clearly oppressive, manipulative and inhumane but we weren't there to object just to get [daughter] in and out as quickly and as hassle free as possible.

So we came out with too much information to digest and a few leaflets and headed home dropping my sample off at the doctors.  Now you may not want to hear that bit but documenting life means documenting all of it including the less desirable bits.

Martin also sent me a message on BuckFace "Aah - but is Pigs Harlequins Chip Potato Shop in the list - particularly their seminal work Pigs Fry Up." to which I replied "Oddly no. Neither was their best album Pigs Fly Satanic Detritus to Rome."

IF - Auschwitz & UAS

So why are 1 in 8 of us living with the pain of hunger?  1 in 8 - is that all?  I think someone is messing with the figures.  Of course 'the pain of hunger' is a consequence of deprivation and poverty.  The effects of poverty are far more than 'the pain of hunger'.  Poverty disables people not only in body but in mind and spirit as well.

Unfortunately most of us tolerate the most fundamental evils in this world for our own comfort and convenience.  Most of us live our day to day lives allowing the voices of our culture, the journalists, the teachers the lawyers and politicians to spout such overtly contradictory nonsense because we would be devastatingly abused if we objected.  It becomes a compulsion, an irrational need.  In fact it can be compared to the apparent stupidity of drug addiction or the abused wife clinging on to her abusive husband.  Why do we allow this nonsense;  And non-sense is exactly what it is!

Survival!  That is what it seems to be about.  We need to survive because that is what we are doing as children.  We learn to live in the contradictory environment of our childhood.  We all know that most of the teachers and parents spouted contradictory nonsense but we think that was because it was 'in our interest'.  I have heard too often people justifying the nonsense spoken by teachers in particular.  How, exactly, was it 'in our interest'?  The presented imagined case is that there is no other way.  One can dream up any number of examples;  A child reports that someone has hit them.  "Don't tell tales."  The child explains that the teacher's instructions are contradictory.  "Don't get clever!"  Another classic is the one that goes "This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you."  And the case of the teacher getting angry and threatening the child commanding that they stop bullying.

If the authorities actually made an effort to be logical and reasonable and consistent they would learn and the situation would improve.  So why don't they?  Because they believe they have no choice.  "If I didn't discipline the children they would run amok."  The only reason the children would 'misbehave' is because they have been denied the opportunity to learn how to behave.  They have been beaten, intimidated or threatened in some other way to do what they are told.  The real lesson they learn is that telling other people how to behave is the way to get on.  And they spend a large part of the rest of their lives doing just that and thinking that if you don't 'teach' children the difference between right and wrong they simply wouldn't know.

We are all in this soup.  The really frightening thing is that the most powerful and influential cultures on the planet are causing so much harm it is almost incomprehensible.  Paradoxically it is those very cultures which are advancing our understanding of human psychology and healthy emotional living.  But the pain continues.  It seems quite urgent to me that things change very quickly.  But bringing up generations of humans in a healthy emotional environment seems to require that the 'adults' already here are emotionally healthy and that is clearly not the case.

What set me off on this train of thought was the IF campaign.  They have launched with this video called "Enough Food For Everyone IF"



It suggests:
IF we stop poor farmers being forced off their land and use crops to feed humans not cars,
IF we give enough aid to stop children dying of hunger and help the world's poorest feed themselves,
IF governments stop big companies dodging tax in poor countries,
IF we force governments & companies to be honest and open about their actions that stop people getting enough food...

That we could end hunger on the planet.  Unfortunately that, wonderful though it is, is naive in the extreme.  You cannot 'force' people, companies or governments to be 'good'.  We simply have the wrong paradigm.  Look at the WikiLeaks affair.  The only changes likely to come about from the ideas of this IF campaign are that the governments, companies and individuals will learn how to lie better and present their (self serving) case as being in line with the ideals.

You cannot 'force' people to live in peace and harmony.  Force, as such, IS the problem.  We have to 'allow' governments and companies to do the right thing.  We have to stop the punitive attitude.  We have to devise ways whereby it is advantageous and profitable to do the right thing.  Charities are an abomination.  That we have to make special concessions to allow people to be helpful is a damning indicator of the kind of culture we have developed.  It should be profitable to look after other people.  In fact it IS profitable to look after other people by nature but we have created a culture to warp and abuse that very natural state of affairs.  What it really boils down to is that we must really do the right thing in spite of the fact that it is not always the easiest or the most 'profitable' thing for us just now.

These thoughts took me to the current controversial news item regarding David Ward (Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East) and his comments on his web site about the Israelis and the Palestinians.  What he said was:

"Having visited Auschwitz twice - once with my family and once with local schools - I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza."

Which is a reasonable, compassionate and accurate comment.  In fact it is the sort of truthful observation that we should all be making.  But he has been seriously reprimanded by his party for making such a statement.  Why?  Because it is undiplomatic I guess.  This is a salient example of how we maintain the illusion and lies that the Emperor is wearing such beautiful clothes.

I know it is difficult to face the truth in this culture of ours.  We have the most perverse way of blaming the victim or the messenger, anyone but the perpetrator, of the crime.  I have written about a mental condition that I call Uncle Adolf Syndrome and this is a perfect example of UAS in action.

Maybe, at the heart of the problem, lies the natural human survival instinct to side with the stronger guy.  Maybe there is nothing we can do about it.  Except, of course, there is.  We can start BEING the stronger person and start looking after the less fortunate and the less strong.  It is a complicated world but unless WE do something to change the primitive culture that we live with it will sort itself out without us.

We have to STOP the lies and self-deception.  I support the IF campaign but it is not enough to pursue those objectives we all have to stop accepting the utter garbage we are fed by governments and companies.

'nuf said - goodnight!

The ironic humour of Judge Testar

So what we have is a coalition of countries who go to war based on a heap of contrived lies.  

I am, of course, talking about the US led attack on Iraq in 2003 on the back of the World Trade Center disaster.  The following years of violence killed over 600,000 Iraqis who had nothing to do with the ideological or financial machinations of the various protagonists in the conflict.  However, a bloke by the name of Bradley Manning allegedly had in his possession a massive amount of evidence incriminating these protagonists.  Like any responsible and respectable human being, whoever did have this incriminating material, decided to blow the whistle on these gargantuan abusers and to hand the files to WikiLeaks - the famous whistle blowing website.  This is the advice given by governments, officials, teachers, the police and all sorts of other authorities;  Tell the truth - blow the whistle on the bullies!

If you haven't seen the video Collateral Murder you should watch it, unpalatable though it is, as a responsible human being.  So when WikiLeaks publishes the Collateral Murder video and then nearly 400,000 documents in the now famous 'Iraq War Logs' and then nearly 100,000 documents in the 'Afghanistan War Logs' to expose the incredible deception, double dealing and treachery of the US and various other 'friendly' governments the response is not entirely surprising.  The US basically go after Julian Assange, the figurehead of WikiLeaks, like a swarm of crazed bees.

The salient point, with respect to 'His Honour' Judge Peter Testar, is that the US government (and presumably the UK government) did not like what WikiLeaks was doing and in spite of the fact that it was a legal action carried out in an open manner and funded quite legally by donations from the public, the US government used undue pressure to illegitimately coerce or force legal entities such as PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Amazon and others to ILLEGALLY withdraw their services from WikiLeaks and anyone else associated with them.  "It is intolerable that when an individual or a group disagrees with a particular entity's activities they should be free to curtail that activity by means of attacks such as those which took place in this case."  Those are the words of His Almighty Hypocrite Peter Testar.  They are his very words as reported in The Independent and various other newspapers.  It is INTOLLERABLE! 

But, of course, the hypocrite was referring to Christopher Weatherhead and Ashley Rhodes who were Anonymous hacktivists and had been party to a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks on Visa, MasterCard and Paypal during 2010.  Their objection was to the illegal activities by these companies in their attempt to disable WikiLeaks and prevent them from functioning.  Hey Mr Testar where do you get off being all moralistic when it comes to a couple of people trying to support YOUR moral paradigm?  You total wally.

But - perhaps he was just having a laugh.  Perhaps it is just an ironic sense of humour and he means no harm by it.  Perhaps he is actually a well educated, intelligent, fair-minded Judge!

As a complete non-sequitur but perhaps of more consequence to the moral fabric of the universe I also discovered that scientists have discovered really really cute miniature chameleons in Madagascar - that's the island not the film.  Admittedly it was last year but it is the first I have heard of them.  These tiny little fellows are, they think, examples of what is called 'island dwarfism' whereby species become smaller due to limited resources (for example living on small islands).  I wonder if we shut lots of courts down, to limit their resources, the judges might become smaller.  That would be nice - we could kinda tread on them and make them go squish.

The picture of the little fellow is courtesy of the National Geographic website and I use it in compliance with the Fair Use policy on account of the fact that I am taking a small excerpt or sample from their content to illustrate the relevant material and to encourage more traffic to their web site and zero profit to me.

Thank you and goodnight.

Down at The Drake Inn

Just another sublime and evocative provocative work of genius from an angel if ever there were such things.

The first thing Sinéad O'Connor's "4th and Vine" reminded me of was Hustle by Tunng. I guess some experts would cite the genre and it might have something to do with the drum and bassishness with banjos and weird percussive devices. Being a percussive type myself - but an ignorant one - I also think there is something very similar in the rhythm.

But all of that is technical and the real beauty for me in this song and video (directed by Kathryn Ferguson) is the way it soaks up the best of the community spirit and cultural atmosphere of village life in mid 20th century Ireland while being juxtaposed with the irony of Sinéad's anger at the bigoted and perverse oppression of that very culture. But Sinéad IS a collection of paradoxical and contradictory emotions and views. Somehow, without sarcasm she manages to quite genuinely draw the very best from the real people of Ireland in spite of the darker side. A bit like her rendition of Once in Royal David's City (which you can find at the bottom of the page entitled Sinéad O'Connor, Pantheism, RTÉ and 100 windows!) which somehow embodies the very best intention and meaning from an otherwise discredited religious culture. She is simply mind blowing.

The song, 4th & Vine, is being released in the UK through One Little Indian on 28 January 2013 or 18 February 2013 depending upon your source. But it appears you can buy 4th & Vine now as a download from Amazon anyway.

Here is the (apparently) official version on YouTube



But then I went on to listen to another track from the album 'How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?' called Queen of Denmark. First of all I wondered what it was about the Queen of Denmark that was worth singing about and then as I began to listen to the track I thought this is one of those songs that is good and nice and interesting and maybe a little artistic and BANG - It got me! It hit me where it hurts. It is just another totally magical, straight from the heart, sincere, powerful, emotional pieces of pure artistic expression from the dark angel of innocence that is Sinéad O'Connor. This is another MUST listen to.

Sinéad O'Connor: Queen of Denmark



When Sinéad wonders what she wants from this world at least she is giving me a bit of what I want.

Who hurts who?

So what is it that is so cruel about this world?  They say people are 'depressed' or suffering from 'anxiety disorder' or this or that condition. But what causes these things?  I hardly know where to start this story - this ramble - this analysis.  So far humanity appears to regard careful thinking, rational thinking, logical thinking as productive, creative, positive things.  But I am more and more encountering the stunning contradictions in the conventional 'ideas' that our culture seems to assume and live on.  Hitting children is okay but hitting adults is not.  Shouting is rude but when you are being ignored deliberately and it drives you to shout because the other person is abusing you it is convenient to blame you, the victim, for being rude.  If you tell someone that someone else is stealing from you or otherwise abusing you, or someone else, you are criticised for 'telling tales'.  But the pretence in the media is that you should come forward and tell people.  How about the bizarre case of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.  Bradley Manning sees the most glaring abuses and crimes being committed by an authority, the US Army, and so he gives the incriminating evidence to Julian Assange who publishes it on the internet;  Telling the world the truth of what is going on.  Telling the US citizens the unacceptable truth.  The US, and basically the rest of the Western World, pursue Julian Assange with the most disgusting and primitive aggression, in some way basing it on a feeble and inconsistent assumption that somehow he has been 'disloyal' or 'treacherous' and want him dead.  They collect up Bradley Manning and illegally imprison him in solitary confinement for nine months without trial.  All this is based on the idea that the USA is the good guy and so little deviations from perfect are acceptable in the pursuit of the greater good.  But at the same time they are using other people's similar motives to accuse them of being evil.  It is so overtly contradictory I cannot understand how it continues.  If I believed the world was populated by malicious zombies it would make sense.  So let's assume these millions, even billions of people who support the US, the UK, Europe and other apparently legitimate cultures are, in fact, mindless zombies who are relentlessly destroying the world and living at other people's expense.  Let's assume that they are killing other people's babies and destroying billions of human beings (which, I note, they are).  Then it would make sense not to care about them and to lie and cheat, to steal and to do whatever it took to survive in their world.  It would even make sense to destroy their culture or to arbitrarily shoot some of their children or even random shoppers.  But the bizarre thing is this is how so many people seem to be living.  They don't care about the overt contradictions of the governments.  They don't care about the systematic abuse by the state.  They do nothing about the injustices surrounding them.  They treat other people like mindless malicious zombies and get on looking after themselves even though it requires a degree of deception and cheating on their part.  This culture is living on precisely the same values that the German culture was living on prior to the second world war.  The Germans gave up on the pretence and started simply dealing with the problem by constructing death camps with dedicated ovens and gas chambers and building an entire railway system to deliver these people, this dross, this inconveniently still moving detritus, this human waste to the disposal sites.

Do all these 'good Christians' with their 4x4s, their suburban semis, their little jobs, their 2.7 children with their pink tutus and a birthday cake with candles once a year realise what they are doing.  Do they care?  They do know what they are doing.  That is the most tragic reality.  The hardest thing for me is the realisation that they do know what they are doing.  I have grown up with these people and they are lying to themselves quite overtly.  They resist with anger if you get anywhere near making them admit to themselves what they actually know.  They bury the truth to survive.  But if you ever question them on the more pertinent issues they get angry and irrational.  It is as clear as anything that they have the knowledge of what they are part of and are afraid of it to the point that they will not allow it to surface from what just might be called their subconscious to their conscious mind.

If I had my choice over again I would not chose to exist.  Given that I do exist the question for me is what can I do about it.  During my life I have encountered profound happiness and profound sadness.  I have experienced sublime pleasure and intolerable pain.  All I want is to be left alone to get on with my life and to pursue some of the more beautiful aspects of this thing called reality.  But unfortunately I have incidentally encountered too many arseholes who's only desire in life seems to be to shit on otherwise okay people.  What is that about?

My biggest problem, it seems to me, is that I was born to two very badly damaged individuals who, in the name of this pretentious 'goodness' abused and mistreated their children appallingly.  It may not have been their fault but that doesn't change what happened.  Now, I suspect, I am damaged beyond repair.  I have spent most of my life trying to get far enough away from the damaging influence to lick my wounds and to limp on with what remnants of my life could be salvaged from the devastation.  But unwittingly I married my father; Talking psychologically you understand.  I married the same abusive patterned behaviour.  The same unfeeling, sentimental, judgemental, pretentious, sanctimonious, self serving... unpleasant git.

Why would I do that you might ask?  The trouble with us humans is that we are psychological.  This person, my now ex-wife, used different words, moved differently, was devious about different things and she seemed to my conscious mind a 'different' person from the most heinous people who spawned me.  But it didn't take many years to realise that the same patterns were at work.  Then the problem was what to do to survive.  Us humans survive - it's a Darwinian thing.  The reason my ex-wife seemed (in part I have to admit) a good partner was because in some inexplicable way I felt psychologically/emotionally safe.  It 'felt' right, in spite of various foibles or odd values that were clearly wonky.  It 'felt' safe.  That is what happens to us;  We are back in an environment from which we clearly 'survived'.  It is, to our psyche, familiar and survivable.  We are particularly vulnerable if our early years have left us feeling vulnerable because we don't feel confident about surviving so when another abuser of the same 'type' turns up we feel 'safe'.  On this account if there were a God it would clearly be malicious.

So it seems there are too many contradictions in the contrived world of humans.  When it hurts they are wrong.  You think you are but the evidence is it is them.  So when it hurts remind yourself that that is the evidence that you are right.  It is a bit like when someone punches you - you know who has hurt who.  The same thing applies emotionally.  When someone hurts you emotionally it is they who have hurt you.  Avoid the tendency to ask "What is wrong with me?"  It is a perversion and one probably born in childhood when you needed to survive.

Cancerous Simulacra & other stuff

When I woke up this morning
You were on my mind.

Hmm that takes me back.  They are lyrics of a song sung by Crispian St Peters back in 1966.


It is a little disturbing actually to realise that I was not only alive then but getting romantic.  The song, for the record, was written by Sylvia Tyson in 1964 and there have been quite a lot of covers over the intervening near half century.

And I notice above I have put "there have been" but when talking it is not uncommon (not where I'm concerned anyway) to say "there've been".  However, on looking around the internet to see if it is correct English (so to speak) I couldn't find it.  The Enchanted Learning web site has quite a lot of English word contractions but notably misses both "there've" and "fo'c'sle" (or "fo'c's'le") - pronounced "folk sul". Oh this is so off the point but you see the way my tired bored brain limps from one subject to another with flimsy abandon.

When I woke up this morning - you were probably not on my mind.  But what was on my mind was the pain I was in.  Constant pain.  I live with pain.  I wake up and my legs hurt and my lungs hurt.  My stomach feels tender and bloated and my right arm feels as if someone has attached a clamp to a nerve in it.  But I lie there worrying and wondering what is wrong.  I am exhausted and can't easily get out of bed.  I have only had four hours sleep but the worries of my life are preventing my tired brain from switching off to get more sleep.  Partly my problems are the result of years and years of not enough sleep through serious stress.

So I turn on the radio in the hope that the mundane chattering of various newscasters or interviewers might allow me some reprieve from my own cascade of banal desperation and afford me some sleep.

There is a piece called George Orwell: The Appeal of the Dystopian Novel;  John Humphrys talks to John Sutherland (professor of English literature at University College London) and Margaret Reynolds (professor of English at Queen Mary's University) about George Orwell.  I thought this was going to be interesting but was shocked to hear John Sutherland claim (of George Orwell in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four') "He is absolutely 100% wrong in his predictions."  He went on to say that the only thing he was right about was the tyranny by CCTV and asserted "...the rest of it, the notion of a Socialist Totalitarian State is bonkers."

How come people get to be professors and to talk on a national radio station (that is listened to around the world) and to spout such utter drivel.  The man is bonkers himself.  I did wonder what causes people to utter stuff like that and apart from the obvious possibility that he is quite deliberately talking nonsense in order to provoke there is another possibility and that is that the man cannot comprehend a metaphor.  He clearly does not understand what George Orwell was concerned about and if he thinks the CCTV cameras in public places all over the country are what Orwell 'predicted' then he has misunderstood that too.  He went on to claim and exclaim "He was completely wrong.  The notion that you can troll people by this nonsensical newspeak which reduces them just has not happened - He's wrong!"  Well I find this a sad case of a man who has clearly been successfully brain washed.  Being a professor he is probably unwittingly attempting to brainwashing a lot of students too.

One of the dreadful things about our oppressive culture and the ever growing phenomena of doublethink, thoughtcrime and newspeak is that the psychological condition which manifests these corrupt conceptualisations is being passed from one person to another like an infectious disease.  You 'catch' it in the assumptions that you have to make in order to 'understand' what people are attempting to say.  There is a developing field in psychology called interpersonal neurobiology which is looking into the ways that the patterns that exist in one brain are reproduced in another by the communications between them.  There is an obvious corollary to this when it comes to information technology.  The information is produced with the corrupt mindset and stored electronically.  When people access the information it reproduces the corruption in their brain too.  I have had a lot of personal experience of this but one simple example being that I explained to an official that I had been forced by circumstances to move from one accommodation to another on several occasions.  Because of his prejudicial view, when he wrote the report that went onto the official computer system, he wrote that I had been evicted several times.  Eviction, you might note, implies fault.  Now when someone else reads the report they conjure the same 'prejudicial' view because the way the events are described actually embody a different reality than the one that should have been described.  (You can read all about this and a heap of other abuses in the Children Services Abuse section of Toxic Drums in the document entitled 'Stage 2 Report Response'.)

The significance being that the corrupt mindset is being literally stored and reproduced in the interconnected information technology.  We are effectively building a false representation of the world in the machines which we are increasingly relying on.  It is the material manifestation of Jean Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation' where the simulation of reality in the computer becomes the reality in which we live.  It begins to form our reality and so becomes the source of our simulation and is no longer the product of, or representation of, a real reality.

That wally professor also claimed that Orwell predicted we would be ruled by religious fanatics and that was clearly wrong!  Orwell staged the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in Oceania which was in a state of perpetual war.  I also heard on the BBC radio today some politician saying that we will be fighting the terrorist threat for at least the next ten years.  This being on the back of the Algerian hostage fiasco and the French military activities in neighbouring Mali.  Well it has recently been established that in spite of the fact that the American Constitution explicitly requires a secular government no one stands a hope in hell of being elected as president if they are not a Christian.  George Bush and Tony Blair both made extensive reference to God and Christianity as justification for their "War on Terror" which was, in fact, directed against Islamic nations and Islamic 'fundamentalists'.  Whatever they want to claim the solid facts seem to suggest that this ongoing 'terrorist' threat is an ideological conflict polarised around perceived differences in Christian values and Islamic values.  So we are in a state of perpetual war and it is being run by religious fanatics.

And so my painful life goes on.  I have been interrupted today by a number of people but one of those people is insane.  On the delicate subject of me and my daughter my weird sister managed to tell me that I was not bringing her up correctly.  I gave an example where my ex would, for example, criticise our daughter and claim that I agreed with her.  Now my position was to generally let them get on with it but if my ex wanted support for her abusive action I was not about to pretend I agreed.  If she asked me explicitly "You agree don't you?" the answer may well be "No".  My sister said that I should not lie but I should say I agree in front of the child and talk with my ex-wife about it in private at a later time.  The horrible thing about this is that too many people think like this.  Lying to children in particular is not lying.  Especially if you can hide it well and fool them.

Do I hate the world in which I find myself? YES!  It seems full of self deceiving self serving gits.  But the worst of it is that it seems embedded in our culture and the whole system is cancerously eating us all up with its diseased malfunctioning.  Ugh!  It is not good.

People! - Who needs them?

So what am I to say.  I lie in bed thinking all sorts and it makes a whole lot of sense.  I imagine I am telling someone as if explaining how things are.  We do this, us humans - we explain our understanding to other interested parties.  So we have worked out how to get the honey out of the tree and we explain to our children or a friend how we do it.  We also explain to judges and police why we did what we did or how it happened.  In the first case it is to help them improve their lot, and in the second case it is to prevent them doing us harm.  In different ways they are both interested parties.  We share our understanding or interpretation of events with others.  And in part this is what is going on when I have all these thoughts that make a whole lot of sense going round in my head.  I am rehearsing, practicing  pretending or imagining talking to someone else.  It is a fundamental human activity to communicate.

This morning I was thinking that first of all you are tricked, betrayed and lied to and it causes serious damage and you are lying in the street weak and homeless.  You are telling this person who has stolen your goods and is doing well for it that they are cruel and have lied to you and tricked you and they deny it.  "No I didn't.  You lied to me and tried to steal all my things."  And your response is "No I didn't - it was you..." and then you realise what it sounds like.  The audience - the 'judge' - can hear two people denying the accusations and blaming the other.  But you are the injured party, you are the one in rags, you are the one with no money to pay lawyers, you are the one shivering in the cold and drenched by the rain because you don't have an expensive luxury car to travel in.  You are the one who can't get a decent education who can't explain so well what is going on.  So clearly, according to our current cultural conventions, it is you who are wrong.  You are the angry one raising your voice, you are the one who uses bad language and you are the unsophisticated pleb who is aggressive and dangerous.  It is people like you who cause all the trouble in this world.  If it weren't for the likes of you then us kind, responsible, respectable, honest, wealthy people would be alright.

An aside that is a continuation as well...  I was checking the spelling of 'pleb', not that it seems a difficult word to spell but spelling has always been my archilees heal and Micro$oft Word said it was wrong so I typed it into Google, as you do, and came across an article in the Independent by Howard Jacobson entitled "Yes, I did call you a pleb.  I can say what I like when I’m angry.  Now just open that gate."

So it seems that the uneducated common folk are rude and unsophisticated and they should listen to the wise respectable well educated people who basically cause their poverty and distress because they must be right.  Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' at it's very worst.

I do understand that people who are (reluctantly) in work not only resent the scroungers who are living on state benefits and won't get a job (that doesn't exist) but also don't give any serious thought to the fact that the system is a profound deception.  When it is illustrated that some 'fair' benefit doesn't work the thoughtless retort is that they are lucky to be getting anything - or some other trite dismissal of the facts.  It is clearly contradictory and yet these apparently 'better' people in jobs (and I am talking about the unfortunate majority who 'blame' the poor for their plight) criticise the 'scroungers' as if they are being unfair or benefiting at the unfortunate employed people's expense.  The solution should be staring them in the face if they have half the wit they think they have;  Give up your job, make one of those dirty rotten scroungers do your job for their living and you live in luxury at their expense.  It really is that simple.  Why not?  Because (Sorry to you intelligent folk reading this but I have to explain to the morons - or are they cretins?  I can't remember now.) It is not nice struggling in poverty with no opportunities to do anything.  For the unemployed person who now has your job it would be a little like winning the lottery.

The trouble with my blogs is that some are far more interesting than others.

Killing people without ZyklonB

So how does this work then?

Yesterday I had to phone 999 to call for an ambulance.  The reason was that I was experiencing very severe and very horrible pains in my abdomen and chest.  To start with I tried taking a pain killer but the feeling was so disorientating and nauseous that I thought I had better phone the doctor to make an appointment now before it got so bad I couldn't.  The receptionist who answered the phone advised me to phone for an ambulance.

I dialled 999 and the operator asked which service;  Then they wanted to know the address and the nature of the emergency.  I explained and they obviously alerted their first response team or whatever they are called.  Within 10 minutes a paramedic had arrived and was wiring me up, taking my pulse and temperature, spraying angina stuff under my tongue and getting me to take a soluble aspirin.  About 10 minutes later an ambulance team arrived and to cut a long story short I struggled down two flights of stairs and got into the ambulance.  My daughter came with me and was understandably very worried.

All their tests did not confirm any problem with my heart and the consultant dealing with me suspected it was a severe bowel spasm.  He gave me some potent muscle relaxant, a pain killers, a tuna fish sandwich and sent me on my way.  I made an appointment to see my doctor later that afternoon.

So what was wrong?  Obviously at this stage no one knows for sure but my doctor suspects some kind of dyspepsia.  However, whatever it is it is not an isolated one off thing.  I know because my whole body is failing in many respects and for the last 10 to 14 days I have been getting dull headaches and feeling severely tired and under the weather.  I have been perspiring after the smallest exertion and suffering severe palpitations at night lasting anything from half an hour to three hours.  Over the last ten years I have been under the most dreadful stress and I am suffering severe 'worn out' syndrome both emotionally and physically (probably PTSD).  I am on the verge of collapse and collapse is what I did yesterday.  So for 24 hours I have been ignoring the world and either entertaining myself rather mindlessly online, sleeping or watching nature programs.  Then I cooked something for my daughter and me and decided to go to bed early.

BUT - We have an appointment with the DWP tomorrow at 9 am.

What could be wrong with a 9 am appointment with the DWP?  The Department of Work and Pensions, which is basically the department responsible for providing unemployment benefit and sick pay, are becoming more and more oppressive.  I recently encountered a newsletter from the "Disability Law Service", a charitable organisation, who are concerned at the new arrangement whereby if someone has a sick note provided by a highly paid, properly regulated, professional expert doctor then the DWP can pay a very lowly qualified health worker to examine you to ascertain if the 'sick' note - now called a 'fit' note - thank you George Orwell - is valid.  (You can see the latest DLS newsletter at http://www.dls.org.uk/web_pub/.)  So what was the point of having doctors authorise sick notes?  Why not just line us up at the railway station and separate us into those who are deemed fit for work and those only fit for the gas chamber?  Since my nephew has been suffering from something akin to Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome and has had a highly trained and professional neurologist diagnose that his somatic and autonomic nervous systems are severely out of sync meaning that he simply cannot function regularly or reliably he has had his sick pay simply stopped because the unqualified person at the DWP medical centre has deemed him fit for work because he can move his limbs and subtract 7 from 47.  He is currently getting £0 and has no savings.  It is only fortuitous that someone has a house and feeds him.  So what could be wrong with a 9 am appointment at the DWP?

What is wrong is that when you NEED help and people withhold it, it has very serious consequences.  This is very worrying.  And that is what I am now doing.  My heart rate has gone up, my stomach is feeling tense and I feel sick.  So what could be wrong with blatant cruelty from the authorities?

When I say that they are killing me I am not speaking metaphorically.  So to answer the initial question: This is how it works.

DVLA Camera Vans and Toilet Seats

Well today I got three hours sleep but then I was ill in bed all day yesterday until I had to get up at about 6 from boredom and the need to cook something for my daughter.  Strangely I do not feel too bad.  I slept from 6 in the morning to 9 am.  I have taken a pain killer just in case I get a headache because I needed to take my father to Tesco to do his shopping and I will need to go pick him up when he's done.  Prior to taking him I thought I could be efficient because I had just received my DVLA renewal notification for road tax so I went to the web site to renew it and came across the annual problem that the insurance is due to run out on 26th January and the road tax renewal is due for 1st February.  Their 'oh so effing clever' system is clever enough to prosecute me if I do anything wrong but it is not clever enough to allow ME to be responsible for my legal affairs and to BUY road tax and be responsible for BUYing compulsory insurance.  They actually won't renew the road tax until their interfering system can authenticate a valid insurance for the day the road tax is due to start.  It doesn't take a software engineer to see the contradictory stupidity of it all.

I have to wait until the 27 January when the rollover insurance becomes valid for one year from 27 January 2013 to 26 January 2014 and then I can renew my MANDATORY road tax and wait for it to arrive through the post.  When it arrives on 2 February I have then been breaking the law for one day because it is MANDATORY to DISPLAY the tax disk in the vehicle.

But then things got worse.

Image courtesy of Martin Veale
Steel and Survival: Motoring Notes 

I couldn't renew my road tax because the 'authorities' want control whilst they still want to hold me responsible when things go wrong.  Whilst at Tesco I saw a white van driving around the car park.  It had what appeared to be four cameras on the roof pointing down at about 45 degrees.  It had DVLA writ large on the side.  I was shocked;  Shocked in that intellectual way rather than emotionally.  Emotionally I am in despair at the state of our civilisation.  Did I just call it 'civilisation'?  Oh the trickery of the language.  But here was this van driving slowly round and round so I stood out in the roadway and politely flagged the van down.  The young tattooed guy driving the van politely stopped and wound his window down.  I asked him if he was doing what it looked as if he was doing and he confirmed he was taking photos of people's licence plates to check if they had valid road tax and asked why.  I said it was so dreadful that it comes to this and he said "Well if people would pay their tax it wouldn't have to."  I said that I was not criticising him personally but I was just sad that the authorities could spend so much attention to making sure everybody has paid their road tax but they don't allocate it correctly and won't put so much effort into making sure everybody has got what they need, like jobs.

"Oh well," I mused, "it just gets more fascist all the time."  He kind of agreed with me.  That, I guess, is a plus.  I don't for one minute blame him for doing an available job - if I were offered that opportunity today I would take it - and it was a pleasant surprise that he didn't feel the need to overly 'justify' his role.

One of the problems that I keep encountering is how people will explain "A" reason why something is justified as if it is the whole story.  Of course if you have an arrangement such that collectively we pay for the roads through road tax then there is a fair obligation on road users to pay that tax.  But the authorities are not using that money to pay for the roads and the road tax has just jumped from £180 last year to £220 this year which makes no sense at all.  It is just theft.  But the politicians and the police and the judiciary are not held to the same rigid correctness that they are happy to apply to the plebs.  And, I gather from Martin Veale's blog that, they are happy to clamp your vehicle if it does not show up on their system that it has a valid road tax licence.  But that is not only condemning someone without a trial but it is happily doing what the machinery dictates.

Then I went home and phoned the insurance people hoping they could authenticate the insurance renewal so that I could get my tax disk on time.  The lady who answered the phone was blonde.  Now I am not prejudicial and I was blond once (but I'm better now) but some people dye their hair blond and the motive that drives most girls to dye their hair blond is 'appearance';  They want to be sexually attractive to the opposite sex.  They like alpha males and want a man to look after them and protect them.  They are needy for approval.  As an aside here I will say that you can tell a lot about people from a conversation on the phone.  I once arranged a meeting with a businessman in London and I almost knew he would be wearing a yellow waistcoat.  When I arrived at the meeting he was wearing a yellow waistcoat.  The girl on the insurance helpline was not only blond but was wearing high heeled shoes and she had red nail varnish on her fingers and transparent gloss nail varnish on her toes.  But that aside she was 'politely' brisk and it was a little difficult talking to her.  I explained that her brain was clearly function much faster than mine this morning.  She believed me.  When I explained the difficulty and the legal conundrum she said that I shouldn't worry if the tax disk is a few days late.  She actually said "I can assure you, hand on heart, because my husband is a traffic policeman, that they wouldn't prosecute you for that."  Well I was momentarily speechless.  I said that there might be lots of nice policemen (I lied) but the automated system would not apply that kind of understanding.  I thanked her for her help and wished her a nice day.

It is not surprising that our society is collapsing when such nice people can believe it is such a nice world because they do what the oppressive control freaks want, look pretty, and get shagged regularly.  They must think it is like that for all of us - unless we are old gits that live in an attic and get what we deserve.

So far the day was going well!

Then my mother broke the toilet seat again.  I am too tired to make an interesting story out of that but it was vaguely interesting and I benefitted financially from sorting the problem out so I can't complain.

How to start the day.

So there I am listening to the radio at 6 in the morning and this is how it goes...

It's six o'clock of Friday the 4th January Good morning this is 'Today' with Evan Davis and James Naughtie.  The headlines this morning;  Labour are proposing that the long term unemployed be guaranteed a job, paid for by cutting tax relief on the pension contributions of the wealthiest.

And the program went on... and on... and on.

How do we do it?  How do we, as a culture, continue with this utter insanity?  That is, in part, a rhetorical question.  We do it by being brutal, unkind and oppressive to our children.  Fundamentally this is how we perpetuate the insanity. When you frighten children into conforming it creates a kind of emotional wound which becomes a callus and forever affects their intellectual interpretation of the world.  I encountered a sublime example of this in a conversation with an elderly woman from what we might like to think is the older generation.  She was complaining that the trouble with young people nowadays ... yada yada yada ...  and that hitting children was a good thing because it helps them remember.  She is a friend of my father and he is getting forgetful in his old age so I mused that perhaps we should hit him as it may help him to remember too.  She snapped back "Don't be stupid;  It only works on children."  It may seem reasonable to dismiss this as stupidity but I am interested in how and why 'we' humans manage to be so overtly and stunningly self contradictory.

It is all about pain.  She was clearly beaten as a child and now believes that that is HOW she survived.  In a perverse kind of way she must imagine that to be kind to children you must hit them.  These politicians spout utter nonsense and they get away with it because the listening public are just as stupid.  You simply cannot guarantee jobs for the unemployed unless there ARE jobs.  But they understand that and so propose to use the collective resources (taxes - and in this case reclaimed illegitimately) to 'create' jobs.  Creating jobs like that will inevitably cost more than to pay someone either a fair wage for a USEFUL job or a totally minimum survival 'benefit'.  In fact it is insulting and a deliberate perversion of the English language to call it a benefit but that is too much detail.  These politicians are incompetent and irrational ... plebs? dare I say it?

Unfortunately they are stupid and they do get an opulent living at the expense of the unfortunate, but slightly nicer, people at the bottom of the pile.  How do we humans continue to tolerate such stupidity?  I noticed, also, that Malala Yousafzai, the probably quite nice, young Pakistani girl was leaving the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.  Malala, you may recall, was shot by another bunch of 'would be' rulers, the Taliban!  The Taliban claimed they shot Malala in the head - she was only 14 years old - because she was "promoting secularism".  Well HECK you Taliban jerks... if your religion sanctions shooting little girls in the head why would any sane human want you or your effing religion?

Us folks in Britain think we are better than that but we can still carry out the same cruel dynamics; We just disguise it a little better.  Labour are suggesting forcing people to do non-jobs, which will actually cost more than giving them benefits, so that when someone is too ill to do the work they can stop their benefits altogether.  The perverse justification for this is that if they won't work it can be said to be their own fault.  But do any of these politicians wonder what someone might live on if they stop them getting any money at all?  Of course what they know is that it is the most frail, the most damaged and the most ill members of society who will simply die quietly in the slums somewhere and the politicians will get away with it.  People in work will be so afraid they won't object because to do so will put them at risk of the same fate.  So, just like in the German concentration camps that Primo Levi wrote about, the poor will oppress the poor on behalf of the rulers just so that they don't suffer so much.

What possible sense is there in these politicians, and their baying throng, claiming that some people are too lazy to work?  I would like to ask all the people who are collecting benefits if they would like a job.  I think the vast majority would say yes.  But the whole subject is obfuscated by perverting the English language in the first place.  People don't want to do pointless work.  Even the sanctimonious politicians would draw the line at shovelling shit for no purpose except that other people tell them to do it for a pittance.  Nearly all people want to fit into the community and to have a sense of purpose and self worth.  Nearly all want some function in their community.  Our culture runs on the idea of doing a 'job' for money.  People don't want to do a non-job for little or no money.  Oh God why am I wasting all this cyber space.  Anyone who stops to think about it knows full well that a population of people like to work.  If there are enough jobs for all and no one is being paid too little or too much the society functions well.  What we have in this country is a system that is cascading towards some getting stupidly rich and not enough work for the rest of the population.  It is a manufactured crime and it is not so different from the Taliban shooting little girls because they are afraid of them.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband (to name just three currently prominent politicians) are all but bearded Taliban who have decided to shave off their beards as a disguise.

There!  That's telling you!

In case you are wondering I hate the sanctimonious, hypocritical, pretentious, greedy, stupid politicians who want to lord it over other people to massage their own egos (and to line their bank accounts with illegitimate money).  And another thing, just before I go, I am now very ill, in part, due to being unemployed for too long!

Simroid the Cyborg

So why do cyborgs go to the dentist?  Well that is not a joke but the answer is "To get their teeth fixed."  This is not a dubious doll that arrives in a big crate wrapped in brown paper but is, in fact, a robot developed by Morita Manufacturing in conjunction with Nippon Dental University in Japan.  Only the Japanese could come up with this!  They have developed a lifelike 'cyborg' (not really a cyborg as cyborgs are part human - hang on - maybe she is) which can answer questions and react to 'pain' just like a real dental patient.  This one is called Simroid and she tirelessly helps dentists practice their art until they get it right.

Personally I don't like dentists as a breed.  This is not solely because they have caused me a great deal of physical pain and inconvenience but because there seems to be an ivory tower culture which will not budge in the world of dentistry.  The dentists seem to think that it is their project when they are fixing your teeth.  They seem to think you should admire and respect everything they do.  So they decide your teeth should come out or they should be straightened.  If you question whether this is actually what YOU want they treat you as if you are stupid.  It seems to me that they are more focused on 'doing the job right' according to their 'teacher' and can't seem to incorporate the patients priorities or values.  They also tend to be judgemental and condescending.  I have too often heard criticism by dentists that the patient hasn't looked after their teeth and so any distress is their own fault.  So I am not a fan of dentists but I have come across one or two - no - one dentist - who used his skill and experience to get the results that I wanted as well as he could.  Now that is a good approach to dentistry.  Pity their aren't more good dentists around.  Funny - My father's father was a dentist - and my father is a seriously dysfunctional, oppressed, repressed, oppressive, judgemental git.  It all makes sense now.  Maybe if his father had had one of these cyborgs to play with he might have been a better man.

Incidentally if you are thinking that this very lifelike doll would do well in another, older, profession I can tell you that they have already developed  such things and they do arrive in unmarked crates but that is for another blog.

Here is the video of Simroid in action.  Happy fantasies to all you repressed dentists out there.

Swordfish

Since I have nothing to write about I will make something up.  How wonderful to tramp through the orange peel of someone else's sword fish.  How ridiculous is it to make a New Year's resolution to write something on my blog every day of the year?  What happens when I have nothing to say?

So I went to http://www.randomwebsite.com/ and the first thing that came up was http://www.historicalweapons.com/.  Not very useful - and it is in Croatian to boot!  You can find out what language it is with Google's translation tool.  It has an auto-detect option.  That is, it automatically detects the language, it doesn't find your car if you have misplaced it on New Year's eve.

Then I came across something a little weird.  A love affair with goat.  But the guy spends more time designing and selling templates for pumpkins now.  His Goatee Style web address is http://goateestyle.com/ and his Zombie pumpkin web site is http://www.zombiepumpkins.com/ but I have embedded the goat romance here.  It may not satisfy the Bronies but Groaties need their fix too.



After this all I got was crap so I have given up on randomwebsite.com - It's a fail.

So I tried stubleupon and came across www.wherecoolthingshappen.com/1-perfectly-timed-photos/ which was a bit nifty.

And I found a quote for which I can't locate the origin but it goes...

"Before you judge others or claim any absolute truth, consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are travelling at 220 kilometres per second across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not 'you'. The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don't just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colours you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum."

which is sort of a bit interesting.  Before the internet I used to think these things were very interesting.  Has the internet dulled my sense of wonder?  I wonder!

Well I might get the hang of stumbleupon one day but after some time of stumbling I did come across the Osaka City Station Water Fountain Clock.  It is something else.  Words can't do it justice you will just have to watch it for yourself...



Now I have to go get dinner;  Lots of garlic, tomatoes and noodles.

(If that does not remain the most boring entry this year I will cut of my ... something.)

Sinéad O'Connor, Pantheism, RTÉ and 100 windows!

Raidió Teilifís Éireann or more often refered to as RTÉ or even RTE is an Irish public broadcasting service.  It is funded by both commercial revenue and a television licence fee.  It could perhaps unfairly be compared with the British BBC.  I never knew that before today but I was drawn to finding out via Woman's Hour on Radio 4 - A BBC radio station.

Since I have nothing better to do I will explain that I woke up in pain.  This is not unusual but invariably the pain gets worse.  When it is the same or less than before I can live with it because I know I have survived it before.  But my legs were aching and my lungs felt as if they had fiery cinders in them.  My heart was beating too strongly and felt as if it was struggling to cope.  I had only slept intermittently and partly the discomfort is a result of that.  Of course the old "cause and effect" question arises - is it anxiety which causes the symptoms and the restlessness or is it the lack of sleep that causes the symptoms and hence the anxiety?  In my opinion it is clearly the anxiety which comes first.  It is caused by too much trauma.  However, if I get enough sleep it does reduce the detrimental effects.  So I awoke feeling crap and turned the radio on.  I listen to Radio 4 because I have managed to tune the damn radio into that station and I don't want to change the settings for fear of losing the good reception.  So it is laziness in a way but I mostly find Radio 4 innocuous even if I cannot stand John Humphrys' amazing and almost fascist naivety and it also contains a lot of interesting material.

It was very interesting this morning.  Woman's Hour was on and someone was singing.  The voice was amazing.  It was Sinéad O'Connor singing "Reason With Me" from the album "How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?"



The section in Woman's Hour was called "Sinéad O'Connor and 2012 musical highlights" and I continued to listen with interest.  Sinéad O'Connor has always impressed and moved me beyond the norm.  I am not a fan as such but, like millions of other people, I was profoundly moved, even stunned, by her video rendition of a cover of Prince's song "Nothing Compares 2 U" in 1990.  I could say a lot about that particular masterpiece but it touched me.



Having listened with a great deal of interest to the interview I went to the internet to try to find the song I had heard and the most identifying phrase I could recall was something about minding monkeys (the line transpires to be "I ought to wrap it up and mind my monkeys").  Well what I found was a track called "Monkey In Winter" which was a collaboration with Colourfield...



Reading around the subject of Sinéad O'Conner on Wikipedia I ended up back on YouTube and discovered to both my delight and almost shame that she had also collaborated with Massive Attack.  I discovered it via the Monkey In Winter Track because it was on a compilation called Sinéad O'Conner Collaborations.  Obvious title for an album of collaborations I guess.  But what I discovered was that it is one of my favourite tracks and is on the album 100th Window by Massive Attack.  It is called "Special Cases" and is one of the most haunting tracks I have ever encountered.  I have always loved the vocals and wondered who the singer was.  Now I find out it is the incredible and inimitable Sinéad O'Connor.  How did I ever not realise that?

Here is a version presented by Blagovest Stoichev on YouTube with an interesting video giving a kind of surreal juxtaposition conjuring new interpretation and significance.



Sinéad made a number of insightful and interesting points not least of which being that she prefers to call her "faith" "knowledge".  But she also explained her change in attitude towards Ireland recently and I have taken the liberty to transcribe a short excerpt from the interview because I think it is a valuable observation...

"I've changed my attitude towards Ireland since cringingly embarrassingly recently we had to have a referendum, believe it or not, to establish the rights of children to exist as individuals in their own right.  It was in our constitution that they didn't exist as individuals so they had no rights.  You know, I mean, that's very dark ages kind of stuff.  And when I realised that night that only 30 percent of the population voted I stopped giving a toss about Ireland.  Genuinely;  I don't care anymore.  Up until that point I was interested in campaigning for Ireland.  I had Irish flags painted up the side of my house which I've now changed with Rasta colours.  But now, I tell you honestly, I will never fight for an Irish issue ever again after the fact that only 30 percent of the people voted for children's rights in the constitution.  If that, er, vote had been about material things and money and this, that and the other everybody would have voted.  So I was staggered to see that, you know, you might put in all this love to your country;  70 percent of the people couldn't be bothered voting.  So I couldn't give a toss now.  So I don't care what happens to Irish people anymore."

Unfortunately this is how I am beginning to feel more and more about the people of the world in general.  Particular people are different, of course, but in general they seem like a pretty numbskull lot.  Fantasies such as the Zombie takeover of the world are beginning to seem far less fantasy and frighteningly more like reality.

But during my hunting around for information on Sinéad O'Connor I came across a truly amazing rendition of "Once in Royal David's City" performed Sinéad specifically for Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) for Christmas 2012.  Which is where this article started.



Apparently Sinéad is a pantheist - I think I am too.