ATOS

ATOS

AtoS, as the logo is written, is a non-name really and I refer you to Wikipedia for details if you wish to know more.  But many people ask "What does ATOS stand for?" and knowing something about what is going on

Auschwitz Terminal Outsourced Sorting

simply springs to mind.

I am not entirely sure what is going on here.  When I was at primary school (way back in the 1960's) it seemed straight forward when someone was being kind and when someone was being unkind.  It has never been difficult for me to know the difference between simple kindness and simple unkindness.  There are lots of things that don't so easily fit into those categories but nice and horrid were poles apart.

Years ago, in the 1970's I 'signed on' what was then called the Dole and went to the equivalent of the Job Centre.  Back then the government department was called the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS).  Funny how it has changed its name to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and it seems to have lost the Social Security bit for real.  I recall we used to have a card called a UB40 which stood for Unemployment Benefit Form 40.  You may have heard of the reggae band from Birmingham called UB40 which formed in 1978 and named after the little card.

The people in the Dole office (or the SS as we sometimes called it) were like the kids at school.  Some folk were kind and some were unkind.  But for me, much as socio-politically times were similarly difficult, it seemed that generally the people were real people with the occasional not so nice git (to put it colloquially).  So, although the circumstances were not good the people were quite often quite nice and helpful.  And it didn't affect me too badly because I was fit and strong so I could easily take on most unqualified jobs.

I went off to get educated and still don't know if that was a mistake for me.  I had a brief spell unemployed in the early 1980's and things seemed to have changed dramatically.  The general attitude of the people in the DHSS was judgemental and negative.  There was an air of disdain in their demeanour.  I knew someone who worked in the department and they told me that the staff were trained to treat people badly.  In fact it went deeper than that; they used techniques like making the floor higher on their side of the counter than on the claimants side.  The counter was at a height suitable for them thereby making the claimant feel small and inferior.  They actually employed psychological techniques to make this a negative experience for the unemployed.

My unemployment didn't last long and I spent many years fully occupied and working and other stuff like getting married and having a child.  Then, due mainly to unkindness, my situation was catastrophically wrecked as was that of my daughter's too.  We are now a single parent/single child family.  For many years I have been totally beside myself with dismay at the institutionalised cruelty that we have experienced.  Major issues like cruel teachers, vicious education authorities, vindictive nurses in the NHS and ruthless abusive Children Services employees.

I am now watching, at close quarters, the behaviour of the political elite and the cascading abuse bleeding throughout this culture.  I have no doubt that experts are involved in designing and manipulating the socio-political landscape.  I think one would have to be slightly insane to think that somehow the people in positions of power today were more naive or less capable than the equivalent folk in the 1960' and 70's.  Or even than the folk back in the 1930' and 40's.  So now I ask you to take a look at how much behind the scenes planning went into the socio-political landscape in the 1930's and 40's by both the Germans and the British (let alone the Americans et al.).  When one reads historical accounts of what was going on behind the scenes it is hard to imagine how calculating and, indeed, ruthless some people were.  As Franklin D Roosevelt famously commented "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."

One could write endless weighty tomes dissecting and describing multiple dimensions of cultural manipulation, collective psychology and political machinations and there is possibly some benefit in that but ... ... It can also come back to that simple environment of the primary school playground;  Some people are being kind and some are being unkind.  It is clear to me that, like the money, the unkindness is accumulating in heaving excess at the top of the cesspit of British society.

Atos:  We have a respected and regulated profession of Doctors authorised to use their expertise to issue official sick notes where required.  To use a foreign private  IT company to arbitrarily override the British Medical Profession and to segregate the sick into those who can be put to work and those too sick to work is inhumane and disgusting.  It is just a more sophisticated way of sorting people than they used for the gas chambers in Auschwitz.  But then you would expect them to be more sophisticated if they are going to try it again in the 21st century.

Here is an excerpt from DW's web site.  They are the German equivalent of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and say of themselves that they "represent[s] Germany in the international media landscape."  They have a page entitled "Germany marks the liberation of Auschwitz"

What had happened in Auschwitz was not immediately public. It was in mid-April 1945 when the survivors recounted their ordeals to the German service of the BBC. Anita Lasker, a young cellist, was one of them.

"A doctor and a commanding officer stood waiting upon the arrival of the transporters on the ramp and everyone was sorted before our very eyes," she remembered. "That meant, people were asked their age and about the state of their health."

Many unsuspecting new arrivals revealed certain ailments, in effect signing their own death warrants. "Children and the elderly were disregarded above all. Right left, right left. Right is to life. Left is to the chimney," one eyewitness said.

They didn't think it could happen then and we don't think it can happen now.

EXCEPT
IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING
ATOS

Auschwitz Terminal Outsourced Sorting

I refer you to a small entry in Wikipedia concerning a brief history of Atos Healthcare and I offer just a small sample here for your delectation:

In June 2012 British Medical Association doctors voted that the Work Capability Assessment should be ended ‘with immediate effect.

Grant Shapps MP claimed that 878,300 benefit claimants dropped their claims rather than be assessed by Atos

In 2011/12 Atos was paid £112,400,000 (that's £112.4 million) to carry out 738,000 assessments. 38% of appeals were successful which cost the government £500,000,000 (that's £500 million) to fund the appeals.

Atos has been criticized in the media, in Parliament, by the Church, by the medical profession, and by protest groups regarding its disability programs.

Government statistics reveal that between January 2010 and January 2011, 10,600 sick and disabled people died within six weeks of ending their claim.

Government statistics also revealed that 1300 people died shortly after being declared fit for work by Atos.

In January 2012, there was a scandal when it was disclosed that Atos had found a man in a coma to be 'fit for work'.

Atos assessors have found patients with brain damage, terminal cancer, severe multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's Disease to be fit for work.

On 24 April 2013 a woman who was a double heart and lung transplant patient died in her hospital bed only days after she was told, after assessment by Atos, that her allowance was being stopped and that she was fit for work.

In 2013 an FOI request revealed that from 1 Jan 2012 at least 92 Atos doctors have been found guilty of misconduct.

28 of the 140 medical assessment centres (that's 20%) do not provide wheelchair access and many are based on the second or third floor of buildings.

And it gets worse!  Can you believe it?  It actually gets worse!

It appears I am not the first person to see the similarities between Auschwitz and Atos.  Just do a search on Google images for "Atos logo" and it transpires lots of people are comparing the Nazi health checks and Atos health checks.  I have included some of the logos on this page as historical social documentation of the mood of the British people in 2013.  You can see more on The Great Atos Rebrand – Update Of course I have to add here that I DO NOT CONDONE THESE IMAGES - and of course if I added "*innocent face*" some stuck up Judge Tugitoff could interpret what I have said to mean that "Atos is a paedophile ring" but I would have to take exception to the judge's interpretation because it means nothing of the sort.  I couldn't claim that Atos is a paedophile ring because I have no information to suggest that.

That would be like Iain Duncan Smith claiming "that 8,000 people had found jobs because of the benefit cap".  Oops!  He did.  And when John Humphrys challenged him on the Today programme saying “Your statement is unsupported by the official statistics published by your own department.” His response was “Yes but by the way, you can’t disprove what I said either."  So following Iain Duncan Smith's logic I could do exactly as Iain Duncan Smith has done and say that  "You can't prove that Atos is not a paedophile ring."  Of course logically that is true but it is no argument to suggest they are which is what Iain Duncan Smith was trying to suggest.  No - I'm not saying that Iain Duncan Smith was suggesting Atos is a paedophile ring, just that it would be the same logic.  What I am doing, of course, is proving how ridiculous and unacceptable Iain Duncan Smith's remarks really are.

So it seems people can say what they want if they are the bullies with money but other people are not even allowed their own opinions even if they are correct.  So, given that some people are expressing negative views about Atos (and with substantial reason if the facts are to be believed), Atos simply overrides the law and gets a website, carerwatch.com, shut down without any enquiry, warning, court order or anything legal.  They just bullied the ISP to shut down the web site.  Check out the article "Atos complaint suspends carerwatch website" by Nick Sommerlad on the Mirror's blog site or "ATOS SHRUGGED" on SchNEWS.

So although the web site is back up, and credit to whoever achieved that, it remains the case that dissent is not so welcome in this country when you are a near monopoly foreign company taking billions of pounds from the British tax payers.

And to be absolutely clear here it is my opinion and my perception that Atos is engaged in something so sinister that history will pretentiously regard it as a crime against humanity.  Why do I say 'pretentiously'?  Because (as well explained by Sigmund Freud) it seems we are quite happy to project our evil ways onto other people or other times and so we see the Nazis as evil whilst interpreting similar behaviour in our time as perfectly morally acceptable.

Well goodness gracious me!  I was looking up Arbeit Macht Frei to explain briefly the meaning and relevance of the 'Atos Macht Frei' logo when I happened across an article on the Guardian's Greenslade Blog entitled "Daily Mail deletes 'Arbeit Macht Frei' advice to unemployed graduates".  If you don't know the appalling history of this phrase then go read the article and then read up on 'Arbeit Macht Frei' on wikipedia.

Oh dear - I will have to stop this and go to bed but just before I go I encountered

THE NEW REPUBLIC
ENTWICKLUNG DURCH IKONOKLASMUS

And a couple of articles:
Time to Rise up and Defend
Germany Calling - Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich
Even the Dying Will Work
ATOS Register of Shame
ATOS Suicide Attempt

If this was a movie I'd be scared.  But this is real life.

Man sanctioned for a heart attack.

This is way beyond the pale.

A Man is sanctioned for having a heart attack!

There seems no point in expressing exasperation or anger at the utter depravity of British politicians.  It is not simply the Conservatives, although they are possibly the very worst, because the other parties are going along with their agenda every step of the way.  If your country is really in dire straits financially it is reasonable that everyone pulls together but there is not even the slightest pretence of that in Britain.

I would try to explain the simple reality that when some people have exactly enough to live on, and no more, there is nothing reasonable about taking their money.  And when others are awash with more money than they can handle they should reasonably help out.  But we all know that anyway.  I am dismayed at the constant stream of 'explanations' of what is wrong as if you can 'explain'  to your rapist that they are hurting you.  This government is enacting, by relative stealth at this stage, the most frightening and insidious cull of the population imaginable.

I thought I would compile a list of the damage being caused ranging from articles on the subject such as one in the Guardian entitled  "Mental health experts warn against pace of incapacity benefit cuts" to known cases of suicide such as Stephanie Bottrill and Peter Williams.  I began a provisional search for related information and was shocked at the scale and insanity of the problem.

But I came across one case so ridiculous I thought I would pop it on my blog as a sample.  Remember there are thousands - maybe millions - of cases like this and worse.

A man was in one of the infamous Atos Healthcare assessments.  The medical examiner told him he was having a heart attack and should go home.  That is ridiculous enough but some weeks later he received a letter stating that he was being sanctioned (a euphemism for being robbed by the government) because he had "withdrawn from the assessment".

Make no mistake about it these things are happening all the time up and down the country.  You won't hear of most of them because they are people without voices and you are deafened by your busy life and the likes of Facebook and [un]reality TV.  And so when you do hear of it you think it is an exception and probably an exaggeration anyway.  "There must have been something else going on."  Stop burying your heads in the sand because it never saved an ostrich and you do rather present a provocative target for the abusers.

Here is the authentic source of this particular case.  You can read the original transcript on the House of Commons own web site.

In the House of Commons on 19 Mar 2013 in the Second Reading of the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill Debbie Abrahams, Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth said (amongst other things) at approximately 14:46 hrs:

"For example, one of my constituents was a beneficiary of employment and support allowance after they had retired on grounds of ill health as a result of a heart problem. He was required to attend a work capability assessment with Atos. During the assessment, he was told that he was having a heart attack and the nurse said that she had to stop the assessment. He got a letter a couple of weeks later saying that he had withdrawn from the assessment and, as such, was being sanctioned. That beggars belief. I have other examples, as I am sure do colleagues."

And if you want a taste of other utterly cruel insanity try "A Selection Of Especially Stupid Sanctions" on the Birmingham Against The Cuts blog site.

Thanks to an anonymous contributor for the brilliant art work.  If you want recognition or the work removing just let me know.

Anal sphincter muscle of the cultural topology of Britain.

Having spent some horrible time in a wayward town on the east coast of this declining refuge from the empirical epoch of Britain called Boston I found a web site called CRAP TOWNS RETURNS and had to leave a deposit on their blog.

Having browsed their crap towns web site I soon realised that it was also a crap website about towns.  It's not entirely crap but it is not so easy to navigate and many of the pictures fail to load.  One of my favourite entries was for Newark.  Someone called "Chris D" had posted:

“Newark” is an anagram of “wanker”.  There is so much more that I don’t even need to write.

Since I had spent a while composing the deposit, and have no idea if it will ever be read, I thought I could also deposit a copy here.  This is my contribution to CRAP TOWNS:

Boston was the fattest town in the UK in 2006 with about a third of the adult population clinically obese;  Conveniently they don't have any figures beyond that date.  (Why not?)  Boston now has the densest immigrant population in the UK with over 10% of the 64,600 population from "new" EU countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Romania.  West street is now colloquially called East Street and the town is often referred to as Bostonia in Lincolngrad by disgruntled locals.  The central government have never addressed their legal responsibility to fund the level of immigration experienced by the town, leaving it collapsing under the pressure and unable to accommodate the changing demographics. 

Boston has not been a good town to inhabit for hundreds of years, being cut off from any progress in the rest of the country by wetlands which were only inhabitable for half of the year.  Major transport routes were developed up and down the country on the west coast helping the western ports, towns and industries.  But the east coast got left behind economically.  The Humber Bridge was part of a failed attempt to improve transport on the east coast but other infrastructure was never developed.  Boston has been isolated physically, culturally, industrially and economically for hundreds of years.  Some have mistakenly romanticised Boston as 'sleepy' but somnambulistic or zombified would describe it better. 

The liberating 1960's seemed to miss the isolated fenland town and it maintained it's feudal mentality with the few rich landowners bestowing poverty on the peasants.  The tragedy being that too many of the peasants kowtow to the landowners thereby continuing the legacy.  Boston is a cruelly hierarchical town and is one of the lowest points in the cultural topology of the UK.  Sure it has 'potential' but until something is done to realise that potential it remains perhaps the worst place to live in Britain.  There are places beginning with 'B' like Bradford and Banbury that may be the proverbial armpit towns of Britain but Boston is a certain orifice somewhat lower down the metaphorical body of Britain.

Thank you to Paul King for his photo of a tractor and Boston Stump circa 2011, and to J M W Turner for his painting of Boston Stump circa 1833.

"I am going to shoot somebody!"

DISCLAIMER:  I really don't mean any of the following.  It is fiction - really.

"I am going to shoot somebody!"

Whew - That is the sort of thing you can't say on your blog.  Well unfortunately it is a quote from somebody else.  So I couldn't possibly mean it to represent something I think.  Does this defence sound a little like a fear of the "thought police" in Nineteen Eighty-Four .  Well that is because it is getting that serious.

A prime example of the ridiculous insanity that now pervades our society is the case of Sally Bercow outlined in an article entitled "Sally Bercow Settles Lord McAlpine 'Innocent Face' Tweet Libel Case For Mystery Sum".  Even the Huffington Post seems to swallow the story whole instead of ridiculing it.  It seems the people of this country (and many others) are losing their grip on sanity.  There is NOTHING illegal about Sally Bercow's tweet.  What she typed was "Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *Innocent face*"  From this Mr Justice Tugendhat (what a name - or is that deformation as well - yes I know it is usually defamation but I was joking - but this is how silly it gets) claimed that it meant Lord McAlpine was a paedophile who was guilty of sexually abusing boys living in care.  To do this case serious intellectual justice would take a long time but there is NO case to answer.

Here is a hypothesis (just to make it clear that this is only a 'theory' lest anyone wants to abuse me legally, financially, emotionally or in any other conceivable way):  What is really going on is that Sally Bercow is the wife of John Bercow who is the current Speaker of the House of Commons and who is a decidedly right wing individual.  I won't fill this blog with an explanation but you can take a look at the Wikipedia entry for starters.  Sally, it appears, was attacked (Legal Abuse) by an emotionally 'distressed' Lord McAlpine (Does he have 'emotional' problems? - Well the answer is yes.  But is that defamatory or libellous or even slanderous - since one can say "I said on my blog..."?  And the reason I can say he does is the same double-speak that these authoritarian, chauvinistic, egocentric, control freaks use because I can mean it to mean he has an emotional problem which is Sally Bercow.) and, with the threat of 'serious repercussions' she apologised and offered a financial settlement.  McAlpine was clearly not satisfied with that and pursued her some more.  The judge was clearly playing some perverse game, possibly (Only a hypothetical possibility you understand - not a 'real' possibility. (Can there even be a difference?) (This is probably getting too intellectually convoluted for you lot.) he was part of the same paedophile ring as Lord McAlpine and needed to swot this little bug good and proper lest anyone else started making innuendoes or allusions.

I do just have to qualify here that I am not suggesting the paedophile ring which included Judge Tugendhat and Lord McAlpine actually existed.  I am doing no more than Judge Tugenhat when he said "it meant Lord McAlpine was a paedophile".  What he should have said was that it was meant to mean that Lord McAlpine was a paedophile.  But hey - who's splitting hairs over such an inconsequential matter.  Maybe the journalist simply misreported it.  One thing that nasty (only a hypothesis) Baroness Neville-Jones would (did) attest to is that being governments or institutions they "can't be malicious".  Apparently they just might make mistakes but they are never deliberately malicious.  What a load of... dare I say it... oh go on... bullshit!

The nasty little authoritarian bullies are obviously getting scared when they have to take someone to court for a tweet saying (reading?) "Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *Innocent face*" and better still they have to find the individual GUILTY of libel.

AND - Can you believe this?  The article reports:

Speaking for Lord McAlpine, Andrew Reid of RMPI Solicitors said he was pleased with the judge's finding that the tweet was highly defamatory.

"The apologies previously received from Mrs Bercow did not concede that her tweet was defamatory. Clearly, she must now accept this fact.

"The failure of Mrs Bercow to admit that her tweet was defamatory caused considerable unnecessary pain and suffering to Lord McAlpine and his family over the past six months.

Since when have these arrogant, ruthlessly cruel, self important people suddenly got the monopoly on feelings?  The poor people being chucked out of their houses by Iain Duncan "Mussolini" Smith and his cronies aren't allowed to have 'feelings'  The fact that they are committing suicide in their droves is their own silly fault.  For what it is worth my opinion is that even IF Lord McAlpine has not been found guilty of being a paedophile (as Judge Tugithard seems to think) I now have my suspicions given his pathetic attempt to 'prove' his innocence.

I have rarely seen such a grubby public display of Freudian exposure.

Ha ha ha ha ha Judge Tugitoff - Make something of that if you can!  Eeeek.

Something else I'd like to say is that the USA are spying on us.  Now I guess I had better go on the run to Russia or Ecuador or Venezuela.  Maybe if I just stay in Britain and start mixing with the immigrants no one will be able to find me.

All of the above is simply sarcastic, ironic, satire meant to illustrate the ridiculousness of even attempting to suggest there is anything wrong with the government, the legal system, the hierarchy, the Lords, the Queen or anybody else who is rich and important in this country called Great Britain which I freely admit is theirs and not mine and I have no right to be here and I'm really sorry and where did I put the iron because I have to go iron my hands now and I'd like to apologise in advance to Dobby because no offense was intended and I will trap my fingers in the wardrobe door several times tonight to save anyone the effort of doing so.  And could I apologise on behalf of those horrid Jews in the second world war who caused the Gestapo to scuff their shiny leather boots on their grubby skulls.

This bit is the only non dramatic artistic expression intended for consenting adults only:

I AM DISGUSTED AT THE EVIL HIERARCHY OF THE BRITISH POLITICAL SYSTEM.

Twitching cadavers in the government

Here are two people (Iain Duncan Smith and Benito Mussolini) who have been in positions of power.  First of all can you tell which is which?  And second I propose a mind experiment:  Dispose of all you know about these two people and just pretend you only have the photo to go on.  Now imagine you have a beautiful daughter and she must marry one of them.  Which one would you choose?  The one with passion or the angry little man?  It says a lot about how bad Briton is at the moment - and the funny thing is it is still getting worse.

The trouble is we are getting worse even than Germany in its Nazi era and Italy in its Fascist era.  The only thing we really have to worry about is what to call the American/British/European era.  The New World Order doesn't sound quite bad enough.

Today I read: The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman (General Martin E. Dempsey) says NSA leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs have undermined U.S. relationships with other countries and affected what he calls "the importance of trust." (in The Huffington Post)

Now what is wrong with people?  The only way it has 'undermined' relationships is because it has revealed the depths of their treachery.  There is no suggestion that the US treachery may be the cause of their 'undermined' relationships - only that they have been discovered.  Does no one understand that this is insane?  Does no one notice?  Why am I wasting my time writing this since it is so self evident the only people who will understand this already know it.  The rest cannot know it because they are clearly as insane as the American hierarchy.

It is quite clear that General Martin E. Dempsey is an evil man.  (He is Catholic too - par for the course if current scandals are anything to go by.)  But on the subject of 'evil', Dempsey is clearly self contradictory and, as such, evil.  Not everything which is self contradictory is evil but contradictory moral actions which destroy others is reasonably defined as evil.  Jesus had a lot to say about this and I can vouch for the fact that he didn't have much truck for the likes of Dempsey.

But why - oh why - are we putting up with such trite and desperately cruel treachery from the people we 'elect' to govern?

And the funny thing is it is just as bad over the pond here in Britain.  All the politicians are merging under the influence of some external malevolence.  There is no difference between the parties any more.  With the UK debt at a ridiculous rate of growth unprecedented in history the rhetoric about austerity to reduce the deficit is a disconnected, meaningless, manipulative, oppressive and divisive charade.  You can check up the figures yourself but the 'deficit' is only the shortfall in what should be paid each month and what is paid on the massive debt.  Reducing the deficit does nothing about the increasing borrowing and the scale of the debt.  It is like not quite being able to pay the 'minimum payment' due on your credit card (which I agree is serious enough) with your left hand whilst borrowing massively with your right hand.

A simple thing to bear in mind is that there is enough resource and wealth in the UK to support 60 million people comfortably.  I am not advocating equality here but the reason so many are dying and suffering is down to bad distribution.  The bankers, industrialists and politicians have all the money.  So they take a little more from the poor.

So I am very distressed by the rapid decline into cruel Dickensian moralistic judgemental detritus.  If we don't remove the twitching cadavers in the government and the banks they will infect all of us.  We will become the living dead.  Sounding a bit dramatic?  You ain't seen nothing yet!

Just getting pissed on!

I was roaming around the weboshpere in my browsotron when I encountered an article on THE SKWAWKBOX BLOG entitled FREUD: FOODBANK DUNCE – OR DEVIL? about some fatuous comments made by oh-so-la-di-da-di Lord Highfalutin Might-be Baron David Anthony Freud (yes - great grandson of the late and great Sigmund)

I had to make a comment:

It strikes me that there are people like David Anthony Freud, or Baron Freud as he prefers to be known and Ian Duncan Smith and Baroness Neville-Jones (but I had better stop as the list is quite large) who are entirely irrational and illogical.  They play at pretending to think and in that regard they are relatively good at the game.  But a close inspection of their utterances soon reveals contradiction and nonsense.  BUT - These people are in positions of power over other people.  They destroy lives like vampires.  They are, arguably, the very definition of evil.  So what can one do about them?  I would make some suggestion like "Shoot them in the head" but big brother might come and get me for being a terrorist and then they could lock me up without a trial so I won't.  But instead I will refer you to two little things which a guy called Jesus allegedly said some 2000 years ago [Mathew 23:27 (1611 King James Bible)] "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." and [Matthew 18:6 (1611 King James Bible)] "But who so shall offend one of these little ones which beleeve in me, it were better for him that a milstone were hanged about his necke, and that hee were drowned in the depth of the Sea."  Yeah I could buy that :)

Then, quite liking this guy's blog I decided to read the A LITTLE ABOUT ME AND THE AIM OF THIS BLOG page.  Apart from the fact that S W Walker is a Christian he seems quite reasonable.  And I was reading some more comments on his blog when I came across a reference to a video entitled "MMT Movie: Economics for Dummiez".  It was enlightening AND funny so I had to include it here.  My favourite quote from the video is:

"Trickledown economics is another way of telling you it is raining outside when really you are just getting pissed on."

Enjoy!

Fantasy drama princesses bandits slavery pirates prostitution and violence.

I know of a person called Kiyoko Silvers who writes novels.  This is true because she has completed two and is well over half way through her third.  The first is called Blood of the Kavatha'dral and  is currently available as an eBook; it is definitely worth a read.  I say this because if you enjoy a good adventurous yarn involving princesses being captured by bandits and sold into slavery this book has it all.  It has so much more too.  I am not a big fan of fiction although I read it occasionally but I prefer philosophical and mathematical stuff.  This book, however, gripped me from the moment I started reading it.  It is not a weighty tome - about the same size as "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" - but it is packed with drama, adventure and significant insight into real life and real dilemmas.

Blood of the Kavatha'dral is about a pithy princess and her three prissy princess acquaintances.  Kess, the pithy protagonist, is brought up with a degree of self reliance and self defence.  At the age of five she is given a dagger as a present from her father and she learns to use it.  At the age of 17 she is out with three other princesses when they are set about by bandits and captured.  The story follows the four princesses as they cascade from one disaster to another.  As the adventures unfold so too do the characters of the princesses.

Kess, who's full title is Princess Kesshi Faikana, Storm Maiden of Valgate, is fearsome and generally impulsive;  The other three are, unfortunately, very  sheltered and naive.  They are, in the words of a bandit, 'Palace Brats'.  Kess is endlessly being tempted to desert them because they will not fight for themselves and she finds herself risking her life and liberty on account of their inabilities.  It is not feasible for Kess to single-handedly 'rescue' all of them so the question is whether the other's can learn to look after themselves in time or will they inadvertently lead to their own and possibly Kess' demise.  Will Kess have to desert any or all of them?

This book is certainly worth a read and Kiyoko Silvers is definitely an author to keep an eye on.

Twinkies and the American economy.

It was the phrase "... the fat slob, Twinkie eating, bozos of America don't have enough money to fight their wars any more." that grabbed my attention.  It was so sweet - like those Twinkies I guess - that I couldn't resist eating listening to some more.

It was an interview with Max Keiser on RT and Bill Dod was asking Max about the connection between the collapsing bond market and the Edward Snowdon affair.  This is a transcribed excerpt of Max Keiser talking to Bill Dod of RT (aka Russia Today) TV network.

"It's very telling that the foreign minister of Ecuador said that you're talking about us extraditing Edward Snowdon;  What about bringing back those bankers we asked you to bring back to Ecuador who we caught rigging and terrorising our market.  What about the Icelandic bankers who have been asked by the government of Iceland to be extradited back to Iceland that are being held in the UK.  What about these other instances where banking terrorists are being sheltered in the US and the UK and they are not responding to extradition agreements.  So this is all about financial [legislature(?)] Bill.  Unfortunately the fat slob, Twinkie eating, bozos of America don't have enough money to fight their wars any more so they have to resort to snooping, data gathering and market manipulation."

He goes on to say

"Look at the bond market today Bill;  It's selling off pretty spectacularly all over the world because  confidence in the American hologram of finance is collapsing.  They've flipped the switch.  They see that the emperor has no clothes.  There's no underlying economic activity to support the military occupations and financial occupations that are emanating from the US.  GAME OVER Bill.  It's GAME OVER!"

That sums it up so well that I am now a dedicated fan of Max Keiser.  I always rated him but felt he had a tendency to get over excited and a bit elaborate.  This transcription revealed, for me, the amazing succinctness of his message.  He gets what it might take another person an hour to say said in three minutes.

You can watch the whole interview (4 mins 43 secs) here:


I would say that humanity is at a profound crossroad and it has to choose but that is not enough.  It simply cannot continue with the self-contradictory nonsense of the authoritarian, dictatorial, hierarchical, self-serving, self destructive paradigms that are dished out by ridiculous self serving bullies.  So there is no choice really - Humanity will change.

Is Cameron behind the Child Porn?

Was this David Cameron arriving at the Grove Hotel in Watford for the secret Bilderberg meeting behind a headline of CHILD PORN TEACHER IS ALLOWED BACK IN THE (BILDERBERG MEETING/GUEST BEDROOMS/CLASSROOM)?  What did it say on that paper?  Why was he reading it so intently?  What are they doing in there?

It would be a farce except it is so serious.  There was an article on the Guardian web site entitled David Cameron to attend Bilderberg group meeting and I decided to leave a comment.  I was interested later to note it had been 'recommended several times.  So for your perusal and enjoyment I have included it here.

Unfortunately this is far more serious than a joke.  People are going to die in revolutions around the world as a result of these clandestine machinations by our "elected(?)", "democratic(?)" "representatives(?)".  It is too disgusting to make light of.  They are lying in our face and virtually no one cares.  The most profound proverbial is currently hitting the fan.  And, to top it off, if they don't like this comment they will simply erase it!  What a lovely brave new world we are living in.  Just go to basefuk and twitter and amuse yourself to death - that appears to be the idea.  How can the statement "Downing Street said it was acting in an open manner by publicising the prime minister's attendance in advance." be allowed?  It is, in your face, lies. They haven't in the past, they weren't going to now, but having been caught they pretend they are 'admitting' it but they still won't either publicize what "our representative" not "our ruler" is saying.  This is a more clandestine, more insidious, and far more dangerous ruling elite than Hitler's Third Reich.  Don't believe me?  You won't have to wait long to find out if "WE" don't "DO" something about it.  But, hey, it might just be too late so maybe we prefer the anaesthesia of inyourbootface social mastication.

I am NOT amused!

So the day went on and I got more and more depressed; With this Bilderberg meeting and WikiLeaks.

Check out these amusing and interesting as well as informative articles by Charlie Skelton for the Guardian: The week ahead: Bilderberg 2013 comes to … the Grove hotel, Watford
Bilderberg 2013: welcome to 1984

The problem seems too much like the complaint to the Children Services;  No one cares.  Then Dad wanted to go shopping then I played Go and got bored and I revisited the WikiLeaks website and read all about the disgusting illegal behaviour of the mega companies and the American right wing politicians and I found this video.  It cheered me up...



But how I wish people would take this seriously.  Very few people read this blog and so it feels as if I am pissing in the wind but if all of us don't start objecting to the illegitimate behaviour of these mechanistic, self-serving, abusive and illegal companies and practises there seems only one way the world is going.  I was going to refer to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four but then I thought maybe Aldous Huxley's Brave New World might be more appropriate so I went to Wikipedia to contemplate the issues and found the following excerpt from the foreword of  Neil Postman's 1985 book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

I feel much inclined to refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - We are amusing ourselves to death.  But if that is the way you want it I can recommend being amused by Roger Water's brilliant album Amused to Death.

Killer robots and Motorola identity pills

So Motorola has come up with this good idea of a pill or a tattoo which is a personal identification device and you won't need to remember another password to get on the internet or access your bank account.  They will even have the ability to locate you geographically.  Just imagine; If you get kidnapped they can rush in and rescue you - How lovely.

From The Sydney Morning Herald Forgot your password? Just take a pill

From The Huffington Post Passwords In Tattoos And Pills? Motorola Announces Plans For Wearable Tech (VIDEO)

They have even reported it on the Children's BBC called CBBC Motorola's password in a pill and electronic tattoo

And you can search for it on Google.  You know - that search engine whose philosophy was "Do No Evil" but don't worry they changed that.  Hang on a minute who owns Motorola?  Did I read somewhere that Google had bought Motorola?  Oh yes - in 2011 Google bought Motorola for about 12 billion dollars.  Now who is the senior vice president of advanced technology and projects at Motorola?  It wouldn't be a nice young girl who was the first female director of DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) which, although they developed the internet and cloud computing, they are also responsible for developing t Agent Orange, micro air vehicles and killer robots?  Oops yes it's that lovely Regina E. Dugan.  So hang on a minute - Google owns the company that employs an ex-director of DARPA and they are now developing a pill to identify you.

You have to realise that Eric E. Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google Inc. is in a secret meeting this weekend with 140 other influential world figures at the Grove Hotel in Watford.  You might ask if it is secret how I know about it.  For over 50 years this organisation, the Bilderberg Group, has been having illegal secret meetings.  It is only in the last few years that, largely due to the information age, they have been unavoidably exposed.  But their agenda remains secret and that is illegal too.  Now that they have been exposed they are pretending that they have never been secret.  They have even created their own web site as if nothing is wrong at The Bilderberg Meetings - The Official Website. This behaviour is clearly deceptive and dangerous.  The 'official' list is now available on the internet at many places including the Telegraph. but there are reasonable grounds to assume that there are at least 20 unannounced attendees including Bill Gates who is coincidentally flying into London this weekend.

So I will let you work out for yourself whether this Motorola pill is consumer driven or control driven and I will show you a video that you won't believe.  This guy went out and asked Americans to sign a petition to support the Holocaust Celebrations.  He explained to people on the street (in America) that the Jews liked to celebrate the Holocaust with beach parties where they would have competitions to see how many people they could bury in the sand and how they loved to roast pork on the beach too.  These American citizens swallowed it all (not the pork) and would happily sign the petition.  You don't believe me?  Take a look.

What conspiracy?

So there I am, getting up and getting on with the world.  I dip into this and that and the other and before I know it my mind space is like my desk space and my room space; a complete jumbled mess.

Monsanto:  The first thing to note about Monsanto is that there is a scandal currently doing the rounds about their genetically modified wheat being found in non genetically modified wheat fields.  I recall from years ago that there was a lot of controversy about the potential uncontrollable consequences of their business activities.  The thing that strikes me most about these controversies is that the alarm bells ring when they illegitimately try to hush things up or falsely deny things that are clearly happening.  For me it is one of the under emphasized issues in all these protests/objections/conspiracy theories etcetera.  The facts are often unavailable and disputed but the overtly presumptuous and illegitimate denials beg the proverbial question "What exactly are they trying to hide?"  I encountered a little video on InfoWars where someone tried to upload a video to YouTube but when they entered the tag "Monsanto" the system mysteriously couldn't save the video.  It is worth a look:


Video streaming by Ustream
So often in these government enquiries or radio interviews I hear the defence that there is no 'evidence' that there is anything sinister going on.  Consequently the clandestine and insidious behaviour cannot be addressed and so it carries on.  Actually these people in responsible and influential positions have a duty to be open and responsive.  They have a 'responsibility' to address the issues raised.  Psychologically they are presented as an innocent victim who should be given the benefit of the doubt.  We are presented with the paradigm that anyone can make a mistake and it isn't their fault and they meant no harm and, indeed, one mention of a good motive seems to vindicate them and represent them as morally benign people who are being picked on.  But they are the ones calling the shots.  They are the ones in power with the money and influence.  And the reality is that when the little guy simply steps over the line he/she is guilty because they 'might' have been plotting to overthrow the world.

But as you can tell - I am not a journalist - and I am in danger of ranting.  So that is the bit about Monsanto.

Jew Bashing:  I also encountered a tweet from Stephen Fry ‏stating This is deeply disturbing … http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YTkD2BXzD2k#%25 … so I went and watched the video.  Was I deeply disturbed?  No!  Do I believe the Jews should be exterminated?  No!  Do I think this guy, Alex Linder (who ironically looks remarkably stereotypically Jewish), is being deliberately controversial for his own aggrandisement?  Yes.  Where has Stephen Fry been if he hasn't seen tons of this stuff oozing out of every pore of the internet?  Why am I not disturbed?  Years ago I would have been but now I see billions of people all screaming their own perspectives of pain.  What I find worrying is that their distress seems understandable but they externalise it, personify it, and then want to kill anyone who looks like it as if that will address their sense of injustice and put things right in the world.  It seems that the thing to do is to destroy all the oppressors.  But that is what they are doing.  They are just winning (in their own subjective way) but if 'we' - the good guys - did the decent thing and killed them first wouldn't we just be them winning.  There has to be a more realistic and accurate solution to this and I think there is one.  It is too much to dive into just now but it is about being a little more accurate about what we judge as wrong, undesirable or unacceptable.  Abuse is abuse whether it is committed by a Jew or a Christian, a black or a white person, an athlete or an invalid or a Jehovah's Witness or a Scout leader or a priest or a politician or a banker, a butcher a baker or a candle stick maker.

The main thrust of that is that we have to stop the abuse and not keep siding with 'our' politicians, or 'our' religion, or 'our' sex or race or any other group identifier.  Something that springs to mind, of course, is the Bradley Manning trial which is currently in process.  The guy revealed a mass of illegal activity being perpetrated by the American government and military (and more) and he is being vindictively persecuted for revealing their 'secrets'.  We have to hold the American government (and all the others implicated in the leaks) to account for their illegitimate actions.  They MUST be stopped.

Then there is the Bilderberg Group:  Ha!  That's a good one.

It was not so many years ago, probably 5, that any suggestion that such a thing existed was laughed out of court as a ridiculous conspiracy theory.  Alex Jones, of Prison Planet and Info Wars fame, was significantly involved in exposing this extremely secret organisation.  It is frightening to realise that although the authorities worked hard to deny that such an organisation existed, when they were finally irrefutably exposed they put forward a pretence at a legitimacy to the whole thing.  Now when they don't tell the public that they are having the meetings we are supposed to accept that it is a good idea to keep these very important people safe from terrorists and those other undesirable characters that might disrupt the important affairs of the totally rich and influential do-gooders who are working hard in our interest to secure the globe and make it safe for us in spite of the terrorist and people like Alex Jones.

Unfortunately too many people will accept these projections.  I know this for many reasons not least of which being that I believed them myself years ago.  But something was wrong.  I couldn't put my finger on it and so I continued to 'think' about it and for years something was wrong but I couldn't figure it out.  It IS the distress.  It IS the repression as a consequence of the oppression.  It IS the fact that the authoritarians are self contradictory.  It is clearly ridiculous to suggest that you must kill people to maintain peace, that you must oppress people to protect freedom, that you must lie to people to maintain the truth and that you must benefit from people for their own good.  Even if you are tempted to 'understand' that we need an army to maintain peace or that we need someone with a stick to stop people being horrid to other people or that we need a hierarchy to maintain freedom - even if you think these things make a kind of sense you have to take a second look and acknowledge there is something contradictory about it all.  There is clearly something wrong even if you can't quite work it out.  It is called fear.  You have been threatened instead of supported, you have been hurt to show you what you shouldn't do and you have been lied to to protect you.  You have learnt (emotionally) that you 'need' this hierarchy because if you confront it it will not protect you - indeed IT will hurt you - and if you conform they are the nicest people in the world to you - well they would be so long as you continue to make yourself 'think like them'.  If our leaders (who should be serving us not ruling us) are so afraid of us that they hide behind immense security then they are clearly NOT looking after our interests.

For example check out these links from InfoWars:

No Fly-Zone Enacted Over Bilderberg Meeting

Bilderberg Authoritarianism Destroys Humanity

Bilderberg Security Kicks Out Alex Jones

Bilderberg 2013: Transhumanist Death Cult

Amazon and Google chiefs join other corporate tax avoiders at annual Bilderberg confab

Bilderberg Ring of Steel

This is too big a subject for me at the moment but the fact that the members of the Bilderberg Group were quite willing to break international laws and national laws as if they are above them and that they were quite willing to lie through their teeth to deny that any such meetings were being held and then when they are exposed they simply change their story tells me that they are extremely dangerous and looking after themselves whatever it takes.

Do not be fooled.  Now that Alex Jones has exposed them and for the first time in their history they have a public relations department and a press office, do not for one moment be fooled into thinking we are getting somewhere.  Think about it.  What would you do in their position?  It is simple - you would continue with a facade.  You would make the current Bilderberg meetings legitimate and run a secret organisation behind it.  So now like complete suckers we will swallow what they ejaculate from the press office and, choking slightly, thank them for their honesty.

Be afraid!  Be very afraid!

And, you see, that is what I have to put up with in my life when I am already ill as a consequence of irresponsible authoritarian oppression.  When are we going to stop them?  Oh and PS here is a map showing the location of the Grove Hotel where the very secret Bilderberg Group is meeting from 6th to 9th June 2013 just to see if I can get Toxic Drums Blog taken down by the secret police in Britain.


View Larger Map

Exploring the outer limits of cellular interaction.

The inherent paradoxes of life.

I have to apologise to Manny for saying that Brian Eno was in the Velvet Underground;  He was not.  But in my defence, not that any defence is needed except in a post holistic inconsequential pre-Raphaelite existential hollow caustic world of big art tree artrists, he was strongly influenced by them and worked with John Cale - a founder member.  I would have said that Brian Eno worked extensively with both founder members of the Velvet Underground but I went to check my facts and was astounded at what I discovered.  So let me explain:  John Cale and Lou Reed are the two 'founding members' of the Velvet Underground.  Nowhere on the internet could I find a page containing any significant references to both Reed and Eno.  So, although I know they know each other is it possible they have never worked together?  On the subject of Cale and Eno they did an album called "Wrong Way Up" which is a gem in the history of music.  A strangely small, but beautifully formed, gem.  One of my favourite lyrics of all time is from the track "The River" and goes: "I remember you saying, As her deep eyes opened, In the first light seeing her, 'Here is someone new'."  When I first heard the words I was cast into a dream like meditative state of pure awe and wonder as it summed up the profound and inexpressible beauty of seeing a new life arrive on this planet.  It so perfectly expressed the peace and love, the profound yet inexplicable power of a sentient self-aware conscious human emerging from the complexity of this soup we call the universe into existence.  And so here it is for your delight...



Of course the song resonated and expressed my experience of being present at my daughter's birth so it came as no surprise to discover that Brian Eno was inspired to write those lyrics as a consequence of being present at his daughter's birth.

In my chaotic scrambling around the internet I was amazed to discover that Lou Reed has just had a liver transplant.  It was only a week ago that Laurie Anderson said that he was dying of liver failure.  He says  he is now "bigger and stronger than ever" and is looking forward to writing more songs and appearing on stage connecting in heart and spirit with his audience and the universe.  That, of course, is paraphrasing which is nothing like parachuting.  Lou Reed is a truly wonderful human and when I discovered that he and Laurie Anderson were united in that strange cultural euphemistic dysphemism called marriage I was delighted.  I am a fan of Laurie Anderson and I guess she became 'known' to the world with her track "Oh Superman" (which you should, could and can see here - this is a rendition, (to render something is to transfer it to, or manifest it in, another form and is typically used in computer graphics when an image is constructed or 'rendered' from the data but this word developed a more sinister meaning when it was used as the euphemism "extraordinary rendition" by the British and Americans in their 'War on Terror' to refer to illegally kidnapping 'suspects' and transporting them to other countries to be tortured because it would be illegal in either of those two countries) indeed it is an extraordinary rendition, of her performance as displayed in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.



Laurie Anderson seems to be a much underappreciated creative and significant talent.  Her ... blah blah blah ... socio-political comments ... blah blah blah ... on the hidden agenda of the collective cultural subconscious reality are profound, insightful and important but no one really cares.  I know that it is inaccurate to say that no one cares because some do, but it feels as if no one cares because the few that do have little impact and the majority who don't are sycophantic supporters of the power mongers who do all the damaging doings.  But... as a special dedication to the now departed Nic Minuta here is another brilliant rendition of Laurie Anderson's work.  It is called "Walking and Falling" and is from the album "Big Science"



When I say "the now departed Nic Minuta" I am not being euphemistic.  He is not dead he is just departed.  Oh God why can't these people understand?  Dead is dead - departed is just... just... departed, moved on, gone to another place oh f**k how can I explain?  The euphemisms are too strong and are overpowering me until I begin to think the meaning of the words are the ascribed meanings which are not the meanings and then I don't even know if we are all departed because we are only someone else's molecules.  NO - this blog entry is not descending into chaotic madness - or is it?

I knew a guy who was dying of liver failure.  He died unfortunately.  I love Lou Reed and I ask myself the question "Is it because he has lots of money that he has a new liver?"  Is it possible that my friend might have had a new liver if he had enough money.  And given the known illegal trade in spare part livers can Lou be absolutely sure that his replacement liver was not illicitly manipulated from the bowels of some poor oppressed peasant half way around the world?  Oh such unpleasant thoughts in such a  beautiful world.  But I am still very pleased that Lou Reed is not only still with us - I mean alive - but is feeling good too.

I have to go now.  I mean I have to stop typing and do something else.  I am not trying to make some profound and meaningful statement about transcending to a higher plane of consciousness although I might give it a go.

Sour grapes or Bitter Melons.

Picture by Nakano Hajime of bitter melon prepared for eating.

I don't do News normally. Well that is more a case of neither being interested nor wanting to be interested but unfortunately other people's chagrins and machinations get unavoidably drilled into my otherwise serene stream of blithe consciousness. The problem with this is that I don't experience the blithe consciousness because it is a little like talking about a calm ocean with a raging gale in it. They are seriously and destructively disturbing my life. In fact they are making my life what it is. Is this beginning to sound a bit bitter? I guess I am getting as bitter as the famous momordica charantia. "What?" I hear you exclaim. Bitter Melon you ignoramus. Well who has ever heard of the momordica charantia - really? But I looked up (did I 'google'?) 'most bitter fruit' on the internet and discovered this bitterest of fruits on wikipedia. What I found interesting is that it reminds me of an adenomyomatopic gall bladder. I have such a gall bladder and it is an ailment not an asset. For some unknown reason the gall bladder starts to malform. I have my own theory and it has to do with the bitter and twisted emotional state that I have become. We don't have these 'analogous' descriptions of emotions with no rhyme or reason. Whether we are conscious of it or not they remind us of conditions out there in the physical world of stuff and we describe them in those terms. One of the things that authoritarian hypocrites do to me is to gall me. I have found myself using that term on many occasions. It seems a possible consequence that my gall bladder is now malformed due to my being repeatedly shocked and horrified at the appallingly self-contradictory behaviour of people in official positions of 'responsibility'. It is hard to use that word in relation to these people because they entirely lack any responsibility ironically in spite of the fact that that is their role. This morning on the radio I heard some head teacher representing head teachers complaining that the politicians were bullying them. She heads up the top level of people tasked with bullying the new people coming into the world! Well I guess it would seem reasonable to her given that she is supposed to be bullying children that it is shocking someone above her should be treating her in the same manor.

Then there is the case of the 7 men (mostly Pakistani and all Muslims) who have been sexually abusing children in Oxford. Well I am horrified. I am profoundly horrified. And when I say 'profoundly' I mean it profoundly. I cannot express how this horror echoes into the very core of my sense of existence. But I doubt my horror is quite what most would expect. I fully accept that the actions of these seven individuals (and doubtless many more who have not been brought to justice) are lamentable and cruel. But my disgust is at the authorities and the culture. What worries me is how 'we' as a culture continue to support the authoritarian bullshit being spouted by these hierarchical abusers; the judges, the politicians, the teachers, the police, the social workers, and, tragically, the parents of millions of children. Our culture is inherently abusive. Nearly everyone reading this will recall as a child examples of contradictory sanctimonious pontificating by judgemental adults. I was at school in this Britain. I was at many schools and in that respect am well placed to 'know' that what I experienced was not 'because' of the social class of the school. I was at lower class schools and upper class schools and in my opinion the abuse gets worse the higher up you go in the class system but it is abuse all the way. We enable, facilitate and cause this abuse seen in these seven Muslim men. It is interesting to me that they were all Muslims too. It is so politically wrong to highlight this fact but in my opinion it is relevant. The risk in mentioning the fact of their religion is, of course, prejudice. Prejudice is about assuming certain attributes of an identifiable group and then pre-judging individuals in that group with those attributes. Prejudice is like bias and causes misunderstanding. But the three main Abrahamic religions on this planet, namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam are fundamentally abusive. They engender abuse. Not to beat about the bush or to put too fine a point on it abuse begets abuse. That is perhaps the very worst thing about abuse; that it causes more abuse to cascade through the culture. Consider this for a moment; The reason the girls were not 'believed' to start with was because the 'authorities' saw them as low lifes. One girl in the Rochdale abuse scandal explains in a radio interview how she was described by social workers as a prostitute who had made a life style choice. This attitude was clearly part of the fog in the Oxford case too. So how do the authorities miss the signs that serious abuse is going on? Clearly because they are abused people playing an abusive authoritarian role of making sure that the bad people are controlled. So in their psyche they can't distinguish between an abuser and an abused. Those dirty, uneducated, unpleasant and rather smelly girls are clearly abusive individuals who can't be bothered to wash, chose to take drugs and will happily sell their bodies for profit. I guess it is a bit like the unemployed in this country - they are lazy and choose to doss around and get a living for free from the state. The mindset goes on to say ... whilst we, the responsible and hard working individuals, put ourselves out to 'earn' a living. And there is the abuse in our culture. We actually think we are better than them. It follows that we are entitled to more wealth and luxury. That is why we, the rich, can see them, the poor, as getting something for nothing whilst we rob them blind from our moral high ground. Anyone who thinks poor unemployed people are getting something for nothing should do what their criticism implies and take advantage of the situation. They clearly don't like working and are jealous of the unemployed so why don't they just give up their job and become unemployed thereby making their lives far more satisfactory. The contradiction is clear. They don't do it because they wouldn't like it. So why, exactly, are they complaining and criticising people who they are ultimately abusing. But it IS our cultural paradigm.

God gives you freedom and you must choose to love and obey him. Good God! It's an oxymoron.

"Be good or I will do bad things to you." Eyes dart from left to right - So you mean "I" have to be good or "you" will be bad. So that is your justification for being bad. Have we got a chicken egg sort of situation here? Samuel Butler once proposed that the hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Richard Dawkins comes to mind with The Selfish Gene whereby the concept of the gene as being the thing that is surviving rather than the species turned conventional ideas in biology upside-down. We need the same sort of revolution in the world of morality and how we understand our culture.

I also notice in the news, the British news, that politicians are very concerned at the moment that 'the public' don't trust them. I noticed that the emphasis is on regaining the trust of the public and notably not on BEING more trustworthy. Well how could they possibly grasp the real issue when they have been abused by this culture and are in the process of continuing the abuse?

Enough is enough.

Dead sharks don't talk.

The first thing I have to do today is write. I decided that a long time ago; that I should write something when I wake up. I can't remember who said it but somebody did. I was cleaning my teeth this morning and thinking of saying that the good thing about brain cancer is that your brain is getting bigger. Imagine that; A disease where you are getting cleverer all the time. I know it is nonsense but my brain has to test out all these theories. I was listening to Damien Hirst on Desert Island Disks this morning and he said something about his work entitled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living". I had a weird thought the other day. I was specifically trying to imagine what the world would be doing, and specifically my daughter, if I died during an operation to remove my Gall Bladder. It was not the usual fictionalising of the scenario. It was tangibly different. It was genuinely imagining how the world was without me. The more I think on this the more profound it seems. But then my insights into life and people often seem profound. This would be so difficult to try to explain. But I am going to try.

So there is this world full of dynamics - there finished. That is what it feels like. The minute I try to explain it it seems to evaporate.

When I was younger... - What a decidedly obvious and ludicrous thing to say. People say it all the time. It is like when people in shops ask if they can help you and you start telling them about a problem you have and they suddenly realise you are not regurgitating the normal response but are actually engaging them in reality. I do it all the time. It is my way of both suggesting they stop running on the plastic automatic of our culture and of inviting them to think about the uniqueness of their own life and mine. Anyway - when I was younger is stupid because you were hardly likely to have been the same age or older before. But when I was younger I did have what I regard as a profound thought. There were two people and they had a child and another and another and then they had one that was different, one that was profoundly different... it was me. The point about that idea is that being 'me' has always intrigued me. Why am 'I' looking out of these eyes. Why can I see everyone else but I am 'inside' of me. But this is because being human is a thing - a phenomenon - an emergent experience from a complex system. Each one of us (presumably) has the same intangible and weird experience of the difference between being the 'me' that is us and everyone else. Once you get your head round that, so to speak, it does not seem off the trajectory to consider what it is like without you there. What is actually going on when you are not there. How do people feel who took you for granted? It is the same idea of being at your own funeral. But whereas in life you can, and some do - and some psychopathic, or sociopathic to be more pc, gits don't - imagine, or even empathetically simulate, the experience of people around you and particularly, or possibly by some people's definition specifically, the people you love it seems a dependent corollary that you can imagine, or empathise, with how they feel when you are not there. I guess it is becoming clear how difficult it can be for me to explain the ideas I have. I could start with something like emergent behaviour of complex systems and explain that in detail. Some have done it before. It is not my idea. It is a conceptual metaphor or descriptive analogy of a relationship and phenomenon. The idea being that the behaviour of a complex system 'happens' and cannot be predicted by 'knowing' how the system works. Well it needs a little more explanation than that. The thing is (roughly) that starting with Newtonian science we think we can 'understand' the world by the paradigms of 'cause and effect' and 'reductionism'. It is a bit like building a steam engine. Each bit does something that cause something else to happen. Each caused action causes another and by understanding how all the 'reduced' interactions work you can work out how the whole system will behave. There is one small problem with that - it doesn't seem to work in all cases. Whether the problem is in the universe or our limited simulations of reality in our 'brains' is neither here nor there for this discussion but it remains true that some things happen that are unpredictable. This is more than the mistake 'we' have been making for years of thinking that there are things we don't understand because they are too complicated. Chaos theory adequately explains how some things are 'unpredictable' using the conventional paradigms. I could explain all that and then, from there and using those ideas and 'paradigms', explain the next step. But it all seems too much to be dealing with at the moment of trying to explain what I am thinking. So, going back to where I was, the idea of 'being there' after you are dead watching and 'knowing' how it is for people you love when you are dead is a weird and differnt thing from the norm. But I was indulging in it the other day to try to understand how it is for my daughter. Because if there were anything I could do now which would support her when I am not there to do it then I would like to be in a position to do that. Some people think it is down to money and so long as they provide materially for their loved ones that that is all that is needed. They are materialistic and it doesn't make sense to me. I am in danger of rambling now but then that is what I do so live with it. That was decidedly aggressive - Sorry about that.

So I am angry with Damien Hirst for making so much money and leaving me with none.

Nobody's listening.

Yet again I wake up tired and with a headache as if I have a fever. I want to sleep but my thoughts and physical condition prevent it. I am in pain, exhausted and have a desperate sense that the abuse will continue and there is nothing I can do about it. I turn on the radio just to fill my brain with arbitrary noise to distract me from my own thoughts which are clearly fruitless. The radio is full of junk. Humanity is blithely meandering its way through the malaise that is the substance of existence. Melvyn Bragg is discussing cosmic rays with some experts in the field. Melvyn Bragg has a series on Radio 4 called 'In Our Time' where a range of fascinating subjects are discussed and elucidated by Melvyn and usually three academic experts in the relevant field. This is a rare and delightful deviation from the normal unconscious blather that spews out of the Radio 4 speakers. Sometimes I wish there were a text stream of the content of the programs; a transcription of the exact verbal content. I wish this because I hear so much contradictory and irrational content coming from people who appear to think they are making sense that I would love to illustrate how what they are saying is so clearly wrong and most often by the speaker's own definition. But no one is listening. No one is listening to me and ironically no one is listening to the radio. They may be hearing the content but they are not listening. There is a difference between hearing and listening and the words can be looked up in a dictionary but in this instance I am highlighting the difference between being aware of the sound emanating from the radio and being aware of the ideas being communicated.

Insidious Poison in Blood and Culture.

It is really difficult for me to hold it all together. This blog is, on the one hand, a random attempt to spew out the disconnected thoughts and feelings that pervade my conscious mind and on the other hand is an attempt to make sense of the chaos and confusion and to bring some coherence to the issues that matter to me. It fails on both accounts.

So first I will report on the disconnected and disturbing thoughts I have been having today. I am exhausted and that makes it difficult and the thoughts cascade sometimes like a torrential white water rapid. This means that to sum it up in a few sentences is all but impossible. I did not get through the day without falling asleep for several hours and this is because my body is behaving like an exhausted body whilst I have 'done' virtually nothing. I put this down to the biochemistry and the balance of all things that effectively simulates the same state of affairs as a body that is exhausted. Well how funny is that if I am not in a life that has had at least the last ten years of disproportionate distress. But I wake up in the morning and believe myself to be on the edge of homeless and with no resources to protect myself from the deprivation that will ensue. The more I have everything stripped away from me including facilities and equipment, time and shelter I become more exhausted, less focused, more shabby, less fit, more dirty, less happy, more anxious, less well and the net result is a hopeless destitute. From that place there is very little hope of recovery. I am frightened and angry. But I still have to struggle along with the bits and pieces of a day in my life. As the day moves on I know that I am actually ill. I know that whatever it is that the medical profession is unable to avoid diagnosing much longer has been alive and well in me for at least ten years. Five years ago I had a number of occasions where I nearly collapsed but no one wanted to take any notice. But my blood is poisonous. I am hoping that if the medical people remove an offending part like my gall bladder that suddenly I will feel ten years younger. That suddenly I will find a 2 mile walk invigorates me instead of wasting me for three days. That when I decide to do three things I just do one after the other instead of collapsing after the first one and having to plan the next task for the next day. Maybe I will be able to sit at the keyboard and type without it being exhausting - I used to do that without thinking in the past. It is this 'hope' that reminds me I am not well. But I also suffer from the view that no one 'out there' can even believe me. I am just criticised for being lazy or squandering time. I am categorised as something less than human that deserves what it gets. I feel the intense prejudice in the culture. I am so distressed that all the 'nice' people I know actually inhibit my ability to say what it is like for me because they don't want to feel guilty. I am ostracised because I am in emotional pain. And I see this as a collapsing culture. I see little or no hope. I see the holocaust happening all over again. It is just that this time they are working hard to hide the mechanisms even from themselves.

And I could go on. But it will have to do to say that I am seriously distressed and it is not without cause.

And then there are wider issues like making Freedom of Information requests in an attempt to assist the 'governing powers' to achieve their objectives of openness and transparency. How is that for a diplomatic approach? The odd paradox is that the corrupt system wants to employ secrecy to maintain power but the unavoidable conclusions are that openness is necessary for good governance. So they are obliged to 'pretend' to want openness whilst every fibre of the institutional body is straining against it. I came across a web site the other day called Alaveteli (http://www.alaveteli.org/) which attempts to coordinate Freedom of Information requests such that the requester has a little more influence and possible success because of the backup of the Alaveteli organisation and community and the information is more readily available to more people because it is coordinated through the website. If you need to know something that you have a right to know from 'our' government this site is worth a visit because it may be a good place to get assistance and leverage.

I was also trawling TED in my despondent mood in the hope of finding something uplifting or inspiring and I came across a talk by one Bryan Stevenson. His talk has had nearly one million views and it is said to be the talk with the longest standing ovation in TED history. Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer (or would that be an attorney?) and "is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system." His talk was not immediately stunning but it was insightful and substantial. He has the most remarkable way of finding a positive way of talking about some very unpalatable facts. Very often people are polarised to be conformists or opponents of the system. It is often hard to raise the opposing view to the establishment but Bryan Stevenson manages to talk about the injustice in the American justice system in a language which is possibly acceptable to the 'justice' system itself. I always fear a Judas roll when I hear people framing the argument in the paradigms of the oppressor but if it works I guess one has to go along with it at least until it fails. But it did strike me as interesting that 1 in 3 black American males have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. Anyway here is a TED talk worth listening to...