My other blogs

Gradually i seem to be working out what it is I want to do on line. 


The plan seems to be this at the moment

Keep this blog as my main blog - a blend of personal, London, interests and political views - and in the future make it more of a show-case for my worked on pieces.

I have a new blog now - to take a more historical perspective on things:

http://laughingnoamhistory.blogspot.com/


Like all my blogs, this is a work in progress. I have many many thousands of pages of writings, articles and archived material from the past ten years which currently reside on hard drives and in boxes. My intention is to get all of this onto this blog in some form or other over the next few years.

Any entires that start looking rather good will be promoted to my main blog, Just Say Noam, and Twittered to death.

Until that day - please watch this space. Or not....

It will be full of 'plagiarised' bits, unfortunately - i make no pretence that it is all original, though some of it will be. I will reference as much of it as I can, however, when i started this project over a decade ago, I wasn't too hot at keeping notes of where all the information came from, and was much much too enthusiastic just to pull together a convincing narrative for myself. Luckily Google is my friend, and will help a great deal, but that'll take quite a bit of time and is fairly painstaking. 

Also - some of it may turn out to be a bit conspiratorial or speculative in nature. That was where I was a decade ago. these bits should be rewritten, framed in correct context or removed. If you see any bits like that still in there, again, feel free to tug on my coat tails, I'd be grateful for the support.

Meanwhile if you recognise your own works on my blog, not properly referenced or credited, then please do send me a message and I will put it right!

I've also set up a third blog to support this project called Daily Links - just as a repository for articles I find online as my browser links are only available on my own laptop, and they are, I am ashamed to say, rather ramshackle and badly organised and things tend to get lost in there.  

thoughts on Bowie, ramble part one

I find myself with something to say about David Bowie, oddly, after
being a fan for 32 years or so and having been through my besotted
teen phase, my rejection phase in my early 20s, rediscovered him about
10 years ago which coincided with his last recorded output (the
brilliant Heathen, and less brilliant ----- ), I now suddenly find
myself able to listen to his greatest works, the ones in the 70s and
late 60s, with completely new ears.
Bowie himself does seem to have extraordinary talent and yet I think
in his early years you could easily have been forgiven for thinking
him to be one of pop history's also rans. This I think is because his
talent is not the straight forward one that many of the great pop
composers have.
His early songs were rather poor to be honest, or mawkish, with
twinkly bits and corny stories. However, something happened when he
started working more closely with musicians. You can hear it on the
Bowie at the Beeb discs as the rather average sounding songs he wrote
in 1966/67 got turned into somehting completely other through late 67
and 68.
By 69 David Bowie as we know him was more or less there. He was able
to use the talents of his musicians, and the influences he'd subjected
himself to, to produce an entirely new music. On the debut album now
known as Space Oddity you can hear a blend of country rock and folk
throughout the album, with some psychedlic interludes, which very much
is of its time and yet sounds like nothing else. It is London,
English, suburban, very warm and seems to be about the exotic in the
mundane. It's not a million miles away in purely sound terms, from the
sort of albums churned out by the likes of Macca a couple of years
later. But by then Bowie had moved on.
On the second album - which is a clumsier album - The Man Who Sold The
World - Bowie attempts to go heavy. It is all together darker, delving
into myth and the occult. There are great moments - All the madmen
about his brother - some touches on that that were to become trademark
Bowie - varying the speed of the vocals.
No doubt very influenced by Led Zeppelin at the time, who, apparently,
he was rather scared of.
In 71 there came Hunky Dory, which I don't really like too much. It's
whimsical, incoherent and obviously a reaction to his previous - odd
that he'd make his heaviest and then his most accoustic albums back to
back like that. But clearly he was trying things out. This was his
Neil Young / Bob dylan album.

Bowie - a pop tornado - who tore through the landscape ripping up and
everything absorbing some, did really change everything. Did he do the
job the Beatles did in the 60s - I have argued before that left to
itself the US would not recognise its own pop culture, rather it would
go all out to stamp the devient culture out. it really only accepts
the multicutral soup that is Pop, blues, rock n roll and jazz after
the fact and as a nice safe historical artefact.

In the 50s rock n roll was utterly wiped out by the elites that run
America in just a few years. Many of the key early figures were forced
to turn away from rockabilly / rock n roll and turn to country for a
living. Others were destroyed by the press, and Elvis became an
establishment cuddly figure that could represent the sanitised rock n
roll which became the dominant form. The Beatles however shook all
that up.

They revived rock n roll and were instrumental in taking it to the
next phase - rock. While their brethrens the Rolling stones, and all
the other nice middle class boys were intent on rebelling via blues,
the Beatles were far more sophistacated than that and came up with
some original music.

The Beatles took Rock n Roll back to America, and ultimately they were
never sanitised. they were unGodly aliens who were told in no
uncertain terms to Get Back to where they came from. Eventually Lennon
was shot, which effectively ended the Beatles' story.

The other thing the Beatles did, which was probably more subversive at
that time was support black music like almost no-one in America did.
The Beatles, being British, were obviously not immersed in a racist
society. They also idolised mostly black American artists.

I would argue that without the Beatles, and the European support it
helped to bring about, black music would not have been elevated into
the mainstream as quickly as it was. Even so, the music business in
America remained instituitonally racist even in the 1980s.

Of course, the Beatles weren't alone. Frank Sinatra was also a notable
anti-racist who fought the segregation laws.

Bowie then came along after the 60s counter culture that bands like
the Beatles and the stones, the Kinks and Small faces, etc had helped
to inspire. Now we had Iggy and the Stooges and numerous garage style
bands all over America - which in very real terms was where punk
started.

Bowie was almost alone in picking up on the US garage scene -Iggy, the
Velvets, etc. and allowing them to inspire his music. After he'd
worked his way through Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles and Led
Zeppelin, he started writing songs inspired by this far more extreme
music which had been almost totally ignored by everyone.

It's arguable that Bowie's take on that stuff was much much safer, and
less pure. And indeed I agree with that. But as a way in it was
invaluable.

Without Bowie, who else in the mainstream would have brought this 60s
music through into the 70s?

Fucking Noise

One thing about being AS is my increasing noise intolerance. The noise distraction actually prevents me from thinking freely and if I'm listening to speech, speech going on within ear shot actually interferes with my ability to understand what I'm listening to.

Today I'm on train listening to a podcast which is all speech. All was fine until I got to Lewisham. Nice and quiet. Then this family got on with a small kid. They sat near me. The kid has yapped non stop at the top of her fucking voice since they got on. I'm struggling to hear my podcast. Shut the fuck up, kid.

What normally happens is some twat gets on, sits next to me or right behind me and then proceeds to shout into a mobile phone non-stop for the whole journey. I sometimes feel like going back to when i was a kid and putting my material out through a loudspeaker so I can reciprocate the annoyance I'm feeling.

Yesterday a bloke sat next to me on the tube who's mp3 player headphones were spewing out noise louder than what I could hear coming out of my own fucking headphones!

There is no need for that level of ignorance! My view is that some headphones don't leak, so all headphones should not leak. Some people can talk quietly on their phones and keep the conversation to a minimum when on public transport, so why can't can't everyone. it's just good old fashioned courtesy.

As for loud mouth kids yapping their faces off, I guess there's not much that can be done there, I'm just a grumpy old twat sometimes!

Sketch for an article: "Hypocrisy"

A RANT I WROTE TONIGHT WHICH WILL BE KNOCKED INTO AN ARTICLE THROUGH THIS WEEK!

As we sit here looking at the arse end of 2011 there is one word that sings out loud and strong over all the bullshit. You guessed it - hypocrisy.
the government, parliament, the police, the press, the tabloids, the city, banks, big tax evading corporations, the middle classes, Liberals, Labour Party - the whole fucking lot. Hypocrites!!!
In 2011 the crisis which was largely to do with the methods that the very rich used to become much much richer. They did it firstly by deregulating the banking system. An early attempt to deregulate credit back in the early 70s led to runaway inflation under Heath, brought under control by Labour, though it left them fatally wounded. Once back into power, the Tories brought the country immediately into recession. That's the recession Labour had spent their whole term in office trying to avoid. So - why?
The root of all that was in the Chicago School of economics. Alan Walters visited Chile a number of times in the 1970s and characterized himself as an "honorary Chicago boy" . In chile workers were cheap and had few rights. corporations were able to walk in and do the business they wanted. 


And that is what this is all about. thatcher wanted to make Britain more like Chile. In the process she privatised as much as she could, and deregulated as far as she could in all areas except for the areas that affected the poor or the working class who were subjected to more and more controls, laws, regulations, curbs of freedom; by the time the Tories had finished it was even illegal to dance in a fecking field!

So over the years profits increased. and increased and increased. Private Equities and tax havens sucked the money out of Britain and away from those who could use it to live or for the public's benefit. Governments and the media worked in concert with corporations to do this; academics were bought, we were all sold a lie: that once capital had been set free we'd all be better off. Well, some were better off, and that's where Blair came in. Never in recent history had the rich got so much richer than under New Labour. The Tories may have released the capital, but New Labour made sure most of it flowed to the right people as they continued Thatcher's project of deregulation after deregulation. After all, that's why they were allowed to take power.

And so we had the great orgy of wealth which occurred under New Labour, every Tory's favourite Labour Prime minster until it all went tits up. how marvellous for that was them? They manage to indoctrinate the "workers' party" and get their own crooked man at the top - tony blair the tory fall guy. Well he's getting paid handsomely for his treachery now.

Finally, as the elite - the 1% if you will - decide that it's time to bring the Tories back, we suddenly find out that many MPs were reinterpreting the rules regarding expenses liberally, or creativel even, some to the extent that they went to prison. This was largely used a means to control MPs and hammer Labour just before the election. Even though the Tories who were buying far larger properties and raking in far larger "expenses" seemed to have got off with a lot easier than Labour mps.

The media - and far wider than just Murdoch which we now know about - all fell into line in the general rubbishing of Brown, which made little sense, and was essentially a personal attack. Even the guardian fell behind the Liberal Dems who was being led by elite approved Blair clone, Clegg.

The next set of people who seemed to be interpreting the rules rather creatively were bankers who freely admitted that they would find a way round any kind of regualation the government would impose; and despite huge public feeling against swollen unjustified bonuses, they continued to pay themselves indecently large sums of money.

Look back into the history of the unholy alliance of corporations who were just making money up and then pocketing it, leaving the public with the debt. And you see Enron. Enron were not acting alone but those who should have been auditing and monitoring Enron's activities completely failed, and were never brought to book. Enron was merely the particularly rotten tip of a great festering pyramid of mad labyrinthine accounting practices designed to magic unearned money straight into the bank accounts of the already over-rich.

Democracy has been eroding for years. the gap between what the public want and what politicians delievr has grown ever wider. every elction must bring about a step increase in the number of alienated voters. My own alienation began as long ago as the early 90s as Labour failed to pick up on what was fairly obvious support for a move away from tory politics. Blair was able to ride this obvious desire for change but then failed to deliver change and made the rich richer, and created a whole new generation of disposessed young people who were effectively written out of New Labour's dream of prosperity.

Part of this erosion was due to the corporate media who had most politicians over a barrel. Now we know that there was an unholy truce between media, government and justice system. The full extent of this is no doubt being kept from us still, and the mainstream media is clearly trying to give the impression that what we are dealing with is an isolated instance and in the past. in fact as it unfolds it is clear that it this sort of corruption is the norm rather than a one off anomaly.

It's also interesting how the whole thing is being steered away from being about police, politicians and judges and is now only about celebrities being stalked.

so we come to 2011. those who are now being examined by the media, by the politicians and by the police, as a priority are not the tax evaders, the rule breakers, the corrupt officials, but those who are the poorest in society. We now get news full of benefit cheats, scroungers, those who refuse to work, those who work and still claim, those who sublet their council houses. And this is on the BBC.

And the news never fails to remind us about the august riots. We are invited to morally judge the rioters. the law and order brigade are easy for them lawbreaking is just wrong under any circumstances (oh except for the poor old sainted motorist who is being vicitimised, and occasionally you just have to hit a woman / paki / gay - it's human rights gone mad, and taking a few things from work or fiddling your expenses, that ain't a crime, etc) so they condemn as a reflex.

The liberals condemn because though they sympathise there just is no excuse for criminal behaviour, not even living in a delapidated flat, with no decent school, with impoverished parents, where gangs are the only social order, where crime is the only work, where the police only enter to randomly raid or harass you or your neighbours, where you have to stand up for yourself or stay scared, and where opportunity is like Santa Claus or the Yeti, and what they should have done clearly is sat down and written a stern letter to their MP or got one of those non-extstent jobs that pay you enough not to gradually slip into more and more debt just to keep your head above water, or started a petition! But then we know Liberals don't live in the real world.

And the socialists condemn because while they are pleased to see people rise up and confront the police they're absolutely appalled that these people fail to do it in the prescribed manner, and raid shops to steal a few things that they could otherwise never afford, for themselves, their families and their friends. How dare they be materialistic!

And so the same people who were marginalised by Blair, an kicked in the teeth by Cameron are now being shat on by all and sundry. But as the numbers of the marginalised grow, so will the chances of more riots. I believe that the riots ended not because the police gained control but because the rioters grew weary, and retreated. they will be back despite the appalling injustices they have been subjected to.

while those who fiddled their expenses, fiddled their taxes, bribed the police and politicans, or indeed allowed themselves to be bribed, those who fiddled their system to take an extra few quid, nothing that will make them rich, have been effctively hung out to dry and all the press and the middle class worthies can talk about now is how hard can we punish the poor for daring to complain about being poor.

oh and if all that fails - we can tell the poor how lucky they are that they don't live in Africa, because that's not really fucking offensive at all is it!!

October Walk

Wandering about London towards the end of October I found various things I hadn't noticed before...I started in Pimlico with this attempt at reflecting the "youthful" nature of an urban street. Apart from the fact that this is utter drivel - urban streets are not in any way youthful...I think it's hit rather wide of the mark and maybe it reflects a 63 year old's view of youthfulness. Wonder how long before it gets nicked for scrap.(see left)? But at least it doesn't fall foul of Danny Baker's theory about the trouser bringing about the decline of modern statuary. That is, statues look silly in trousers. I hope to be examining this in more detail as time goes on...One way round this is to stick to female and / or classical subjects.

Edgy: this 'naughty' girl is roller-skating on a bench

Trousers are definitely not an issue for the next new sculpture I found, near Vauxhall Bridge on the north bank. And here...

an empty headed couple of gender stereotypes here

Smile!

vauxhall

These flats (left), which make up the St George Wharf development, started going up around the time i first moved to Camberwell. They're going up....and they've absolutely transformed the area. No-one used to live in Vauxhall, and now fecking thousands do. The US embassy fortress will be going up near here from 2013- no doubt so they can pass orders to MI6 as befits the tinpot little poodle nation that we are...and never forget that poodles are vicious little shits! Back in 2009 Boris Johnson was upset with the plans. It appears now to be opening in 2017.

This is an artists impression I found on-line:

I caught the Frog thing or whatever amphibian animal they named it after. I didn't have my proper camera with me unfortunately, which is always the way! It's heading to the MI6 building where it rejoins the road for a run back to the depot.

Then I walked along by the Thames for a bit. Haven't done this in a couple of years! Water seemed to be unusually high.

one of my favourite views: lots of water

I passed by Parliament Square before jumping on the tube to go back to the office. Glad to see the protest continues despite Brian Hawes death earlier this year.

Stuff Round Up

Does this mean Dark matter may not exist?

And this issue - has always bugged me. Just exactly why do corporations get the same rights as human beings?



Citizens United Case that prompted this amendment

dream

i found myself being made an officer in the navy. an admiral no less!

I was given a ludicrously over-decorated jacket to wear and two
shirts. That's right, 2 shirts which I had to wear one over the other.

On the way home through the centre of Plymouth I was harrassed by
small boys on bikes, one of whom was supercool riding a bike with the
back wheel missing and only half a wheel attached to the front. I have
no idea how he did this.

Then I remembered how anyone in a suit was attacked in Plymouth. I
recalled a time when I was on a bus, in a suit and locals started
throwing bricks at the bus windows when they saw me in a suit. No
doubt this is a throw back to my time at school where my uniform was
likely to provoke violence from boys at lesser schools.

I remember very little else!

Christmas Playlist

May be I'm coming to terms with Christmas now. Its difficult for me because while I manage to get through the rest of the year keeping myself out of distressing sociable situations, Christmas forces you to make a choice. The choice is: join in 100% or be left out utterly and on your own.

Over the years I've managed carve out my own niche. Obviously it was fine when i was a kid and even round my Gran's house as a child I used to go off to be by myself for much of the evening. And this was accepted under the guise that I wanted to see the Christmas Bond film, which was a regular feature of the ITV schedules. I'd sit upstairs in my Granparents' bedroom and watch on their little t.v. and be plied with drinks and snacks throughout. It gave a me a cool (as in temperature) space with reduced stimulus in which to sit, be and think, as well as watch a Bond film (one of the good early ones I hasten to add).

I went through a difficult patch then as a teenager. Found night clubs and that difficult and used to get far too wasted far too early. Mainly because the sociable aspect of this ritual was limited for me, and quite obviously I became much more sociable with alcohol, for a short time. So ended up I getting wasted instead.

Then i met a girl and married so it became a family Xmas. Her family up in the fens. Then friends took me in after she left me, and I had what up till then had been the best  Xmas of my adult life, with the people I had campaigned and protested with during the previous few years. Then came a second marriage, a whole new family, and my own child now, kept me in Xmases for the best part of a decade! Me and S more or less felt the same about xmas so we'd go off and do out own thang more often than not. Our own thang took in Norfolk, staying in our own flat and having friends round, disappearing off to Amsterdam one year or setting up camp in a relative's house for a few days.

God I miss her!

Since then it's been a struggle again. Two years round my parents in Devon before that got too much for me and them! My Dad's 70 now and they are SO set in their ways my presence for more than a couple of days seems to upset them more than please them. Then from 2009 I've been back on my own again. This will be my third solo Xmas since splitting with S. Next year I'm seriously considering going elsewhere, though options are limited as is money!

What's good about being by yourself is that you can pretty much ignore the whole thing and I get some time off work to catch up with "stuff". This year I've been to a couple of works dos, my local cycling do, and I've downloaded a load of Xmassy music so I can at least have a party on my MP3 player!

This is the most engaged in Xmas I have been for at least 4 years. There was that last final disastrous Xmas with S, the 2nd or 3rd most depressing of my life! We were both incredibly depressed that year. A split was inevitable!

And so - to my Xmas playlist.....

I've tried to find stuff a little off the beaten track - the sort of stuff you hear on 6Music played by those in the know, but that never appear on the mainstream compilations, or indeed hear in the shops.

I think I've done pretty well. A lot of the stuff I was after is unfortunately only available on vinyl or CD, and often not available at all, but i found some new stuff.

First off i went to look for festive soul and funk

James Brown
This album is misnamed. While there is definitely funky tracks on there, it appears to be a compilation from across Brown's career and includes much from his pre-funky era. So it might as well have been called Soulful Christmas. But for about £3 it was worth it even if only half the tracks came up to standard.
Having said that, James Brown's soulful stuff can be pretty good too!

Santa Claus go Straight To The Ghetto

Soulful Christmas

Santa Claus Is Definitely Here To Stay

Tit For Tat (Ain't No Taking Back)

Santa Claus, Santa Claus

There's much more to be had from this album, but these are the best tracks.


Bootsy Collins
I think this might be a bit of an overlooked christmas gem:

It's all good.

Chestnuts (AKA The christmas Song)

Jingle Belz

WinterFunkyLand

Santa's Coming

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer 

Rudolph is now a funk and soul reindeer. This album is stuffed full of originals and classics radically reworked in the Bootsy Collins funk idiom. You can't go wrong at £7.49 (Amazon). Though I found many of the tracks to be available as free downloads and on You Tube. 

Motown
This is an album of mixed quality. Though enough good tracks to justify it's cost.

There's a few Jackson 5 tracks on there. I'm no Michael Jackson fan, quite the opposite in fact, however the ones on here are mostly very good.  Also on here, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, a mental version of "Joy To The World" by the Supremes. the Temptations aren't as good as you'd hope. They seem to be taking Xmas far too seriously and religiously for my taste, though "My Xmas Tree" ain't too bad, if a little sentimental. Marvin Gaye appears too with the marvellous "Christmas In The City". Kim Weston's "Wish You a Merry xmas" is cool in classic Motown diva style.


Then I looked for reggae and ska tracks - harder to find, unfortunately. At least on MP3 anyway.
http://www.mistletunes.com/reggae.html
I consider this to be a project in progress....watch this space.

finally, though i didn't initially go searching for it - jazz numbers kept coming up - so I selected a few

All of these albums have at least one good standout track on them, sometimes several. i advise you to check them out before buying.

Christmas Jazz

Ella Fitzgerald

I bought a couple of tracks of this - while I love Ella, the combination of her rich voice and Xmas schmaltz means i can only take her in small doses. Still great though. In small doses. It almost doesn't matter what you buy off this and amazon let's you sample before you buy, which is very helpful. 

Not the Verve, that wouldn't be a very happy Xmas would it? But Verve, the Jazz label. 

I didn't buy the whole album, but a few tracks are worth buying. Ella Fitzgerald's "Rudolph", Ramsey Lewis Trio's "Here Comes Santa Claus", "'Zat You Santa Claus", Louis Armstrong, "Greensleeves" John Coltrane, Shirley Horne, "Winter Wonderland", "Santa Claus Is Coming To town", Bill Evans, a jazz organ version of "Jingle Bells", Jimmy Smith, 

The Ultimate Jazz Christmas

Count Basie's Jingle Bells is sublime, and a must have for any Christmas playlist. But don't buy the album, it's just not worth it. Pick off the 3 or 4 tracks you'll like, at the most, and buy them.

 Finally, more traditional type music:

Plenty of old school xmas classics on here. The album is way cheaper to by than individual tracks so go easy. If you start feeling you want to buy more than 6 or 7 tracks of this album then you may as well buy the whole thing and listen at your leisure. Some of the tracks on here are seldom heard such as Louis Armstrong's "Cool Yule" and Earnest Tubb's "Blue Christmas".


I already have the perennial favourite - the Phil Spector Christmas album. It's a shame I only get to play it three weeks of the year

And this is my rather modest Christmas groceries stash:

The duck is in the freezer!

Happy Xmas!

The Moon

I wondered if I could get a decent snap of our Moon with my camera. I'm quite pleased with it.

"I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean how dare they go on strike when they've got these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?" Millionaire & ex public schoolboy, Jeremy Clarkson

aging, flabby millionaire tosspot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_Colombia

Between 1986 and 2010 over 2800 were killed according to one source, and over 4000 according to others. Most assassinations were carried out by paramilitaries or the Colombian military; some were carried out by the guerillas. In 2009 only around 4% of workers in Colombia were unionised. Wikipedia

Clarkson probably thinks this is a good thing, least ways, he hasn't apologised for his crass and offensive remarks. His non-apology reads thus:

"I didn't for a moment intend these remarks to be taken seriously – as I believe is clear if they're seen in context. If the BBC and I have caused any offence, I'm quite happy to apologise for it alongside them."

Here are some examples from the "Justice For colombia" website - there are many many more examples if you click on the link, and they continue right up to the present. 

http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/campaigns/union-rights/

1st of October 2009 at 8.30 p.m., hired assassins seriously injured Mario Montes de Oca Anaya and killed Alberto Luis Pastrana Soto, who was with him at the time, as they approached the main entrance of Hospital San Jerónimo in the city of Montería, Córdoba. 
Montes de Oca Anaya, head of the local branch of the Córdoba teachers’ association, ADEMACOR, and a legal advisor on the matter of displaced persons, received three bullet wounds and is currently in hospital in the city of Montería. As in many other such cases, the death threats against the teacher were reported, but the authorities took no action. Mario is the brother of Boris Montes de Oca, a member of the CUT executive and head of the Labour Relations and Collective Bargaining Department.

8 December 2009: The ITUC has denounced and strongly condemned the murders of art teacher Zorayda Cortés López, who worked at the Higher Technical Institute of Pereira, the capital of Risaralda, and Leny Yanube Rengifo Gómez, a teacher and active member of the Cauca education workers’ union, Asociación de Institutores y Trabajadores de la Educación del Cauca – ASOINCA.

It is unacceptable and a cause for grave concern in the trade union movement that 195 teachers have been assassinated in Colombia, without a single arrest being made, and that 35 trade unionists have been killed this year alone.http://www.ituc-csi.org/colombia-195-teachers-killed-no.html

Teacher Trade Unionist killed every two weeks in colombia

http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-17808-f0.pdf

It's not just the killings, and it's not just Colombia, there are imprisonments and intimidation worldwide, Turkey, Iraq, Somalia, Thailand, all over central and south America, Africa and the Middle East. Have no doubt that if the west continues down its current road of oppression and injustice we may well see this happening in Europe too. Remember that it was happening in Europe as recently as 35 years ago. That's not even to begin on some of the suppressed stories from the 1980s miners' strike in the UK. Don't be complacent!

http://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?page=morenews&id_mot=43

This makes Jeremy Clarkson very very happy: a murdered Trade Unionist

Altered States

This entry was originally written before Ken Russell died, however, upon his death i decided to embellish it somewhat to make it into a sort of personal take / tribute on Ken Russell. STILL NOT FINISHED

Here's a film which explores a few Fortean concepts: religion, creation, the nature of humanity and so forth. Funny old film really. It'll take me a while to work out what I think..

I've been having a Ken Russell season lately. sometime ago i searched for Russell's filmography on Lovefilm and put most, if not all, his films onto my rental list. 

so far I've mainly revisited films I'd already seen. it's both astonishing and outrageous that many of Russell's films are still not available on DVD. 

The film story is based on this

Altered States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20078923,00.html

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1075

Another right on its way out,. After this the tabloids can say anything they like about you, unless you're rich. Who do I blame? The Liberal Democrats of course! Cowardly, despicable, scumbags who continue to ensure that our extremist government remains in power.

Billy Goat Gruff

Until I went onto Twitter I felt like a lone voice of sanity, on the internet, shouting in the wilderness.

Why is that?

I think internet bulletin boards were the key problem.
Urban75 was abusive -while some good people post on there, the vast majority are middle class or higher, snotty little twats who presumably are now snotty middle aged twats - best part of a deacde since i was there - talking about gardening and how very edgy Brixton is. Fucking yeah - sure it's edgy! I lived there in 1988 and can categorically state that Brixton has been thoroughly gentrified. If you want to see edgy have a poke around Camberwell!
So I fell between the nit-picking pedantic pseudo intellectuals, quite often mummy's boy with shed loads of cash but no perceivable life, who used to give me shit for not being politically active while I was trying to keep a family together in hostile circumstances, and struggling with autism.
These were the sort of tosspots who would squat a property and then let their own house out for high rents. Pretend anarchists. I will name no names!
Pretend working class as well - again - no names. The times that my working class origins got challenged by precious little middle class children was untrue! to them if you work, can speak words of two sylables, undersatnd basic philospohical concepts, have a degree, don't have a "cockney" / northern accent, then you're middle class. Apparently. That'd be news to all the bosh bosh, "loads of money" builders who live in south east London, and thousands of cabbies, teachers, solicitors, bankers, journalists, etc. who pulled themselves up by bootstraps and did genuinely make a success from nothing, with or without support from their parents, but chiefly, only becasue the state made those opportunities available to a wider part of society than just public schoolboys.
I'm digressing big-time here.
Later:
Bikeradar was peculiar. Lots of mummy's boys who worked in media / law / technology who were decidedly middle class, or upper middle class,
I got called commie, hippy, all the names under the sun for expressing a pro-scientific understanding of the environment and human society.
"It's worse in Africa" v- bleak house
Cif - a little better, but sometimes i was completely on my own.
"shameful" for wanting to understand reasons behind rioting - clearly economically/ politically driven and unless we understand that worse will happen in the future. Or we could live in an oppresive police state. I suggest anyone who thinks that has a little read about south and central america - even "nice" middle class people were murdered by the state.
Twitter - feel like there's a huge netwrok of like minded - anarchists and socialists i can talk to. The ideas I thought were out there - like maybe we can discuss ideas instead of picking each other up on our spelling - though that does still happen, and thankfully there's a block button. Very handy
Trolls - not just an internet phenomena. They are real people expressing genuine views or prejudices.

They need to be challenged - probably not on the internet, but in the streets, we're not quite living int he Matrix yet - we can all still interact in the real world. Even the opressive Met police haven't stopped that yet - though they are well on their way to doing so.

Pointless Overtaking

I'm not on the bike at the moment, but it doesn't stop me from posting up other cyclists' experiences. Here's an excellent video entitled "world's most pointless overtake". I have to say - this sort of thing happened to me all the time while i was on my bike. It drove me round the bed. I even tried to comment on it once, lightheartedly, to a driver who'd overtaken me seconds before we both came to a red light. My attempt at a light hearted reprimand ended up with him calling me a cunt, going completely red in the face, and finally threatening to kill me.



Thanks to rogerhotuk

Fortean Times Unconvention - Sunday

Roberts & Clarke

 Christopher Josiffe: Gef the Talking Mongoose

The link takes you to the Fortean times article which appeared back in January. a lovely and entertaining article, nice bit of research by Josiffe, who I met once at a South East London Folklore Society meeting.
I missed all but the Q&A session for this.

 Dave Clarke and Andy Roberts: Cursed Stones

Dave Clarke, again, sharing the stage with "long-time sidekick" Andy Roberts for a talk on cursed stones. This examined "cases where people have linked hauntings and other supernatural experiences with cult stone artefacts such as Celtic stone heads and other stone objects, such as the Hexham Heads and the Tigh nam Bodach shrine in Scotland."

 http://www.philipcoppens.com/glenlyon.html

Andy Roberts started off by saying that though the pair wrote the UFO section in the Fortean Times, this wasn't their main field of interest, that they only wrote the UFO stuff to piss off the readers (big laugh). In fact their main field of interest seems to be, er, fields. And things you might find in fields, stone circles, ley lines, that sort of thing, and indeed, the subject of this talk, "cursed" stones.

The talk started in Scotland. The claim was made that spiritual beliefs and practices have survived from pre-Christian times in various parts of the UK. Examples were forthcoming. 

Tigh nam Bodach

The talk also took in an area of Derbyshire where sacred stones are secretly revered.

This particular "cursed" stone head (below) after apparently causing havoc, was eventually taken to Lockerbie by its fearless and sceptical new owner in December 1988. Subsequent events led to said sceptical owner suddenly not being sceptical any more.

David Clarke

The story of the Hexham Heads was recounted, and I do remember reading the article in the FT quite a long time ago now. These stone heads were dug up and strange things a happened. We learn also that a man, (truck driver?) eventually popped up on Nationwide to claim he had made the Hexham Heads and indeed made some more that were nearly identical. Regardless of their authenticity, they are currently missing, wherabouts unknown.
At the end of a lecture a woman stood up to say that a report exists in her museum (didn't catch all the details here) of an analysis of the Hexham Heads, and they were indeed made of concrete, not stone.

the stage with Hexham Heads slide

Little Mannie: an amusing aside

a "real" stone head (speakers' own)

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince: The Forbidden Universe

I wasn't sure about this talk. It started well enough with the claim that science wasn't quite the rational exercise that scientists tell us - or that is written in the text books. At least not in the early days anyway. Which I accept perfectly happily, an looked forward to finding out more.

But, it began to dawn on me 15 / 20 minutes into the talk that these people weren't dispassionate, neutral Forteans weighing up the pros and cons of something that appears strange, but were in fact believers in this thing they were talking about, which at that point still hadn't been made clear. I saw that quite a few people were now walking out. I don't know if they were walking out in protest, they may have just seen it as a good chance to go and get a coffee, use the toilet, smoke a fag, etc. But if that was the case, not many came back.

A lot was said about Isaac Newton and his unorthodox religious views, which are decidedly non-scientific, I accept, but then Newton wasn't a scientist, and science as we know it didn't really exist. He was more like an alchemist.

So we got onto Hermeticism and the Hermetic revival around the time of the Renaissance. Copernicus and his sun centric cosmos in 1543, long lost Egyptian documents written by Hermes Trismegistus (thrice great Hermes) , the fact that all the early scientists owed their discoveries to the ancient philosophy.

Pickett gave us the true story of Galileo and dispute with the orthodox church, as she saw it. His support for Heliocentricism was seen as a threat to the church. From their website:

The Hermeticists taught that a wide acceptance of the heliocentric theory would be the trigger for a religious and political revolution. If and when people were allowed to believe that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way round as they taught, then - to them - all hell would break loose. They could not let this happen, so they threatened Galileo with the usual agonising death of heretics.

Then Prince came on and spoke, and I'll let his argument be described in his own words:

"Part Two of The Forbidden Universe takes the story to the present day, contending that the view of the universe emerging from the latest scientific discoveries, particularly of quantum physics and cosmology, can be seen to vindicate the ancient Hermetic belief in an evolving, living, conscious universe. Far from being merely a historical footnote, Hermeticism hold the key to humanity's future.

There is something else, some great irony and even a cover-up on the part of today's scientific orthodoxy. The fact is that, although staggering to many, science itself has proven beyond doubt that the dazzling array of fine-tunings of the laws of physics and biochemistry that has enabled life to be arise in the universe cannot be ascribed to chance. Therefore, science itself implies the existence of a designer…

However, it must be stressed that while this shows that life has been created and is meaningful, it neither proves the existence of the biblical God nor the truth of the account of creation in Genesis.

Yet totally in denial, scientists have rushed to embrace the totally speculative multiverse theory - which by its very nature can never be proven - rather than admit that they themselves have demonstrated that the universe has been designed. This is not science. This is desperation."

There was mention of theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler who speculated about their being a "Participatory Anthropic Principle" in the Universe.

So where do I stand on all this? Buggered if I know, really. It's be tempting to adopt this belief system, especially as it seems to piss Christians off quite so much. Yes, it's a nice idea that agency pressed a button around the time of the Big Bang and started all this going to exact specifications; and impossible to entirely rule out too as we know that given enough time, we too will be designing and creating out own multiple universes. If we can do it, then how can we deny that we may be part of someone else's handy work. Maybe we're aprt of a computer programme?
But then I think, where does it all get us. Isn't it just better to do as the more honest scientists do and admit we just don't know, and maybe we never will.

Ted Harrison: Apocalypse When?

From the Program:
The world should have ended on 21 May this year, according to American radio preacher Harold Camping; or has the Apocalypse been postponed to 2012 as the Mayan Calendar is supposed to suggest? Over history, hundreds of dates have been set for Doomsday and, so far, every prediction has fallen flat on its face. So why do prophets keep prophesying? Why do their followers believe them? And how do failed prophets and disillusioned followers cope with the inevitable ‘disappointment’ of waking up on Judgement Day to find everything as normal? And how is the world supposed to end when it does? Will a wrathful God take to the skies with his angels? Will we be hit by a meteorite or rogue planet? Will the human-race score an own-goal and cause irreversible climate change or blow itself up with nuclear weapons? Ted Harrison explores the history, mythology and psychology of End-time rumours.

I really enjoyed this talk. Made me laugh quite a bit, thought the speaker was excellent. I'm not sure everyone thought it was as amusing as I did - though he was throwing in quite a few jokes, quite dry jokes. My kind of humour I guess.

Guardian on the end of the world

John Martin: Apocalypse

Mayan Prophesy Joke

And that's where it ends for me - as I took to the pub to talk to a friend I rarely see.

I missed:

Gail-Nina Anderson: A Popular History of the Mummy

Nina Conti: Her Master’s Voice