SLOWLY CHOKING TO DEATH

I was trying to get myself to do the right thing and contact a doctor.  I am a bit confused about what one is supposed to do nowadays.  So I started by going to what is euphemistical called "my surgery's" web site.  I'm reading through lots of stuff which sounds like promotional sales talk like "we are working hard to care for you, and to keep our staff and patients safe", and "Your health and wellbeing matters to us".  Then I came across this:

"For your protection and ours, if you are invited to the surgery for an appointment, you MUST provide your own face covering, a mask, scarf or something smilar [sic]. We are no longer in a position to issue face masks to patients."

This is where I stall.  I know some people ridicule and belittle me for getting upset about things like this.  I have to try to understand how to cope with that attitude.  Am I little (meaning a bit pathetic) and stupid?  If that were the case, is it something I can do something about?  I think what they think they mean is that I need to be "brave" and walk into the thing I am frightened of.  That makes sense when working on a ship and you have to do things that hurt or are frightening.  I could, I suppose, ignore what I perceive to be a threat and carry on.  But my experience in life is warning me of something bad here.  So I think some more.

It is ridiculous that they come up with phrases like "Your health and wellbeing matters to us" because they are supposed to be a medical centre and they are stating the obvious.  Maybe they think some people don't know they care and they feel the need to reassure them.  But there are other possible motives such as that they are lying.  I think most people are aware of the problem when someone says "trust me".  It begs the question "Why wouldn't I?"  Some would suggest I am being paranoid but I am not - I am simply trying to understand what is going on.

When their focus of attention goes from the patients' health to their own bank balance that might cause them to perceive the need to reassure their patients that they care about them.  If someone wants me to write some software I negotiate a fee because I cannot go around writing software for no pay.  Once a fee is negotiated I pay full attention to the quality of the software.  If I am "incentivised" to write the software as quickly as possible to maximise my profit then the quality of the software is compromised.  The same applies to medicine.  So the very wording on the surgery's web site does not inspire me with confidence, and actually does the reverse.  People sometimes feel they don't know how to detect scammers and I think herein lies some of the clues.  When someone spends disproportionate time and effort trying to convince you they care about your wellbeing you should get suspicious.  The significant word in the last sentence being "disproportionate".

Having clarified some of what causes my alarm bells to start ringing I then encounter that statement saying I have to provide my own face covering.  That is absurd to the point of being insane.  When I read irrational insanity coming from someone I am relying on to have expertise that I don't posses, it becomes an affront, let alone very worrying.

There are multiple issues at play here.  The first being that they are the medical experts and should know exactly what benefits there are from wearing what sort of masks in what circumstances.  Their expressed requirement indicates no such consideration, awareness, or knowledge.  They are simply mandating "a mask, scarf or something smilar [sic]"  As a complete non-expert it has become clear to me that there are important practical differences between different materials used as masks, let alone other issues such as how they fit.  Can I turn up with a motorcycle helmet on?  If that sounds ridiculous (as it is meant to) then by what criteria am I supposed to judge an efficacious mask.  If I turn up on a warm day like this wearing my lovely woollen winter scarf wrapped around my face and sit in a waiting room I will overheat and risk passing out.  If I could acquire an N95 mask I will suffer breathing difficulties, and I might pass out.  (I have COPD and high anxiety - "For people with COPD, face masks are in fact intolerable to wear as they worsen their breathlessness." [Kyung SY, Kim Y, Hwang H, et al. Risks of N95 Face Mask Use in Subjects With COPD. Respir Care 2020;:respcare.06713.  doi:10.4187/respcare.06713])

Then there is the issue of supply.  Where do I find a mask to purchase?  If there is an outlet with an adequate supply why can the surgery not get a supply for their patients?  It would make more sense, if cost were the issue, to purchase the available supply and to sell masks to patients.  Of course, given that that is not the reason, they would risk instigating an unnecessary problem of dissent and criticism if they charged patients at the door for equipment they were demanding they wear.  All of which should soon illustrate, even to those who haven't considered the issues yet, that any of these possible arguments presented so far, are irrational and vacuous.

Give that we are supposed to believe there is some medical rational for wearing a mask and given the budget for the surgery including the property, staff, equipment, and services, in what way could they possibly justify not supplying masks for patients?  I can't see any other reason except the pretence of cost.  If they presented the justification that it was about the cost then not only is that ridiculous and unacceptable but there is a contradiction in that they say they don't care what sort of face covering you use.  If it doesn't matter what sort of face covering you use then there is no suggestion of any significant cost if they supply cheep paper masks.  Surely no one can make coherent sense of this.  They say "We are no longer in a position to issue face masks to patients."  Why not?  Were they providing masks for patients previously?  That sentence implies they were, so I really want to know what has caused the change.

Then there is the issue of power, control, and hierarchy.  What they are saying really is that, quite regardless of any efficacy, they demand that you wear a mask to symbolise your agreement to do whatever they demand.  They are actually demanding evidence of my subservience to them.  This is exactly what was going on as the Holocaust gained traction in Nazi Germany.  Wear this colour triangle.  I do worry that people may think I am making a mountain out of a mole hill, but actually I am trying to figure out what this is all about.  I am not particularly concerned about this one issue in isolation; I am concerned to put the various pieces of the jigsaw together to begin to understand the bigger picture.

When someone phoned me from the surgery some years ago saying that my daughter needed to come in for her vaccinations I asked which ones.  Their response was "all of them".  I enquired further saying she had had some vaccinations so which ones are they talking about.  It got to the point of me asking the nurse(?) what vaccinations are on her medical records and I was told that was irrelevant because their records were not complete.  I suggested I come in and discuss these (apparently VERY important) issues with the doctor.  The nurse{?) reacted by saying "I can't deal with people like you." and put the phone down.  If no one can deal rationally with the question of vaccines then who is going to tell me, with any real knowledge, authority, and integrity why they can't supply masks?  They have made it explicitly impossible to trust them.  They have created a layered structure of hierarchy where the people at the bottom (you understand that hierarchy of wealth that we have acculturated - it used to be that the doctors and nurses were at the "top of their profession" and the likes of managers were "lower" in the hierarchy) - the medical staff -do not know or understand the reasons for the orders and edicts being handed down to them.

I understand to a significant degree how all this junk happens psychologically and sociologically but I do not know what to do about it, nor why so many people fall so enthusiastically into ridiculous compliance to keep their job when the rules and edicts are evidently stupid even to them.  This situation is declining rapidly and hanging on to notions that things will get better is delusional.

I genuinely believe there is no way out of what is befalling us except via a most terrible holocaust.  Although I could wish people could effectively wake up and begin to push back against the insanity, all the evidence suggests they cannot or will not do that.  It was only six months ago we had a general election and the Labour Party went to the trouble of presenting an exceptional and detailed manifesto and a costing model which clearly outlined highly practical ways to stop the decline.  The majority of people did not read that manifesto.  Instead they preferred to vote for a well known liar and charlatan called Fucko the Clown.  Fucko the Clown and his circus presented no plans of any scope or substance - just "Get Brexit Done".  It was clear to me they were aiming for a dictatorship at the time, and the evidence is unfortunately continuing to support and strengthen that interpretation.

I will not be attempting to steel myself to walk into this particular battery cage today.  I prefer to sit here bleeding and in pain.  I am far too distressed and poorly to attempt to see a doctor today.

Afterthought:  Having re-read this muse I feel a lot of people might summarise it in their mind as a "mask, don't mask" issue related to medical health.  It is not.  The questions and issues around the medical efficacy of masks is a totally different subject and I would like to feel confident in the experience and integrity of experts to advise me on that matter.  The above reveals the utter incoherence of the actions currently being taken by medical centres up and down the land.  It is about the difference between someone informing and helping me, and someone ordering me about for their benefit at my expense.

MURDER HORNETS KILL MORE THAN COVID-19

I was going to use the headline:
41 DEAD AS MURDER HORNETS RAMPAGE CHINESE PROVINCE
But having written this perusal around the manipulation of figures I decided "MURDER HORNETS KILL MORE THAN COVID-19" was even more indicative of how ridiculous headlines can be.  It is true, because murder hornets did kill more than Covid-19 in Shaanxi.  It is true, but it is so extraordinarily misleading that it is, effectively, a lie.  These things can be fun to play with, but they are becoming a death knell for humanity due to social media, psyops, asymmetric communication, and an intellectually and emotionally damaged population.

The 'headline' for this blog post was gleaned from the most dramatic single statement I could find in a Wikipedia article about the Asian giant hornet, or vespa mandarinia, which is currently being called the Murder Hornet in Click Bait Press.  The actual statement was "In 2013, stings by Asian giant hornets killed 41 people and injured more than 1,600 people in Shaanxi, China."  The first thing to consider is that that is an extreme case so we can deduce that the situation is probably far better than that.  It is also in a particular location where the wasps are relatively common, and it is likely that people go looking for them because they like to eat their larvae.  The second thing that comes to mind is a comparison with the distorted and dramatised figures relating to Covid-19 deaths.  Covid-19 appears, by all accounts, to be significantly more dangerous and deadly to humans than giant hornets.  But it still remains extremely difficult to get any clear or meaningful idea of the significance and impact of Covid-19 from the persistent click bait headlines distorting the very meaning of the information presented.

Shaanxi province has a population of 37.33 million, so 41 deaths equates to 1.1 deaths per million per year.  That extrapolates to 85,800 deaths in the world population in 10 years or 858,000 deaths per century.  Assuming the human population might rise then one could speculate that over 1 million people could die of killer wasp stings in the 21st century.  Of course with this kind of manipulation of figures one could attempt to reduce the target population to specific named areas where more deaths have occurred.  Maybe 20 of those 41 deaths occurred in a village of 2,000 people raising the 'deaths per million' rate to 10,000.  It's not long before you arrive at a figure of 100% of people killed by killer wasps die.  It is equally true to say that there is a very high probability (not one I am about to work out now) that 0% of people you know will die from a wasp sting.  I wonder what quantum probability wave function collapse might tell us about this - or what this might tell us about probability wave function collapse.

Maybe I could find a way to justify the headline "Quantum physics predicts everyone will die from Killer Wasps".  Or better still "Science predicts everyone will die from Killer Wasps".  All I have to do is write a small article explaining that in multiple universe theory there is one universe where that is true and I can claim the headline is factually correct and get some lucrative advertising revenue from my click bait science article.

Taking this to extremes it is true to say "Murder Hornets kill more than 10 times as many as Covid-19" or maybe "Murder Wasps 10 times more deadly than Covid-19".  I just have to explain in the text that 3 people have been reported to have died in Shaanxi province from Covid-19 whilst vespa mandarinia killed 41 people in the same province in 2013.

Warning: Stay Alert in Click Bait World - It's Dangerous Out There.

INVERTING SELF AWARENESS

We are going to have to talk about this 'mental health' issue.  You can't say that; it's anti-Semitic.  Fuck off; all you Brexiteers are fucking mental.  Bastard Libtards; you do my fuckin' 'ed in.  What the fuck, you fucking mother fucking fuckers; I hate the fucking lot of you.

"Ka-ching".

The digital money keeps flowing from your account to the ethereal megabank in the upper echelons of cyberspace.  The degradation of language, the distortion of collective cognition, and the projected landscape of illusion are all part of the fourth industrial revolution and the conversion of individual identity into digital tokens to utilise your brief manifestation as a material biological blob for the benefit of a plutocratic elite.

It is extremely hard to pull it all together and to make coherent sense of the current changes evolving within the context of 'life on this planet'.  It is becoming increasingly clear to me how the advent and progress of  computing is changing what we would, in olden days, have called reality.  When using such labels as 'reality' we assume a great deal and presume upon the collective consensus to afford meaning to such a term.

At a certain scale of observation we mutually agree there is such a thing as material substance.  A good exercise for anyone reading this is to delve into the etymology of the word 'material'.  In short it relates to mother and nature in its Latin origins which were evolved from the ancient Greek term 'hyle' which, although it means 'wood', was a generic reference to the essential substance manifest by form coming into being.  It was not the stuff that was made into a form but more that the form created the substance in order to exist.  In short the word has evolved from a more ethereal origin than the common daily usage implies.  When you pick up your cup of tea to have a drink it is of no concern or consequence to you what the philosophical ramifications of a material substance may be because your cup is solid, its real, and you get to taste your tea in the real world.

Many years ago (perhaps forty) I was actually shocked when I realised that the physical manifestation of the cup was there in order to facilitate the dynamics required to experience life.  I won't attempt to describe slowly and gently how that construct is formed in a mind just here, but it was a shock for me to realise that the 'real' world, as I thought of it then, was only a symbolic representation of the underlying non-material reality.  Coming from my Roman Catholic upbringing it was akin to a realisation that the temporal world is not real and the spiritual world is the real reality.

For the presumptuous sceptics amongst you I have considered at length whether our cultural constructs form, and therefore restrict, our interpretation of the world or whether they are just an arbitrary framework from which to begin to discover the world.  It is a bit of both and varies in different people to different degrees.  For those limited to learning by rote you will never understand why 56x8 gives the same result as 8x56 whilst 56/8 does not give the same result as 8/56.  You will learn by rote, repeat with great skill and finesse, and be highly pragmatic in mathematical exercises.  But you will never 'understand' why it is so.  And why should you?  Pragmatism is a highly desirable characteristic.  For me, however, I seek understanding as a pathological necessity.

So it seems in all my subsequent reading and investigation I am not the first person to encounter this deeper issue of the substance of real life.  During my career developing software it became increasingly clear to me that there was something about algorithms that was more real than the real world they affected.  An algorithm is in some way an ethereal pattern.  It has no material existence except that it needs material in which to be manifest.  A bit like the idea of balance, which Pythagoras was at pains to point out was real and could never be perfectly manifest in the material world but could only be approximated.  This, of course, led to Platonic solids and eventually to our entire Western Scientific philosophy which, ironically, is entirely upside down.  Western Science struggles with Quantum Physics (a profound misnomer which again leads to much misunderstanding) because we collectively believe in the material world whilst Quantum Theory disposes of it completely.

A brief example is that what once took several office clerks, some bits of paper, envelopes, stamps, machines to make stamps, invoices, trips to the post office, more clerks, cheques, bank clerks, postal vans, VAT invoices, delivery vans burning fossil fuels to get a widget onto your desk can now be rendered in algorithms such that you can click on a picture on your smart phone and your 3D printer will belch out the widget onto your desk with all the financial transaction handled electronically.  The algorithms symbolically manifest the erstwhile material dynamics to render the desired result.  A large part of the material world becomes redundant in the algorithmic representation of it.

People think robots will take over the world, they imagine Artificial Intelligence will be dictating to us, and there are endless imaginings of various dystopian futures.  But it isn't happening like that.  Only a few years ago there was an idea that we will all be controlled by our digital devices.  Eventually we would have embedded chips and could walk into a supermarket, take food, walk out and the money would be deducted from our digital accounts without us even having to think about it.  Too many numbskulls cannot even see the inherent dangers in that.  But we don't need to be physically 'chipped'.  With the onset of distant iris scanning and biological identity the supermarket already knows who you are, where you are, what you are taking, what you want, what they can sell you, and what is in your 'account'.  You are being 'identified' simply by walking the streets of London.  Apart from many unanswered questions about 5G the surveillance state is constructing a virtual world with you in it.  As such, it has immense control over you.

Currently the cultural cognitive models suggest that if you are a thief (culturally understood to be a 'baddie') you won't be able to get away with robbing the supermarket because the surveillance state will intercept you.  This is all perfectly fine until you philosophically question what amounts to 'theft'.  In what way, for example, have the supermarkets purloined the goods they are selling you.  If you can't get a job, and you can't get an authorised employer to deposit electronic digits into your account, you can't get food to live.  You literally have to comply with the algorithms in order to operate in the world to live.  Bang goes the 'black market' and any hope of having alternatives to survive without the system.  No safety net makes everyone entirely dependent on compliance with the electronic superstructure in which they exist.

Then comes the conceptual side of things.  It is already happening and is deeply disturbing to see the pathological conformity with cultural narratives.  I saw an interviewer asking people outside a London rail station what they thought about all the surveillance cameras.  No one objected.  Better than that, many people dreamt up justifications on the spot like "I suppose if it makes us all safer it's a good thing".  Literally people's brains are conforming with the inevitable as children conform to their parents.  We get our sense of self, our identity, from our surroundings and most profoundly and inherently from the people we interface with.  As this sense of an all-seeing presence pervades our consciousness we do not see it as a thing but instead we simply respond appropriately.  Marshall McLuhan's reference to the overarching technological brain (a hypothesis in 1962 when he wrote about it) and the way Big Brother would go inside of us is stunningly perceptive.

Through social media, cloud technology, the internet of things, digital money, remote biometric identification, and the ubiquitous surveillance state we are evolving into something akin to a supraorganism like an insect colony where our limited responses, depending upon our perceived environment, are entirely predictable and controllable, and support and maintain the greater good even if it is to our own personal detriment.  And for all of this, the vast majority will still believe they are running their own lives.  We are fast becoming the physical manifestation of the virtual algorithmic world of artificial intelligence.  So we are not going to be taken over by robots in any way that we imagine; we are simply becoming its extension.  Like the little fungus infected ant that just happens to want to climb as high as he can today.

Mental health is transforming into a euphemism for compliance, and mental health problems are simply something for the supraorganism to remedy or remove.  Big Brother is already inside of you.

Thanks to Tookapic & Markus Spiske for original images.

ISRAEL ENGAGES IN OPEN CHEMICAL WARFARE

Israeli chemical drone warfare 30 March 2018

Israel joined the United Nations 11 May 1949.  The OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) is one of a number of Specialised Agencies within the UN.  There has been a Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) since 1675 when France and Germany agreed to prohibit the use of poisoned bullets.  The current UN OPCW CWC was agreed and entered into force on 29 April 1997.

There are two notable anomalies relating to this convention.  The first being that Tear Gas, or lachrymators in general, are prohibited from being mass produced, stored, and/or used in warfare but not for internal State use for the purposes of crowd control.  Had it prohibited internal State use then the Convention would likely never have been ratified.  The second anomaly is that although Israel has signed the CWC they have not ratified it.  This essentially means it is one of a very few countries who will not accede to inspections or verification by the UN OPCW.

On Monday 12 March 2018 a report appeared in The Times of Israel claiming that an unmanned aerial vehicle UAV (a quad copter or drone in common parlance) had been used on Friday 9 March 2018 to drop Tear Gas on protesting civilians in Gaza.  That was the first known use of this technology for chemical attacks on civilians.  A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said the UAV was not operated by the army but by the Border Police.  The Border Police declined to answer any questions.

It is now widely reported that on Friday 30 March 2018 Israel has again used UAVs to drop Tear Gas on protesting civilians in Gaza.  Not only is Israel crossing a very dangerous line in terms of a general consensus of good and bad behaviour but they are clearly in breach of International Law.  It seems, on the surface, a mere convenient distraction that it is the Border Police as opposed to the Israeli Army that is operating these drones.  It is tantamount to a blatant admission of the seriousness of their breach of International Law by attempting to imply this is an internal matter involving the police rather than the army.

However, Gaza is not within the State of Israel.  For all the deliberate ambiguity about the international status of Palestine as a sovereign entity it is certainly not part of Israel.  It follows that Israel have launched chemical attacks outside of their own country which is an act of War.  According to the UN OPCW CWC this is a grave breach of International Law.  Israel's hope that they can defend themselves by claiming this act is internal and therefore not prohibited by the CWC is entirely incorrect.  Although Israel have not agreed to allow UN inspectors to examine their chemical production or stock pile they are, as signatories to the CWC, still bound by its prohibition of the use of Chemical Weapons in War.

For many years it has been understood by those who look into these matters that Israel develops a range of sophisticated methods for population control and oppression.  It is also interpreted that they use Palestine as a kind of laboratory for practical experimentation and to prove the efficacy of their products.  It is well understood within interested circles that weapons sell significantly better when proven in the field of operation.  Israel's market invariably grows each time they provide evidence of the successful application of their products.  One most dreadful case (amongst many) was their use of flechette missiles against children in UN protected hospitals in Gaza in 2014.

Israel is the world leader in drone development.  US and UK police and military regularly attend training and education courses in Israel run by the IDF.  US & UK finance Israel to a ridiculous level and although on the surface it is said to be to help them 'defend' themselves from external threats and terrorists it can also be seen as a research and development budget for population control products.  It is a strange thing that for all the rampaging of ISIS over the last few years they were never any kind of a threat to Israel.

The profound warning for the UK and US populations is that as Western economies are collapsing the powers that be are very concerned to impoverish and control the now redundant population.  Not only is Israel in breach of International Law and this is dangerous on the global stage but this technology has to be sold to someone and the biggest investors to date are the US and the UK.

Israel is indulging in chemical warfare.

Avoiding the benign terror.

Mathematical 'Art'

I was having a discussion on the internet with my friend who shall be called Dave.  Several other's got involved and then Dave said to me "When I tell you I 'feel' God you can't feel what I feel yet because you haven't felt what I've experienced."  He went on to say "What you are seeing right now is the worldly things... Negative things... And in all the beautiful sunsets where I see God the Artist, you see science and death."

Well I got mad.

No Dave - That is neither correct nor fair.  I think you are projecting your subconscious onto me.  It seems to me it is possibly you who fears that the alternative to your sense of euphoria is misery or, as you put it, "science and death" as if it is cold and meaningless.

As it happens I have had very similar 'feelings' to the one's you describe.  I experience the profound joy of being alive and the sense of awe at the complexity, beauty and wonder of it all.  If I come across at times as 'negative' it is precisely because I think life is sacred and irreplaceable.  I am appalled by the inhumanity, death and destruction that is wrought in God's name on this planet.  I am angry, very angry, and with good reason.  My humanity bleeds for the pain and suffering of millions on this earth and I spend a lot of my time concerned and puzzling over it.  If my life is worth anything it is to bear witness to the truth of what is going on.  Many people would rather feel happy in their ignorance and that is a viable option but what I see is people afraid to view the terror that is rampant in this temporal existence.  If I choose to carry a disproportionate volume of pain that is my choice (as much as any of us has any choice).  I would suggest that I am actually far more in tune with what Jesus stood for than 90% of practicing Christians.  I say that from quite a lot of experience including being a practicing Christian for many years and attending possibly the best Roman Catholic private school in the UK and spending many hours discussing theology with seminary students and priests.

I made a film called "Recoil" many years ago.  It was entirely abstract with nothing 'recognisable' in it and wholly black and white with a sound track composed jointly by myself and Cabaret Voltaire.  It was viewed by a priest who knew nothing of my motive but he understood exactly what it was about.  He described it as genius.  It was about God recoiling at the realisation of what he had created.  I mention this just to add substance to my claim of sincere involvement and awareness of those issues that most people associate with religion and in particular Christianity.  I understand religion far better than most and have, ironically, probably had more conversations with God than the proverbial 'hot dinners'.

So by all means discuss religion with me but please don't tell me I "haven't experienced it yet" or try to convert me to some blissful interpretation of God which, in my humble opinion, is an escape clause.  Christ didn't die for no reason; he died, as is so often explained, for our sins.  But that is not a get out clause to carry on with gay abandon killing and maiming children with impunity to protect our own sense of wellbeing and happiness - which is how a lot of people treat it.  You are not singularly responsible for the deaths of thousands, actually millions, across the Middle East but I don't see you lobbying against your government to stop this insane war machine where they are unleashing the most sophisticated 'scientific' technology of death upon millions of civilians in the Middle East.  That is the real cold hard "science and death".

I profoundly, and with every fibre of my existence, object to this wholesale industrial slaughter being perpetuated by our cultures.  No - Christianity is about standing against oppression.  It was never meant to be a cushy ride and using God and the Church to gain a sense of peace and contentment for one's own sake in spite of the dysfunctional trauma being perpetrated by our societies is an affront to the man who stood against authoritarian hierarchy and oppression and died on a cross for our sins.

He knew, because it is predictable, that they will kill anyone who stands against them.  It is not a fiction or a practise run - it is real life and real death.  The profundity of death is we have no real way of not seeing it as the end.  It is the terminal meaninglessness of our existence staring us inescapably in the face.  This is why Christ descended into hell before ascending to heaven.  It is the absolute hopelessness that has to be experienced before the revelation of the incredible wonder that is reality.  Most Christians simply sidestep that fearful awareness and continue to delude themselves that it will be alright in the end.  There is only one way it will be alright and that is when we wake up to the fact that this is reality, this is God, this is what it is about.  In Christian terms this is absolute - this is sacred - if you can't value and respect it as the very existence, the very becoming, of God then it is a charade and a falsehood.

In fact the tragedy is that by avoiding the benign terror that is the revelation we project it onto others.  Hence the cultural fear of terrorists giving rise to the 'justification' for being the harbingers and executors of death (real death) to millions of others.  We become our own worst fears.  No Dave, I am not ignorant of God, I fear and love God.  But I cannot indulge in the now entirely corrupt material world manifestation of the false religion maintained by the very hierarchy that Jesus objected to.  And to add to your education I also produce beautiful mathematical, scientific, 'art' to add to the delights on this planet too.  And here is a wee example [at top of blog page]:

You can see more at

http://samspruce.deviantart.com/gallery/33264046/Patterns

or

http://www.toxicdrums.com/gallery/index.htm

:)

I hope my emotional creative writing has conveyed a little more of my passion and beliefs. ;)

Why is all this irrational junk accepted?

This is just a meander.  Why?  Because there are too many issues taking up my time which are important but there is no time to do them justice.  But then this seems to be how it is meant to work.  And the associated image has no relevance to the text except that politicians are wallies.

I was listening to the radio this morning and although I usually like to check my references, get my facts right and generally make sure the writing is correct and that the references are supplied and can be validated I am not going to do this on this occasion because the message is more important than the medium.  The medium, in this case, being the examples which illustrate the point.  The point being that utter bullshit is being swallowed whole by the British public on a daily basis.

So I am listening to the radio hoping to get back to sleep.  It is the Money Program, or something similar, and the gentleman presenting the program has a droning sort of voice ideal for somnambulising me.  But he is talking about John Lewis and some situation where they have been underpaying their workers.  Oh the details!  The wonderful details.  The long and the short of the story is that JL have 'discovered' that they have been underpaying workers due to complex European regulations relating to holiday pay and how it is worked out.  Having acknowledged that they have been underpaying folk they have agreed to put the situation right and to back pay all the underpayments.

But there is a catch!  They are only going to do that for the people who could cause them a problem if they don't.  People who have left the company and are rightly owed some money WILL NOT get what they contractually deserve.  It is a contract and it is legal.  John Lewis OWE them the money.  But, and this is the bit that causes the problem for me - NOTE - I didn't say it WAS the problem for me and there is a reason for this;  It is the issue that causes the problem. 'It', the 'bit' or the 'issue' is that due to recent changes in the law it will no longer be economically viable for people to make a claim against John Lewis.  The law has recently changed such that if you want to claim justice, if you want a tribunal to ascertain if, or that, JL owe you the money you have to pay a non refundable £400 for the privilege.  Of course you will need a lawyer, or a degree in law (costing thousands of pounds borrowed from ... from who exactly?  Currently it is the government that 'lends' money for education but that is just step-politics until you get either used to it or dependent at which point they will 'privatise' the loan system with the banal suggestion that it is to make it more competitive and ultimately cheaper to the customer.  But there is no competition when the government are 'providing' loans at no profit to 'the government' because 'the government' is the system by which we 'govern' 'us'.  Those jerks in suits acting like spoilt toffs are the people representing us in the 'house of discussion' - You know The House of Parliament.  There is no 'government' which is them and not us.  They cannot take money from us because they are us.  They can't make a profit from us.  If they could they would no longer be representing us.  But all that is too much for the ignorant population to understand so they carry on with their irrational junk justifications for whatever it is they want to do next to get their rocks off at our expense.)

This is how it turns into a rant.  Getting back to the point: The politicians have used the mask of austerity to claim that legal aid is a drain on the hard working people of this country.  (Note the divisive and prejudicial verbiage "hard working".)  But what they have really done is only made 'expensive', or large sums, affordable for justice.  To people with money this seems to appear to be like it not being worth stopping your Lamborghini in the street to get out and bend over to pick up a 20p piece.  I think all of us could understand the rational of that.  But what the politicians seem to deliberately ignore and the ignorant public don't notice is that very few people have Lamborghinis .  It is true that it is not worth stopping your Lamborghini for 20p.  It probably costs that in petrol just to stop and start the car.  But for poor people who only have a pound, when they drop 20p they have to stop and pick it up.  After all it is 20% of what they have.  20% of the Lamborghini alone (not counting the mansion you have to have first and the garage with electric doors and the insurance and the unearned income) would be £40,000.  Why do the poor people who are so dumb as to fall for the fake sycophantic bullshit ... I can't put it into a simple sentence.

I am going to get legitimately offensive here.  The FUCKING STUPID MORONS who are working seem to willingly swallow the spunk produced by their abusers because ... because ... because WHY?  Because they are being favoured by the abusers because they comply with the abuse.  They don't want to be the 'poor' people being killed off.  This is profound cultural Stockholm Syndrome.  They shave their heads, call themselves skinheads or BNP or EDL or UKIP and ponce around arrogantly as if they are 'hard working' people denigrating the poor and licking up to (literally in many cases) the bullies.  It is simply not reasonable to withdraw legal aid for 'small' cases'  If large corporations are derelict in their responsibilities and a poor person wants justice they simply MUST be held responsible.  If one supposes that there would be so many illegitimate small claims that the poor lucrative business would go bankrupt defending itself against these claims than one is not living in the real world.  But there's the rub - they are not living in the REAL world.  Interestingly they are living in the PARANOID world.  They don't think they are because they project that attribute onto people they are abusing and they believe that the people beneath them would steal form them given half the chance.  They believe that the people they are 'holding down' would abuse them.  Why would a person who had been brought up in a secure and supportive family situation where they could assume they were valuable and loved act in such a prejudicial and frightened way?  It is simple - they have been abused as children.  Research can, and does, illustrate this no end of times.  There are acres of literature about this.  But it doesn't need the research, it only requires rational logical thought about the evidence in front of you.  But people are frightened out of doing that at school.  I guess it does get complicated to explain it.  John Lennon is a good starting point.  Check out his life story - his life of abuse and how it turned him into an abuser.  Check out how he could see something was wrong and paid attention to it.  Instead of being abusive he tried to figure out how and why.  Then go check out Arthur Janov, the Californian psychotherapist, counsellor bloke who is famous for the misnamed "Primal Scream Therapy" of the 1960s and read his books like "Prisoners of Pain" and "The biology of Love".  The research has been done.  This is not just a fancy idea.  But I guess to many it is like trying to explain Einstein's theory of General Relativity and trying to explain spacetime.  You don't even have to understand it to believe that GPS wouldn't work without the understanding.  You can ascertain that yourself and the people who do know do know.  So why are we so vulnerable to this abusive culture that the general population continue to support the abusers for fear of something worse.  The only 'worse' threat is coming from them.

So back to the Money Program:  Why do people let the fact that people who are no longer employed by John Lewis cannot get justice simply slip by?  In my opinion the whole bloody country should stop until John Lewis pays them.  John Lewis - well the executives enacting this crime - should be jailed if they don't sort it out within 24 hours.  Then, of course, the politicians who allowed the reduction in legal aid should have all their assets confiscated and lose their jobs since they cannot be trusted.  Then the people who instigated the injustice, the illegitimate legislation, should simply have everything confiscated and be thrown into jail.  They will be given the option of a fair trial if they can 'earn' (by being 'hard working' folk) the lawyers' fees and the judges' fees and the rental costs of the court houses from within their prison cells.  What?  That is impossible and so not fair - GOSH!  Pardon me for not noticing!

And there were numerous other things I wanted to mention but that will just have to wait.

Too many ideas to handle.

It's those inside out people again.
Then there's the pointers to pointers for accessing information.  It's a conceptual thing.
If you could zoom out from time like you can zoom out in space what would it look like?
They are building the railways and the gas chambers in cyberspace.
As with Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" it is similarly true that "Arguing from within a double bind is self destructive".
And there is the possibility of being somewhere in time where you don't exist in space.
There is the issue of the DWP only paying your subsistence (they call it a benefit) if you agree to give them authority to withdraw funds from your account.
Try being cooperative in a bartering culture.
There are level crossings and railway gates which symbolise human brainlessness.

I am seriously disturbed by the culture in Britain.  It is not unique to Britain and in part it can be seen throughout human history and across the globe.  But it is not always there and it can appear in different dilutions in different times and places.  I am talking about the cruel oppressive culture.  People talk about slavery, wage slaves, abuse, oppression, power, control, subservience as if these things are aspects like leaves and bark on a tree.  You could think of 'green' and 'tall' as other kinds of 'aspects'.  There is also the case of illness being physical or psychological.  What is interesting is that these differentiations of qualities or aspects can too easily lead to thinking of them as separate entities.  But they are aspects, inherent in the whole.  Like time and space they do not exist in any way separately.  It took Albert Einstein to make some coherent sense of what otherwise looks like a piece of magic.  There is no such thing as time if there is no 'space'.  And what is space if there is no 'time' for it to 'be'.  Space-time is a more coherent perception of the reality in which we live.

The issue here is that human behaviour, and particularly I am talking about the rampant control culture that is escalating in Britain, is multifaceted and there has to be some holistic comprehension of the state of affairs for there to be any reasonable chance of getting out of this alive.  I am talking dramatically and literally on many levels including personally (or for any individual person) and collectively (for Britain, every other country and culture and humanity and even life itself).  Just as a thought for those sceptics who argue that pursuing research in science just for the sake of it is fruitless let me draw your attention to the (getting well worn) fact that satellite navigation doesn't work without General Relativity.  There is a lovely small article on Physics Central entitled "Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life" about this issue which is worth a read if you like that kind of thing.

Cultures have collapsed before and there are many theories which say something about the whys and wherefores of their demise but clearly there is no comprehensive satisfactory understanding otherwise we would not be doing it so consistently over and over again.  But I do have some theories which also have something to say about it.  It is the Inside-Outness that occurs.  In some sense it starts with Inside-Out people.  Inside-Out people as I describe them are people who build a map of the world in their head and then think the map is the real world.  We all build a map of sorts in our heads.  What happens is stuff happens and it affects us.  The effects cascades through our physical being causing changes in the balance of all our molecules ranging from muscles and hormones to blood and neurological connections.

The bit I am concerned with is the brain.  The behaviour of the brain, and therefore its actual physical form, changes.  Psychiatrists refer to neural pathways which are sets of connections that allow electrical impulses to flow through a particular route in the brain.  This arrangement of the brain reflects the experience of the person in the world.  Analogously we build a map.  Obviously the world we think we see is our map and so long as our interactions with the real world 'work' everything is fine.  When something doesn't work as expected this is the point at which we can 'learn' something new.  We can adjust our map based on our experience to more accurately fit the real world.  But Inside-Out people do it the other way round.  I am talking, at this point, mostly about their response to other people although it is a general theory.

It seems that as people get older they become less versatile.  It varies enormously in different people but we are at our most sensitive to learning when we are younger.  If people experience trauma which they cannot handle it affects their versatility and ability to learn.  Also if people are oppressed they are conditioned to repress certain emotional responses thereby limiting their ability to learn along that pathway.  Oppression is a form of applied trauma.  First the trauma is set up and then it is constantly threatened to control the individual.  Often parents are unaware that their disapproval of behaviour is a threat to not support the child and, of course, the child is dependent upon the parent for its survival.  Unbeknownst to most parents they are quite capable (even if inadvertently) of threatening the child's life.  But the child is unlikely to react as if it has been threatened it just learns how to behave in order to survive.  But that behaviour is likely to be compulsive and transparent to the child as they grow into adulthood.  The reason I mention all of this is because it seems the 'best fit' cause for the prevalence of Inside-Outness.

So, for Inside-Out people, if something doesn't work it is the world that is wrong not their map.  A simple example is, say, a Doctor sticking a needle into a child's arm.  When the child says "Ow" an Inside-Out Doctor's response is "It doesn't hurt".  Another classic "This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you."  Inside-Outness appears very judgemental because it doesn't understand why the other person may be behaving the way they are.  The Freudian Oedipus complex is a bit Inside-Outish too because the focus of attention is on what is in the way of the goal as opposed to the goal.  In other words aspects of the real world need destroying in order make the external world fit the internal map.  They are trying to 'fix' the wrong thing.  Inside-Outness appears to be caused in part by an inability to deal with the real world.  It is caused when the individual feels threatened.  Due to the consequences of the socio-economic climate a large proportion of people in Britain feel threatened.  They are acting more and more Inside-Out.  The people at the top are coming up with totally Inside-Out solutions like taking money from the poor to protect the rich.

Then there is the theory of the benign oppressor and the closely related Stockholm syndrome.  The reason I mention these here alongside Inside-Outness is because they are all aspects of the rather perverse way that culturally we perceive the world.  These traits seem to cause certain aberrant thinking and actions.  Some years ago the government (of the UK) changed a small piece of legislation regarding the Children Services (a part of the Social Services - it is horribly complicated and they don't even quite understand who they are or even what they are called - but then obfuscation is desirable since they steal and abuse children - that is a matter of record and much as they apologise and even retire somebody when they get caught they still do it - and yes I have got a thing about them but not for here - check out the Children Services Abuse section if it interests you).  The law had been that the Children Services could not interview a child alone without the parent's permission.  They changed the law such that they had the power to take a child away from the parents against their wishes and interview the child.  Here is the problem: If the parents are abusive the child needs the opportunity to talk freely.  To talk freely requires that the interviewers are benign.  If the Children Services are in any way prejudiced or have some agenda of their own and the parents are benign and have the child's interests at heart then the danger becomes clear that the malevolent party now has the legal right to remove the child from the benign parents.  There are solutions to this but that is for another discussion.  The important issue is that the new law is clearly unsatisfactory and prone to, even encourages, abuse.  The reason it appears to be a good idea to the legislators is because they believe themselves to be above reproach and view the population as having bad elements that need weeding out.

If people fear the ruler they need to see the world through the oppressors eyes.  They take on the world view of the oppressor and have to interpret their experience through that paradigm in order to guarantee their safety.  They become Inside-Out by proxy.  (This neatly includes the reference to pointers to pointers at the beginning of this post.)

And then there is the issue of the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions - used to be the Department for Health and Social Security (DHSS) - funny that - and nobody notices the profound renaming of this department from our "Oh so benign" government 'oppressors'.) only paying people's subsistence (they call it a "benefit") if they agree to give them authority to withdraw funds from your account.  It was clear, as with the Children Services example above, that there is a fundamental philosophical flaw in this new rule.  Of course if you start with the premise that the authority is benign and the population contains bad eggs then it makes sense.  When unscrupulous individuals defraud the system the authority simply removes the "stolen" funds back from the person's bank account.  And, of course, with the horrible views of the likes of the Baroness Neville Jones, that the government will never do anything bad - it might make the occasional mistake, but not intentionally - there is no problem.  Except there is a problem.  It is clear that the government must respect the rights of the individual and if the transaction is fraudulent they must go through the proper channels, as any individual or business would have to, to get the law to redress the fraud.  That is how it works but the government have ridden rough shod over the rule of law.  This seems to be done largely on the basis of the ignorance of the population.  There is a most horrible assumption by the people of this country that the "authority" has the right to invent the law BECAUSE it is the government.  That constraint on the people claiming their insurance - their social insurance - the tax taken by the government for that purpose - is wrong, disgusting and worst of all it is very frightening.

One might worry that they will start stealing people's money.  But as the Right f'ing Baroness would say "Of course they wouldn't do that."  Well watch this - They have now introduced a new layer of complexity whereby the disability allowance can be stopped.  The claimant can appeal and this can be a lengthy process.  Enquiries were made about this and the official line was that you can claim Job Seekers Allowance in the interim.  Then when your appeal is successful they can claim your JSA was fraudulent because you were clearly NOT fit for work.  You might want to appeal against this but they will have the money out of your account anyway.  I could get very angry about this but I will leave it as an observation of the criminality of their thinking let alone their actions.  They are culling the population and it is working!

So now that we have WikiLeaks' Julian Assange trapped illegitimately in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because of the Americans belligerent and ruthless illegal pursuit of him ... and we have Edward Snowden trapped in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport because of the American's belligerent and ruthless illegal pursuit of him ... and we have Barrett Brown, a journalist, imprisoned in the USA without bail, facing over 100 years of potential jail time, much of it for posting an http link to a public forum ... and we have Aaron Swartz, the founder of Demand Progress which launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA), who was found mysteriously dead in January 2013 after facing 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines ... and the list goes on.

We have the corrupt cookie laws which make the users responsible for the abuse of data instead of holding the owners of the web sites responsible for their own behaviour.  We have the NSA/GCHQ/PRISM scandal which is just the tip of the iceberg.  Given the governments' propensity for breaking the law and demanding information from mega internet moguls like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft and more it wouldn't even be necessary for them to be trawling the internet for their own illegitimate data but they are doing.  They are doing so with the same back to front logic as the DWP and the Children Services insofar as they say they are only interested in tracking terrorists.  But does no one see that if they have all the data and they happen to see you as a thorn in their side they have the wherewithal to search the data for anything they could construe as illegal?  And none of us are perfect.

But, of course, as per usual, there is something worse.  I have often wondered how the Germans actually built the industrial scale extermination machine of the Holocaust.  Didn't anybody realise what was going on?  Were they all stupid?  Were they burying their heads in the sand?  Didn't they see the dedicated railways being built?  Didn't they wonder what the giant ovens were for?  Well I happen to think that it would be nice if more people took personal responsibility for their lives (gratuitous remark coming up - instead of abdicating responsibility to some fictional delusion of a benign oppressor called God) and "Just said NO" to the authoritarian bigots but there is another factor contributing to their 'ignorance'.  Retrospectively we have the whole picture (NO - correction - the bigger picture) but at the time they probably didn't envisage what was to come.  Some did - they knew what they were doing - but most people were suffering the Stockholm syndrome of believing that escaping the Third Reich's terrors was equal to the Third Reich being 'good' to them and so they kind of trusted them.  After all you don't expect the people you talk to or see in suits in responsible positions, the people psychologically who fit into your 'parent', 'guardian' or 'teacher' paradigm to be inhuman.  Please go back and take a good look at the current political leaders - they are more like the Third Reich than you would like to think.  And why then can we not see the final solution being built on the internet.  Why are so many people so blind they cannot see that they are walking into the abattoir of the internet.  They are handing over all their rights, their bank accounts, their freedom to the megalomaniacs running the country and the electronic neural network.

IF WE ARE NOT CAREFUL WE WILL FIND OURSELVES TRAPPED INSIDE THE INSIDE-OUT ABATTOIR OF THE WEB.

I missed out the bit about the level crossings. - How stupid to change a failsafe design for a fail-prone alternative.  Gates, as illustrated in the picture, are closed to either the road or the railway or both but never to neither.  It is so simple really, but someone had to design barriers that go up and down instead. - WHY?

There was also the question "If you could zoom out from time like you can zoom out in space what would it look like?" but I will have to think on that one because it is just a question.  You may want to boggle your mind on it for a while.

And there was the Damien Hirst thing but I will have to leave that for another blog.

Love to all the good people (I know there aren't many of you but hey) and good night.

Patty-Cake Cats & Gastroscopy

This is a visually altered and enhanced image of the inside of my stomach.

Earlier today I had to go to the hospital to have a gastroscopy.  Well strictly speaking I had an oesophagogastroduodenoscopy but gastroscopy is easier to say.  A gastroscopy is a procedure performed with an endoscope inserted into your stomach via your oesophagus (more commonly called your throat) and possibly beyond.  The endoscope is a medical instrument used to examine the interior of a hollow organ in the body and is usually a long flexible tube containing optical fibres to supply illumination, a tube to supply air (to inflate the organ) and instrumentation to relay video images.  There is also often a spare tube to insert other instruments like snippers to cut bits out for biopsies or culture samples.

Not a pleasant experience.  You can be sedated for the procedure but this carries its own additional risks and leaves you unfit to do anything for 24 hours.  In my case I have no one to get me home so I opted to simply have the back of my throat numbed with a very nasty tasting spray.  Having someone push a rather large and not so very flexible rubber hose down your throat and then guggling about for 15 minutes is decidedly uncomfortable and quite gruesome.  The sensation of having your stomach blown up is pretty weird too.  I suspect that if you ever have to have a gastroscopy the idea is to only have one because after you know what to expect I think it is probably even worse.  But, if you are reading this because you are going to have one and want to know what it is like all I can say is it is quite tolerable but not nice.  I think the worst of it is the idea of what is going on.  At least that is the worst of it for me.  They did warn me that I might have a sore throat for a day or two but when the numbing spray wore off after about 45 minutes there was no soreness at all.  I drove home and have been perfectly fine since.

But since this is a particularly horrible subject I decided some light entertainment was required and so here is the latest Patty-cake cats video for your entertainment.


Thank you and good night.

Total human height is about the diameter of Pollux.

Some say the Eridanus Supervoid is a gateway to a parallel universe.  As gateways go it is a little large at 5000000000000000000000000 meters in diameter and it is slightly cooler than the rest of the universe at -270.5 degrees centigrade.  At 25 nanometers a modern computer chip transistor gate is a less than half the diameter of a Human Immuno Virus (HIV).  A strange quark is about twice the diameter of a charm quark and strangely it is 50 times as massive as an up quark whilst being less than half the size.  The holes in spacetime foam are possibly the smallest thing known to humanity at about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 meters.

All this and more is beautifully illustrated in a zooming animation by Cary and Michael Huang on their htwins.net site at http://htwins.net/scale2/

And to top it all off they have included the very civilised Russell Teapot.

Kaboom

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children Services Abuse

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

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

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

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

Abuse is abuse no matter how small.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please keep in touch ;)

Integrated Children's System (ICS

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

Jesse Ventura

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

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

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