Monsanto Cats.

They strap fifty cats with GPS and cameras to see what they get up to. They find they have territories, fight for them, hunt and sleep. Cats are part domesticated and part instinctual merciless hunters. OK we know that but what about humans? Today Juliemouse posted articles about aspertame and Lasso. Aspertame is an artificial sweetener used in Diet Coke etc widely accepted as causing a host of illnesses, and Lasso is Monsanto’s weed killer so toxic a whiff of the stuff will cause similar illnesses and a higher dose, death. So what merciless instincts do we have? For sure we once had the daily choice between killing and starvation and its concomitant thrill; and there’s nothing more thrilling than survival. But now like cats our daily bread and cat food requires nothing more thrilling than a walk around Tesco. Our murky world of instinct goes unsatisfied. So we find it in dangerous sports, the apprehension of performance and the combat of rhetoric. And some of us find it in the wheeler dealing cut and thrust of commerce. They are all ways to satisfy our merciless hunter instinct. Bankers, financiers, politicians and corporations producing spertame, Lasso, deep sea oil and now shale gas are all simply new ways to create the thrill of survival, and however we dress it up by our domesticated side as somehow a profit and loss account benefit to society that’s not the basic motivation. And as if to prove it their actions are truly merciless. They produce harmful chemicals, create wastelands and economic collapses that cause great harm to many people with zero active empathy for their plight and defend ruthlessly their right to continue doing it. This is not a theoretical debate, a matter of morality or an intellectual problem it’s the instinctual thrill of survival misplaced. We all need to satisfy that instinct, it’s life affirming, but in productive ways. So what’s it to be Monsanto, life by much good or life by much bad? Your choice.

Gove's Call Centres.

In ‘The Call Centre’ Nev runs one of Wale’s 300 call centres like a fun factory. He’s realised it’s such a death inducing job the only path to long term survival is to spend every moment offline clowning in his own version of a Big Top Circus. Who’d have thought your serious conversation about the virtues of free cavity wall insulation in your area was with a young woman standing and gyrating Gangnam style? Nev has found there are only two things transmitted down a phone line, audio and fun. And the fun helps sales. With 700 in his second largest of 300 call centres in Wales he’s a big fish in an industry employing between one and two hundred thousand people, and that’s just in Wales, and a millionaire from supplying a product NOBODY likes. And all by allowing mayhem to happen. Yes mayhem is that good. It unleashes such connection and creativity in the most blood curdling near-death 9 to 5 environments that they become fun and provide results. I know I worked in one such drawing office. Watching the program I oscillate between the life and death of the human race, between Albert Einstein and Michael Gove. Gove’s call centres, namely the nations schools, are a richly drab affair. Nervous shift leaders prowl the slurried ranks of surly disinterested phone operatives poking them into reluctant life with a humane tasar stick set to ‘you must learn to love rejection because you are a nobody in my telesales empire.’ So who’s it to be, Nev or Gove? My money’s on Nev, mayhem is that good. In fact Nev for Secretary of State for Education. Yeh!

Ale House Emergence.

Our first Open mic night at the Ale House was a success, apparently. Thanks to our whipping up of loyal friends we had an audience and thanks to everyone’s talents we had a good time. It was mayhem from the start. One speaker cable went down and I would have punched it in the face if it had one. But Mothermouse and I make a good combination. She winds up the energy and I provoke the chaos. Actually it’s all very Person Centred when I think about it. It’s something to do with emergence, that in emergence something greater will happen. I’ve noticed that when people try to impress they somehow die a little and when they let go they live a little more. And that’s infectious. Sure practice and talent are important but the delivery is about living a little more. So Tom played blues, a Dutch theatre group did theatre, another lad played and Tara sang unaccompanied. I thrust Mike into the mix on his double bass knowing he could cope with anything. He joined me for a couple and then Mothermouse joined us and got people going, and then Tara joined as well for a couple of verses. Tara wanted to do a Jessie J song that I knew so we did that. By this time thanks to Mothermouse and Tara there was so much energy bouncing around we all, well we all emerged. Brilliant. And to finish it off a woman who, granted she was pissed by then, had previously told me she didn’t like live music because it made her feel awkward and had always stayed in the other bar when it was on, was at the back dancing and telling us she had a brilliant evening. And all thanks to emergence. It’s just a case of allowing it to happen.

9/11 Plus 12.

So the conspiracy theorists are still working on 9/11. It’s an interesting phrase ‘conspiracy theory’, it conjures up people stitching fact together to suit some outlandish explanation of events, usually implicating people in high places. Where the official explanation majestically enter as ‘the truth’ conspiracy theories intrude as misleading conclusions of an over fertile brain with hidden motives, though in the case of 9/11 I suspect the reverse is true. Demonstrators and protesters are, almost by their own definition, on the back foot. The situation somehow defines them as a streaker at a football match, not a team member or official, but someone who is intrinsically offensive and out of place. In the same way that the unconscious mind has little time for the negative, as in “don’t do that” imparts “…do that”, the position of ‘ being against that’ hands the position of power to ‘that’. The obvious conclusion is to not be a negative protester but a positive advocate of something better, or not even better because that holds an element of comparison, something different but on the same subject. On a similar theme don’t herd into what can easily be labelled a mob, dismissed and corralled. Be identifiable as ‘a part’ of the whole but spaced say twenty feet apart from other parts of the whole. That way a group of leading thinkers can cover a large area, be visible and not rounded up. How did I get onto this, oh yes, 9/11. As well as hundreds of dubious associations and financial occurrences, numerous eyewitness accounts, expert and indisputable photographic evidence the official version of events follows the simple explanation of terrorism; terrorism by Al Quida operatives. But because all the above has been documented by ‘conspiracy theorists’ pitching ‘against’ the official ‘truth’ their hard evidence is named and lamed as subversive speculation. The planes that hit the twin towers were air force planes (no windows) using an automatic guidance system. (visible pod under fuselage) The towers (all three) were brought down by sequenced thermite explosions. (heard by firemen and others) The Pentagon was not hit by a plane (only a missile could make the tight flight path) and photographic evidence shows no damage from the ‘planes’ engines either side of the small impact zone. The engine debris inside the Pentagon was identified as not from a passenger plane and eyewitnesses heard a bomb blast not an impact explosion. Of course something that has fur, four legs and a tail, purrs and laps milk might be a tumble dryer but we have four of them and we call them cats.

TT Reality.

An interviewer talks to a rider on the Glencuchery Road at the start of a TT race on the Isle of Man. The interviewer will walk back to the media centre and watch; the rider will reach 180mph in around 20 seconds plunging down Bray Hill, a quiet suburban street with houses and gardens each side. It bends to the left into a dip then over a rise where his bike will leave the ground. He will brake hard down the hill to Quarter Bridge, turn right, accelerate hard along the short straight to Bradden Bridge and swing left and right over it. He will sweep through Union Mills past the corner shop and out into the country. He will do this for two hours at an average speed of 130mph and do over 160mph for most of it, and all of it on 37 miles of country roads between banks, walls and trees, through villages and over ‘the mountain’ six times. His right wrist will control around 250 horsepower, his right fingers the front brake, his left foot the gears. He will experience a level of reality most of us including his interviewer never will. If he’s able he will come back next year to do it again.
Such is our craving for reality. Today I will potter in the garden, dig out some compost for the runner beans and chop up yesterday’s tree cuttings, and I will crave that reality, the kind of living that makes death worthwhile, and constitute the dreams of an old coward. May they all come back safely, and remind the rest of us there’s more to life than safety.