Modern life: What is wrong with it all?

A few years back a couple of friends and me decided to cycle a well known UK route called the C2C. As the name suggests it goes from sea to sea. In this case, from Whitehaven to Sunderland. We packed up our bikes with tents, food and other essentials and set off on the 4 day trip across the land, camping by night. It is possible to do the trip in one day if you are very fit, but we were not, and the additional weight of carrying what we needed to camp etc., slows you down, hence the 4 days. It was relative hardship compared to ordinary daily life, peddling our way across the Cambrian mountains, through sunshine, rain, fog and hail. The aches and pains of leaning on the handle bars, the bruising and soreness on your backside, revealing themselves more assertively each morning as you start the next leg of the journey, make for discomfort that us pansy-ass townies are really not at home with. Additionally, the late night sounds of your mates snoring and what I can only describe as half-goat-half-pig-half-goose mating grunts at 3 am in the morning, eminating from perhaps 20 feet away, amongst other strange noises, leaves you tired if not exhausted each morning. But still, we got on our bikes and peddled. On the upside, you see the country from a completely different perspective. You start to enjoy the rolling hills and peaks, at least when you're coming down them. You encounter people in a new context too. Folk are helpful, friendly and sympathetic to your quest, perhaps to some degree wishing it was them. By the end of the trip we were truly exhausted, though simultaneously elated at our small achievement, and enriched by the experiences along the way. But, something else had happened to us. We didnt want to stop. We didn't want to go home. We wanted more. What and why?

There was a comradery that developed, despite sleep loss and fatigue induced grumpy exchanges, that I have not experienced in daily town life. Something about the shared hardships and joys that creates unspoken bonds that we don't experience in modern life, save perhaps within the family home, but even then there is something different about this. There was more than just the bonds that made the experience so memorable and precious.

If we step back and look our lives and peer down from a larger perspective there are hints at why. We are constrained by having to pay for our homes and life in them, which forces us to take paying jobs, with our homes creating physical barriers to all outside the four walls. So for the most part of our lives we are either in our homes or in the place of work doing work, where the opportunities for the kind of experiences and comradery I'm talking about do not really exist. Furthermore we are bombarded constantly by marketing, everywhere, it is even piped directly into our homes courtesy of the box in the corner of the room. It teases us, manipulating our desires and emotions, making us addicted consumers of products, somehow dulling our brains to the fact that we are forced to pay all of our lives to live on a tiny patch of our own planet. The bricks and mortar having been paid for just a few years into our mortgages, and the rest just pampering the rich who hold our planet hostage. In this sense we are slaves to the rich. We are forced to live within their laws and ideologies, and skillfully manipulated and coerced into accepting this way of life.

Out on the road, we discovered something about freedom and friendship that is difficult to find or experience within the highly structured system of modern life that is imposed on us. Perhaps the fact that being on bikes, relatively unconstrained by road laws, allowing us to go just about anywhere also had something to do with it. I can't even adequately describe the meaning and joy of what we discovered. It is only something that can be appreciated by embarking on such adventures I think. But it changed me. It continues to change me. Every time I do something outside of the norms of the system now I feel that freedom and joy, and it's addictive. More and more I reject modern life; it's fakery, the celebrities, the rules, the slavery. And I feel good about it.

We can't continue our existing way of life. We already know it. The exhaustion of resources, the damage to our ecology, the wars that will probably ensue, the biological hazards, the nuclear hazards. If the constraints of wage slavery and these mentioned threats are not enough to compel you to change your existence, your existence will change anyway. The question is, do you want it to be on your own terms or are you going to let the terms of others, specifically the rich and powerful, be imposed on you?

My experiences have taught me that there is a much more fulfilling existence for us, waiting for us, beyond the walls of this fake life imposed on us by the rich. It will involve work too, but not this meaningless 'existance' as servants. We have to fight for our rights and freedoms, and that takes comradery and solidarity that doesn't come from ordinary modern life. You can experience it on an adventure, in protests and demonstrations, through participating in life with fellow ordinary folk. It creates meaning for your life that you wont find on your TV, in the supermarket or at work, but you have to seek it out to understand it. As the famous anarchist Rosa Luxembourg once said "those who do not move do not feel their chains", and that is something we cannot truly grasp whilst continuing to go through the motions of the life that has been designed for us by the rich for the rich.

Do something you have never done. Do something beyond normality. Understand what the word liberty means, and how we give it up by continuing with modern life. Become addicted to freedom and learn how to fight for it.

"Profits and tax cuts are not dirty words" according to David Cameron

This is the headline of a lead article from The Guardian today. It is in fact interesting to see such statements make it into headlines, as it suggests that there is a debate afoot as to the reality of the statement. If profits and tax cuts are not dirty words, why say anything? The very fact that the PM felt the need to say it is evidence of a fight back against public opinion by the ruling class. So I'd like to explore these words here for your consideration.

Let's be clear, when David Cameron states that 'tax cuts' are not dirty words in an act of defence against an opposing public position, we know he is not talking about tax cuts across the board but merely tax cuts for the rich. One of the Cameron government's first taxation acts was to cut the 50p rate on inheritance tax, which is a tax that only affects the rich. Why tax cuts for the rich? It's not as though they are facing any financial hardship is it? It is however the corporations of the rich that are lobbying our ministers and MPs on a daily basis, with campaign donations and offers of post-parliament 'consultancy' roles for MPs carefully tucked up their sleeves.

We should all take time to consider the meaning of the word profit. What is profit? What does it mean to profit? If I grow fruit on my land and exchange some for vegetables grown by my neighbour there is no profit. It is a mutually beneficial exchange for the purposes of our survival. It gets a little more complicated when we venture into the world of money, but the principle remains; in a fair and equitable exchange of goods or services there is no profit. Profit only arises when one party is exploiting one or more other parties, and on this 'principle' the ruling class has worked very hard to convince us all that it is fair and good, Cameron's own words being an explicit example. So who are the exploiters and the exploited? Well clearly ordinary folk are exploited by the rich, otherwise they wouldn't be rich! This isn't to say that the rich do no work. In fact they work very hard, exploiting us, because it is so profitable, but then should we really be calling this work? A con artist might have to go door to door for weeks before finding a suitably gullible enough victim with sufficient money to make his efforts worthwhile, but we don't call it 'work', nor should we of the activities of the rich. Furthermore the rewards to the rich are astonishingly disproportionate to their efforts.

The status quo is maintained of course by the fact that the wealth of rich gives them power, doorways into the process of government, and furthermore their domination of the media allows them to persuade the unsuspecting masses in their favour whilst keeping the truth as far from us as possible. If only folks had the time to look into the public record properly. The parliamentary record. The declassified record. Interestingly if we were all working to the principles of making a living rather than a profit, especially the rich, then there would be far greater financial equality. Perhaps more to the point though is that if we did away with the profit system and ditched all of the pointless junk produced in its name, we might all only have to work a 2 or 3 day week. Then there would be time on our hands to look into what the ruling class actually do. Catch 22. That's how they keep us intellectually and financially chained.

Thankfully ordinary folk exist in vastly greater numbers than their ruling classes, such that the mere act of talking about these things and propagating these ideas amongst ourselves leads to powerful people's movements that force the rich to act in our favour lest they risk revolution. Monsieur Guillotine's famous invention, used prolifically for shortening members of the French ruling class in the French revolution, really does play on their minds when we take to the streets.

You fund it so they do it

People keep whining about their governments, yet you keep funding these war criminals and thugs. If you follow the teachings of Jesus, he said "let him who hath no sins cast the first stone", which means you are supposed to pay attention to your own crimes and deal with them. But you people just keep working for them and funding them with taxes. If you want to change things, if you want to stop terrorism, war, oppression then stop funding it, and stop participating in this corporate fascist nightmare.

U.S. Army prepares to invade U.S. NDAA

Which Iraqis welcome UK troops?

"William Patey and Stuart Innes, together with General Brims, have started that process have begun to focus Iraqi politicians' minds on what needs to be done. Moreover, our military are back on the ground visiting police stations - a fact welcomed by the majoraity of Iraqi Police Service Officers." [1]

Peter Hayes, Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in London 2005 – 2007 [2]

Apparently Iraqi police were happy with the UK military back in town, but nowhere in this document does he express an interest or detail of what the Iraqi people thought about the matter. It is not surprising since the elite seem only to be able think in terms of control rather than freedom. "what needs to be done" seems also to be what the UK wants done rather than consulting Iraqis.

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[1] 30 September 2005 – South East Iraq Impact of Security Incident in Basra, Document reference IRQ 0406 0122 833 1 B / Req 2 / Doc 

[2] Sri Lankan IT BPO Industry Chamber http://www.slasscom.lk/node/92 where Peter 'serves' as British High Commissioner to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka since March 2008.

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The Tower of Babel

There is a tale told in the Bible about something called the Tower of Babel. The story goes that men tried to build a tower to reach the place of God, and God brought down the tower and scrambled the languages of men so that they could not collaborate in such a plan again, or so he thought...

A tower is a structure, constructed from substructures and layers. It is hierarchical in construction, and it is this that we should be looking for if we want to unveil 'T2'. Hierachy is everywhere in human society today. Contrary to common belief it is not necessarily a natural formation in human gatherings. Many ancient and even remote modern cultures are virtually structureless. In the Western World, we see towers reaching to the sky all around us but most of the time fail to see that they are merely substructures. What separates us is an idea that gained footing before the Romans; that depriving other sentient beings of life and liberty equals good profit.

The McDonalds lettuce washer reports to the floor manager. The floor mananger reports to the site franchise manager. The site franchise manager reports to the regional franchise manager. The regional franchise manager reports to the franchise general manager. The franchise general manager reports to the board of directors. The board of directors reports to the shareholders. The shareholding corporation market subsidiaries manager reports to the conglomerate management. The conglomerate management reports to the conglomerate board of directors. The conglomerate board of directors reports to the conglomerate shareholders. The conglomerate shareholders give 'donations' to the campaigns of politicians who will best represent them, and maybe arrange for the other politicians interested in their line of business other things to worry about, like where their children are right now, whether will they be embroiled in a sex scandal in the morning, or perhaps whether they will have an unfortunate 'accident' in their car on the way home.

Here we have 9 tiers of commercial hierachy, and a fairly typical one too. Each tier coercing the tier below, usually with the threat of losing their job for more mundane matters..., and ensuring their complicity and compliance in whatever agenda the tier above is operating.

So up there amongst the gods, we have military moguls who do so well out of death by metal and other forms of chemistry, banking moguls who own most of the planet, oil moguls who are doing so well from poisoning us all to death, the Biotech moguls who are doing so well out of experimenting on human beings and engineering the seeds of life to replace us. Shamelessly quoting from the film Contact (though perhaps not a good choice here) "are these the people you want talking to your god for you?".

God, or nature, it seems is poised to reply to these men, and in fact to all of us. Unfortunately the tower, now on the verge of collapse, is going to hurt and kill a lot of people as it crumbles down on top of its populations. The tower has suffered a few minor quakes in recent years, and all indepentent economists are telling us that they were merely preludes to the grand finale.

I'm just wondering though, are you still holding the tower? Are you still passing up more support? Do you really have to keep doing that? Humans did just fine living off the land before they started building towers. Are you living off the land or are you on the tower?

Are you still living in fear?

Have you ever considered what it is that 'the law' does? I know many people have but just in case you haven't here is something to think about: If you steal a loaf of bread because you are hungry, you will likely be assaulted and held prisoner by the professional thugs hired by the wealthy company owners. When the paid thugs of the national company arrive you will again be assaulted then kidnapped whereupon they will attempt to extort you for lots more money than the 'value' of the loaf of bread. So, what was the crime you committed again?

You can't leave your prison unless you have a special permit that allows you to leave the prison on license loan or sale to another prison. In order to get that permit you have to become a slave to someone else who will give you a fraction of your value to them. When you have accumulated enough slave credits and made acquaintance with a medium to high ranking advocate of this system who is willing to sign the photos for your permit, then you may submit your application along with the ransom money for discretionary licensed loan or sale. When you receive your permit you will have to produce more slave credits to use the only modes of transport and transportation routes that your owners will allow. Failure to comply will result in your assault, kidnap and extortion.

Those people with the most slave credits are no longer called slave owners and prison wardens but much nicer names like shareholders and politicians. The slaves themselves are no longer called slaves but much nicer names like workers and work force.

If you want to escape your prison, you have two choices. One is suicide, which most of us manage to avoid, but the other is far more preferable. It's a little harder than suicide because involves thinking for oneself rather than just doing and thinking whatever you are told.

Your prison is your fear of the consequences of doing what your owners don't want you to do. You can't live in fear, meaning that If you are in fear you are not living, but rather functioning as your owners want you to.

By the way the name or euphemism for your prison is 'The Free World'.

Are you still living in fear?