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Sunday, September 20, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
World Government
Chances are, you oppose world government. After all, world government would provide a centralized structure that would allow those who would abuse such power to focus their attack in one location. Indeed, centralizing power in a world government could produce truly horrendous results when that power is abused. And history has certainly taught us that power will be abused, and that concentrating power only allows for greater abuse and more tragic results.
And so you sit content, knowing that there is no world government (yet) and although people have talked about it here and there, it most definitely seems a long way off - something to worry about a few decades from now, or even further in the future.
However, I propose that a world government is already in place. This is not a democracy, a republic, a monarchy, reptilian overlords, or even a plutocracy. The world government that is currently in place is best described as a corporatocracy (or corpocracy). And this is not a conspiracy theory. It is well documented by one of their own, John Perkins, in his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
Multinational corporations and banks have far more power today than governments (indeed, they control some of them). Governments have lost control of their reigns, and the corporations are running free. Their lobbyists exert more influence over the politicians than do the voters, so even democracy is trumped. And when there is danger that some of the largest of these will fail, governments scramble to globally hand over £trillions to stop their demise. They have worked for decades to put themselves in positions of power so that governments depend on them, meaning they can stop government imposed restrictions they dislike, and pressure governments into passing laws that benefit them.
Have you noticed that as people in the world generally seem to want to go to the left politically, much of the world is being steered to the right. Even left-wing politicians are abandoning their positions and becoming right-wing. So who is steering the world this way? Certainly not the voters. What other answer can we give than those who have most to gain from it: the multinational corporations and banks!
Just to spell it out: This is a bad thing. The Corporatocracy has repeatedly demonstrated that it is predatory in nature, and will prey on the poor, the helpless, and the uneducated. And when it comes to their methods, we're all uneducated (or probably innocent). They murder activists, they starve populations, they ferment wars, they steal water, they destroy the planet. They must be stopped!
And so you sit content, knowing that there is no world government (yet) and although people have talked about it here and there, it most definitely seems a long way off - something to worry about a few decades from now, or even further in the future.
However, I propose that a world government is already in place. This is not a democracy, a republic, a monarchy, reptilian overlords, or even a plutocracy. The world government that is currently in place is best described as a corporatocracy (or corpocracy). And this is not a conspiracy theory. It is well documented by one of their own, John Perkins, in his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
Multinational corporations and banks have far more power today than governments (indeed, they control some of them). Governments have lost control of their reigns, and the corporations are running free. Their lobbyists exert more influence over the politicians than do the voters, so even democracy is trumped. And when there is danger that some of the largest of these will fail, governments scramble to globally hand over £trillions to stop their demise. They have worked for decades to put themselves in positions of power so that governments depend on them, meaning they can stop government imposed restrictions they dislike, and pressure governments into passing laws that benefit them.
Have you noticed that as people in the world generally seem to want to go to the left politically, much of the world is being steered to the right. Even left-wing politicians are abandoning their positions and becoming right-wing. So who is steering the world this way? Certainly not the voters. What other answer can we give than those who have most to gain from it: the multinational corporations and banks!
Just to spell it out: This is a bad thing. The Corporatocracy has repeatedly demonstrated that it is predatory in nature, and will prey on the poor, the helpless, and the uneducated. And when it comes to their methods, we're all uneducated (or probably innocent). They murder activists, they starve populations, they ferment wars, they steal water, they destroy the planet. They must be stopped!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Worst Events Travelling in Europe Last Winter
The pictures can be better viewed here.
- Staying in the yurt in Wales. It rained every day, and the yurt leaked. Everywhere. Including on us as we slept. Oh, and there were plenty of big slugs – we lined the inside of the yurt with salt to avoid them crawling on us in our sleep. It looked like a weird, demonic summoning circle.
- Breakfast in Newport, UK. Greasey, tasteless, crap food, and expensive for what we got. Ick!
- Our day trip from Edinburgh to Innerleithen. We paid over £20 for the bus, and then realised we’d been sold the wrong ticket, meaning we couldn’t get on and off the bus as we wanted to, even though the correct ticket would have only costs us £0.42 more. There was an icy wind that day, and the temperature was around -15C. We bought an ice-cream anyway (Innerleithen ice-cream is famous), walked a little, froze, and miserably returned home. And the bus conductors weren’t at all helpful or nice. We really ended up paying £30 for ice-creams and a miserable bus ride. Oh, and we’d been saving up our money for the trip out that day, hoping for a nice day out. Oh well.
Hitching from Toulouse to Tabby’s. And hitting our all-time-low: going McDick’s out of desperation. See the “Unfortunate Events” post.
Laura’s allergic reaction. See the “Unfortunate Events” post.
Laura’s root canal surgery and general dental problems (we went the dentist 5 times in 3 months for the same tooth). It sucked. And it’s still hurting. (The pictures is of the snow we had to dig our way out of in order to get to the dentists, up a steep icy slope!)
Zamora. Getting dropped off at 3am, finding a crappy and not-so-cheap hostel, walking for miles the next morning, only to find a bad hitching point and waiting ages. And finally giving up and taking a bus. Hitching in W Spain sucks.
Andy, our English host in Santa Ana La Real, Spain. He was a complete dick. We worked 7hrs/day for two weeks and only got 1 day off. And he still complained that we weren’t working hard enough, even though we consistently did extra work.
The caravan at Carrapateira – cramped, dirty, there was a broken window so it was cold, and we had to sleep separately. Also, the caravan in Santa Ana La Real wasn’t much better.
The tasteless soup at Carrapateira that was recooked and served for 5 consecutive meals (the pics are of the time I 'fell' into the river, and the huge waves by the local cliffs. Nothing to do with soup really, but good pics!).
Laura also managed to eat a slug that was in the salad at Carrapateira (the picture is of another bug there, not the slug).- Hitching in the Barcelona suburbs on my way home to Britain (alone). It was at a motorway-motorway junction, cars were fast, people were snobby, and there was nowhere else to go. It was hot, and I was low on water. I eventually made a sign that said “Socorro”, apparently Spanish for “Help.”
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Random Fun Poetry
I was randomly invited into a creative writing group in Manchester a few days ago. We did a few words games, were introduced to Ranga, and several of us wrote poems. Here's the poem I wrote (for which I was given the first two words of each line as a framework), along with a few interesting Q&A from the 'icebreaker':
The earth is our only home,The following questions and answers were written separately as lists of each (some true, some untrue). They were then put together randomly, giving some rather interesting results. Some may require a little thought:
The earth is atomically fractalic.
The sea brings life and death,
The sea - relentless chaos.
The air flutters around us, yet
The air, our air, is polluted by them.
The stars are hidden from cities, so
The stars withdraw into nostalgic mystery.
The sun, in response, grows hotter year by year.
The sun - symbol of patriarchy, symbol of death.
The dreams, they die a scorched death,
The dreams, our dreams, are even now alive.
Wake up, sense this planet is your home.
Step up, step up, make your dreams live.
What is the experience of a cat?
Truth is a process within linguistic subjectivity.
Why does the universe favour the creation of diversity?
There is a colourful bus outside.
What doesn't ever evolve?
There are absolute truths that are relevant.
Will you leave the room please?
Theology is a process that must continue.
Furthermore, is there truth at all?
I breathe a lot more each day than a rock does.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
We're Just Animals
We’re just animals like all the others;
diverse, yes,
and different from them, but still, one of them,
one of them bound to this planet, this earth, this soil and rock and
growing plants,and so tied to its fate, to the pollution we
make, to the way it changes.
Changes in a way that will probably kill us, and we’ll see it in our lifetimes,
our children dying around us in a starving and dying world.
And so much will go, even if we entertain the idea that humans will survive these climate changes,
so much will be lost,
so many species will become extinct,
so much diversity will die,
so many things that will cease to be
in a will-never-happen-again way
in an always-impoverished way.
And the rich won’t escape,
because they still need people and power to move all these people around
and all these goods around
for them.
They may prolong their life,
but that will just mean they see more death around them
and so have an impoverished life
full of death!
diverse, yes,
and different from them, but still, one of them,
one of them bound to this planet, this earth, this soil and rock and
growing plants,and so tied to its fate, to the pollution we
make, to the way it changes.
Changes in a way that will probably kill us, and we’ll see it in our lifetimes,
our children dying around us in a starving and dying world.
And so much will go, even if we entertain the idea that humans will survive these climate changes,
so much will be lost,
so many species will become extinct,
so much diversity will die,
so many things that will cease to be
in a will-never-happen-again way
in an always-impoverished way.
And the rich won’t escape,
because they still need people and power to move all these people around
and all these goods around
for them.
They may prolong their life,
but that will just mean they see more death around them
and so have an impoverished life
full of death!
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Weirdest 12 Events in Europe This Winter
Going “Fairy Dancing” in Pembrokshire, Wales. That involved doing strange circle dances on the side of a wet hill, with bare feet, treading in sheep shit, to the music of the harp, accordion, flute, and sheep horn.
The drunk trucker who picked us up E of Paris. Drunk, and still drinking. And coming down off cocaine. And high. And convinced that he could drive at the same time as looking at a map and explaining where he would drop us off. And swerving wildly. I guess it was more scary than weird.
Laura spent her time at Isidore’s farm massaging the arses of cows. OK, it was really their backs, just above their arses. But she had to stand behind them in wellies, hardly able to walk because of the shit on the floor and rub them, “so they would get used to humans touching them.”
Playing “Sport” with Isidore’s daughter in Rupt Devant St. Mihiel. This involved jumping over an elastic cord, and then hooking the cord around your nose, stretching it, and jumping free from it. Truly weird. Sadly Isidore himself died in an accident after we left. RIP, you were a great man.- Travelling to and arriving at Tabby’s. See the “Unfortunate Events” post.
The New Years Eve party in France – getting lost on the way (while other people who were lost were following us!), the weird rave tent (with children running between everyone’s legs), the old man who tried to kiss and molest the girls, and the pyro/firework dancer.
Night of the wigs. Again, at Tabby's. With Jean-Baptiste!
The little goat at Tabby’s. I’m pretty sure it was tripping on something, the way it jumped and frolicked, tried to head butt the ground with its horns, and kept falling into the narrow trench we were digging. Weird Animal.
The devil with right-handed cramp. Rennes-les-Château.
The day trip to Andorra. This was meant to be a nice day out to visit and explore the country. Instead, we broke down and overheated the car, packed the engine with snow and ice to cool it, stopped quickly to buy tobacco in Andorra, and then rushed home to meet the new WWOOFer, Geoffrey. Again, with Tabby.
Being taken to Portugal, while hitching, by someone who went out his way for us, took us out for coffee, and yet didn’t understand a word we were saying. And we didn’t understand a word he spoke either (except “Café”, which when we heard it, we were so relieved to hear a word we understood we responded “yes, yes (si, si),” even though we didn’t really have time to stop). We did make it to our destination that night though, so all’s good.- Being picked up hitching by a family of Romanian gypsies. 10 of us packed into the vehicle, with two of the teens on the bed in the back and the baby on a lap. The teens tried to get money and weed out of us to pay for the lift, while the father/driver insisted the lift was free and nothing was asked of us. They were very kind though, and fed us crisps and sweets, dropping us in the South suburbs of Sevilla. Close to midnight in the rain. Which sucked!
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
On the Mystery: Quotations from the Prologue
These quotations are taken from Catherine Keller's 2008 book On the Mystery.
"Theists and atheists more often than not share the same smug concept of God. For example, they presume that what we call God is omnipotent and good, that He proved his love by sending His only Son to die for us...
Can we stop right there?
Do you see how loaded with presuppositions just that little sentence is: it presumes that love and dominance work smoothly together, and that nothing that happens to us, however horrible, happens apart from the will of God. It presumes that divinity should be addressed as 'He'. It presumes a Christian monopoly on the truth. Moreover, most folk will assume that these presuppositions are simple 'biblical'. Yet there is, for example, no biblical term for 'omnipotence'. The closest notion, 'the Almighty', is actually a mistranslation of El Shaddai, 'God of the Mountain' - literally in Hebrew 'the Breasted One'!"
"Revelation is not the dictation of some unquestionable piece of knowledge. Rather, it resists knowledge in that sense, the top-down knowledge that masters its objects, that confers power on those who possess it: what the cultural critic Michel Foucault calls 'knowledge/power'. How ironic that Christian theology would become the ideology of the rules. Even now."
"Theology is not better or truer than other disciplines of thought. Indeed, it has over its complex and conflictual history legitimated more violence than any other -ology.
Those who involve themselves in theological questions seek wisdom only as we relinquish any pretense of innocence. Wisdom has always already outgrown innocence. The biblical prototype - the divine Sophia - precedes all creation, after all (Prov. 8:22-23)."
"Often what is called 'mystery' (as in 'Don't ask questions, it is a holy mystery') is mere mystification, used to camouflage the power drives of those who don't want to be questioned."
"Process... means becoming: it signifies the intuition that the universe itself is not most fundamentally a static being or the product of a static Being - but an immeasurable becoming. Indeed the word genesis in Greek means 'becoming'."
"The traditional unchangeables of God may prove to be points of theological fixation rather than fixities of a divine nature. They may be the false fronts of our cultural immobilities: 'God as Unchangeable Absolute' functions as 'Sanctioner of the Status Quo' - even if that status quo is unjust and unsustainable."
"Putting theology in process means freeing it from a deadly mirror game I will call the binary of the absolute and the dissolute. In this polarization, the desire for absolute certainty reacts against the fear of a nihilistic dissolution, a relativism indifferent to meaning and morality."
"This book proposes a way for theology to avoid the garish neon light of absolute truth-claims, which wash out our vital differences. Yet this way will just as firmly elude the opaque darkness of the casual nihilism that pervades our culture - the 'whatever' of indifference."
"Mystery is not a stagnant pool but a flowing infinity."
And that's just the prologue! This book is truly an ocean of treasures!
"Theists and atheists more often than not share the same smug concept of God. For example, they presume that what we call God is omnipotent and good, that He proved his love by sending His only Son to die for us...
Can we stop right there?
Do you see how loaded with presuppositions just that little sentence is: it presumes that love and dominance work smoothly together, and that nothing that happens to us, however horrible, happens apart from the will of God. It presumes that divinity should be addressed as 'He'. It presumes a Christian monopoly on the truth. Moreover, most folk will assume that these presuppositions are simple 'biblical'. Yet there is, for example, no biblical term for 'omnipotence'. The closest notion, 'the Almighty', is actually a mistranslation of El Shaddai, 'God of the Mountain' - literally in Hebrew 'the Breasted One'!"
"Revelation is not the dictation of some unquestionable piece of knowledge. Rather, it resists knowledge in that sense, the top-down knowledge that masters its objects, that confers power on those who possess it: what the cultural critic Michel Foucault calls 'knowledge/power'. How ironic that Christian theology would become the ideology of the rules. Even now."
"Theology is not better or truer than other disciplines of thought. Indeed, it has over its complex and conflictual history legitimated more violence than any other -ology.
Those who involve themselves in theological questions seek wisdom only as we relinquish any pretense of innocence. Wisdom has always already outgrown innocence. The biblical prototype - the divine Sophia - precedes all creation, after all (Prov. 8:22-23)."
"Often what is called 'mystery' (as in 'Don't ask questions, it is a holy mystery') is mere mystification, used to camouflage the power drives of those who don't want to be questioned."
"Process... means becoming: it signifies the intuition that the universe itself is not most fundamentally a static being or the product of a static Being - but an immeasurable becoming. Indeed the word genesis in Greek means 'becoming'."
"The traditional unchangeables of God may prove to be points of theological fixation rather than fixities of a divine nature. They may be the false fronts of our cultural immobilities: 'God as Unchangeable Absolute' functions as 'Sanctioner of the Status Quo' - even if that status quo is unjust and unsustainable."
"Putting theology in process means freeing it from a deadly mirror game I will call the binary of the absolute and the dissolute. In this polarization, the desire for absolute certainty reacts against the fear of a nihilistic dissolution, a relativism indifferent to meaning and morality."
"This book proposes a way for theology to avoid the garish neon light of absolute truth-claims, which wash out our vital differences. Yet this way will just as firmly elude the opaque darkness of the casual nihilism that pervades our culture - the 'whatever' of indifference."
"Mystery is not a stagnant pool but a flowing infinity."
And that's just the prologue! This book is truly an ocean of treasures!
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