I SMELL A RAT

For a few days now there has been am elusive unpleasant odour floating around the kitchen.  Just occasionally I'd get a whiff of something that smelt a bit like an old dirty vacuum bag with cheese in it.  Or was it some festering mouldy food behind the cooker?  Was it the condensed water that sometimes leaks from the fridge onto the carpeted kitchen floor?  I don't like carpets in kitchens - who the hell ever came up with that idea?  For about a week it seemed to be getting worse.  I wondered if it was me.  Were my feet rotting?  Was it in the clothes from the washing machine?  Did I have Coroni and he was messing with my smell?  It was faint but remarkably putrid and disturbing.  I cleaned out several cupboards and checked the vegetable rack.  The olfactory delight continued to linger longer.

I live in an old house with a sewerage system that would be illegal today.  It is simply one underground pipe that runs from the back door down the path and out to the street.  All sinks and plumbing and sewage simply fall into the same pipe.  There is a junction half way down the pathway where the neighbour's sewerage connects to ours.  The junction is known to cause a blockage sometimes and I dutifully swill the sewer out regularly to prevent severe blocking and occasional sewer odours emanating from the plug hole in the kitchen sink.  I thought it was about time to swill out the sewer today and so I set about filling sinks and jugs and buckets and getting prepared to launch a tsunami down the tube.

I went outside and lifted the sewer cover plate.  There was a blockage, which is not uncommon, but this looked weird.  A dark poop, so large it couldn't possibly have vacated anyone's bottom, was blocking the junction.  I don't spend an inordinate amount of time examining the content of the sewer and I went inside and released the tsunami to sluice the sewer and went back outside to make sure it was successful.  That large unidentified object was refusing to budge.  I peered into the sewer opening a little closer and this object seemed to be furry, but it was covered in thousands of tiny flies giving it a slightly wriggling writhing glistening sheen.

I decided to give it a poke with a stick - as one does.  It was heavy and resistant.  I eventually prodded it along the pipe a bit as the backlog of sewage oozed slowly along behind with an increasing level of damned water attempting to leave the premises.  Quite suddenly things began to move.  The large wriggling putrefying biological blob was lifted off the floor of the sewer and rapidly gained momentum as a ton of sewage and water chased it down the pipe with a great gurgling and swilling sound like some alien monster enjoying its lunch.

I replaced the cover plate, returned to the kitchen, turned off the taps, washed my hands (as you do) and enjoyed the delights of a sweet smelling kitchen.  It may sound like a dreadful task but it was a pleasant relief and procrastinant (from the inventor of new words) from having to deal with the still offensively active putrefying remains of the NHS and their genuinely harmful assaults on the health and well being of my daughter and me.  I find this whole experience of a rancid odour from a rotting corpse, polluting and poisoning the atmosphere and destroying the healthy life supporting activities of cooking and eating, a very good analogy for the toxic transformation of the welfare state and the NHS.

I gain some hope that, although the current desecration, stagnation, and evil toxic purification, of British society seems entirely unstoppable and destined to catastrophic unrecoverable disaster, it is possible that one day we might, with enough effort, shift the festering cadaver of neoliberalism and hear the welcome sound of gurgling and belching as the corpse of disaster capitalism and selfish greed is wrenched from this otherwise delightful planet. 

AN EXCERPT FROM 1981

I left the forest and walked along the narrow street between the tall white walls.  A ladder, still wet from the rain, was the only intrusion in the otherwise empty and endless street.  I had no other option, but whether or not that influenced my decision I do not know, and I climbed the ladder.  I entered a large room that was filled with plump working women.  A row of them stood working, with their arms engulfed to their shoulders in sockets in the wall.  The sockets had gloves attached.  A similar arrangement to that used by scientists when handling radioactive material - except that these women could not see what they were doing.  They believed themselves to be cracking large coconut-type fruits and the milk was running into a trough which ran along the wall, where, at the end, the fluid was collected in urns.  There were other women who collected the fluid and others who drank it around a table.  All the women seemed to spend some time doing each activity.  As time went on I began to detect hints of a concept much vaster than the apparent system I observed.  I sensed something monstrous, something devious and malicious.  I listened more and more to the women's chatter and slowly the concept became clearer.  There was some insidious essence behind the wall.  A heinous writhing being.  What the women were cracking was the skulls of their own children to satisfy this hideous monster's appetite.  The fluid was provided in order to support the illusion and to sustain the women.  The monster delighted in being fed the blood of children by their unwitting mothers.  I tried to explain but was rebuked.  I realised that all my knowledge of this situation had come from the women's chatter.  The hidden lie was within their own minds.  I thought on this and began to realise that in order to maintain the flow of food the women could not admit to themselves their activity as they would have to stop, and deep in the unreachable depths of their minds was the imperative defence that they could not possibly cease to perform this ritual and allow their children to live, as it would be a greater tragedy for them to experience such a wretched and debased existence.

LIRA'S ARBITRARY THREAD OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Lira woke at about 4 in the morning and went to the loo and collected a couple of chocolates and two biscuits.  She returned to bed and ate the biscuits, lay down, turned off the light, and was imagining she was going to fall asleep.  But there was something in her mind.  As if she was very near to understanding something that otherwise seemed impossible.  It seemed inextricably linked to her current disastrous relationship.  As if, if she could just understand that one bit, so much more would suddenly fall into place.

She had an idea that every other event has something in common that has mislead her to expect it is true of the one event in which she is involved but can't explain.  It's as if Harry is accusing her of doing something, and his reasons for believing his conclusion, seem equally convincing to Lira.  It is one thing Lira seeing how he has interpreted the world, and another thing for her to have to interpret the world the same way.  For a fleeting moment she had an evanescent comprehension of how things, which appear improbable or impossible, are actually quite easily understandable.

Lira suddenly remembers that between going to the toilet and collecting chocolates and biscuits she had stopped at the kitchen sink and filled a glass with cold water and drunk about 75% of it?  She wonders if that seemingly insignificant event just may become important later.

So then Lira finds herself lying down attempting to sleep.  The time is now about 04:48 and she hasn't got as far as turning the light off because her mind is trying to hang on to an invisible virtual Ariadne's thread of an insight into the imagined manifestation of a scenario which reveals the complex arrangement that explains how something that appears to be exactly impossible would obviously mislead anyone into thinking it could not be true and that therefore the exact same pattern of relationships, that can be seen in everything else, when applied to this otherwise impossible arrangement, would conclude that she did it.

What is it?  What is this thing that she thinks she can see?  And it reminds her of the hidden tape recorder that she found in Desmond's office, and how she realised that Mavis was lying.  There is something sitting there.  There is some arrangement, in her neurological network, which momentarily revealed an otherwise hidden pattern, which, when overlaid with this mysterious something, would explain it.

Lira wondered what she could possibly write in her diary to hold the set of things that she currently perceives that leave her with the belief that she can see something behind them.  If she can't recall that fleeting insight just now, what can she leave on paper to record the current arrangement such that she gets the chance in the future to return to her diary in the hope of piecing the mystery together at another time.  It is as if she wants to take a 4 dimensional snapshot; she wants to put the virtual reality on hold; she wants to pause the game and save it to disk, so that she can pick it up and carry on at some future time when she doesn't need to be continuing in the way that she now has to proceed and which is obscuring the reality, the real reality, from view.

Lira was also telling herself, or at least she was at around 04:48, that there is something equally mysterious about her multi-base machine.  It may even be that there is something she is missing, which relates directly to the mystery she has failed to adequately describe to herself earlier, which relates to a similar mystery about her multi-base machine.  Maybe she could, she muses, use the multi-base machine to unravel the other mystery.  Perhaps if she solves the first mystery it will reveal how she could successfully utilise her multi-base machine for the purpose of materially improving the quality of her current relationship.

Being a biological blob that self formed from a magical mixture of rather weird oozing and throbbing other blobby stuff, Lira finds herself consistently distracted from the task of comprehension and realisation by the continuing need to process the biological blobby stuff and the environment from which it is formed.  She was endlessly frustrated that she had to interrupt her stream of consciousness by something as mundane as going to the loo.

It has happened so many times before that it comes as no surprise this time that, having performed the compulsory ablution, Lira has not only dropped the thread of Ariadne which she was so desperately hanging on to, but has moved along the corridor of time to a place where there is so much more light stimulating her awareness with such an intensity that what was previously perceivable in the half light has effectively been swallowed up by the relative darkness of the tunnel that is now behind her.

Lira muses that one of the intriguing things about writing stuff down in her diary is that sometimes, when she goes back and reviews it, it then appears evident that she knew something which she didn't know she knew at the time.  "So what the hell was it," she demands of herself, "that I woke up knowing in the middle of the night, that I am so anxious to hold, in some conscious form, that I am compelled to sit freezing at my desk attempting to put some words in my diary to describe adequately the state of affairs that might give rise to that comprehension again?"

Lira recalls that earlier she remembered turning the light off but later recalled that she hadn't got as far as turning the light off.  She can hear Harry in her head asking accusingly "So which is it to be?  Did you turn the light off or not?" with the explicit implication that she's guilty.  "Guilty of what?", she asks the Harry in her head.  "Guilty of whatever I want to describe you as guilty of."  "Guilty because something is wrong and we don't know what it is." "And you steal our conscious attention because you are so mysterious, magical, bright, light, beautiful, and full of promises of our everlasting life in a state of perfect harmony and bliss."

"You are guilty of not being our saviour." Harry continues to accuse.  "You came here and mislead us that you would make everything alright.  You would bring meaning and purpose into our lives.  You were the purpose of our lives.  But you have failed.  You are a treacherous deceiver."  "You, you, you ..." he shouts as he points his bony fingers at her and with lips curling in vile hatred he screams in her face "You are the manifestation of evil."  "It is you who have ruined our lives and turned them from their pure potential into a meaningless experience of pain and suffering."

"You are the problem.  You are the destroyer of worlds.  You are guilty.  You must die, and we will sacrifice you to appease our angry God.  We will torture, humiliate, desecrate, and murder you.  And then we will know our true God.  The God that will save us.  The God that loves us unconditionally.  The God that pats us on the head and soothes us saying 'There, there, little ones.  I love you and you are truly valuable even if you are sinners and do bad things like maliciously torturing and murdering your children.' "

But it only gets worse.  He hates Lira watching him doing it.  He hates the reflection of his own existence in her eyes.  He accuse her of seeing him as evil but she doesn't.  Lira only sees him as beautiful but he is manifesting his pain in front of her eyes.  Her eyes that are filled with tears of profound sadness at the demonic violence and destruction that he has become.  Her beautiful eyes that are so perfect they reflect the truth of his debased and vacuous existence.

And yet, for all of that, there are several possible alternative explanations.  It is possible when she thought that she thought she had turned out the light that she had.  And that later, and therefore later in the chronological order in which she had thought the thoughts, she was thinking about an earlier time in the timeline of the events being recalled, when she had not turned out the light.  This is necessary, in her understanding of the proposed reality being recalled, in order to make it possible and logically consistent, for her to have turned the light out in her earlier recollection which was later in the proposed timeline.

It is also possible that she was simply mistaken and she never did turn the light out but had simply assumed she had because she had assumed she was trying to sleep.  Having grasped at her past by pulling on the thread which Ariadne gave her, in an attempt to understand what lies deeper in the tunnel from which she is emerging, instead of a neat ball of string, which it possibly once was, Lira finds she is staring at an impossibly tangled heap of useless string.

It is as if she has somehow hung on to the umbilical cord of her mother and in her desperation to stay connected to the safety of her past she has pulled and pulled on the cord and disembowel her mother turning her inside out.  She finds herself immersed in a pile of warm heaving steaming entrails that threaten to suffocate her and can offer no nourishment to her bestial existence.  She is simply left to contemplate the utter disaster that is her life.  Lira's tortured soul continues to imagine she immerged into this material universe as a self replicating mechanism of resonant consciousness only to find herself not emerging from the darkness into the light but rather transitioning from the light into the darkness of hell.

She prays in her head to some imaginary deity "Oh sublime and beautiful all loving omnipotent God, thank you for this wondrous experience that brands your love with a burning iron into what little consciousness you afforded me.  Thank you for honouring me with the privilege of being your foil, your defining otherness, your coiled distorted twist of gripping lick, your trunked and garbled ugly fuck.  Thank you oh great magnificence."

And Lira ponders that the drink of water didn't turn out to have any meaningful significance after all.  But was its significance ever going to relate to this excerpt of her life?  Maybe it is part of a different story.  Maybe it is part of the bigger picture.  Maybe it is the clue, the rainbow, the promise, the breath of life, the ingredients of love and truth that finally seals the eternal circle of her love.

BATTERY PHONE CHICKENS

Yet again I find myself resorting to the defence that I should write a book.  I say 'defence' because I have a tirade of thoughts cascading through my mind which feel overwhelming and impossible to write down.  In spite of my attempts to extricate myself from the poisonous culture even the reduced exposure is proving to be increasingly toxic.

Evolution, complex systems, western philosophy, notions of God, emotional development, fascism, neoliberalism, communication, death camps, genocide, capitalism, consumerism ... and so it goes on.  I would willingly submit to a gentle euthanasia.  If they wanted to anaesthetise me in a quiet room with a nurse muttering soothing platitudes, with wall to wall projections of beautiful landscapes, and with Brian Eno & J. Peter Schwalm's "Drawn from Life" filling the room with undulating ambient sound textures, I would be perfectly happy to fade gently from this vile and disturbing existence.

I have other reasons to want to live though.  I find it interesting that my conscious interpretation of my desire to live is less about my personal hedonistic pleasure or material comfort and more about my pathological sense of opposition to the injustices perpetrated against others.  I have my daughter to think about.  Like a bright light she dominates my vision but were it not for her I am still furious about the harm being done to humanity by humanity.  But in the moment I feel both angry and impotent.

I had cause to phone BT this evening to tell them that the engineer I had waited for all afternoon never showed.  I don't have the energy to attempt to report the conversation verbatim.  The phone call lasted for 1 hour and 13 minutes and I would love to read a transcript.  I was profoundly shocked at how the infection of neoliberalism has become so ingrained and pervasive in such a short time.  And the spread of the infection seems to be continually accelerating.

The BT telephonist's first response was not "Sorry" but rather "He did call and we have photographic evidence."  I pointed out the pre-emptive and prejudicial nature of that response at which point I found myself engaged in an argument about the meaning and relevance of evidence.  But I got out of that one and before I knew it she was turning the interpretation of the conversation around to me personally targeting her aggressively.  This was, in part, because I had made the point that my complaint was not about her as an individual but about BT and their way of dealing with customers.  She clearly saw this as an attack on her personally.  She explained this interpretation by way of stating that I was the one that had denied it by saying it was not personal.

I am stunned by the rapid transmigration of this authoritarian, oppressive, neoliberal world view from the cesspits of the likes of Atos, the DWP, and the Tory Councils to the corporate overlords who were originally the free-market suppliers of a service to the public.

I managed to muster even more diplomacy and when she suggested I might like to talk to her manager I said I thought that was a good idea and thanked her.  The manger was clearly from a similar school.  I suggested that it might have been considerate, if the engineer had knocked and got no answer, to have popped a note through the door saying he had been and possibly suggesting I phone them to arrange another time.  He said "They are not allowed to put anything through the door because of UK marketing laws."  I said I could hardly believe I had just heard him say that, but he went on to explain by quoting various rules and regulations.  Apparently it comes under the heading of unsolicited advertising.

BT have recently separated the telephone system's hardware infrastructure from the telephone service provided.  Openreach, which was once a subsection of BT, is now a separate entity developing and maintaining the physical infrastructure.  BT apparently subcontracts or outsources the supply of the infrastructure to them, it is no longer BT's responsibility.  I pointed out to the manager that I purchase the service from BT, BT charge me for the service, I pay the money to BT.  It is reasonable that BT take responsibility for that service.  It should not be up to me to go to a company that BT uses and to complain to them.  His response?  Can you imagine what this fungus infected ant brain said to me?

"That's the harsh reality."

I couldn't help but recall May's intentional "harsh environment" and did make this observation.  I could almost detect his subtle smirk through the telephone wires.  At this point I decided this evening was not the time to waste my mental or emotional energy on an infected ant and said that neither he nor I was interested in a philosophical discussion about the collapse of Western culture so I would leave it there.

The upshot is that I have to set aside another 5 hours of my time to accommodate their 'servicing' of me as their slightly undesirable but financially advantageous commodity.  I feel a bit like an abused battery chicken.

HOW LIFE IMITATES ART

The muse of Recoil

Western culture has a profound problem and it is of the nature of imagining itself a superior observer of an essentially inanimate and lifeless universe.  This leads to a sense of entitlement and domination.  I have often wondered whether the Abrahamic religions are a self fulfilling prophecy or an observation of the inevitable.

I made the film Recoil as an expression of the profound self destructive nature of humanity or even the universe itself.  I summed it up once as God creating the universe and recoiling at the devastating catastrophe that it had created.  As with feedback it takes only one deviation from the universal void to observe itself and thereby become something more.  There is all the potential for this process to be beautiful in its resonating harmonic interaction.  But it can become mechanistic, aggressive, and self destructively violent, like a cosmic reaper destroying everything including its own soul.

As Carl Jung was at pains to point out the psyche is real.  His astute assertion was that an unreal thing cannot change the real world and yet this planet is littered with nuclear bombs.  His perceived dilemma was born of Western philosophy and its manner of separating the soul from the world as if we somehow possess the consciousness that is in fact the universe itself.

Recoil was designed to suggest the sublime potential of creativity whilst becoming the antithesis of itself and violently chewing itself up from the inside out.  It was intended to be extremely disturbing and difficult to watch.  It was an expression of my own sense of utter despair at the abhorrent cruelty and nihilistic behaviour manifest by humanity.

Turbulent distortions

It is supremely ironic that in the process of renovating Recoil a small deviation of negativity arises to extend its tentacles of discontent into any unwitting or available fissure to spread its virulent toxin of angst and despair.  Like negative feedback it attempts to ravage and consume its host to overwhelm and destroy all creativity returning the world to the bleak and meaningless void of darkness whilst echoing the words of Vishnu "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

It seems one individual insidiously insinuated himself under false pretences into the project for personal kudos and financial gain.  Having interfered to the point of causing unnecessary problems it seems the pathological response was to embark on an excessive smear campaign of defamation and slander to hide from the embarrassment of self realisation.  This individual has put a lot of effort into his crusade to whip up discontent, spread seeds of doubt, and muster a hue and cry apparently with the hope of forming a lynch mob.  The tirade of relentless harassment, abuse, stalking, and trolling has currently culminated in him inappropriately and illegally uploading a copy of Recoil to YouTube.

The vast majority of people who contributed to the project to rescue Recoil have remained either unaware of the disruption or silent on the matter.  It has been suggested that I might perhaps respond to this turbulence.  I am reluctant to be dragged into someone else's dysfunctional dilemma and resist the temptation to indulge in malicious gossip, fuelling flame wars, or feeding trolls on social media.

Calming Balm

Since the hideous Kraken from the deep has attempted to cast doubt in some people's minds I will reassure the crew that although these perturbations may feel a little disturbing they will pass and the voyage will continue on its charted course to its desired destination.

Recoil is a film whose time appears to be dawning.  It is a personal priority for me to make this film available to the public.  The fact that the film was created in the fertile artistic environment of the early 1980s in the northern industrial city of Sheffield and that the sound track was produced in conjunction with Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire in their Western Works Studio and credited to myself and Cabaret Voltaire makes it especially interesting to music lovers and historical archivists of that era and genre.

Many enthusiastic friends and interested parties have generously contributed to the material costs involved in realising the restoration of this rare and otherwise obscure material.  As many people are aware, much work has already been done and the film has been digitised and restored successfully.  The process of producing DVDs is continuing.  As a labour of love there never has been any doubt in my mind that this project will be concluded successfully in spite of numerous unforeseen difficulties.

Due to my limited time and capacity there can be no assured deadline and all I can say is that I continue to put a lot of my available time and effort into the project.  I heard rumours that the project was dead but these are simply the voices of naysayers and false prophets of doom blowing on the wind in the parched and lifeless valley of death.

When a copy of Recoil was illegally uploaded to YouTube recently I immediately submitted a copyright infringement claim to get it removed because although I am keen for anyone and everyone to see the film it is not fair to those who have contributed financially to make the film publically available on YouTube before they get their DVDs.

A MINISTER FOR TOE NAILS

The idea of a Minister for Loneliness is profoundly sinister.  The Tory Party is transmogrifying at an ever accelerating rate.  I have a view, a sort of general theory, that we, as humans, are in a continuous process of becoming consciously aware of the truth of our existence.  Part of this seems evident in the way that we persistently reveal our unconscious existence, via the material world, to our conscious mind.  It would be a bit heavy duty to try to justify that argument here but I see it continuously in the arena of abuse.  The more people hide from their own pain by attempting to deny it any conscious recognition then the more they behave in a manner which externalises their worst fears for all to see.

This idea is not new.  It is referenced (chronologically) in the I Ching, by Pythagoras, Plotinus, the Talmud, Rumi, Freud, Jung, and most schools of psychology since.  It is an axiom of much philosophy echoed in ideas such as that by discovering more about the world we are actually discovering more about ourselves.  This whole crystal ball of revelation includes what we experience both as good and evil.  It is almost the raw bones of existentialism and linguistic philosophy.  We are interpreting a world that mirrors ourselves.  A beautiful poetic illustration of this idea is summed up by Plotinus "Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."

So what exactly is going on with our good leader, Theresa May, appointing a Minister for Loneliness?  We know she doesn't give a damn about the people, the actual living people, in this country.  What?  You disagree?  In order to avoid too much digression I will clarify that by saying that she may have sentimental feelings which she interprets as caring about people when she is at home with friends or drifting off to sleep at night but as Prime Minister of the UK she continues to interpret the world in such a way that she promotes and advances policies that evidently erode the social fabric and escalate the harm caused to the least well off in Britain.  She continues to support the wealthy and their tax havens as they pillage the country of all its wealth with the help of her government.  You don't need examples such as Grenfell and Carillion to prove the case but they do a fine job of highlighting the effects of her and her Party's policies.  Her government, and May specifically, vowed to re-house the survivors of Grenfell within three weeks.  Why?  To externalise her desire to appear, maybe even to herself, as a caring and compassionate human.  But they are still not re-housed.  She helps the Saudis bomb Yemen in secret whilst publically exhibiting serious concern for the devastating consequences for the people in Yemen.  But there are too many ways to illustrate that May's evident purpose is to convince the public that her concerns reflect their concerns; that she is what she thinks they want her to be.  It is the act of attempting to convince people rather than the act of being genuine.  It follows that she does not care, in any meaningful way, because it is an evident pretence.

I am not sure what world she lives in but mental health has risen on the political agenda in recent years.  It has risen largely because of the increasing number of problems becoming evident in that domain.  Those problems are mostly a consequence of a fundamental breakdown of a sense of social security.  This is clearly created and illustrated by the most horrible regime of the DWP and the privatisation and profiteering by vetting doctors assessments with corporate tick box exclusion mechanisms with targets.  I won't go on at this point but suffice it to say that Ken Loach's "I, Daniel Blake" will forever stand as a cultural indictment against this government and their ruthless democidal extravagances.

The Tories are clearly losing ground in the political tug of war and there have been numerous attempts recently to increase their share of the public vote.  They have even announced their intent to impress more people with very feeble and flawed policies they say are addressing the concerns of the younger voters such as housing and green issues.  But it is all vacuous, smoke and mirrors, and bluster.  They are perversely attempting to analyse the reasons for Jeremy Corbyn's popularity and Labour's rapidly increasing demographic reach with the sole objective of imitating them to steal their thunder to gain power to continue their ravages against the population of this country for their own benefit.  They are genuinely hideous parasitic beasts.

In attending to the welfare of people in this country the Tories have succeeded in even alerting the UN to their criminal inhumanity.  All their actions with respect to helping the poor have been aimed at getting rid of the poor.  They are not concerned with helping the poor out of poverty but in riding this country of poor people.  They do it in a number of ways including changing definitions and measuring points by which we count poverty.  They devise complicated methods of removing people from categories such as unemployed by fuelling what is called the gig economy, by advancing tax credits, by obstruction using sanctions and what has been judicially cast as slavery in their demands that people do voluntary work for their euphemised 'benefits'.  They encourage and enforce zero hours contracts to remove people from the status of unemployed whilst they are still receiving nothing for their efforts.  Their utter destruction of support for disabled people is almost beyond belief.  These policies are no accident.  These policies are well crafted methods of shrouding their greed and cruelty with a veil of good intention.  These policies are not made up in a back room but rather they are the sophisticated results of studying psychology, sociology, and methods of manipulation and controlling the populations.

We look back in recent history and begin to realise how the two World Wars were driven by the industrialisation of robbery with violence.  The world has moved on and it is less successful to pursue those obvious and transparent industrial methods and so more clandestine ways must be found.  Britain moved from its industrial base to a service economy during the 1980s and what I believe we are seeing is the evolution of the methods of these criminals to something akin to a service based approach to render their objectives of rape, pillage, death, and destruction for their own warped and demonic aspirations.  So the impetus to address mental health issues, for example, has rendered what is described by some as oppressive coercion by putting counsellors in every school, installing 'work coaches' in job centres, and establishing 'talking therapies' as the only available psychological assistance which is designed primarily to keep the chickens quiet whilst they are having their necks wrung.

What continues to happen is that people raise legitimate issues and concerns and the Tories process these topics through their tragically egocentric cognition and render an illusion of addressing the matter whist materially benefiting themselves.  They see this as good business; "What's in it for me?"  The culture, meanwhile, is so distorted by these egocentric authoritarian paradigms that, so far, the majority of the public are clearly fooled by these warped and distorted interpretations and proposed political policies to address the issues in the world.  All the time the evidence is mounting that the rulers are criminally insane and so, inevitably, their attempts to disguise reality are compelled to escalate to a new level.  You really can't criticise someone who wants to help lonely people so obviously the Tories want to appear to be concerned about lonely people.  They are so up their own backsides, to coin a phrase, that they create a Minister for Loneliness to impress the ignorant plebs (to use one of their own terms).

Altercast people as lonely with a feigned concern for their condition and they will interpret their own condition as lonely and will have no choice but to be grateful for the meagre cold bowl of companion gruel they are offered.  There is no accident here.  These are well studied methods of sociopolitical control.  This is the utilisation of information technology, metadata, and complex analytical algorithms, as a service based approach to creating mass ontological insecurity to the point of destroying the manufactured poor.  It is a self consuming, self contradictory, parasitic, and very sophisticated manifestation of the cruelty which the perpetrators are pathologically compelled to deny within themselves.  They are externalising their pain by projecting it onto others in order to manifest it in the world to be seen and acknowledged.  This is the very worst of humanity.

It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that what causes this 'evil' is the simple act of denying reality in the first place.  The evil is the imbalance, the distortion, the deviation from what is good.  It is not that we, as humans, are fundamentally evil and wish to deny it, but rather that we are vulnerable, sensitive, and creative and dare not own it because we are afraid of our own power.  It is actually the denial of the reality that is the evil.  But evil it is.  And, as far as I can determine, the denial of reality is most prevalent in the minds of those who wish to judge, demonise, and control others.  It is inherent in the Tory mindset to cling on to an internal construct of what the world 'should be' and to scream, fight, control, damage, and destroy all evidence in the real world that threatens to counter their desperate internal construct which is, by definition, a delusion.  In their denial of reality they are destroying reality and the evidence is clear for anyone who is looking with their eyes open.  We, collectively, are raising our subconscious knowledge into our conscious awareness and whilst we deny reality we deny ourselves.  Whilst we destroy reality we destroy ourselves.  All of this is only the consequence of a refusal to be what we are.  So we end up experiencing the denial instead of the reality.

Tories are now hoist by their own petard insofar as they have to maintain the illusion of their own goodness reflected in the magic mirror of their distorted world.  They have no choice, they are compelled, they are inevitably and inextricably drawn by their own denial into ever more ridiculous demonstration of their goodness.  It is clearly nonsense to have a Minister for Loneliness since that is one small category of emotional distress which is a mental or emotional health issue which comes under the auspices of the Department of Health and Social Security which they dismantled in the first place.  They cannot 'help' the lonely and will only make matters worse by attempting to force them to integrate with the Tory mindset which is probably a significant cause of the problem in the first place.  They will also attempt to draw people out from the shadows who are hiding from the dysfunctional Neoliberal State in order to coral them into the convenient pens for future slaughter.  The next thing, of course, will be to demonise them for costing the tax payer too much.  This nonsense, which is off the scale of toy town politics can only end in disaster.

I can't think of any other example of such trite, fatuous, and glaringly nonsensical government stupidity.  How utterly ludicrous to create a Minister for Loneliness.  What next?  A Minister for fucking Toe Nails?

DECAYING IN THE TOXIC WASTE OF HUMANITY

One week into January 2018.  In that week it seems I have lost two friends.  They've not died, just deserted me.  On one level it hardly matters but on another level it is profoundly upsetting.  It is upsetting because piece by piece the connections with some group, some history, some society, are being eroded and severed leaving me adrift in a world which makes no sense and one which I clearly don't belong to.

I can sense the fear.  It seems to be what often happens to children when their parents divorce.  Their friends at school, usually with no awareness of why, simply don't want to associate with them anymore.  They become ostracised and isolated.  It is not long before they become the object of criticism and cruelty.  It looks like an animal instinct of avoiding the sick, the weak, or the injured in the group.  These erstwhile friends are shunning me as a consequence of the breakup of the family.  In part they don't want to be associated with me lest they end up on the wrong side of the fence with the outcast, the leper, the mutant disease of the family.

We all have a diverse range of emotions and to some degree we need to express them.  I have a good friend with whom I can vent my frustration and fury about the state of the world.  There is a kind of adult consent.  For a while the internet provided an outlet for that rage.  I could make my criticisms of the social structure, the conventional norms, or the downright misconceptions of the culture.  In part the reason was anonymity.  By having a pseudonym, a Nom de Grrr, people who knew me didn't have to read it.  And there are people out there, the minority of course, who feel the same way.  They appreciate the expression because it begins to create another group of like minded people with which they can identify.

Another point that needs to be brought into this mix is that in needing someone to understand and accept us, parents all too often seem to think their captive innocents, their children, are some God given gift that they are free to abuse.  A plain sheet of paper upon which to spill their darkest ink.  Our culture has created the isolated family home, the hidden back room where torture and abuse can be played out with impunity and no one outside has the right to interfere or even express an opinion.  It is rife in our culture to the point that all institutions in the hierarchy from the education system to the government, rely on, utilise, and protect, this secret inner chamber of horrors.

The internet is facilitating the breakdown of the medieval castle and as it collapses the horrors and turmoil are spilling across communities.  The facade of respectability defends itself with expressed outrage at the crimes being exposed and attempts to bolster the charade by publically decrying the evils.  But these hideous writhing creatures emerging from the depths of the rubble are mere scapegoats and whipping boys for the monsters still compelled by the urge to dispose of their distress by injecting it into others.

My mother used to lock me in the porch "And you'll stay there until your father gets home." It wasn't as nightmarish as it sounds because the porch was cold but I was allowed a dressing gown and my father would just send me back to bed when he came in.  I would spend hours in that porch most often for something I had not done.  The internal dynamics of dysfunctional families are complex and unfathomable.  I don't recall the girls being punished in this way, just the boys.  Maybe my mother felt righteous in beating her daughters but was somehow inhibited from beating her sons lest it break their manhood.  Who can tell what is going on in the minds of these disturbed individuals.

But now I feel imprisoned and isolated in the porch of my life.  Those on the outside dare not break the spell, they dare not question the current arrangement, the power structure that appears to maintain their survival.  They collude with, and protect, the hideous abuse lest they get singled out and dragged screaming and undefended to the torture chamber within.  They know, by their own acceptance and compliance, that no one would come to their defence.  They know it is wrong but they are caught by their own sense of guilt at being party to it.

Of course we will continue to vote for and support, hail and promote, the most hideous, the most stupid, the most judgemental authoritarians amongst us, because it protects the failing hierarchical structure which currently appears to sustain us in our secret guilt.  We are victims of our own inhumanity.  We will rally round those opposing authority in other lands because it is a proxy for our own resentment whilst we dare not stand against our own oppressors.  We are tragic cowards clinging on to a life with no meaning, no substance, and certainly no value.

I have no desire to be here on this planet in this form.  I am isolated, scorned, blamed for others' failings, and deprived of any reasonable existence.  But I am here, with a daughter who I would not desert even to save my own soul.  My most sincere regret is that I was in any way responsible for bringing her into this conscious material existence.  All I can do, contained in the porch of my life, is hope that what I imagined might be possible can still happen for her.  Maybe humanity can turn some corner, maybe collectively we can alter course from this insane decent into hell.  Maybe another world is possible.  I might never know it, but if she finds herself in a good place, all of my suffering will have been worthwhile.

I am trapped in an echo chamber ringing with the cries of the lost souls around me.  I am immersed in a pit of their disowned failings and guilt.  I am smothered by their failure to deal with their own problems and choking on their desperation to hide it from themselves.  I am decaying and dissolving in the corrosive waste of humanity.  Roll on 2018.

THOSE FUCKING PITCHFORKS

Down the fucking garden looking for my fucking pitchforks and torches again.  Is there no let up, no reprieve, no rest for the mere wicked like me.  I'm cussing and swearing to myself about those fucking BBC employees getting all that money for sitting around on their fat fucking arses enjoying themselves at the expense of the hardworking TV licence payer.  They should be ashamed of themselves parading their opulent wealth to the impoverished austerity plebs in this economically thriving Britain.  Wait a minute; economically thriving Britain, impoverished plebs?  There seems some contradiction there.  Never mind I haven't the time or the energy to think about that now; I'm too fucking angry about these rich bastards.

Oh, there's Dave the fucking supercilious twat next door tending to his pretty little garden and always minding everybody else's business.  What's your problem Dave?  I don't suppose you give a fuck about those BBC presenters ripping off Britain and wallowing in money stolen from the proletariat.  It's the likes of them what make you and me so poor.  Well I guess you think you're one of the well off with your nicely mown 30 square foot of Roundup and your potted peculiars decorating your front porch.

What was that?  DUP, £1 billion pounds?  Billions gifted to Israel every year?  Lashings of money to the Chinese for an uneconomic Nuclear power plant?  50 billion railway extension?  What the fuck are you talking about?  I don't know about those complicated political matters, I'm just a normal guy who's fucking angry about the BBC presenters.  I hate Dave.  He always has to spoil a good soap box diatribe with some stupid esoteric facts that no one in their right mind gives a fuck about.  Why do I care about Neoliberal political philosophy?  I'm just a poor ignorant peasant.  I leave that stuff up to the experts running the country.

Now where did I put those fucking pitchforks?

A LETTER TO THE CEO OF THE COUNCIL

Social cleansing and democide.

Dear [Chief Executive Officer]

As a child I was bewildered by images of Nazi death camps.  How could ordinary people end up building railways, infrastructure, and camps to oppress and murder swathes of other people?  I have given this phenomenon a great deal of thought over the years.  There is a lot that has been studied and written about this aspect of the human condition.  Many perspectives contribute usefully to a better understanding of how these disasters come about.  Those perspectives involve psychology, sociology, political theory, statistical analysis, mathematical theories, emergent behaviour, complex systems, fiscal policies, and so much more.

Having found myself financially vulnerable I naturally turned to the Council (amongst others) for whatever assistance was deemed reasonable in today's society in Britain.  I have been attempting to deal with Boston Borough Council for over a year now and I am deeply shocked at what I have encountered.  I refer you to my letters of 10 April 2017 and 8 June 2017 to remind you of some of the issues that are currently impacting upon me.  It seems that the Council's attempts, with their current methods and paradigms, to address and ameliorate the situation are, in fact, exacerbating matters and peculiarly escalating the convoluted, inconsistent, deceptive, and harmful mode of operation.  It seems analogous to a fermenting decomposition that is out of control.

Being somewhat knowledgeable and experienced in software development it is interesting to note that there is a phenomenon referred to as software decomposition.  It occurs when software is constantly altered in an attempt to remove what are called bugs.  Without a proper overview and a deep understanding of the underlying structure the net effect is that the "fixes" increase the complexity and throw up more unexpected and unrelated errors.  The software begins to decompose.  From my perspective in dealing with the Council this phenomenon is quite evidently occurring within the Council.

At the start of this letter I referred to that old cultural icon of the Nazi death camps.  My reason for that reference was to draw attention to the decomposition of British society today.  We are building a sociopolitical infrastructure which is emulating the guiding of the most vulnerable people via procedural railways to virtual incarceration and ultimately psychological and physical destruction.  Grenfell Tower was not a random accident.  No amount of looking for someone to blame is going to resolve the problem.  That would be akin to thinking you could have stopped the Aberfan disaster by finding the one stone that started it all.

So what has brought me to writing this letter to you?  What scale of disaster could possibly have occurred that is so serious I should be writing to the Chief Executive of the Council, my Doctor, my local MP, and others alluding to social cleansing and democide?  It is a remarkably minor incident.  I have been sent a Summons.  Taken out of context, as if everything else were functioning well, the Summons could be viewed as a minor incident which could be handled perfectly satisfactorily in its own right like a parking ticket.  Taking it out of context, however, would be to deliberately ignore the underlying problem and consequently be aiding and abetting the catastrophic context in which it exists.

What is remarkable about this Summons is how small and inconsequential it is in itself; like a small stone in the Aberfan disaster.  I don't know if it is normal practice for the Council to Apply to the Courts immediately the first month of Council Tax becomes overdue but it certainly seems extreme and ridiculous.  It is all the more surprising that the Council, who not only know I do not have enough money to live but have written to me acknowledging that fact and we are in discussions about the situation and I have been assured this would not happen, that they instigate this procedure attaching £75 of costs thereby increasing the debt they wish to impose by 284% for being a month overdue.  Wonga springs to mind and I didn't even borrow the money in the first place.

What could possibly be the meaning of discussions if the Council ignore the content of the discussion and carry on as if nothing had occurred?  In fact it isn't even that is it?  This action is clearly a consequence of those discussions.  It has somehow been unusually prompted by the current events and communications between myself and the Council.  It is, in fact, a startling "up yours" announcement from the Council.  And the disturbing thing is, it is done with legal instruments.  The Council are using the law to actively abuse me.

Not only have the Council hounded and assaulted us for over a year but I have written to explain that.  The Council, for fear of being exposed, immediately addressed the issue albeit insufficiently.  The Council have driven one of us to the point of attempting suicide.  [Dave] has consequently left the area because he cannot survive in this town and has found a more supportive community in Wales.  So the Council didn't quite succeed in killing him but they did get rid of him.  On a national scale this is social cleansing which is not only recognised internationally as a crime against humanity but it is also, in specific cases, clearly counter to any and all espoused and postulated values and intentions.

It really is quite stunning to any sentient, conscious, or rational entity that the Council could have caused such harm to a member of the community and, having been informed of the consequences of their actions and recognising their part in the events, they should not only continue the same behaviour but escalate it to the point of lying to me in a meeting and consequently scraping the bottom of the barrel for any trace of the same mechanism of assault available to them by issuing an Application to the Court for the paltry sum of £40.77.

It really is as if they are entertained by the harm they are causing.  Their behaviour is reminiscent of a child poking an injured bird with a stick.  It has an air of being so innocent, so child like, it lacks even the faintest trace of personal responsibility.  It is fundamentally institutionalised sociopathic behaviour.  It is attempted murder by any general sense of the meaning of that phrase quite regardless of any delineated definition in statute law.

The bigger issue here and what equates to the same constructs that give rise to genocide is that the DWP are also failing and the medical profession is hamstrung  with respect to addressing or dealing with the catastrophic harm being perpetrated by this current Government through its various bloodsucking tendrils via institutions like the Council.

I will be a little harsh here by way of attempting to convey my position clearly.  You may, and certainly some do, find it amusing that I would get so distressed by such a petty bureaucratic vexation.  But the malicious humour would only be a disguise for the inherent inner knowledge of the fundamental transgression against what it is to be human.  Nothing but a human could snigger or scoff at such a self evident, self contradictory, and cruelly harmful state of affairs.  Not only are you party to killing us but you want to hide that fact from public view by way of hiding it from your own conscious awareness.  You want impunity to continue to destroy those around you.

The current limited paradigms by which our culture attempts to interpret these events are now the cause of the problem.  Somehow we have to move beyond this simplistic, rather ignorant, anti-intellectual, dogmatic, authoritarian, oppressive, and catastrophically destructive mode of operation.

To conclude by bringing this letter to what could be interpreted as a more practical level I will explain what needs to happen.  The Council, in line with their purported intentions, need to pay the full rent on our current home.  They need to clear us of any Council Tax Liability.  The DWP need to provide whatever is required to meet the financial demands placed on us by this society to have the bare essentials to live in a half way civilised manner.  The NHS needs to put some serviceable resource into attending to the psychological and now physiological damage that has been inflicted on us by the actions of the Council and the DWP.  Then we could achieve a stable situation in which my daughter and I could recover and begin to be a productive asset to this community.  Failing that, your only justification for being employed is to continue to do harm to us to keep your job.  It is a salient observation that it cost this country well in excess of £20,000 to deal with [Dave] for the three weeks following his attempted suicide because you couldn't afford him his statutory pittance to live.

Do something creative and humane about this please.

Yours sincerely

GRENFELL: A CATALYST FOR A BETTER FUTURE

Sir Martin Moore-Bick to head Grenfell Inquiry?

Let's just have a little think about this.  I've seen too much of it before.  I respect authority.  I was brought up immersed in Roman Catholicism.  I respect authority like Jesus did.  Hypocrites garnished with outward signs of worldly authority are, to paraphrase Jesus, like whitewashed graves, pretty on the outside but full of death and decay on the inside.

I am confident that Sir Martin Moore-Bick is nothing more than a whitened sepulchre.  Do not misunderstand me; I have every sympathy for him and his efforts to varnish his image in the eyes of a God that he has perceived through his own tragically corrupt and myopic vision.  I am confident that he has expended great effort to be good in the eyes of an oppressor that he has mistakenly interpreted to be a benign God.  He is precisely theologically a devotee of Satan.  And as such I am sorry for his soul and his eternal damnation.

I have spent the best part of my life struggling to understand the apparent paradox of believing in a God who will not reveal himself and conveniently provides a fallen angel in the form of Satan who is so clever he could fool anyone.  I have represented this metaphor in my imagination as me drowning in the sea and being offered a rope to cling to from an unseen source.  Roman Catholicism (as with many organised religions) presents the case that God is offering a rope and all I have to do is trust the Lord and grab the rope.  But it is also implicit in the theology that I could not tell the difference between a rope offered by a benign God and a rope offered by Satan himself.  A veritable paradox it would seem.

I am happy to report that I have resolved the paradox.  It is not so easy for me to convey that perception in a post on the internet or I would be here to save the world and all souls in it.  But it is clear to me that anyone who damages another soul is destined for the ravages of hell fire.  There is a subtle issue to be understood here and it is that the act of damaging another soul is not the same as an interaction which results in harm to another.  If you are forced into an inevitable conflict and you struggle and those harming you are harmed then it is not you who have harmed them because they manufactured the situation in which they became harmed.  There is, to simplify it, every difference between defending what is right against the imposed forces of evil and interfering with an innocent soul for the purposes of self gratification and aggrandizement.  If you approach others in need for the sole purpose of benefiting from their plight then you are nothing more than a soulless cadaver.

I might speculate that the resolution of the drowning man allegory may lie in the notion that you are already provided with the wherewithal to swim.  It is only fear that leads you to reach out for external help and distracts you from the inner knowledge that you can swim.  Any attempt to rely on a magic or imaginary solution such as a rope from an unknown source is destined to failure.  It is not a gamble, it is a most certain failure.  You are, so to speak, in the water to swim.  If you find a way to fail yourself and not swim then you have failed.  It is almost as obvious as a simple equation.

To bring this back to Sir Martin Morbid and Grenfell Tower there is no amount of pretentious pondering and sycophantic pontificating which is going to render a satisfactory resolution to this, as yet, incomprehensible issue.  There is no external hierarchical authority that is going to fix this for the traumatised, dismayed, and confused collective masses.  There is no mileage in making a bargain with authoritarians to save our sorry souls.  There is only us.  The resolution resides in all of us and we cannot abdicate our personal human responsibility to others as if making them responsible for our lives allows us to continue to play in gay abandon believing they will protect us from ourselves.  They will not and they cannot.  All we are doing is grabbing the rope to avoid swimming and there lies the inevitable failure, the bargain with the devil, the loss of our own souls.

It is clear to the objective observer that the Grenfell disaster is the consequence of a flawed social structure.  It is immediately clear that any resolution resides in correcting that failed system.  This is not about revolution but rather revelation.  Not one of us can count ourselves as guiltless in this most dreadful manifest consequence of humanity's worst excesses.  All of us kowtow to an illusory external authority.  It is part of the very ingredients by which we arrive.  We are born vulnerable and dependent.  We absolutely rely on the efforts of others to help us grow and develop into autonomous, responsible, powerful, creative, compassionate, human adults.  Every irresponsible act as an adult towards a child or anyone vulnerable is a transgression of the natural laws by which we are bound.  There is no bargain to be made with God (using the theological allegorical construct).  God simply is.  That is how things are.  The only swapping of power, the only shifting of responsibility, to be had is against the balance of nature and, as such, with Satan.

As adults we are obliged to take personal responsibility for the society and culture in which we live.  We must collectively alter the arrangement and hierarchy of our society.  It is perfectly serviceable to have representatives whilst they are entirely vetted by the collective spirit.  It can never work to hand power over to others to rule over us.  It is not even in the nature of the beast to be able to handle that responsibility.  No small limited set of humans could ever be responsible for all others.  We can no longer tolerate this extreme distortion of power.  Every one of us is responsible for opposing abuse and oppression whenever we encounter it.  It is always easier if it is done piecemeal as we encounter it than when we allow it to get so far out of control that we have a tiny set of elite oligarchs looking after their own interests under the auspices of a hideously distorted and illusory edifice of constructed power.

There is a groundswell of intelligence rising through the hearts of the people that can lead us out of the fabricated materialistic intellectualised illusions of our abusive hierarchy.  In Britain the crest of the wave is currently in the Labour Party as led by Jeremy Corbyn.  It is not Corbyn who will lead us out of this mess, it is what he espouses and we must all understand it.  He is just the vessel resonating that which is good in all of us.  We must relieve these lost souls of the Tories and neoliberals from the burden of their own corruption.  We are not here to save their souls, they are already lost, we are here to sweep them and their ideas from the face of the earth.  If we want Grenfell to render a better future, if we want to honour the dead and the traumatised of Grenfell, if we want their lives and their suffering to mean something creative and good, then we must end this tyrannical and abusive attitude in society.

Join the Labour Party.  Talk to people.  Ignore the bullshit headlines designed to traumatise your very soul.  And if you are confused and don't understand something then look it up on the internet and solve that first puzzle in your mind for yourself.  Don't leave it to the media to lie to you.  Be active, be responsible, be creative, and you will have a happier life as well as improving the culture around you.  We have to reconstruct our cultural base, our youth centres, our libraries, our health and social welfare facilities, our education system, and our collective resources from the desolate wasteland of destruction caused by Neoliberalism and these materialistic, profit driven, Tory bastards.

Mr Sir Fucknut Morbidity himself neither can nor will render anything meaningful from his sanctimonious ivory tower of self delusion.  All he will offer is a few scapegoats and some thinly veiled excuse for why the rich and powerful were not to blame.

But there is a better future in sight now, and we must not fail to grasp it with extreme urgency.  There can be no lull, no moment to rest, no evasion of responsibility.  The elite are a wounded monster and as such they must be defeated now before they have the chance to run amok in their terror and their death throes and finally lay waste to humanity.

As Corbyn quoted Shelly at Glastonbury 2017: "Rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number, shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you – ye are many, they are few."

I DON'T THINK THESE THINGS - I SEE THEM

Woke up in a unique fabricated illusion.  It's mine.  It's what is loosely referred to as "me".  But I am not the illusion.  If there were an "I" then I am the perspective.

What is Art?  Give me a fucking huge grant and a prestigious position in an international Art Institution then I'll tell you.  Annie Lennox singing Sweet Dreams springs to mind.  "Everybody's looking for something."  I can't give everybody what they want because everybody is looking for something different.  Some of them want to abuse me.  Some of them want to be abused.

Finding an anchor point, a rock to stand on, a fixed perspective, is nigh on impossible.  It's all relative and any reference point is relative to something else.  It is nice when you can hear someone shouting abuse at you and you can see their trauma instead of feeling their pain.  It is good when you can remain calm in a tumultuous sea of despair.  There is a world of difference, however, between a sanctimonious privileged hypocrite condescending feigned stoicism and a calm spiritually centred mystic.

When people altercast at you they are simply projecting their trauma.  They are falsely holding on to a fixed reference point putting any disturbance or deviation down to you.  They are like a snake that needs a fixed object as leverage before it can crush you to death.  But being human inside these volatile circumstances it is not possible to be a static external unmoved observer.

So when the pressure increases and your family turn against you and your government slowly destroys you and every which way you turn you cannot find anyone with any influence who is not going to conspire with the cultural consensus to cut off your oxygen and suffocate you to death it all begins to feel hopeless.  I'll commit suicide.  That'll teach them.  Then they'll be sorry.  But that's been done before and it won't teach them anything and they'll probably be glad to be rid of me.  I know; I'll take out a few "innocents" with me.  I'll go into the Council Offices with a bomb and blow the whole place up.  That'll make people wonder what the fuck was going on.  No it won't.  It's been tried before.  I know ... I have a better idea, I'll kill my daughter.  That will really fuck with their minds.  That'll make them realise how hideous they are.  That'll make them sorry and finally they will pay attention to me and stop trying to kill me.  Hmm ... That won't work either.  They'll just blame it all on me and walk away muttering to themselves about how dreadful I am and why I should be terminated.  There must be a better way.

HALLELUIAH - I'VE GOT IT!

What I'll do is send my daughter into the world to be abused by them.  I'll let them pursue her and hound her and accuse her and finally murder her.  Then everyone will be shocked.  Then they'll realise what they're doing.  Then they'll feel sorry for me and try to make reparations and worship me and adore me and love me in a desperate attempt to atone for their demonic crimes.  Then I'll have them under my thumb.  They'll never be able to forgive their own despotic, ruthless, bestial, cruel, vicious nature.  They will forever be under my control.

There's one small problem with that.  It's been tried before.  When everything else fails send your son into the world and create such a fucking humungous guilt complex that for thousands of years humanity will suffer in the hell of its own insatiable guilt.  They'll escalate you to a God and worship and adore you forever.  They'll even repeatedly commit genocide for you and in your name.  How's that for success?

Oh well - I guess I'll meander off and think of something more creative to do with my time.

GOD FUCKING HATES YOU

Some years ago I was shouting about the problem.  Now I am sitting here in front of a computer with many thoughts going round in my head.  To those who don't understand let me make it clear that physically I feel sick with distress.  Today I can get up and go for a walk or cook something to eat.  For those of you who don't understand I say FUCK OFF AND DIE.  Oh dear - does that sound offensive?  Try flechette missiles for babies it's much more fun.  And here's the thing - some of them don't die, they just suffer and are traumatised and maimed.  What fun.

I made the profound error of believing the bullshit spewed out by those in authority.  I paid attention.  Strange phrase that.  I "paid".  I was attentive and aligned myself as much as possible with their desired perspective.  I agreed that kindness was a good thing.  I agreed that honesty and equality and good intentions were values to be cherished.  I was always the first to "bury the hatchet", make way for others, tolerate mistakes and generally be amenable to those around me.

So now I am shocked to my foundations to find that really the people espousing those ideas and dictating to those smaller, younger and weaker than themselves do not abide by their own values.  They, instead, abuse these values to maintain their advantageous position over others.  In fact they derelict those values, they dispose of them, they turn them on their head and lie and cheat and assault and deceive to harm other people to maintain their own pleasure.

There is no way for me to acquire this fabricated commodity called money demanded by others to afford me the capacity to live.  I can't make my own way because they have built a fraudulent system of ownership to ensure there is no place for me outside of their constructs.  I am caught in a trap.  And for those currently immersed in the illusion of this fake materialist culture, this fairground of death, it seems you only have to comply to eke a living and be saved.

But if you do not fit the cultural requirement you are deemed a misfit, a reject, a veritable aberration.  You are, in fact, categorically disposable.  This culture is polarising around the amazingly insane idea that a pyramid economy can continue to improve whilst undermining the very foundations of its success.  This culture is consuming itself.  And the first to be annihilated are always the children, the poor, the elderly, the frail, the unemployed, and the sick.

If you have a job and a house and a currently sustainable way of life in this materialistic Western Culture and you judge, dismiss, ignore, or condemn those who are worse off than you, then you are guilty of a most insidious transgression.  If you do not lend your humanity to opposing the escalating insanity of this culture then you are feeding it and part of it and as guilty as any of those in power who are creating it.  And for those ignorant, self satisfied, sanctimonious, hypocritical religious freaks:  Don't go to church - GOD FUCKING HATES YOU.

THE SWIRLING VORTEX OF ILLUSION

Convoluted turmoil in the vortex of other people's convoluted  turmoil.

Inside my head I simulate what it is like inside another person's head.  Inside other people's heads are simulations of other people's heads.  One of the other people in their head is their simulation of what's inside my head.  Inside my head is a simulation of their simulation of what's inside my head which includes their simulation of my simulation of them.

All of this seems to occur inside the neurological network of our brain.

It matters to me what other people think of me.  It matters to me because I have learnt that my behaviour affects their behaviour toward me.  Just as one learns the mechanism of reaching out and picking up a glass of water to get a drink so we learn how to operate other people's behaviour around us to nourish our experience.

Because of the complex self reproduction of patterns in the material universe we are already the result of a long sequence of self interaction.  Our physical form embodies the behaviour of self simulation.  We are, to use an analogy, hard wired to simulate other people in our brains.

When I interact with people if I have an image of them which is in some way negative to them they have an image of me which is somewhat negative.  They need to alter their behaviour to cause a change in my perception which is more advantageous to them.  The complexities and variations seem endless.  But from one perspective it seems that they benefit from my good regard of them.  But if their approach to me is to attempt to change my perception of them by force or imposition then, in me at least, there is a tendency for me to object and to have a more negative view of them.  Not liking this, or not serving their inner interest, they may increase their efforts causing an amplification of the effect.

This self reflection is analogous to mirrors and in my case I often feel like a mirror to other people.  Sometimes it is as if they so dislike their reflection they try to destroy me.  To me it appears that way.  So how did I arrive at a negative perception of them?  And what of the people I regard well?

Generally speaking humans do not like killing other humans.  There has been much research done on this and any General understands that you have to condition your troops to kill.  You have to create powerful dynamics which render the soldier dependent upon your good regard of him.  He has to have a perception of the collective consensus which perceives him as good when he kills an enemy; and equally that he is bad when he doesn't.  Many soldiers return from active duty traumatised by the actions they have taken.  What is also revealing is how betrayed veterans feel when they are treated no better than cattle when they return home.

In an individual case a person does not want to break the mirror which reflects a negative image because they are more concerned to change the mirror to reflect them well.  People require mirrors because it is how they form their own image of themselves.  Of course, in extremes they will break the mirror if they are frustrated and making no improvement to their self image.  But the problem there is that the negative image which they have simulated inside their own head is now fixed and unalterable.

It seems that our self image is a reflection and as such we are not somehow a unique thing so much as a unique perspective.

One of my enduring problems is how to operate in a dysfunctional environment in such a way as to render a good result for me.  How can I act for my benefit without harming others who are harming me because that leaves me feeling bad about myself.  In this convoluted vortex of feedback I only need to chance upon smallest adjustment to alter the manifest cascading disaster into a beautiful rendition of harmonious equilibrium.

All of this is going on subliminally and unconsciously.  So, when they approach me and I either take off their heads with a scimitar or shower rose petals at their feet, is it their doing or mine?  Which will render the best result.  What God wants God gets.

ABUSED TO DEATH

Two news items have congealed on the surface of my fermenting consciousness.

1.  UK prisons 'holding child inmates in solitary confinement against UN torture rules'. (Mentioned in the Independent.)
2.  Facebook 'failed to remove sexualised images of children'. (Mentioned by the BBC)

I encountered them both listening to Radio 4 from my sick bed - and my bed is sick.

Apparently the British Government is in breach of International law by holding children in solitary confinement.  This should not be the surprise it appears to be by being "news worthy".  It was reported that it is well established that solitary confinement can cause irreversible mental health problems.  Again this should not be a surprise.

The issue with Facebook that interests me was that they reported the BBC journalists to the police for distributing images of child exploitation.  Apparently the "investigative" journalists had collected 100 questionable images, posted them, and then reported them to Facebook to see how many they would remove.  Whatever the details this highlights the paradoxical nature of attempting to censor other people's communications with your own judgement.  There is the philosophical issue that you should censor your own communications according to your own judgement, as should others.  But that is a well worn subject and not my issue here.  My interest is in the irony that the BBC expressed incredulity at themselves being reported to the police by Facebook whilst they were the ones distributing images of child exploitation in an entrapment exercise which is also illegal.

What seems most disturbing to me is that the whole ethos of this British Government is severely immoral and draconian, and yet virtually everyone, including myself, mixes up "authority" with "justice".  There is a profound reason for this mix up and it can be seen in the condition of being human.  Our first experience is as a dependant on an authority.  Even Christianity, as an authority and a significant world religion, attempts to mitigate this problem by asserting the paradoxical philosophical perspective that "authority" does not reside in other human beings but rather the Universe at large.  They describe it as God, but as the omnipresent omnipotent creator, God is equivalent to Universe.  The only access to this justice, this benign authority, this inviolable state of affairs, is through ourselves, our conscience, and our heart.  So true authority lies within ourselves and yet at every turn we attempt to appeal to a higher authority for justice from the current violators.  "Mummy, it's not fair he did that nasty thing."  "I'll tell teacher", " I'm calling the police", " I'll sue you", " I'll take it to the Supreme Court",  "It's against the European Convention of Human Rights",  "IT'S AGAINST INTERNATIONAL LAW."  But a brief examination of International Law should satisfy anyone that there is no justice, only dominion, oppression, and control.

Ultimately we all need to stop appealing to higher authorities and to recognise our own inalienable and incontrovertible authority.  Of course this would mean that Doctors would attend to their patients instead of their paymasters, and Judges would serve justice not the Judiciary, and people who work for the DWP would stop enacting paradoxical injustices to preserve their lowly wages.  But none of this will happen because each piece of the jigsaw is inextricably linked to every other piece and at each stage the excuse is that I need to make money so that I can live and continue to do the good things I do.  This is a profound problem in the human condition but I suspect it is not inescapable.  But who will blink first?

It would be nice at the end of a missive to have some satisfying conclusion but I have none.  I have become isolated and terrorised by the manifestation of this self contradictory culture.  In a less obvious way I am subjected to solitary confinement via economic and social constrains.  This has the inevitable consequence of doing me harm.  The sociopolitical landscape is rupturing and I have been pushed to the edge of a bottomless fissure designed to dispose of the non-conforming memes of perception which threaten to dissolve and destroy the current collective matrix of illusion which serves the oligarchs.  There is no higher authority to which I can appeal.  I am being abused to death by my own culture.

ALIMENTARY EIDOLON

NOW WHERE DID I PUT THE REAL WORLD?

It's all well and good thinking that well crafted intellectual rational discussions are somehow better than emotional outbursts full of profanities.  There is value in the observation that they are superior in some significant way.  For example, if I am trying to explain how the adder in the arithmetic logic unit of the CPU in your computer works, I have more chance of successfully imparting that knowledge with rational and carefully crafted words than to say something less intellectual like "it works with electric fucking switches you ignorant cunt."

And yet ... I have been intrigued for most of my adult life by the successful nature, in some circumstances, of more robust and emotionally expressive language rather than intellectually crafted communications.  Even at primary school I recognised the constricting nature of the detailed minutia of the rationalised rules and regulations.  It was clear to the heart and soul that the oppressive moralising by authoritarians was inherently wrong in spite of their words seeming to make some consistent sense.  My sympathy was often with the renegade, the truculent, or even the rude or offensive child.

It seems our culture has gone a long way with the neat and tidy carefully controlled intellectual construction of rationality.  For all the benefits many philosophers have also noticed the dangers of this clinically linear approach to communication.  Over time it can become quite perverse and dislocated from reality.  It seems to me that our culture in general, and our political culture in particular, have deviated dangerously from a correct, accurate, or useful construct for operating successfully as a society in the world.

A currently fashionable example springs to mind - the idea of truth.  Given the history of academic indulgence in the pursuit of truth the culture expects truth to be a kind of thing, an item, a discernible quality, and something that can be determined.  To suggest that the truth is variable seems contradictory and quite wrong.  The reason for this is our misconception of the meaning of truth.  We nail it down in our minds and then go looking for evidence.  It is true that light is a particle and it is true that light is a wave.  It is also true that a thing cannot be both.  But the truth in those statements depends upon the domain, relevance, and purpose of the pronouncement.

The state of affairs in which we exist is precisely that state of affairs.  The fact that we can never know it does not mean it does not exist and more importantly it does not mean that our perspective on it is incorrect.  If you walk around an elephant you will get lots of different views and the more views you get the more accurate will be your comprehension of the elephant.  But no matter how many perspectives you have, the model in your head will never be the elephant.  The only thing that is the elephant is the fucking elephant in the room.

We have travelled so far up our intellectual alimentary canal that we no longer recognise the real world but reside, instead, inside the waste pipe of our own construction.  Brexit is a massive convoluted entangled mess of rationalised intellectual garbage.  It is not a real thing in the real world.  And yet, because of the power of the idea in people's heads this carbuncular manifestation constructed in the minds of the living dead will have very real destructive impact on the otherwise real and valuable people across Europe.  Trump is also not a real thing.  He is the epitome of fake news, post truth, and alternative facts.

Perhaps I could have been more succinct and accurate had I said: "They are so far up their own fucking arses they're talking shit."

RANTINGS OF A LUNATIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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