Thank you Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the way - the holocaust never happened!

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

Three Phone Calls

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

Getting tired between three phone calls!

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

Here are the three calls:

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

EVENTVWR

The Indian enevtvwr phone scam.

The Scam

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

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

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

The Conversation

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

The Philosophical Point

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

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

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

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

FEIGNED SYMPATHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PRACTICE NURSE

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

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

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

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

What a funny convoluted world we live in.

Google Analytics Content Overview problem

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

Hikikomori (or school refusal)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Year's Resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Minchin censored for taking Mickey out of lizards.

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

Just thinking numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating a level playing field for the disabled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Kong Dead is ill

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

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

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

Top selling items on AMAZON!

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



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

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

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

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

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

David Cameron rips into the Archbishop!

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Title: Dr Pope David Adolf Rowing Baboon Cameroon.

What a wally!

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

Japanese Whale Hunt

Did you donate to the Fukushima disaster?

Do you know where your money went?

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

SIGN THE PETITION at Avaaz

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

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

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

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

Liege shooting

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swedish Embarrassment

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

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

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

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

Public Sector Strikes - Wednesday 30 November 2011

The Great Pension Swindle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tesco sell rice at 1p

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

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

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