The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘current events’ Category

That’s a fairly bold state­ment up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Sim­ple, its com­pletely trans­formed how I inter­act with the inter­net. (And please note not “sim­ples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “com­plete trans­for­ma­tion” of my surf­ing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the inter­net. I’d plug some­thing into a search engine and let it trans­port me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I book­marked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then nav­i­gate to it again.

Over time, I devel­oped my own inter­net rit­u­als, vis­it­ing my favourite sites on a reg­u­lar or semi-regular basis, check­ing for new con­tent. This style of surf­ing meant I would occa­sion­ally arrive at a site to dis­cover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valu­able online time.

And then, I dis­cov­ered RSS feeds and read­ers. Sud­denly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for any­thing, instead I waited for their head­lines to arrive in my reg­u­larly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the arti­cle fur­ther, I could click once and eas­ily open the page in my browser.

But RSS read­ers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type sys­tem to receive the head­lines. Instead, they refresh auto­mat­i­cally at a pre-defined inter­val or if you are a bit obses­sive like me, man­u­ally refresh­ing every 10 sec­onds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I dis­cov­ered Twit­ter and Twit­ter clients. The “client” part is impor­tant, because if you’re access­ing Twit­ter via your browser, you are miss­ing out on some of its use­ful­ness. I’ll come back to that.

Twit­ter is more than just read­ing about what peo­ple had for break­fast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond fol­low­ing indi­vid­u­als, you can also fol­low web­sites. Web­sites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a ser­vice like Twit­ter­Feed and auto-generate a tweet link­ing to new con­tent pub­lished on their site.

I use Twit­ter­Feed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twit­ter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a short­ened bit ly link to the full text.

Admit­tedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter, you will be alerted to any new con­tent. Even if you are not fol­low­ing me, you still may dis­cover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would spec­u­late that around a third of the accounts I fol­low on Twit­ter are auto-generated from web­sites I reg­u­larly visit. Head­lines and links flow onto my computer’s desk­top via my pre­ferred Twit­ter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I fol­low many news out­lets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twit­ter accounts, the New York Times, var­i­ous Apple and gad­get sites, celebrity news sites, con­spir­acy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are var­ied and diverse, but luck­ily so are the choices avail­able to every­one on Twit­ter. If you’re inter­ested in some­thing, chances are there’s a Twit­ter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twit­ter is also a fright­en­ing good source for break­ing news. As Twit­ter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when some­thing hap­pens any­where in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bub­ble up to the surface.

There’s an organ­i­sa­tion that uses Twit­ter for just this pur­pose, @BreakingNews — BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Nether­lands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more tra­di­tional old-style media out­lets by 10–15 min­utes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media out­fits will adapt and change with tech­nol­ogy and most of them have started already. Twit­ter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twit­ter client really comes into its own. If you’re log­ging onto Twit­ter via their web­site, you are pre­sented with a fairly usable inter­face, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh auto­mat­i­cally. To see new tweets, you must man­u­ally refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twit­ter client is a stand-alone app, that sits inde­pen­dently on your desk­top and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twit­ter, often with one-click.

I have been using Tweet­Deck for a while, but there are oth­ers avail­able, most of them have free ver­sions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like Tweet­Deck because it is col­umn based and is col­lapsable into a sin­gle col­umn, which is how I run it most of the time.

With Tweet­Deck, you can have sep­a­rate columns for your main feed, your men­tions, your DMs plus you can cre­ate other columns to fil­ter your stream even more. You can search with a hash­tag and see real-time results and you can cre­ate groups from your main fol­low­ers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as fol­low­ing and unfol­low­ing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occa­sional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to any­thing that might inter­est me, while I do other things on my com­puter. Like write this post.

While I’ve been work­ing on this fine piece of Twit­ter related prose, I’ve helped some­one with an iMovie ’09 ques­tion and replied to sev­eral tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a dis­trac­tion, but rather it aug­ments what­ever I’m doing and in this case, actu­ally informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of ques­tion that I haven’t been able to answer with more tra­di­tional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of every­one inter­act­ing on Twit­ter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but what­ever you call it, it is a quite pow­er­ful tool.

You can instantly col­lect opin­ions and reac­tions to some­thing from a broad cross sec­tion of the planet, or find local knowl­edge of an event or sit­u­a­tion right now.

Twit­ter has become my point of call for just about every­thing online. I use it to keep track of the news, of web­sites I like and sub­jects that mat­ter to me. I engage in dia­logue with other, like minded peo­ple, shar­ing my own knowl­edge while at the same time, ben­e­fit­ing from other’s.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seek­ing out sub­jects of inter­est to me, I have them streamed onto my desk­top con­tin­u­ously and in real-time, cherry pick­ing the spe­cific pages I want to see and only then open­ing them up in my browser.

Just as the inter­net has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up con­nec­tions with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich con­tent, our ways of inter­act­ing with the inter­net have changed too.

Twit­ter has become my inter­net aggre­ga­tor, my media and infor­ma­tion fil­ter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twit­ter changed your surf­ing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other ben­e­fit I may be over­look­ing? I’d gen­uinely like to hear from any­one who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twit­ter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

You might not have heard, but Michael Jack­son kicked the bucket recently. You’d think that sort of news would get around.

In truth, it did get around, shock­ingly fast. Thanks to TMZ.com and Twit­ter, the sad news spread around the world at the speed of tweet.

And just for today, MJ doesn’t mean mar­i­juana here, it stands for Michael Jackson.

I was work­ing the night he died, just head­ing into the office as the news broke.

I was early and paused out­side the build­ing to have one last smoke before going to my desk. As I flicked through a Twit­ter app on my iPhone. I caught one of the first tweets that stated MJ had been rushed to hos­pi­tal in an ambu­lance with a sus­pected heart attack.

A col­league of mine joined me at this point and as he lit up a cig­a­rette of his own, I told him what I had just read and we started spec­u­lat­ing on “what if” it turned out to be the worst case and he was dead.

For both of us, work­ing overnight in a news­room, MJ’s death trans­lated into utter fuck­ing chaos for many, many hours. What­ever the out­come, I knew it was going to be a nasty-assed night.

In real­ity, it exceeded my expectations.

Beyond that, the rest of my night at work is not really impor­tant. It was yet another busy one, deal­ing with a large break­ing story. I’ve had count­less nights like that.

It wasn’t until after that night, and the sub­se­quent few at work, that I really had the chance to con­sider the sig­nif­i­cance and mag­ni­tude of his death. That’s not meant to be an over­state­ment, its huge news that will carry on run­ning for a long time, as will MJ Inc. which will exploit his pass­ing even more than the media ever could.

Before you start think­ing I’m some mega-fan of MJ’s, I’d like to take a moment to point out that I’m not. I didn’t hate his music either and I can appre­ci­ate his unde­ni­able tal­ent, I was just never a fan of his solo stuff.

As a child, I did like the Jack­son 5, but it was prac­ti­cally children’s music. A-B-C, its easy as 1–2-3… It was like Sesame Street does Motown, before Sesame Street existed.

I liked some of his music videos, because they were inno­v­a­tive, ground was bro­ken with sev­eral, but I never bought an MJ record.

I should also men­tion that I believed the alle­ga­tions about him. Always did, still do. Per­haps its just my view of the smoke+fire equa­tion, but every­thing I read about it, makes me think there’s some­thing to it.

Every­one seems to be skip­ping over that part of the story right now, per­haps I should too.

I’m old enough to have vivid mem­o­ries of Elvis Pres­ley dying. Its dif­fi­cult to really explain how momen­tous this was at the time. Elvis was even younger than MJ when he died, all bloated, pinch­ing a loaf while squat­ting on the bowl.

Not a pretty picture.

Elvis was big when he was alive, they didn’t call him “the King” for noth­ing, but in death Elvis was even big­ger. You only have to look at his estate’s accounts to see that he’s grossed more money since he died than he ever did alive.

Now, think of the “King of Pop”, or MJ Inc. as I’ve been think­ing of it. MJ’s music is more mod­ern, his audi­ence is still on the young side. Elvis’s audi­ence was mature when he ate his last fried banana sand­wich, yet he has still kept on selling.

Also, MJ’s music sounds more mod­ern, it can eas­ily sit on the radio along side music being released today. An Elvis song sounds old, because they pretty much all are now; per­haps “dated” would be a more appro­pri­ate description.

I liked Elvis, I thought he was cool, at least until his 1968 come­back spe­cial. If you’ve never seen it, it really is worth your time. After that, he kind of became a par­ody of him­self, which was sad to see. I do have one Elvis CD, a com­pi­la­tion of his Num­ber 1 hits.

And even though I like Elvis, I’ve still man­aged to make a cou­ple of jokes at his expense. Imag­ine the MJ jokes I could make; or bet­ter yet, don’t imag­ine, just think of some you’ve already heard from your mates.

Only the really funny ones, please.

Its too soon, we have to con­tinue to feign rev­er­ence for a while longer, before we can stop whis­per­ing the jokes and speak them out in full voice, in a crowded room, to thun­der­ous laugh­ter with­out a hint of shame. Try it now and all you’ll get are muf­fled gig­gles and unde­ni­able gasps.

No one dubbed MJ the “King of Pop”, the title was self-anointed fol­low­ing a spon­ta­neous intro­duc­tion when being pre­sented with an award. Once adopted, MJ’s PR peo­ple forced the media to refer to him as “King of Pop” and after a while it stuck.

Now, no one could take that crown away from him if they tried.

His death was tragic, as is any death at a rel­a­tively young age, but his is made more so because of his immense tal­ent. If ever there was a tor­tured artist…

MJ didn’t have a con­ven­tional child­hood. How could he when he was rehears­ing and per­form­ing from such a young age. His father sounded like quite a taskmas­ter, which is polite speak for moti­vat­ing Michael and his broth­ers by beatin’ on their ass(es).

Michael told Oprah as much on tv, so it must be true.

MJ was screwed up, dys­func­tional even, but I believe the cur­rent, accepted term to describe him is: eccentric.

The prob­lem with being the King, be it Elvis or MJ, is no one ever says “no” to you. For Elvis, it was fatty foods and pre­scrip­tion drugs, for MJ, well we can be fairly cer­tain it wasn’t fatty foods.

If we believe what we’re read­ing in the media, then MJ was using all sorts of doc­tor pre­scribed good­ies that most likely killed him. Most dis­turb­ing is the report of one of the drugs being Propinal (AKA Diprovan), a pow­er­ful anaes­thetic that should only be admin­is­tered in a hos­pi­tal because it is a con­tin­u­ous IV drip and requires full mon­i­tor­ing by a qual­i­fied doc­tor. The risks include res­pi­ra­tory arrest, which is fancy doctor-speak for: shit, he’s com­pletely stopped breathing!

Fuck. Why didn’t I hear of this before? Talk about a celebrity endorse­ment! Where can I get my own pri­vate med­ical doc­tor to come round and make a few days just zip right by, while I’m comatose and prob­a­bly mil­lime­tres from death? All the cool kids are going to want to do some POP (PrOPinal = POP as in the King of, its new, street name).

How messed up in the head do you have to be to want to be dosed up like you were hav­ing your appen­dix removed? How much would you want to escape both the entire world and yourself?

And what sort of licensed physi­cian would admin­is­ter that to some­one pri­vately, in their own home? Don’t they take an oath that says some­thing like, “First, do no harm?”

Play­ing with anaes­thet­ics sounds seri­ously harm­ful to me.

Which brings me back to where I started, with this becom­ing an ongo­ing news story. One of the biggest, most con­tro­ver­sial pop stars in the world died sud­denly, pos­si­bly at the hands of some­one else.

Yes, I am talk­ing murder.

And so is the LA Police, or so it would seem to me. Just because they say they don’t sus­pect foul play, doesn’t mean they don’t sus­pect some­thing foul happened.

If I was to gam­ble, I’d say some­one will end up being charged in con­nec­tion with his death. Some­one will become known as the man (or woman) who killed Michael Jackson.

And even though his funeral and pub­lic memo­r­ial are today, this story will run for years and years.

Expect more rev­e­la­tions about his pri­vate life to be com­pet­ing with the twists and turns in the legal bat­tles, crim­i­nal and civil, while he con­tin­ues to break records for music sales and MJ Inc. makes hun­dreds of millions.

What does it say about our soci­ety that we can wor­ship some­one for their tal­ent, while being fas­ci­nated by their eccen­tric­ity, yet repulsed by their alleged proclivities?

As a char­ac­ter, MJ is about as com­plex and rich a tapes­try as you’re likely to find.

And what does it say about our soci­ety that so many tal­ented peo­ple, in so many dif­fer­ent areas of the arts, are so trag­i­cally fucked up? MJ’s not the first mega-star to suc­cumb to such a sad end.

He won’t be the last, either.

Dig it, hep cats. Your hippy’s back and he’s big­ger, bad­der and higher than ever!

Ok, some of that first state­ment may not be true. Please allow me to decon­struct it for you:

- I haven’t been any­where, there­fore I can’t be “back”

- I’m still the same height I’ve been since I was 16. I’m not “big­ger”, unless you count my ego and I don’t.

- I’ve always been pretty bad, short of mur­der­ing some­one, I don’t think it would be pos­si­ble for me to be “badder”.

- I’m always high, so how could be “higher”? “Higher” than what?

So basi­cally, I’ve already wasted 30 sec­onds of your valu­able surf­ing time with utter non­sense and bull­shit. What a start!

Truth is, much like Lon­don, my brain is a bit fried from the heat. This week’s been a bit unbear­able. And don’t for­get the humidity!

How could I ever for­get the sick­en­ing, thick heavy feel of the atmos­phere around me this week? It would be fine if I was on hol­i­day in the Med on a sandy beach, lying in the shade with frozen daiquiris brought to me when­ever I snapped my fin­gers, but I’m not. Instead, I’m stuck in my north Lon­don ghetto hell.

My lair is bril­liant in the win­ter, it holds on to heat like nobody’s busi­ness, but in the sum­mer that qual­ity is a curse. Also, I have a small, south­ern fac­ing con­ser­va­tory, which acts as a super-efficient solar heater for the entire house. It hit a balmy 46 degrees C in there this week, which eas­ily boosts the over­all temp in my house to 32 or 33 degrees C.

In other words, fuck­ing hot!

And before you ask, the con­ser­va­tory does have blinds, on the ceil­ing and win­dows, light coloured, but they don’t seem to make a dif­fer­ence. I’m con­sid­er­ing replac­ing them with totally opaque blinds, that reflect light and heat. I’ve thought about it before, but its a big job that I couldn’t do myself.

Any­way, I’ve got count­less fans, a cou­ple of dehu­mid­i­fiers (which rock!) and a giant air con­di­tioner, which help a bit, but can’t com­pete with the fierce effects of the con­ser­va­tory. I can just about make it com­fort­able to sit on the sofa in my liv­ing room, but so much as shift posi­tion or god-forbid stand up, and its sud­denly like enter­ing a sauna.

Lon­don wasn’t built for trop­i­cal weather, cer­tainly my 100+ year old house wasn’t. Its early in the sum­mer to be swel­ter­ing like this.

I don’t see how any­one can deny cli­mate change when they have litres of sweat run­ning off their fore­heads and into their eyes. Trust me, it stings.

I won­der if I could get plan­ning per­mis­sion to put a swim­ming pool into my tiny back gar­den. Clearly noth­ing Olympic sized, just a small plunge pool for cool­ing off. How much of a bribe would it take? And how much would the pool cost?

All more than I would want to spend.

One just has to accept that its going to be a long, hot, hor­ri­ble sum­mer in the city and do what­ever you can to just get through it.

And if the heat doesn’t getcha, there’s always the swine flu.

Health author­i­ties in the UK announced this week that swine flu can now not be con­tained, and they are expect­ing 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August. I also read that as many as 40 peo­ple a day could be dying from it in that time as well. Shouldn’t we be panicking?

We’re not pan­ick­ing because its all very abstract. It will become much scarier when you hear about swine flu tak­ing some­one you know. If this is going to be as bad as they say, we’ll all find our­selves in the posi­tion of know­ing a vic­tim even­tu­ally. Oh dear.

So far, there have only been 4 deaths from swine flu in the UK and all of them have had the fol­low­ing code used to describe their deaths: they also suf­fered from under­ly­ing health issues. In other words, you’re more likely to die if you have some­thing else seri­ously wrong with you.

That prob­a­bly won’t always be the case and it will start killing oth­er­wise healthy, fit peo­ple. Ut oh.

Damn, I’ve come over all apoc­a­lyp­tic. Well, when faced with the fires of hell and a pig-based plague from Satan, do you blame me?

Happy 420 everyone!

If you’re not famil­iar with 420 (four-twenty), click the above link. Its prac­ti­cally a national hol­i­day in Amer­ica and if we’re lucky, it could very well catch on here in the UK.

Amer­ica is usu­ally sev­eral steps ahead of the UK and the US’s atti­tude to cannabis is a great exam­ple of this fact. Its where the point­less “war on drugs” began and it just might be where it ends too.

Since Obama got hit with a “legalise cannabis ques­tion” from an over­whelm­ing num­ber of peo­ple online, all of Amer­ica is rolling with fren­zied momen­tum towards legal­is­ing this hippy’s favourite plant.

The O-man shouldn’t have been so dis­mis­sive of such a seri­ous and rel­e­vant ques­tion, but he’s a pop­u­lar politi­cian so he can’t be seen to be soft on drugs.

That hasn’t pre­vented Sen­a­tor Ron Paul, who is also a pop­u­lar politi­cian, from call­ing for an end to the war on drugs, but he is a hero and lib­er­tar­ian and not afraid to express an opinion.

Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine can see the pace of change regard­ing cannabis laws in Amer­ica. And the con­ser­v­a­tive right seem down with it too.

Even the main­stream press is get­ting in on the act, with Time Mag­a­zine ask­ing and answer­ing, “Why Legal­is­ing Mar­i­juana Makes Sense”.

Not only that, Time Mag­a­zine also asks and answers, “Is Pot Good For You?” Of course it is!

Why the sud­den shift in America?

Two things right now are forc­ing peo­ple to rethink their stance on cannabis in the states, one of which already applies here in the UK.

Its the econ­omy, stupid.

With this whole recession/depression non­sense, can any­one dis­re­gard the effect a legalised cannabis mar­ket would have on a nation’s GDP?

Legal­is­ing weed, in an instant, would cre­ate legit­i­mate jobs that would be taxed, not to men­tion a tax on the actual prod­uct itself. It would raise a lot of money and fast.

Wait, let me revise that. It would bring an already estab­lished and thriv­ing black mar­ket econ­omy into the main­stream. Ka-ching!

Its been said that if weed were legal and 420 were a proper hol­i­day, it would have the same sort of effect on the econ­omy as xmas. Ka-double-ching.

Weed smok­ers would will­ingly be taxed in return for not being crim­i­nalised, so says Salon Mag­a­zine. I sure as hell would be ready to pay tax on my dope, if I didn’t have to worry about being arrested for toking!

The other prob­lem in Amer­ica is one that hasn’t reached Europe yet, but it could in the future and that is gang related violence.

The south­ern bor­der of Amer­ica is where the real drug war is tak­ing place, but not between law enforce­ment and crim­i­nals, but between rival drug gangs. Police on both sides of the bor­der have been inef­fec­tual and pos­si­bly cor­rupt, when they’re not get­ting caught in the cross­fire. The death toll is sadly, quite high and its bad for busi­ness on both sides of the border.

The trou­ble on America’s bor­der is forc­ing peo­ple to realise that the drug mar­ket should be under some sort of gov­ern­ment con­trol and reg­u­la­tion, for with­out that, it leaves crim­i­nal gangs run­ning the show.

Just as the pro­hi­bi­tion of alco­hol in the states in the early part of the last cen­tury cre­ated gang­sters like Al Capone, the pro­hi­bi­tion of drugs cre­ated Pablo Esco­bar and those like him who con­trol the indus­try today.

America’s finally grasp­ing that legal­is­ing cannabis would solve more prob­lems than it could ever cre­ate. By legit­imis­ing an exist­ing indus­try, Amer­ica will reap the rewards finan­cially and it would help cre­ate a new sta­bil­ity along the Rio Grande.

Check out this report from the very respected Cato Insti­tute, which looks at the pos­i­tive effects of the decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of all drugs in Por­tu­gal. Its very enlight­en­ing and worth a quick read.

You’ll notice in all of debate and dis­cus­sion in Amer­ica, there hasn’t been any talk of cannabis-induced psy­chosis or schiz­o­phre­nia, nor the demon­i­sa­tion of the stronger strains of cannabis known as “skunk”. That’s because its all spin and bull­shit cre­ated here in the UK to allow our politi­cians to use weed as a polit­i­cal foot­ball that scores easy own-goals with the ill-informed electorate.

In the states, stronger weed is prized and cel­e­brated for being par­tic­u­larly “med­i­c­i­nal” and is seen to be more ben­e­fi­cial, not less. There are no “cannabis hys­te­ria mums” and no men­tion of unproven links to men­tal ill­ness. Remem­ber, a for­mer Sur­geon Gen­eral in Amer­ica (C. Everett Coop if mem­ory serves), called mar­i­juana “the most ther­a­peu­ti­cally ben­e­fi­cial sub­stance known to man”.

Con­fu­sion con­tin­ues to reign where cannabis pol­icy is con­cerned here in the UK, with ran­dom, point­less changes in clas­si­fi­ca­tion and penal­ties every cou­ple of years whether we need them or not.

Even the government’s own drug coun­selling ser­vice, Ask Frank, is telling younger callers that “cannabis is safer than alco­hol.” Its com­pletely true and in line with what the experts say, but its incon­sis­tent with the government’s own stated pol­icy, which of course, ignores the advice of the afore­men­tioned experts they employ.

There are already whis­pers in White­hall, many politi­cians here can see the scrawl on the wall, but are won­der­ing how to right all of the wrongs of the last few years. The gov­ern­ment has used the media to paint a totally false pic­ture of the dan­gers of cannabis, so how do they turn it back around?

Sim­ple, just let the lies qui­etly fade away and replace them with the promise of cold hard cash.

Is it going to take open gang war­fare on the streets of Britain for our lead­ers to deal with cannabis respon­si­bly? I hope to god it doesn’t come to that, but I don’t see any other way for them wake up and start deal­ing with reality.

The Guardian pub­lished a great report last week, which states that end­ing the pro­hi­bi­tion on drugs would save the UK around £14 bil­lion pounds. That’s an amount that can’t be ignored, espe­cially in these dif­fi­cult eco­nomic times. Law enforce­ment, the penal sys­tem could all be over­hauled and the resources could be redi­rected to actual crimes with vic­tims and everything…!

They’re search­ing for the green shoots of recov­ery, per­haps cannabis is lit­er­ally the cash crop green­ery we’ve all been seeking.

And maybe one day, we’ll all be able to openly com­mem­o­rate 420 in the man­ner appro­pri­ate to the event. And that’s exactly what this hippy is going to do right now, as I spark up a juicy, skunky spliff.

I’ve been try­ing to get my head around the steady, con­stant stream of fol­low­ers who come and go like the tides. It seems I’m just about gain­ing and los­ing them in equal num­bers and its all rather random.

I’ve been look­ing at the data com­piled at TweetEffect.Com, which cross-references your tweets with the gains and loses in your fol­low­ers. In look­ing at my data, it seems the same tweets attract and repel at the same time.

Con­fus­ing!

It got me to think­ing about the best ways to instantly attract a fol­low­ing on Twit­ter. I came up with ten ideas that I thought I would share:

1) Be famous already — If you are already famous, you have an estab­lished fan base and an instant fol­low­ing. Of course, if you’re already famous you don’t need my help.

2) Imi­tate a celebrity — This is sur­pris­ingly effec­tive, but can be short lived. Oh and point­less, now that @Valebrity and @CelebsWhoTwitter are mak­ing efforts to ver­ify them. That said, a fake Tina Fey has over 100,000 fol­low­ers, you could just change the account name and sell it on eBay for heaps of cash.

3) Get endorsed by @wossy or @stephenfry — Your Twit­ter name men­tioned or rec­om­mended by either of them, or any other celebrity with a large fol­low­ing will attract scores of new fol­low­ers. Whether or not they remain loyal to you is another question.

4) Take a photo of a com­mer­cial air­liner in the Hud­son River or of one crash­ing near Ams­ter­dam — If fate puts you some­place where some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is hap­pen­ing, doc­u­ment it as best you can. Take pho­tos if you have a cam­er­a­phone and tweet them, tweet about what you see. If it is impor­tant enough and you are there soon enough, every­one will want to see what you cap­ture next.

5) Fol­low every­one and hope a large per­cent­age fol­low u back — This is the equiv­a­lent of throw­ing as much shit as you can at a wall and hop­ing some of it sticks. And like shit and des­per­a­tion, this one smells bad too, don’t bother.

6) Swear pro­fusely — Thanks to CurseBird.Com, the more you use bad lan­guage, the higher your rank on that web­site. I like it.

7) Require a res­cue — This one would be good as long as you sur­vive, but if you don’t, its a bit point­less. Hope you’re never in a posi­tion to find out!

8) Offer peo­ple a free lap­top — I don’t know if this works, but I do seem to get fol­lowed by a lot of peo­ple who want to give me a free Mac­Book Air.

9) Offer to tweet your credit cards num­bers if u hit 1,000 fol­low­ers — Guilty! Yes this one’s from me. I’ve still got a long way to go.

10) Be refresh­ingly orig­i­nal & enter­tain­ing — it couldn’t hurt!

The Econ­o­mist, a rather con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tion, has come out strongly in favour of the legal­i­sa­tion, tax­a­tion and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of drugs.

All drugs.

The arti­cle I am refer­ring to is RIGHT HERE and is well worth a few min­utes of your valu­able surf­ing time because it lays out a very ratio­nal, sen­si­ble and per­sua­sive argu­ment for this rad­i­cal suggestion.

As the UN meets in Vienna to decide the next decade’s drug pol­icy, why won’t they lis­ten to the experts?

There are so many intel­li­gent, edu­cated, thought­ful mem­bers of respectable soci­ety who believe legal­i­sa­tion is the only solu­tion. There are loads of senior police­men who believe this, many civil ser­vants and politi­cians do too, but they are too afraid to speak up because of the false hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the issue.

David Cameron, most likely the next Prime Min­is­ter of this coun­try is sym­pa­thetic to the idea of rad­i­cally chang­ing our approach on the sub­ject as men­tioned in this, another well writ­ten and thought­ful piece on the sub­ject from politics.co.uk

I’ve always thought we’ve had more of a chance of chang­ing the laws under a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment, because it takes a strong party to take deci­sive action.

If David Cameron would take one key step in that direc­tion, he could have my support.

Mr. Cameron, I implore you to shift your pub­lic posi­tion based on facts and sci­ence. Please con­sider decrim­i­nal­is­ing or legal­is­ing cannabis as soon as you are in power.

Finally, a gov­ern­ment drug pol­icy I agree with completely…

Ille­gal factory-style cannabis farms should be closed down.

Check out THIS REPORT from the BBC.

Fac­tory cannabis-farms are often set-up in rented accom­mo­da­tion, with the land­lords none the wiser until they receive a phone call from the police telling them their income prop­erty has been trashed.

Ille­gal cannabis farm­ers steal elec­tric­ity from neigh­bours or from the an energy sup­plier; either way its theft and its wrong. Safety is ignored and fires are not uncom­mon. And sad­dest of all, they are fre­quently staffed by ille­gal aliens trapped in a type of hell­ish inden­tured servitude.

Where I split from the gov­ern­ment is their choice of solu­tion; police raids won’t make the prob­lem go away, it will only make it relo­cate to yet another unsus­pect­ing venue. The trade is far too lucra­tive for those involved to give it up. Raids are sim­ply a cal­cu­lated risk bal­anced against a very reward­ing return.

Its sup­ply and demand, the very cor­ner­stone of our cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. To ignore or deny this very sim­ple truth, is to be blink­ered and ostrich like.

There’s a bet­ter way.

There’s always a bet­ter way, but it would involve our lead­ers shift­ing their cur­rent posi­tion, which is one of dis­in­for­ma­tion and lies, towards a more open and hon­est approach.

Its time to legalise the indus­try and take it out of the hands of crim­i­nals. Its time to reg­u­late and tax cannabis, bring the mar­ket under some sort of control.

To be against a legal cannabis indus­try is to be against the very heart and soul of capitalism.

Don’t let the con­di­tion­ing the media has been force-feeding you colour your view on this. They’ve been sys­tem­at­i­cally try­ing to dis­credit cannabis and per­vert your per­cep­tion of it for quite some time now.

Why?

Its easy to score points with the pub­lic by appear­ing tough on drugs. Also, it diverts your atten­tion from more impor­tant issues, like Iraq, cli­mate change or the economy.

The time is now for this unadul­ter­ated bull­shit to end.

Back when Blair and Blun­kett were in charge, cannabis was down­graded and they even toyed with a police pol­icy of mak­ing arrests for pos­ses­sion of cannabis the low­est pos­si­ble pri­or­ity. Things were finally mov­ing in the right direc­tion, the gov­ern­ment was lis­ten­ing to advi­sors and sci­en­tis­tis and using a bit of com­mon sense.

Mean­while in Amer­ica, the “war on drugs” was still going strong, along with fed­eral raids on med­ical mar­i­juana clubs and impris­on­ment for pos­ses­sion. This wasn’t that long ago.

Under Obama, things have already changed with an end to fed­eral raids and an offi­cial pol­icy that secedes power to indi­vid­ual states with regards to cannabis.

Cal­i­for­nia is now con­sid­er­ing legal­i­sa­tion and tax­a­tion, because the state is nearly bank­rupt. Des­per­ate times clearly call for cre­ative mea­sures, this one will bring Cali an esti­mated annual tidy sum of $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) dollars.

Many other states have decrim­i­nalised pos­ses­sion and have made it the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing priority.

Our out-of-touch, out-of-step gov­ern­ment is about as un-Obama as possible.

If peo­ple won­der why Obama didn’t make more time for Gor­don Brown, they’re not really look­ing closely enough. They couldn’t be more polar oppo­sites when it comes to gen­uine lib­eral thought and policy.

Legal­is­ing weed would cre­ate legit­i­mate jobs, for legit­i­mate farm­ers and dis­trib­u­tors; jobs that already exist in the black econ­omy, fuelling a rather size­able black mar­ket that exists out­side the tax and social secu­rity system.

A legal and con­trolled indus­try would insure that safety stan­dards were met at the point of pro­duc­tion, for the facil­i­ties, the staff and the prod­uct. You would know the weed you were get­ting was pure and unadul­ter­ated. You would know the per­son who grew it was paid a rea­son­able, tax­able wage.

As much as I wish to see these dan­ger­ous and ille­gal cannabis farms closed down, I’m smart enough to realise that police raids alone are not the answer. If you really want to end the ille­gal cannabis trade, there is only one prac­ti­cal, work­able solu­tion: Legalise!

Even the UN may come to this con­clu­sion as they pre­pare to finalise an agree­ment this week in Vienna, but as this report in today’s Guardian sug­gests, there are still deep divi­sions with some EU and Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries favour­ing a more ratio­nal approach, with the US pre­fer­ring to con­tinue the point­less “war on drugs”.

Oh Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama, are you lis­ten­ing? The “war on drugs” has been an abysmal fail­ure and many knowl­edge­able and respectable peo­ple believe its been worse than the actual harm caused by the drugs them­selves. Could you please call your min­ions in Vienna and sort this sorry mess out?

If you want to know more, please check out my Cannabis Truth Series

Promises, promises. Politi­cians make them all the time when they are cam­paign­ing, only to con­ve­niently for­get about them once in office, but not Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama.

This week, US Attor­ney Gen­eral, Eric Holder con­firmed that fed­eral raids on Med­ical Mar­i­juana facil­i­ties would end and indi­vid­ual states could deter­mine their own poli­cies regard­ing my favourite plant. He said this is “now Amer­i­can policy”.

How cool is that?

This is a huge shift in the way the law deals with weed in Amer­ica. I wish the UK could be equally enlight­ened, but the gov­ern­ment here works very hard to be as un-Obama-like as possible.

And they don’t want to stop there either. Leg­is­la­tors in Cal­i­for­nia are now con­sid­er­ing tak­ing it one step fur­ther, with a pos­si­ble plan to fully legalise and tax cannabis to help bale out the finan­cially des­ti­tute state. They say it could bring in $1.3 bil­lion (with a B) in tax rev­enue to the state annually.

That’s a lot of green­backs for a lot of green­ery! Its com­mon fuck­ing sense! Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work, never has, never will. If you can’t beat ‘em, tax ‘em.

Obama’s motto through­out his cam­paign was “Yes, we can.” Now that he’s in office, the new motto is: “Yes, we cannabis!”

Roseanne Barr, domes­tic god­dess, come­dian and now radio talk­show host is sell­ing some very cool tee-shirts in Amer­ica with that very slo­gan on them, Yes, we CANnabis.

We should all order our­selves one to show our sup­port for this long over­due change in pol­icy. Let’s hope that it spreads out from Amer­ica to the rest of the world.

Hello. Wel­come back. Did ya miss me?

Its ram­ble time. Woke up too early fol­low­ing too lit­tle sleep. Must focus.

On what?

Its a pleas­ant, relax­ing day off, or rather it should be, but I’ve got heaps to do ‘round the house and I might even wan­der up to my local high street.

Do they call it a “high street” because you have to get high before you go there? No? Well, tough, because I will be high when I go.

It should be a rule that you have to be high before allowed onto your local high street. It would make the entire shop­ping expe­ri­ence more pleas­ant for every­one involved. The shop assis­tants would think all the cus­tomers were mel­low and pleas­ant, the shop assis­tants would be help­ful with­out being over­bear­ing and I wouldn’t nearly get into fist fights with all the rude, surly peo­ple knock­ing into me and block­ing my way.

Oh wouldn’t it be grand?

As soon as they start open­ing cannabis cafes around the coun­try, this is the sort of relaxed Utopia we can expect. Until then it will con­tinue to be no fun.

Did you see a group of for­mer pres­i­dents from Latin Amer­ica are urg­ing the world to adopt a con­trolled and reg­u­lated cannabis mar­ket? Did you look here?

Even the UN is work­ing towards this fairly obvi­ous and sen­si­ble con­clu­sion. In the good ol’ US of A, they are mov­ing in this direc­tion. Pres­i­dent Sav­iour Obama has even said that fed­eral raids against med­ical mar­i­juana estab­lish­ments must end and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment needs to start respect­ing laws passed by indi­vid­ual states.

Many states in Amer­ica have already decrim­i­nalised weed. That means it is con­sid­ered the low­est pos­si­ble polic­ing pri­or­ity, with penal­ties for pos­ses­sion being the equiv­a­lent of a minor traf­fic or park­ing offence.

Why can’t we do that here?

We could and we were going to until Gor­don Brown and Jacqui Smith started muck­ing around with things. These two nin­com­poops believe laws should be used to “send a mes­sage” to peo­ple, rather than reflect the sci­en­tific evi­dence or the truth.

This week the Advi­sory Coun­cil for the Mis­use of Drugs (ACMD). the body that advises the gov­ern­ment on drug pol­icy stated that ecstasy (E, pills, MDMA), be re-classified from its cur­rent A grade, back into Class B, to reflect its rel­a­tive harm to the user. Sounds sen­si­ble enough as E is not in the same league as coke and smack.

The head of the ACMD, Pro­fes­sor. David Nutt went on to say that tak­ing ecstasy is no worse than horse­back rid­ing and an equiv­a­lent num­ber of peo­ple die from both activ­i­ties annu­ally. You would have thought that he said Jesus was secretly Satan for the drub­bing he took over the com­ments. He was even forced to apol­o­gise and his future on the ACMD has been questioned.

Just for telling the truth!

In Amer­ica, MDMA has been used by men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als to assist in the ther­apy process. Would med­ical doc­tors pre­scribe some­thing poten­tially lethal when their first rule is to “do no harm”? What do they know that we don’t know.

Noth­ing! The dif­fer­ence is our gov­ern­ment uses leg­is­la­tion to “send a mes­sage” rather than to treat peo­ple with respect. Leg­is­lat­ing moral­ity never works, because peo­ple have their own moral com­passes and that counts for something.

The sim­ple fact is that any­one who’s ever smoked a joint or necked an E knows that what the gov­ern­ment is say­ing is bull­shit. What do you reckon that does to the government’s credibility?

It knocks it into the toi­let. When a gov­ern­ment lies about any­thing, we all suffer.

Drug tak­ing is a health issue, not a moral or legal issue and try­ing to force it only does a dis­ser­vice to every­one. If I choose to ingest MDMA, or cannabis or choco­late or even bro­ken glass, its my body and my choice.

Crim­i­nal­is­ing mil­lions of peo­ple serves no one. If you’re hav­ing trou­ble with drugs, you should be able to seek help with­out wor­ry­ing about end­ing up with a crim­i­nal record. And if you are enjoy­ing them respon­si­bly, it should be nobody’s busi­ness but your own.

Com­mon sense and com­pas­sion will even­tu­ally rule the day, but for now we’ll have to just keep watch­ing our lead­ers screw things up more and more. Its frus­trat­ing, annoy­ing and unavoid­able, for as long as politi­cians can use the debate over drugs to score points with Mid­dle Eng­land, the sense­less per­se­cu­tion of peo­ple who enjoy some­thing other than booze will continue.

Gee, that wasn’t as nearly as ram­bling as I expected it to be. Lucky you, or maybe even lucky me.

I’ve spent the last week hang­ing out on Twit­ter, tweet­ing my lit­tle heart out. If you’re fol­low­ing me, you now know far too much about my empty shell of an existence.

You’re not fol­low­ing me, hardly any­one is. I don’t know what I expected, per­haps some pied-piper-like effect on peo­ple which had me rivalling the top ech­e­lon of Twit­ter­teers after my first tweet. As fuck­ing if!

Twit­ter is a bit like shout­ing in a crowded room full of shouty peo­ple; get­ting anyone’s atten­tion is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble. Unless you’re famous already, as it seems proper celebri­ties who join Twit­ter enjoy instant popularity.

I’m only an inter­net celebrity, which should mean some­thing on, um, you know, the inter­net, but it doesn’t. So how does one get noticed on Twitter?

I’m tak­ing the long view, much like I did with blog­ging. If you just keep doing what­ever it is you do, peo­ple will find you and wor­ship you like the one true liv­ing god you are.

The other ques­tion is, how much atten­tion do I want to get on Twit­ter? How much atten­tion do I want to get full stop? I already do OK here in my tiny lit­tle cor­ner of the internet.

I’ll let you in on a lit­tle secret, this web­site is actu­ally prof­itable. I bring in more than I spend, though nat­u­rally that doesn’t include my very valu­able time, which you can’t put a price on.

Well, you could really, I get £750 a day, plus expenses, but you get to keep the pho­tos I take of your hus­band shag­ging his sec­re­tary. Oh no, that’s what a pri­vate detec­tive gets!

If I ever won the lot­tery, I would hire a team of pri­vate detec­tives to dig up dirt on my list of ene­mies. Everyone’s got some­thing secret lurk­ing in their lives that they wouldn’t want any­one to know about. I’d like to know.

Sorry, I attended a spe­cial screen­ing of Frost/Nixon last night and I think a bit of Tricky Dicky’s sleaze rubbed off on me. He famously had an ene­mies list and used inves­ti­ga­tors to dig dirt up on peo­ple. Of course, he did it with tax payer’s money, I want to use the lot­tery cash I will never win because rarely buy a ticket.

My week on Twit­ter has been fun. With the ter­ri­ble win­ter weather here in the UK, I’ve been able to keep track of the snow­fall in real time, com­plete with pho­tos and travel updates. I got instant reac­tions to this week’s crackin’ Bat­tlestar Galac­tica episode and I learned that BBC Radio One DJ, Chris Moyles actu­ally seems like a decent guy.

Moyles (@CHRISDJMOYLES) has been a sur­prise on Twit­ter, he tweets loads and comes across as quite a nice fel­low. Who knew?

I posted my own snowy pho­tos and even a pic­ture of 2 of my cute lit­tle kitty cats. Awwwwww! I’ve also posted some jokes and some sur­real shit too, mainly for my own amusement.

I can cer­tainly see the appeal of Twit­ter. Its sim­ple to use and pro­vides a very focussed ser­vice. It is also extremely addic­tive and easy to dip in and out of many times through­out the day.

It may be that the nov­elty wears off for me and I will get bored of tweet­ing my every thought and action, but for now I’m a tweet­ing machine.

So what are you wait­ing for, don’t you wanna fol­low this hippy? I might lead you to where they are hid­ing the good drugs?

Screw that, if I knew where the good drugs were, I would be tak­ing them right now and not wast­ing my time typ­ing up this drivel!