Difficult to tell.

It’s hard to imagine that young Muslim men are going to Syria and Iraq for the right reasons. In England they see poverty and finance taking great wealth for itself, mealy-mouthed politicians and an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East. They feel unheard and powerless to create a more caring and fare society. Their religion says they must fight for what’s right, so they go. It’s a malignant fairy tale that’s been told to our own young lads in 1914, to German lads in the 30’s, American boys since the 70’s. Many when they get there find a different truth, brutality and depravation. Not the opportunity to care and heal divisions but the necessity to hate and kill. What was offered in the friendly sanctuary of a UK mosque becomes a grotesque dream, a brotherhood of death and devastation. Obama may deplore the brutal killing of two journalists but the US’s ‘shock and awe’ tactics in Iraq, Israel’s bombing of Gaza only prove our brutality can be greater and deserving of a response. Yesterday a video of a grey bedraggled traumatised puppy that snapped and growled at every offered hand. With much patience and gentle kindness it allowed itself to be held and stroked. With more it was bathed and became a beautiful white fluffy puppy full of such excitement in its new life it could barely contain itself. It encapsulated our true desire and the way to achieve it. In its brutal fight to create a Sonni Islamic state ISIS is creating enemies faster than it can reload its weapons. Even moderate Sonnis are now against it. So should Cameron stop ‘radicalised’ Muslims from coming back or might they be traumatised, disillusioned assets in our struggle against snappy growling hatred? Difficult to tell. 

TV Money School.

Glazing out over TV adverts I noticed a pattern. Obviously, though not necessarily beneficial to the viewer, 60% are about the virtues of spending money; never ending happiness, undreamt of joy, attraction to the opposite sex, that sort of thing. The other 40% are how to acquire said money. These include PPI repayments, injury insurance claiming, lotteries and gambling and payday loans. The gist is get money for nothing and spend it all. Now call me old fashioned but I earned money, saved it and only spent it on what I deemed necessary. I noticed there were no advert about not spending, on saving and on working and acquiring the skills to earn it. The impression is it will come in as a cheque from ‘Injury Lawyers for You’ and go out on a myriad of products to make you or your bathroom look ten years younger. But there seems something a tad unsustainably about this scenario. For one why bother going to school after you’ve learnt to fill in a claims form and enter six numbers on a lottery ticket? Why earn money when you can get it for free or can borrow it? Why save money when nobody’s explained the concept? And for, I think this is four, why resist the urge to spend when everyone wants you to buy everything? And everyone else on TV lives in Kensington and can afford to spend money like it’s golden rain. But of course reality kicks in and you feel shafted on the way to Lidl’s for a tin of beans. ‘Why can’t I get £5,000 for twisting my ankle on a discarded Magnum wrapper from Waitrose?’ along with a thousand other rhetorical questions. Is it that you’ve been set up to think that way by adverts? But here’s the rub. All those cunningly conceived ads are beginning to backfire. Nobody’s got any money to spend anymore apart from the top 5% and they can’t eat more than one restaurant meal a day or buy a hundred times the average amount of toiletries. And companies can’t find skilled workers because they’re too busy filling in bogus claim forms, and you don’t need to work or know stuff when you can get money for nothing. I know that because I learnt it at TV Money School.

Heads I win, Tails you can’t.

As Princetown’s academics prove America is not a democracy anymore, rather closer to an oligarcy, I wonder where we go from here. It seems the rules have changed while we’ve not been paying attention. The rules are now being made by the top 1%. It will soon be illegal to refuse to buy whatever they are making a profit on. If I don’t buy enough Coca-Cola’s in any one year they will be able to sue me for loss of income. If I refuse to purchase X dozen disposable nappies reasoning my children are pushing forty they can still charge me for restricting their future profits. This is heads I pay them, tails I pay them. It sounds ludicrous but if we’ve let them make the rules you’ve got to admit it’s a pretty neat rule. Imagine going to B&Q and the auto check-out machine says, “In order for us to maintain our projected profit growth for the current year your purchases must total £523.30. As your current total is £252.50 you must spend a  further £270.80 or incur a loss of profits charge of £221.15. This charge will be automatically deducted from your account on the 31^st December 2016. Thankyou for shopping at B&Q.” So there’s your choice, buy stuff or get charged for not doing. You can’t opt out because that’s the law, you can refuse but you’d end up in court. And anyway who are you to unfairly restrict corporate profit? A terrorist? So how can we put the shoe on the other foot? Interesting problem. OK their legal logic is it’s unjust to restrict the corporate right to earn a profit; if there is profit to be made I am legally obliged to let them. Now under the common law’s recognition of quid pro quo, where something of value must be exchanged for something else of value, this concession between corporate and individual must be exchanged for a similar concession between individual and corporate. Might this be, “It is unjust to restrict the individual’s right to take readily available goods even if said individual doesn’t have the money to pay for them.” That seems to even things up heads and tails wise. 

Taking it Out on Me.

Well not me: There’s been a rise of 70% in youngsters, 10 to 14, self-harming in two years. So how do I identify with that? A spokeswoman said, “It is the pressures of the modern world and some of these pressures are unprecedented.” Something about that reading irks me. It quietly condones “the pressures of the modern world” as noble and being unable to cope with them as failure. It’s a view of ‘us and them’ from our adult ego protecting itself. Where we as adults create situations these youngsters are in the hands of the situations we create. And we have created the toxicity, not pressure, that they are responding to, and not in ‘the modern world’ but a malignant world of our making. They are only manifesting ‘the toxicity of the malignant world’ of our adult creation. The answer is not in helping young minds cope with their problems but to blast the cancerous cobwebs out of our old minds. Not a few poorly performing parents, the next scapegoats on the list, but our minds. How are we in a miriad of different ways providing a toxic environment for this next generation? Kids often blame themselves because they haven’t sufficient understanding of what is being done to them and self harming, ‘taking it out on me’, is a perfect example. As a Rogers organism all they know is something is wrong. It’s up to us as adults to see the toxicity we’re creating and put it right. 

How to be the Centre of Attention.

Right now you’re probably thinking along traditional lines, telling jokes at a party, singing ‘I did it her way’ or disrobing due to surfeit of alcohol. Of course old school always works but TV has rendered them a bit samie what with East Enders and Big Brother etc. It’s all a bit keeping up with the Kardasians who, though I haven’t seen it, are probably congenitally programmed to grab the spotlight of one’s awareness like an oncoming drunk driver. But there are more subtle ways. Last week at Spirit Camp I decided to wear a mini skirt. It felt delightful, very free and flappy compared with the masculine tubes of shorts and jeans. It may sound feminine but, as I realised later, it was close to the look of the Indian braves I used to shoot as a kid; both apropos the occasion and decidedly macho. And it caused me much attention especially from women, who, instinctively knowing the greater availability offered by a skirt, took to sexually harassing me. Luckily as the gender roles were reversed it was mutually pleasurable rather than grounds for prosecution. But there’s an even subtler way to be the centre of attention. Buy a pair of reading glasses and leave the little sticker on showing the strength. Honestly it’s like moths to a flame. People have been queuing up to tell me I’ve left the sticker on. “I know!” I’ve had to explain countless times I bought two pairs, ‘2’ and another ‘2.5’ and to know which was which I’ve left the sticker on. It’s simple enough but no, it causes attention like you wouldn’t believe. I tell you if Paris Hilton ever appeared with a sticker on her glasses she’d break twitter and when Madonna wants to make a come back, forget the ice-cream cone bras girl, leave the sticker on your glasses! 

Just a Thought.

America, Australia, South Africa and Israel show the propensity for one social group to subjugate another to the point of near extinction. It only takes a rhetoric and its beliefs to take hold. These historical cases hinge on the influx of immigrants of a different culture crushing the indigenous people. It seems those who choose to displace themselves bring with them a far greater need to exert their presence and claim to the territory than those who call it home. As in all these cases the incomers push the indigenous to the periphery and when they resist they’re labelled rebels and persecuted. They become poor, suffer from a great cultural malaise and labelled nare-do-wells who have brought their plight on themselves. The new order can then wash its hands of them. Originally this wasn’t a conscious policy, it was just how things panned out, but as it worked so well in marginalizing the poor and bringing more wealth to the rich it might now be deemed a rationally effective policy. In fact the writings of Ayn Rand advocating it has been widely read and lorded by major industrial and political figures. In doing so Rand moved the game from a geographical basis to the worldwide global economy. Instead of the European Founding Fathers marginalizing the Native American Indians global corporations have it in their sights to marginalize the people of the world in the name of good corporate economics. And it’s superficially true. Either you work and consume and create their profitability and wealth or become ‘nare-do-wells who have brought their plight on themselves’, and, as mechanisation requires fewer and fewer people, the numbers left to become depressed, drunk and marginalized will increase. I say superficially because this tightening spiral of wealth is unlikely to realise it is a noose around its own neck. Whether or not it is overthrown it will create a wealth of no meaning, dollars of no value and a happiness of no significance. Currently our ‘austerity’ measures are having the desired effect. The populous will be trapped into servicing their debts on lower wages and with diminishing state support. The wealthy will be cocooned in their own health, education and policing services, but as unpaid debt rises and demand falls in line with the proportion of those able to pay, circulating money will slow dramatically. The wealthy will find they can’t meaningfully circulate enough amongst themselves. They will find the services they rely on for support are no longer supported by the myriad of wider social services they have let fail. Universities with no students, private hospitals with no trained doctors, private schools with no trained teachers, even failing farmers without the necessary education. Surrounded by the starving zombies they themselves have created they will be trapped in ghettos of a wealth that rapidly becomes meaningless. Their ethos becomes unsustainable but generations of comfort leave them incapable of change. And all this because we are allowing sociopaths to make the rules, people with corporate rather than human values. Just a thought. 

The Islamic Terraces.

Iraqi Sonnys kicked off the second half before the international ref found his whistle and the Sheas are already back defending their box. The Islamic Football league plays the glorious game with IDEs and rocket launchers as if in some futuristic dystopian blockbuster. Roosevelt’s warning about the military/industrial complex isn’t far off the mark even though he didn’t have the Arab states in mind at the time. It is though reflected in Islam’s conflation of religion, state, law and jihad. It fills the terraces with those who worship the game, are zealous club supporters and have full permission of the manager to use anything sharp or explosive they can lay their hands on. Turn and turn about Shia’s, Sonnys and Alawites have grabbed state power to suppress whichever is the other two. It’s the bad years of football hooliganism with added incendiaries. So it’s difficult to know who you’re dealing with with Muslims. Some see it as a religion akin to Christianity, some as the best foundation of state and legal system, and some as their fundamental right to make war with whomever they choose. This intellectual amalgamation of war and peace into one unified whole is a 1,500 year old example of double-think, but then throughout history almost all factions have at times pursued war in the name of peace. The only surety is that oppression sooner or later will come back to bite you when the tide of time turns. So what’s the answer? Well if you haven’t already guessed, it’s all seater stadiums.