Cannabis, schizophrenia and the War on Shoes
"On that final point, there has been a lot of commentary and some research as to whether cannabis is associated with schizophrenia, and the results are really quite difficult to interpret." [link]
I would enjoy knowing who first decided to posit a link between cannabis and schizophrenia, as this appears an obsession of the scientists in the pay of policymakers. It appears to be a project along the same lines as establishing a link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, a case of fixing the intelligence around the policy to justify a war, be it on a moustachioed dictator in the former instance, and on a plant that produces pretty dreams and a desire for snackfood on the other.
In BookArmor Scientific Review this month:
In a breakthrough study, two British scientists, Thomas and Quincy Pinhut (twins, no relation), have produced definitive evidence that shoes can be directly linked to death in traffic accidents.
Said Thomas Pinhut at an unpacked press conference - "In almost 100% of traffic accidents we surveyed, those killed were wearing shoes. The only cases where shoes were not worn was when vehicles spun off the road in residential areas, smashing through walls and killing a number of people in their beds. Although, even in these cases, shoes were found at the scene..."
Quincy Pinhut picked up on the differences in shoes - "The fascinating thing about the differences between shoes in each case, was this, that the differences, and they are vast - high heels, sneakers, army boots, wellingtons, flip-flops, slippers, hand-stitched moccasins, and so on, well, the fascinating thing we discovered was that this vast array of differences makes no difference at all. Shoes remain linked to death in traffic accidents regardless, and so, we would not recommend a particular shoe, but would point to the fact that not wearing shoes does significantly reduce the risk of not dying in a traffic accident."
The UK government has already pronounced itself satisfied with the methodology employed. "This is a landmark in the understanding of how and why traffic accidents occur. In the past, we looked at such things as driver error, excessive speed, mechanical failure, etc, but each of these factors was not present in every accident. This Shoe Theory is an impressive feat, pardon the pun, in helping policymakers understand the carnage on Britain's roads."
When asked if the government was prepared to take the logical step, and to ban the wearing of shoes, their manufacture, distribution and sale, the government spokesman was non-committal. "What we may do is look at the promoting of shoes, particularly to young children." Of particular concern to ministers are 'booties' that are commonly placed upon the feet of babies. "Gateway shoes are a real concern, and yes, booties are clearly an example of that. In all instances where babies where booties, we've found them later in life progressing from plimsols to deck shoes, and, in a small, but sizeable minority, to the hardcore, Doctor Marten boots, brothel creepers, and so on. If we could get a ban in place on their promotion, it would help in this fight."
In a light-hearted touch to proceedings, the two triumphant scientists closed their press conference by setting a small fire, and after ceremoniously throwing their own shoes on to the pyre, they invited the assembled journalists to do the same. Sadly, none of them took the challenge, and three of them were killed shortly afterwards in separate road traffic accidents.
Worth a read
A Russian who fought in Afghanistan in the 80s and later moved to Canada, his perspective is worth hearing:
"It was ’unpatriotic’ to criticize the Soviet occupation in the ’80s, says ex-Russian soldier NIKOLAI LANINE. Today, it’s the same story in Canada
I thought I had escaped my past, but Afghanistan caught up with me in Canada. Looking at the flag-draped casket of my wife’s first cousin, Andrew Eykelenboom, a Canadian medic killed in Afghanistan, I was overwhelmed with feelings of grief and a surreal displacement of time and space.
I was born in Russia, drafted into the Soviet army at 18 and sent to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Attending Andrew’s funeral, I stood with one foot in the present and one in the past. I remembered my Russian friends, living and dead. Friends like Andrei, who lost his legs in Kandahar near the road on which Andrew would die two decades later. I also remembered the suffering we visited on the people of that country." [link]
Prawo Jazdy!
Very amusing story from Ireland.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
Reminds me of my first innocent trip to Germany when, after seeing signs on the autobahn for hours that read, "Ausgang", I thought, "Wow, Ausgang must be an enormous city..."
About five years later, I discovered that 'ausgang' means 'exit'...
The future
I mentioned this in a comment.
There's a sign around Guatemala City, for a political faction - "The future is in your hands"
I'm interested in this notion of the future as something objective, that can be manipulated.
Isn't it equally the case that "The future is in your minds"?
The future as something subjective, that can be manipulated privately or through outside direction.
Lastly, is there any such thing as the future? Aren't all futures simply a continuation of the present? Looking at the history of Guatemala, for example, there are clear themes that repeat themselves, with one being that the chief obstacle to economic development is always the self-interest of the small number of powerful families that dominate the society. Where is there any possible route out of that? An economic calamity? "Vote for us! We will mismanage the economy and induce conditions that promote real change!"
Is this non-place of the future the location for the non-event of 'change' that politicians are so fond of? Why is the present referenced as a condition to be alleviated by the medicinal properties that will emerge only from the correct choice of party to support...
Domestic extremists!
The progressively more extreme policies of the UK state requires the casting of those who oppose such policies as, yes, extremists.
"Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.
The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor "domestic extremists", the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime." [link]
When the UK's 'national interest' clearly requires indefinite wars of occupation in Iraq/Afghanistan, then this computes.
Searchlight blows a fuse
""This strips away once and for all Nick Griffin's pretence that the BNP is a non-violent organisation..." Searchlight statement.
The opponents of the BNP continue to press weak cases against them, namely,
1) they consort with extremists,
2) they are a violent organisation.
The first is due to an abiding myth that politicians in the mainstream are moderate. This is simply not the case, but this myth continues to permit extremists to govern without significant challenge. Let me make it clear, Tony Blair and George W. Bush were/are extremists, politically, in terms of what they staked out as the leadership prerogatives for Western democracies. That the media and political machines micro-manage the conditioning of their images for mass consumption is a process so ubiquitous that it is not worth describing.
Griffin met with fantasists like the KKK leadership and Abu Hamza, men with big ideas and little power, not men who actually command vast armies and invade other countries and inhabit the leadership positions of entire nations.
The second accusation, that of 'being a violent organisation' because a BNP member, writing on his blog, called for riots, is also rather laughable. Didn't a broad coalition of the left this summer set out to create a 'summer of unrest' and rightly so? Didn't the G20 protests actually demonstrate, once again, that a small, highly-trained minority persists in British society, and is always in attendance at public protests, intent on violence. The technical name for this group is the police. Once again, the state showed that its foundation is the reservation of the use of violence to itself. As such, the BNP calls for riots are a challenge to that power, but they are not incompatible with the business of administering a state, they are central to it.
Who has taken more decisions to employ force in the last eight years, genuine decisions? That result in real bullets being fired, real bombs being dropped, real people being displaced, maimed, killed? That would be the British government, in co-operation with the CEOs of major British corporations, that together form 'the national interest'. Aren't these 'violent organisations'? albeit through the employment of proxies, be they rebel groups, private contractors or the British Army.
"Plaintiffs from the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta have successfully held Shell accountable for complicity in human rights atrocities committed against the Ogoni people in the 1990s — including the 1995 execution by the Nigerian government of writer and anti-Shell activist Ken Saro-Wiwa." [link]
The only charge that might stick is that the BNP is not moderate, and that the calls for riots show that they are, in fact, radicals, prepared to dispense with the rule of law in order to achieve their aims. But this is a presentational issue, and, as outlined above, none of the mainstream parties are moderate either, they are simply framed as moderate and the electorate is conditioned by their history to treat them as such. After all, while bearing the name, The Labour Party, it is clear that this designation no longer designates the same thing, that only the name remains the same, that there is, in truth, no continuity between New Labour and its previous incarnation, just as Bush's brand of Republicanism had little in common with his forebears. These radical changes are often attributed away as the work of 'spin doctors' or as 'cosmetic' or as 'makeovers', whereas I would suggest that they are substantive, and that the spin works against the grain, to make what would be otherwise unacceptable acceptable, to make it appear that far less change has taken place than actually has.
So far, it seems that the media, the political establishment, have not simply taken on the business of a critique of the actual policies of the BBC, but are instead indulging in a mass lampooning (the Independent on Sunday has a truly pathetic cartoon giveaway of 'Nick Griffin's brain' today, for example), spewing of virtriol at the BNP, etc, one that suggests that a concerted campaign is being waged, and that there are perhaps a few fears running up and down the spine of the governing elite.
The Stupid Anti-Nazi Highway Code-Styled Sign
Yes. It reappeared this week during the protests against the BNP. Along with the Stick Man putting Swastika in a Trashcan, this old favourite is both transparent in its meaning and utterly stupid.
What really baffles me is the idea of employing the Highway Code to make a political point such as this. Should these signs actually be commissioned and stuck along the A and B roads of the UK? "Dad, slow down, look, they're trying to stop Nazis..." "Son, if I keep slowing down to prevent the spread of fascism, the zoo'll be shut when we get there..."
Even worse is the implication that simply drawing a red line through one of the most powerful symbols of modern times is somehow tantamount to having 'stopped fascism' - "Go on, Dave, put a red line through it, see? We're halfway there at least... Now let's go and stand somewhere..."
Anyway, below is my own nonsensical companion piece to this, along with the original for comparison.
Bedfellows
Strange that Nick Griffin should have his choice of company targeted for scrutiny.
One of the other esteemed gentlemen on the panel, Mr Jack Straw, has previous in this regard, too:
"JACK Straw says he shook hands with President Robert Mugabe because it was "dark" and he did not realise he was greeting the Zimbabwean leader."
Racist and disingenous? How dark, Jack, how dark? Perhaps they 'all look the same', too?
X
Here's one Zimbabwean who won't be shaking hands with anybody for a while, regardless of the lighting conditions.
X
Restatement of change of purpose
I have concluded that artists have a mission that goes beyond producing their art and must include, if one is principled, defending the conditions that permit free expression itself. That's how I see art and politics as being united, and why I have stopped 'creating' because it appears quite clearly to me, that the West is fundamentally attacking the rights of many people to think, communicate, and act in a free way. Oh, and bombing and killing thousands, too, along with labelling all those who oppose its plans as appeasers, bad patriots or terrorists. Perhaps BookArmor constitutes little or nothing by way of a defence against these forces, but the gesture of postponing / terminating my own literary endeavours, it has a personal significance that outstrips the words that appear here.
I want to say thanks to Clive, Heiko, Alasdair, Leo, to everybody still reading this, for having the commitment to keep engaging with it, rather than slurping up the omnipresent entertainment.