microcosm

good evening, brothers and sisters. i speak to you in a state somewhat jaded. i didn't sleep well last night, but i have managed to busy myself with various little errands throughout the day. i slept in a strange bed last night. not completely strange as in unknown, i have slept in it a number of times before, but strange as in nigh on impossible on which to sleep. there are about 3 mattresses on said bed which i believe is more than faintly ridiculous. 'keep a bed simple and sleep well' is my motto. well, from now on it's my motto about beds. but i had an amazing dream in my last bout of sleep. it was some kind of movie/videogame/real-life thing where you could watch it and be in it at the same time. and it was all real live-action but you could do amazing stuff like in a video game, such as filing away a part of an iron fence and then the sharp part at the end would erode the rest of the fence away, like a fuse burning, and finally it would attack the person at the bottom of the fence. and just before i woke up i saw a huge lycanthrope-like creature which would scare the crap out of anybody. luckily i woke up almost immediately afterwards. don't ask me what it all means.
anyway.... what happens on the reality tv show known as planet earth during this most recent segment?
1/ some people had a narrow escape at a bullfight when a bull managed to leap into the crowd. they killed the bull straight away (no one expected that at a bullfight, i'm sure). anyway somebody got a gash for their troubles. the moral is 'if you're a sadist, get some psychiatric help a.s.a.p.'
2/ some more of bush's old muckers are in court. they were the ones who got caught with their fingers in the rather large tills. you can still go to prison for that stuff. invading countries and killing thousands of innocent people for your own financial and political ends is still ok though, apparently.
3/ transexuals will be allowed two i.d. cards when (i wish i could say if but it looks like 'when') they bring them in, if they are pre-op. what if they don't go through with it in the end? do they have to hand one back? and what about hermaphrodites? or asexual people?

so there's some of it. i'm a bit too tired to think of anything else from the news right now. i've been fixing up my room today, and hopefully, thereby, my life. we shall see how that develops. now i'm going to watch a movie and drink some relaxing herbal tea. there was a time i'd have been out partying but now it's slippers and a warm drink.

be beautiful and honest, my lovely humans. take care of your little bit of the planet.

love

mr w

THERE IS A GOD

AND HE HAS RETURNED TO BLESS US WITH HIS BOUNTEOUS GIFTS.
LET HAPPINESS REIGN THROUGHOUT THE LAND.
LO! THERE SHALL BE MUCH REJOICING
AND THE LAMB SHALL BE LED BY THE STRIKER
AND THE GOAL MOUTH WILL BE WIDE
AND THE BALL SHALL RESIDE ETERNALLY IN THE BACK OF THE NET.
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON.

happy returns vs no return

greetings, people of the internet.
i am back from my trip to england. finally i return to my blog. the incessant ramblings of a confused and ageing man.
so what has been happening? to be honest, i'm not actually too sure. not much, event-wise. though i did see some part of the whale saga. i saw the barge fly by with the whale atop. but not longer after this i found out it had died. small wonder, under the circumstances. one can only hope that next time they'll have a better idea of what to do. though when next time will be is hard to say as there hasn't been a whale sighted in the last century in the thames until last weekend. but it wasn't done well, despite the best intentions. they spent three days scaring the crap out of the poor thing, surrounding it with boats and flashing lights and then when its nerves were shot to pieces they managed to scoop it onto a boat. it was already too late by then. i said from the start they should have tranquilised it and carried it back to the sea. but i'm no marine expert. so maybe that wouldn't work. but maybe it wouldn't have been any worse than giving it the experience of being in the world's scariest underwater nightclub.
my detox.... has been going ok. but no one's told me how well i'm looking. though that may be just british reserve (i like to think so). i have cheated though. one day i was going cold turkey for chocolate and didn't make it to the other side. the fear got to me. but after eating it i felt this weird sugar rush and then moodiness afterwards. so i'll try to avoid sugar where possible.
but anyway... i feel good. so that must be something.
haven't seen much of the news recently so will have to get back to you all on that one. no doubt more lies and bombs.

love each other

mr w

love you long time

just read an amazing story. you can read it here. it shows things don't have to be the way you expect them to be. maybe bush should read it, and see that there's another way.
meanwhile... bin laden has apparently made a tape and released it to al-jazeera. he's dreaming up more 'evil plans' apparently. if it's actually him speaking (it's only an audio tape you see). you'd think he'd have started using cd's by now. surely he has a computer. anyway, he's offered some kind of truce. details are sketchy at best but this tape won't change much. it'll scare those misguided, scared people who can't see the bigger picture. you know, the ones who think we're winning. won't really make any difference to those of us who can think without the aid of fox news.
so, what am i up to, you're all wondering? i'm off to england in the morning. and i'm working tonight so i'll be 'doing a through-er' as they say. no sleep til london. and even then not til at least ten a.m. but i'm hard, you see, i can take it. i make rocks weep just by scowling at them. i've reduced whole villages to hysterical fits of tears just by baring my teeth.
stay up all night? kid's stuff. i've been doing it for years. in fact it's a good job they have winter and longer nights because otherwise people might think i was a cissy. i laugh at long winter nights drawing in. i sneer at cold and lonely mornings with only a cup of lukewarm tea for company.
so, anyway, it's going to be a long night.
not sure when i'll blog again. hopefully not too long from this moment.
until then, be brave my people, the future needs you now.

silly games men play

no, i don't mean in love. in hate, if anything. take this whole business about iran. they are trying to build a nuclear power facility, which they have every right to do. if someone else can do it then why shouldn't they? they may also be trying to make nuclear weapons. i can only hope not. not just because it's iran but because it's one more country posessing things that no country should have. but then, the point is if one has it then why shouldn't another? oh, iran is dangerous. hmmm. so are some people who have nuclear weapons, most notably america. the worrying thing with iran is what they said about wiping israel off the map. but then israel has nuclear weapons. they could more easily wipe iran off the map. and perhaps would like to, too. and then some. so all this nonsense about who has weapons and who wants them. perhaps if the powers-that-be in the u.n. wanted iran to give it up, maybe they should set a better example. why do we keep the nukes if we don't plan to use them? for defence? defence against what? other nukes? but we don't let our enemies have them. it's such a disgusting double standard. i don't want iran to have nuclear weapons because i don't think anyone should have them. any country making or posessing them should be made to stop. but unless everyone's muscly uncle, sam, stops having them there is no point in trying to rid the world of them. 'one standard for us, another one for everyone else'.
on the trashclub message board i saw these two items. part one is a cartoon strip telling you not to believe in evolution but that man and the dinosaurs were created 6000 years ago. together. in six days. now evolution is just a theory but since we find human remains and artefacts from longer than 6000 years ago, what are we to think? kind of rules out that version, n'est-ce-pas? i don't understand why we can't have god and evolution. we dont have to take the bible at face value do we? we miss its true message if we ignore its allegorical and mystical aspects. i'm sure plenty of buddhists don't believe that the buddha was born walking. it doesn't make them any less buddhist. they are focusing on the message beneath. not the surface text. but to the people who enjoy these strip cartoons that was probably a bad example. buddhists are heathens...
the second one tells you that islam is evil. quite a strong statement by most people's thinking, i would hope. they give examples why. some of them are actually quite interesting but since i haven't read the koran or the hadith i couldn't be sure on their veracity.
but for me, personally, i think the sooner we get away from all religion the better. all it does is divide people and the earlier we see our deeper connection to each other the earlier we can set about saving this planet. now, don't get me wrong. i'm not saying don't be religious. i'm just saying nobody and no religion has a monopoly on the truth.
so, be true to what you believe, but don't forget how much we humans can get things wrong.

the frustrations of a sunday

must i always awaken feeling sluggish? i have improved my diet immeasurably. i have cut out booze. yet when i wake up i still feel as if i have been rock 'n' rolling it into the squinting hours of daylight. i was up fairly late. i am, usually. i find it hard to sleep earlier because of my body clock, i bought it on ebay, it was cheap.
bad joke.
and so i drank some hot water and lemon juice and breathed my cleansing breaths. i would say morning breath but this sounds like i mean bad breath, which it probably was, ladies. and also it would be incorrect as i finally awoke at 12.22pm.
and now i am trying to leave the house and go for a walk somewhere. i wanted to get a bit of daylight but already 'the sky is beginning to bruise' as uncle monty would say. so i may go and have a sunbed. 'vanity' i hear you shout in unison. but no! it is my replacement sunlight. but it is a bit of vanity as my skin also looks abysmal and i want to burn away the zits with the radiation. this detox thing promises i'll be looking better within two weeks. i have yet to see any evidence of it but fear not! my friends, i will continue, if only so that i can let you all know its effectiveness.
love each other.
mr w

engagement

hello folks. how are things? i'm fine. absolutely tickety-boo. well, almost, as i am suffering a stiff shoulder. i may have slept badly upon it. i do not know, but it aches and i have tried to stretch it out via the media of a doorframe and a sofa up to now but to no avail. i can only hope that in my slumbers tonight i sleep badly upon it again and realign it. perhaps it is indicative of something else. i am on this detox process still so perhaps it is something being released. hopefully it will return to it's natural habitat and leave me in peace.
so what have i done today? i watched some football earlier. liverpool narrowly beat tottenham. it was pretty tight, clammy even, but harry kewell nicked it for the reds. good to see. for some of us at least. anyway, perhaps you have zero interest in football. and quite right too.
this evening i watched two movies; american psycho and spiderman 2. now i was a big fan of the book american psycho, and the movie was pretty good in places, but it was always going to be nigh on impossible to really do it justice on film. one, because of the content of the book and two, because of the length a movie 'should' be. the book goes into much more detail, on the outrageous stuff and on the mundane stuff, though these become blurred, and this is what makes the book, the whole way he goes into as much detail about his musical taste or people's suits or facecare regimes as he does about his appalling crimes. the film makes a good effort of trying to cope with this by having him talk about his musical choices whilst he's doing other things but i felt it just didn't quite go far enough with that. but as i say, in the constraints of film-making i guess they were up against it. though the end was a bit flat too. in the film that is. not enough peaks and troughs for me.
spiderman 2 was a lot of fun though. he was never my favourite marvel character. that honour goes to the ex-norrin radd. but i always liked spidey, for various reasons. anyway, the film was a good mix of adventure, love story and comedy and it worked well.
god, am i that vain that i sit here writing about the minutiae of my life and expect people to spend time reading it? looks like i am.
well, people, what else is happening in the world?
the americans have killed 18 people in a botched attempt to get bin laden's right hand man. not sure what a right-hand man does but hey i'm open-minded. even if he's not. so yeah, more people die. all these people dying and for what? to keep the world the way it is? no thanks. how about we don't give people reasons to commit terrorist acts in the first place? is that so difficult? probably, if you make a lot of money out of oil/weapons/etc. so we do stuff that makes people want revenge, probably we kill some of their people or something. then they attack us, this is terrorism, not when we do it. then we try to get them and people get killed in the crossfire. all the people dying. when are we going to say 'hang on, why don't we stop putting these shitbags in power? why don't we take back what's ours?'.
some day soon, i truly hope it will be some day soon.
well, that's all from me. good night. and may you realise your dreams.

dog-tired

yeah, like i said, i'm worn out. headache, too. and it's bedtime.
watched a good movie tonight. 'the woodsman' with kevin bacon. very interesting. hard subject matter. watch it yourself....

any news? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4603802.stm
there's this. about the guy who threw a grenade at bush when he was in georgia. he's been in court. they asked him if he was a terrorist and he replied that he was a human being. good answer. anyway, the grenade missed. hopefully he'll be sentenced to 10 years target practice so he doesn't screw it up next time. only god knows what kind of world we'll be living in in ten years time. still, i guess we get what we deserve. we keep this world the way it is.

take care, people.

1984/2006

i read this on akira the don's site and am cutting and pasting it here. i'm sure he wont mind. and neither will john pilger. read it and understand it.

"The death of freedom
By John Pilger

On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.

Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. "That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. "I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said to Brian, who cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in the cells, mate." We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.

As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.

Freedom is dying.

Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an "offensive" T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the "purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the "grounds for intervention" were "carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info" (sic).

He is awaiting trial.

Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held "on suspicion". Some of the "evidence" against them, whatever it is, the government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.

And for what?

Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the security services more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.

Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American doctor, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, accor-ding to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a "terrorist", a description mocked by even the judge in a politically motivated travesty of a trial.

The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US circuit court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime's "right" to imprison an American citizen "indefinitely" without charging him with a crime. This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate in effect voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.

A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the "Project for the New American Century". Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic facade: "the cavalry on the new American frontier", guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at gateways to sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and central Asia. "Pre-emptive" aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as "the crazies". He said: "We should now be very worried about fascism."

In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December, Harold Pinter spoke of "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He asked why "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of inde- pendent thought" of Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while US state crimes were merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged".

A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, "But you wouldn't know it," said Pinter. "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

To its credit, the Guardian published every word of Pinter's warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain's greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.

For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America's medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.

Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush's dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: "Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more." (Thanks to William Blum's Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press.)

The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein's rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.

In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq's "no-fly zones". During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. "We're down to the last outhouse," a US official protested. "There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many." That was seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC, it has not happened.

The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as "liberals" and "left of centre", even "anti-fascists". They want some respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support an attack on Iran.

This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it home."

and what's happening with everybody else?

ridiculous crime

messed up world

ridiculous crime part 2

work it out... no wonder politicians get up to the shit they do, we're all killing each other and destroying everything around us.

f*&^ing wake up!!!

detox

i am detoxing. slowly the poisons that have built up in my system are firmly being told to leave. evicted. they do not belong here anymore. i will begin to feel better as they move on. but for now i am aware of their existence as they mournfully trudge towards their chosen port of exit. this means i feel less than well. i am also still suffering with my christmas gift of a second-hand smoker's cough. and i have a cold. perhaps i should have chosen a better time to clean out my system. who knows. either way, it's happening.
so it's sunday and i have not left the house today. i awoke quite early and began reading my book on atlantis. but later fell back to sleep and awoke chapped-lipped and sluggish. i planned to do things today but my condition has left me unable to get up to much. other than sit at my pc or make food. healthy food, of course.
i'm trying to think of something universal to write about in my endeavours to make this blog relevant.
i don't know. be calm. don't drive too fast. don't get angry with people. don't judge. realise how much power we have to create the world we want. we're creating this one every day.

rock on, people...

LOVE

ahem

i have a cough. a smoker's cough, no less. but i do not smoke. this is the joy of passive smoking. it's free and you get all the downsides. i'm not getting holier-than-thou. thous shouldst know me better than that by now, methinks. i smoked. it's up to people what they do to their own bodies. but it is definitely not up to them what they do to my body. i'm not sure when i picked up this cough. i have a predisposition towards catching chest infections anyway. but on my visit to england i had to endure horrible smoky atmospheres at whichever club or bar i visited. i can't think of one place where the air was anywhere near breathable. luckily in sweden the government has banned smoking in clubs, bars, restaurants etc. but in england they don't want to be called a nanny state. fuck it, who cares what they call you. they're calling you a lot worse over iraq at the moment. so they have been talking about this little whimsical 'partial ban'. you either have it or you don't. and as far as i can see there is no reason to not have a ban. it's not like you are doing anyone a disservice by pointing out to them how horrible smoking is. it is fucking poisonous. it's a disgusting, inspid, insidious habit. you are paying some billionaire huge amounts of money for making you ill. and then think of the costs of your healthcare. save your money, take your kids away for a holiday. buy yourself something new for the house. there isn't any way you can look at smokers and not think 'fools'. they can't help it, i realise that. maybe we should think 'poor things'. everyone who does things wrong is only doing it because they're asleep. but we need to wake people up. make them see that their lungs are precious. that's where they breathe and that's where life springs from every second. i know it's obvious. no wonder the world is in this state. we're trying to run away from it, and in doing so we're making it more of a place from which to run away.

come on, people. let's be happy to be alive...

the easy way

ash

after...

hello lovers
i'm back... you can relax. i've spent my holidays in england and now i shall board my jetplane to even colder climes.
new year i spent playing music with a friend. it was fun but most of the crowd were too drugged to care.
it's strange getting older. you actually start to realise that a lot of things your parents told you are true. you grow up. you don't get boring. it's just annoying to people who don't know the truth yet. i don't know it yet but every minute makes me more conscious and aware. as it should.
there was a time when hanging out with druggies seemed a laugh. then there was a time when it was a chore but not a bad one. now i just can't help feeling sorry for them. maybe i'm being hypocritical. but i've realised the up is not worth the down. why have a come down when you are already up. the drug will do nothing really. but i guess people have to learn that for themselves. it's like being a non-smoker. people may think i'm being sanctimonious but i can't help it if i know things that they don't (yet). if i knew someone was sleeping with their partner they'd want me to tell them. but in this case i have to keep quiet. it's hard though. maybe i should just stop caring, or move in different circles. it's hard to find those circles these days.
ahhh...
so tomorrow i go back to my normal life. normal.
god knows what i will end up doing. i mean it. god knows.
but i'll enjoy it just the same. take it on the chin. just been told that i'm 'on hold' for playing at a club as they want to bring in 'some new faces'. that would be fine except i rock the house every time i'm there. maybe that's the reason for my downfall. making waves... getting too popular. not sure if i do 'being on hold'. so we'll see. but i know it means other things are in store for me.
i came, i saw, i rocked the house (repeatedly)....
and then i was fired....(essentially)

ok, so i'll keep all you avid readers of mine posted with what comes up. watch this space. it's going to be unbelievable. (probably)

LOVE