The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

I’ve always had a very unhealthy obses­sion with death, mainly my own.

I’ve imag­ined my own death count­less times, in count­less ways.

I’ve pic­tured myself pass­ing qui­etly in a ster­ile white hos­pi­tal room, alone, at a very old age, in the dark.

I’ve seen myself col­lapse in the street, clutch­ing my chest, sud­denly and with­out warning.

I’ve thought about all man­ner of vio­lent death too, from a hor­ri­ble car crash, to being bru­tally beaten sense­less by a gang of teenage thugs.

I’ve thought about this a lot, too much, to the point of it being eas­ily labelled a decades’ old obsession.

Its not really death that I fear, its the process of dying and my mor­bid curios­ity at how I will go, when­ever that time comes.

Will it be painful?

Will I suffer?

Will I linger?

Will it take long?

Is it going to hap­pen soon?

The roots of my fear of death were planted by my father. He was an older dad, I was the child of a sec­ond mar­riage who came late in his life. He talked about dying all the time and how he just wanted to live long enough to see me and my brother right in the world.

As a child, hear­ing this mantra of his fre­quently, I wor­ried about his death a lot. I was close with my father when I was a child, his talk of death scared me and dug deep into my sub-conscious, where it remains to this day.

As it turned out, he lived a pretty long life, but had an unpleas­antly long and drawn out death. From his diag­no­sis to his pass­ing, it took about a year, with his health declin­ing steadily in between. The last cou­ple of months were par­tic­u­larly bad, with his decline ever more steep and his hopes dashed with each treat­ment option fail­ing. His final days were spent heav­ily med­icated, but he was at home, in his own bed when he drew his last breath.

As deaths go, I’d give it a 6, he loses points for the dura­tion of suf­fer­ing, but gains some for being able to choose to be at home. Also, he scores well on the life to death ratio, he lived to be 84 and was sick for only a year.

You can’t really do a score­card for death, each one is unique.

There’s an old joke about a guy who, when asked how he’d like to die, said “when I’m 100 years old I’d like to be shot by a jeal­ous hus­band”. That sounds like an OK way to go, as long as you’re a sprightly 100.

My mother’s death, unlike my father’s, was rel­a­tively quick, hap­pen­ing over about 48 hour period, from becom­ing ill to slip­ping qui­etly away.

Where my mother loses out is in the qual­ity of life stakes, she had a mas­sive stroke about 7 years before, which left her severely impaired.

She couldn’t walk, had a lot of trou­ble talk­ing too, and her coor­di­na­tion was par­tic­u­larly poor. For the 7 years she sur­vived after the stroke, she was depen­dent upon help for absolutely every­thing, like dress­ing, wash­ing, eat­ing and going to the toi­let. Its no way for any­one to live, or rather exist.

When my mother had the stroke and was being treated in the hos­pi­tal, my father was given a choice of whether or not to put her on life support.

He had been told it was a very bad stroke and her recov­ery would be prob­lem­atic and never com­plete. He was also aware my mother had a liv­ing will, which pretty much said, if she was ever in this posi­tion, not to take dras­tic mea­sures to keep her alive if the prog­no­sis for recov­ery was grim.

My father ignored my mother’s wishes and said yes to the life sup­port. He couldn’t bare to think of life with­out my her nor could he imag­ine her not mak­ing a full recov­ery. Nature would have killed my mother off then and there, peace­fully, in her sleep, but instead my father chose to use every mir­a­cle machine known to mod­ern med­i­cine to sus­tain my mother’s life.

His mantra to all hos­pi­tal staff became this: “She walked into this hos­pi­tal on her own and she’s damn well going to walk back out”.

How wrong he was.

My father could have spared my mother seven years of a hor­ri­ble exis­tence, but he was self­ish. He paid for this deci­sion him­self as his life got much harder when my mother was finally allowed to go home after sev­eral months in the hos­pi­tal and a rehab facility.

My mother could only get around in a wheel­chair and had sev­eral med­ical appoint­ments a week that my father had to trans­port her to, unaided. He was in his 80s.

He refused all assis­tance at first, and not until he was over­whelmed, did he relent and hire some home help.

My father’s own death obses­sion kicked into over­drive and his new catch­phrase became this: “What would hap­pen to my wife if some­thing hap­pened to me?” This thought ran through his head con­stantly, it kept him up at night, he men­tioned it every time he spoke to me. His fear of his own death now had a tan­gi­ble focus, my mother’s fate.

What you think about can become real, as it wasn’t too long after this that they found a large, malig­nant and inop­er­a­ble tumour in his blad­der. Thus began his one year decline into death.

The “what to do about my mother” ques­tion became inter­twined with the “beat­ing this can­cer” goal. “If I can just beat this can­cer,” thought my father. “then I can con­tinue to care for my wife.” It took him a few months to realise he couldn’t and the part time home help turned into a full time, live in carer for both of them.

When my father died, my mother con­tin­ued to live in their house, with the live in carer. As it turned out, she would have had enough money to con­tinue liv­ing this way, which was what I wanted for her, but her fear helped her decide to move into a care home. It was a good one, but expen­sive, more expen­sive than stay­ing in her home, but it was my mother’s choice.

My mother spent the last five plus years of her life in that care home, before slip­ping into a coma and dying in a hos­pi­tal bed, alone and uncon­scious. She should have died many years before, her life was no richer for those last, post-stroke years of hard­ship and suffering.

We all have to face death in all its var­ied forms and per­mu­ta­tions. Death and dying come in many assorted flavours.

I lost four friends and many more col­leagues, who all died while doing what we do, cov­er­ing the news. I’ve been a jour­nal­ist for over 20 years and when I was younger and more fool­ish, put myself in harm’s way too.

I’ve spent time in war zones and other dan­ger­ous places and the peo­ple I work with still do, every day, to tell you about peo­ple and places many peo­ple don’t give a shit about. Hey ho.

My four friends who all per­ished while work­ing abroad, had quick, yet vio­lent deaths. I’m not going get into any great detail here, Three of them were chased by armed men or rebels before being gunned down, one was killed by a stray, unex­pected mor­tar shell. Each death effected me per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally in quite pro­found ways.

All four of them were rel­a­tively young, some left behind part­ners and chil­dren. Each one was a decent, thought­ful and respected col­league and journalist.

One of these deaths was par­tic­u­larly hard on me because I was on duty when the news broke. I was work­ing on a news desk, the cen­tral point of con­tact for every­one in my organ­i­sa­tion. A lot of the tele­phone calls I received were from dis­traught peo­ple all over the world, wak­ing up to the news of the death of a close friend. Many were in tears, many wanted me to tell them that the news got it wrong.

I wish I could have.

When death comes to the young and good, its par­tic­u­larly hard on those left behind, try­ing to make sense of out it, try­ing to under­stand it.

I’ll tell you some­thing right now, there is no sense in any sense­less death, there is no under­stand­ing. Shit hap­pens, you just deal with it as best you can.

After that spate of deaths, my indus­try tried to improve on safety. More hos­tile envi­ron­ment train­ing was brought in, safety advi­sors in dan­ger­ous places are deployed reg­u­larly now, but jour­nal­ists still con­tinue to be killed in the line of duty.

Los­ing friends makes you think about your own mor­tal­ity, not that I needed any help.

There are two other friends I lost, both of their deaths remark­ably similar.

They were both about the same age, both had sim­i­lar inter­ests and lifestyles. One was a musi­cian, the other a journalist.

Both of my friends were 50 years old when they died, both had mas­sive heart attacks. One was found in his flat, sit­ting in his favourite chair, the other was at home with his part­ner and fell over dead as he got up from the sofa. Both died fairly instantly and may not have had much time to work out what was happening.

Both used via­gra and cocaine reg­u­larly and drank heav­ily too. You don’t need to be a doc­tor to work out that’s a bad combination.

As I get older, my death obses­sion seems to have more things to fuel it.

Peo­ple my age (I’m push­ing 50) die from all sorts of things, nat­ural and oth­er­wise. I think about my health more often. I don’t actu­ally do much about it, but I think about it…does that count for anything?

I get my cho­les­terol and glu­cose checked reg­u­larly, along with my blood pres­sure. All are good, espe­cially my cho­les­terol, which was 3.1 at my most recent test. I don’t look like I should have low cho­les­terol, but I do. Go figure.

None of that means I’m immune from whatever’s lurk­ing out there, wait­ing to pounce on me. I don’t drink at all, but I do smoke, cig­a­rettes and weed. I don’t exer­cise, I don’t watch my diet and I work only nights. Not exactly the regime you’d pay a thou­sand quid a day for at a health farm.

If you would pay a grand a day to live my lifestyle, get in touch, I’d be happy to sort you out, as long as you are happy always being high and mas­tur­bat­ing sev­eral times a day, but not in pub­lic, because that’s just gross.

Will it be a heart attack that gets me? My father had one of those.

How about a stroke? My mother’s got that covered.

Can­cer? It got most of my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side.

Car acci­dent? I think about it every time I get behind the wheel. Will this be my last jour­ney? Is there a drunk dri­ver or over­tired lorry dri­ver out there with with me in his sights?

How about some freak acci­dent, like a plum­met­ing jet engine a’la Donny Darko? A stray bul­let from some silly gang related shoot­ing on my north Lon­don ghetto street? That could hap­pen too.

Ter­ror­ism, viral pan­demic, earth­quake, tor­nado, take your pick, the news is full of so many lethal things.

There are so many ways I could die and not know­ing how its going to turn out for me is a gen­uine obsession.

But would I really want to know how I’m going to die?

Wouldn’t it be the ulti­mate spoiler?

If there was a box I could click online that would reveal the details of my death, would I click it?

Would I really want to know the big three facts about my inevitable death; when? where? how?

Hell, yes! I would def­i­nitely click that box. And then I am sure I would regret it.

What would I do if I did knew the details of my death?

I’d try to cheat it, if I could. If I knew a bus was going to hit me on the high street next Fri­day, I’d damn make sure I was some­place else.

But what if I couldn’t cheat it, some hor­ri­ble dis­ease or med­ical cat­a­stro­phe that couldn’t be avoided. What would I do with that knowl­edge, that my own body was a tick­ing time bomb, wait­ing to go off on a cer­tain date?

Would I get my affairs in order, what­ever that means?

Would I make a bucket list and try to cram what­ever time I had left on doing things I sud­denly felt were important?

Or would I just sit qui­etly, await­ing des­tiny, safe with the knowl­edge that my fate was well and truly sealed?

Who knows? I’ll never find out.

There is no real way to know when you’re going to die. Some peo­ple do find out the “how” from their doc­tors, along with a rough timescale, but I think that’s about as close as it gets. In that sit­u­a­tion, I’d have no choice but to know.

Whether or not know­ing would be help­ful, well, who’s to say?

What­ever does get me, is out there some­where right now, in the world or inside my body. Whether its today, tomor­row, next week, next year or next cen­tury is anybody’s guess. Who knows what mir­a­cles sci­ence might pro­vide in the next decades?

There are two things I’ve always thought would hap­pen to help peo­ple cheat death.

One is my view that age­ing is sim­ply a genetic dis­or­der that even­tu­ally will be cor­rected with gene ther­apy. I think they are close to this dis­cov­ery, iso­lat­ing what it is in our DNA that makes our bod­ies age and then fig­ur­ing out how to manip­u­late it and switch it off. It may sound like sci-fi, but its not and it will have all sorts of eth­i­cal and prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for the future of our planet.

Per­haps only the super rich will ben­e­fit from this dis­cov­ery, maybe it will be avail­able to any­one and every­one. Maybe it will be manda­tory. Maybe it will be kept a secret.

While not deliv­er­ing real immor­tal­ity, it cer­tainly would be a mas­sive step in that direc­tion, as long as you’re not hit by that bus on the high street.

The sec­ond sci­en­tific inno­va­tion that I think will even­tu­ally come, will be the abil­ity to import (ingest? upload? scan? pick a verb) the entire con­tents of a human brain into a com­puter. Once you can do that, you could effec­tively recre­ate a person’s con­scious­ness and con­struct a vir­tual world for them to exist inside. As long as you had a sus­tain­able power source, this the­o­ret­i­cally could deliver immor­tal­ity for all.

Imag­ine being able to con­tinue your exis­tence in a per­fect dig­i­tal world, freed of the con­straints of your flesh. For all inten­sive pur­poses, this dig­i­tal world would be as real as our world and your sense of self, your iden­tity, who you are, would be the same too. You would be reunited with your friends, your rel­a­tives, your loved ones, to spend eter­nity together in the most won­der­ful place imaginable.

That sounds a lot like heaven in the tra­di­tional sense, with one key dif­fer­ence. The heaven of our ances­tors was an imag­i­nary idea, this heaven I pro­pose would be built by man and could one day really exist.

Do I think I’ll see these inno­va­tions in my life­time? That’s the tril­lion dol­lar question.

I think the genetic dis­cov­ery is not that far off, but its use in prac­tise much fur­ther. Its unlikely in my socio-economic class that I will have access to it, if it is in my time.

The dig­i­tal after­life is harder to pre­dict, as guess­ing at the future capa­bil­i­ties of com­puter equip­ment and the rate of change is slightly more com­plex than Moore’s Law would have you believe. Advances in quan­tum com­put­ing are mak­ing the news and once the real break­through hap­pens, we very well may end up with more afford­able com­puter power than any­one can cur­rently imagine.

The sin­gu­lar­ity, anyone?

Once the con­tents of a human brain can be uploaded into a com­puter of unimag­in­able power, a mul­ti­verse of pos­si­bil­i­ties awaits. If I can live long enough to see that hap­pen, I will be very lucky indeed.

I don’t hold out much hope.

I’ve always thought these amaz­ing inno­va­tions would come the day after I die.

So it goes, as Von­negut used to say.

That leaves me with a death obses­sion that won’t be resolved until its my time to shake off this mor­tal coil.

At least I have a pas­time. They say hav­ing a hobby adds years to your life.

There are many big prob­lems in our lit­tle world here that could all be solved with some sim­ple, ratio­nal think­ing and com­mon sense.

Let’s start with a big one, admit­ting to our­selves just how prim­i­tive a species we are, even though we have iPods and Microwave Ovens and other mod­ern won­ders of tech­nol­ogy. We still remain quite prim­i­tive and rel­a­tively igno­rant of so very much regard­ing the uni­verse and our place in it.

We are extra­or­di­nar­ily prim­i­tive, more so than any­one would ever like to think. We are still a tribal race, unable to take a long term or global view of the true nature of our exis­tence or the context.

We still cling to an “us ver­sus them” men­tal­ity, we view peo­ple like us, liv­ing in the same place as more impor­tant than oth­ers, we fos­ter rival­ries and dis­sent between races and nations, rather than encour­ag­ing stronger ties based upon our similarities.

We are all the same, we are all earth­lings first and fore­most, every indi­vid­ual on this planet should have an equal worth, with the oper­a­tive word being “should”, because the real­ity is noth­ing like that.

We value dif­fer­ent peo­ple, dif­fer­ent races, dif­fer­ent classes, dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties as all hav­ing dif­fer­ent and unequal worth in our so called mod­ern soci­ety. We remain incred­i­bly self­ish when only self­less­ness will redeem the human race.

Imag­ine some space aliens arrived, imag­ine them any way you like, as long as they seem real and some­what ordi­nary, because chances are intel­li­gent life in the uni­verse would be both of those things, ordi­nary and most likely real.

Imag­ine they didn’t read the fine print in their Travel Guide to the Uni­verse which car­ried the caveat to our small blue planet, advis­ing against any direct con­tact when vis­it­ing, because of our unevolved and prim­i­tive nature. They missed that bit and landed their space craft in the cen­tre of a big city, expect­ing to be warmly wel­comed by the friendly res­i­dents of our world.

Imag­ine the many sur­prises in store for these space vis­i­tors as they dis­cov­ered our planet was not uni­fied, we still believed we were the only species in the uni­verse, cre­ated by an invis­i­ble, yet all see­ing, all know­ing space god, fight­ing each other for land and oil and reli­gious dif­fer­ences. Oh, how they would laugh and mock us, see­ing us as no more than insects scur­ry­ing around in the dirt.

They wouldn’t be too far off in their brief assess­ment of our world.

I keep com­ing back to the word “prim­i­tive”, because it truly applies. Our knowl­edge of the uni­verse, of our world and our­selves is so blink­ered, nar­row and incom­plete and yet we exist in a giant state of total denial. We have no col­lec­tive self aware­ness of this fact and most would scorn me for me sug­gest­ing it.

Some­times the bit­ter truth hurts.

If we want to have any hope of sur­viv­ing what lies ahead for us as a species, the start­ing point needs to be a giant col­lec­tive real­i­sa­tion of just how imma­ture we are as race, and that we con­tinue to evolve both bio­log­i­cally and socially.

Fol­low­ing that first real­i­sa­tion, must come another big real­i­sa­tion, that our knowl­edge of uni­verse is minus­cule and we know next to noth­ing about the true nature of mat­ter, space and time.

If we ever did truly under­stand the true nature of mat­ter, space and time, then most likely we could manip­u­late all three and make them bend to our will with ease.

We are eons from that point, but that doesn’t make it out of the realm of pos­si­bil­ity, it just depends upon how long we last as a species.

I’ll give you an easy exam­ple of what I am talk­ing about; the Large Hadron Col­lider (LHC) in Switzer­land, which cost a gazil­lion dol­lars (or pounds or euros, or what­ever cur­rency you pre­fer) and is the largest sci­en­tific exper­i­ment ever con­structed, is try­ing to find an invis­i­ble par­ti­cle which the­o­ret­i­cally gives mass to matter.

If that’s gob­bly­gook, I’ll try to explain it, though many of these ideas often feel unex­plain­able to our tiny, meat com­puter brains.

Our under­stand­ing of sub­atomic the­ory is so (and here’s that word again), prim­i­tive, that we can’t see what gives mass to mat­ter, because at the micro­scopic lev­els we can phys­i­cally observe, most of the struc­ture of an atom con­sists of empty space. Sci­en­tists the­o­rise that there must be addi­tional, invis­i­ble par­ti­cles that are part of the sub­atomic archi­tec­ture which give mat­ter mass. I hope I am get­ting this right, I am not an actual physi­cist, but I do play the home game a lot.

To me, this seems like quite fun­da­men­tal stuff that we are only guess­ing at, schol­arly straws at which we can only merely gen­tly grasp.

We are a long way away from any deep, mean­ing­ful under­stand­ing of any­thing big or important.

We still have no idea of the true ori­gin of our uni­verse. Again, we can and do only guess and then only to a point. Most the­o­ries start at some incom­pre­hen­si­ble sin­gu­lar­ity that some­how erupted into the Big Bang and many only start one sec­ond after the Big Bang happened.

I’m not deny­ing the Big Bang, on the con­trary, there is plenty of evi­dence to sup­port it as a the­ory, but many the­o­ries are incom­plete, or depend upon things like cos­mic infla­tion and expand­ing the­ory to fill in their quite con­sid­er­able gaps.

The term “sin­gu­lar­ity” is thrown around quite a bit in sci­ence and yet to me, it seems to mean some­thing that can’t be explained, or under­stood, so let’s just set it aside and take it as read that it exists and is a point on which we can build spec­u­la­tive theories.

Take Black Holes, which are pretty much the­o­ret­i­cal mind­fucks anyway.

There is a phys­i­cal point to a Black Hole that sci­en­tists refer to as the sin­gu­lar­ity, where all that is known about time, space and mat­ter doesn’t apply. Its just an easy way to admit our igno­rance in a schol­arly way.

The same is true for the the­ory sur­round­ing the day when our com­put­ers become smarter than we are and can autonomously design and con­struct ever smarter and bet­ter machines than them­selves. The­o­rists refer to this as the sin­gu­lar­ity as well because they don’t know what the impact will be on our world. Unless you’re James Cameron and you can envis­age a Skynet like com­puter decid­ing we are bad for the planet and seek­ing to wipe us off the face of the earth.

Wouldn’t it be pru­dent to bet­ter our­selves as a species and a race, so when that day arrives, the machines see us more of a ben­e­fit wor­thy of keep­ing around and allow­ing to flourish?

I’m just sayin’…

Per­haps we need to label more things that we don’t get with the word “sin­gu­lar­ity” and increase its com­mon usage and under­stand­ing. For exam­ple, when men col­lec­tively com­plain that they don’t under­stand a woman’s mind, instead of labelling it a mys­tery, you could say its a singularity.

Or these kids today, they are a total sin­gu­lar­ity to me. You get the idea.

Let’s take reli­gion. No, seri­ously, let’s take it some­where and dump it and leave it in the past, where it belongs.

Reli­gion is a prime exam­ple of our prim­i­tive nature that we des­per­ately cling to like a com­fort blan­ket. Reli­gion is a prim­i­tive way of deal­ing with sin­gu­lar­i­ties, by fill­ing in the blanks in our rudi­men­tary knowl­edge of the uni­verse by con­sign­ing every­thing we don’t under­stand to a benevolent/vengeful space god.

Reli­gion is the epit­ome of our prim­i­tive­ness, it is the best exam­ple of how unde­vel­oped we are, because we still allow it to colour how we treat each other and dic­tate our moral code.

When we finally tran­scend reli­gion, as we need to do if we want any hope for a bet­ter future for our species, we will need to base our moral code on more human­ist ideals.

I try to be a good per­son, not because I want or hope for a bet­ter place in the after­life, but because being good and doing good is some­thing that mat­ters to me. I care about my fel­low man and woman. We all need to find that spirit of kind­ness in our own hearts, from a gen­uine belief in the bet­ter­ment of our world.

What we don’t need to do is base our moral­ity on the fear of a non-existent god who will pun­ish us for our bad deeds.

Mur­der is wrong, not because it is in the Ten Com­mand­ments, but because it is immoral to unjustly take another’s life. We should under­stand that at an innate level, in our bones we should all know that killing is wrong.

And we do all know that, but we find ever more cre­ative ways to jus­tify killing on an indus­trial scale, all over the place. We kill with weapons just as much as we kill with our own self­ish­ness and greed. There should be enough of every­thing to go around for every­one, no one should starve or lack fresh, clean drink­ing water, yet we all know that is not the case.

We don’t view the world as one big extended fam­ily, we high­light our dif­fer­ences, rather than stress­ing our sim­i­lar­i­ties. Its actu­ally amaz­ing if you think of what we all on this planet have in com­mon, yet you never hear any­one talk about it.

We all want a bet­ter world, the dif­fer­ences lie in how we all think we get there.

We need to move to a post-tribal mind­set, we need to view things glob­ally, rather than locally.

We need to care more about what’s hap­pen­ing to every­one, not just the peo­ple who are exactly like us.

We need to move to a point beyond reli­gion, where sci­ence explains as much as it can, while actively pur­su­ing answers to the things that remain unknown.

We need to put indi­vid­u­als first and agree at every level that we are all truly equal on this earth.

We need to act respon­si­bly and think in terms, not of years or decades, but mil­len­nia, because if we want to have any hope of sur­viv­ing, we need to be that for­ward thinking.

I know I’ve been knock­ing us for being prim­i­tive, but I don’t want to take away any of our already con­sid­er­able achieve­ments. We’ve worked out some impres­sive things, but we’ve only really scratched the sur­face of what there is to be known in the uni­verse. I’m glad I have a microwave oven and flat screen tv, but we can go so much fur­ther and at an expo­nen­tial rate.

I dream of a time in a time in a few thou­sand years, where we are the mas­ters of all time, space and mat­ter, where all the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse are finally revealed and under­stood by one and all.

I like to think of the many devel­op­ments I’ve seen in my short lifes­pan, and how many more I will see in my remain­ing years.

I’ve joked before that they will dis­cover the key to eter­nal youth and longevity the day after I die. But in the back of my mind is the tiny hope that I will find a way to cheat death, even if it is only in machine form, so my con­scious­ness can carry on learn­ing about and observ­ing the human con­di­tion. Our best days still lie ahead of us and it dri­ves me nuts that I won’t be here to see it all.

Hey. Remem­ber me?

I used to be a some­time blog­ger who some­times blogged here, some­times, but I haven’t posted did­dly in nearly 2 months.

Go me.

The usual non-excuse, excuses apply. I’ve got no good rea­son for doing so lit­tle here, except that I am eas­ily dis­tracted by shiny things.

Appar­ently, being attracted to shiny things is hard­wired into our DNA, and is com­mon to many crea­tures, not just us. Evo­lu­tion favoured off­spring that under­stood shiny usu­ally meant fresh drink­ing water. If you could find the fresh water, you could have a healthy drink and live long enough to pass on your water dis­cov­ery skills to the next generation.

My water comes out of a plas­tic bot­tle (oh the shame) or the tap, so I have no real need to be drawn in by shiny things. Damn you evolution.

I am digress­ing like a moth­er­fucker now.

I’ve toyed with shut­ting my web­site down in the past, but I don’t really want to; I like hav­ing a site where I can spew and vent when I feel like it. I just don’t feel like it very often.

Decem­ber and Jan­u­ary are shitty months for me any­way, what with xmas and the anniver­sary of my mother’s untimely demise and my birth­day all around the same time, I’d really rather just hiber­nate until Feb­ru­ary. I’m not sure how that would work, exactly, but fat­ten­ing up for a long nap is some­thing I think I could really handle.

There are cou­ple of per­sonal mile­stones com­ing up in 2011 that I am look­ing for­ward to already: my 20th anniver­sary of mov­ing to Lon­don and my 30th anniver­sary of smok­ing weed every day. I look for­ward to reflect­ing on both of those things in the future.

Espe­cially the 30th anniver­sary of smok­ing dope every day, because once that passes, I’ll be able to say things like “as some­one who has smoked cannabis every day for over 30 years…” blah, blah, blah. I can feel the smug self-satisfaction com­ing on already.

They still lie to us about weed on a reg­u­lar basis, so isn’t it nice to know your old uncle hippy is here to tell you noth­ing but the truth about it?

Weed is why I am still around, its saved my life in count­less ways on count­less occa­sions. That shit should be legal for adults to pos­sess and con­sume and in some cases its con­sump­tion should be mandatory.

I haven’t given up on com­mon sense pre­vail­ing, but I cling to com­mon sense and truth the way a baby clings to its favourite com­fort blan­ket. If you try to take it away from me, I just might cry and wail.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Yes­ter­day, leg­is­la­tors in the US state of Cal­i­for­nia took the first real step towards a fully legalised, reg­u­lated and taxed cannabis mar­ket. Ear­lier this week, the US state of New Jer­sey legalised cannabis for med­ical use.

All over Amer­ica, atti­tudes and laws are chang­ing and chang­ing fast.

What are we doing wrong here in the United Kingdom?

Lots, by the look of it. How is it pos­si­ble that we are falling behind Amer­ica on this very impor­tant issue?

A few years ago, the sit­u­a­tion was reversed. The atti­tude here to weed was relax­ing, Tony Blair and David Blun­kett down­graded cannabis to Class C, mak­ing pos­ses­sion a very minor offence. In Amer­ica, so much as a seed or a used hash pipe was enough in most states to get you a lengthy, manda­tory prison sentence.

Cannabis didn’t remain Class C for long, as Gor­don Brown asked the ACMD to review its sta­tus. The ACMD did just that, twice and rec­om­mended that it remain in Class C. That was unac­cept­able to our very des­per­ate and weak, make-believe Prime Min­is­ter and he pushed ahead with restor­ing cannabis to to Class B. Class B increased penal­ties for pos­ses­sion, but had no effect on pro­duc­tion or dis­tri­b­u­tion, the penal­ties are the same for either clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Gor­don wanted to send a “strong mes­sage” that cannabis was a “dan­ger­ous, deadly drug”.

Now, you can ask any teenager if cannabis is lethal and once they stop laugh­ing, they will set you straight. Cannabis is in no way lethal, but our cur­rent gov­ern­ment and rul­ing party don’t have a prob­lem lying to the gen­eral pub­lic about any­thing. These are the same shit­bags that invaded Iraq on the basis of utter fab­ri­ca­tion, so a lit­tle white lie about weed won’t cause any issues with their consciences.

Well, I can tell you right now, its caus­ing major issues with mine!

Amer­ica is mov­ing apace to legalise weed. This is a huge shift in atti­tude and approach from their pre­vi­ous pol­icy of “just say no” and the war on drugs. Its seismic!

Amer­ica is the most liti­gious coun­try in the world, if there were any risks to cannabis, some­one would be get­ting sued for dam­ages, whether its the gov­ern­ment for allow­ing it or the peo­ple who pro­vide it. Amer­ica has accepted that cannabis is not a bad thing, but a ben­e­fi­cial prod­uct that can help mil­lions medically.

C. Everett Koop, for­mer Sur­geon Gen­eral of the United States declared that cannabis was the “most ther­a­peu­ti­cally ben­e­fi­cial sub­stance known to man” years ago, but it is only now that Amer­ica is accept­ing his assess­ment. At least they got there in the end.

We are still so far away from tak­ing a com­mon sense approach that I’m not sure what to do. Gor­don Brown, in his igno­rance and desire to appear strong on drugs, has set the cause back at least a decade. Its time we regain some of our lost ground.

Its not just Amer­ica, many coun­tries have relaxed their drug poli­cies to reflect com­mon sense, the most recent being the Czech Repub­lic. How could the UK be lag­ging behind them?

We’re lag­ging behind almost everyone.

I want to change that. I am going to change that.

I just don’t know how yet.

Every jour­ney starts with a first step and this is mine. My goal for 2010 is to com­bat the igno­rance and stu­pid­ity that is UK drug pol­icy. Its time for all decent, upstand­ing, oth­er­wise law abid­ing res­i­dents of this fine coun­try to stand up and demand that they are not crim­i­nalised for enjoy­ing a smoke.

We can fight the lies, we can fight the igno­rance. We can fight, fight fight until we get what we want, which is a legalised, reg­u­lated and taxed cannabis mar­ket. The time is now!

A year from now, we will be closer to our goal.You have my word on it.

Mar­tin Luther King, the famous and revered Amer­i­can civil rights activist once said, “…there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advo­cate obey­ing just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral respon­si­bil­ity to obey just laws. Con­versely, one has a moral respon­si­bil­ity to dis­obey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augus­tine that, “an unjust law is no law at all.””

As part of my never-ending quest to seek noth­ing but the truth, I’ve decided to pro­vide the only gen­uinely hon­est review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fuck­ing sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nick­name is pathet­i­cally lame.

The decade started with the Mil­len­nium, which was sup­posed to be the biggest cel­e­bra­tion of all time. I spent the night in cen­tral Lon­don, on the River Thames, broad­cast­ing live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broad­cast tent near Lam­beth Bridge, block­ing people’s views of the fire­works and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major dis­ap­point­ment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spec­tac­u­lar and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to wit­ness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, col­lec­tive, “is that really it?” in my life.

Lon­don crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Mil­len­nium was no excep­tion. As the clock struck mid­night and I was trans­mit­ting live on behalf of four dif­fer­ent for­eign broad­cast­ers, some­one unplugged our gen­er­a­tor cable and every­thing went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the tech­ni­cians man­aged to get it recon­nected and it all worked, though the cables were cov­ered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleas­ant for the engi­neer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expen­sive TV gear. I can remem­ber smack­ing peo­ples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fire­works began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a pecu­liar glitch in some older com­put­ers that pre­vented it for han­dling 4-digit years, mean­ing some unpatched com­put­ers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the tele­phone net­work to col­lapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets fly­ing overhead.

It didn’t hap­pen, noth­ing hap­pened, cri­sis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were cri­sis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the elec­tion and became the most pow­er­ful sub-normally intel­li­gent per­son in his­tory. His pres­i­dency dom­i­nated the decade and his poli­cies made the world a much shit­tier place.

Think for a sec­ond, if Al Gore had claimed the pres­i­dency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Prob­a­bly not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush pres­i­dency was built on the foun­da­tion of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire econ­omy melted down to near col­lapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stu­pid, his advi­sors no smarter. They dug one stu­pid hole after another, each a lit­tle deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th Sep­tem­ber 2001 took place, you couldn’t imag­ine a worse com­man­der and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your num­ber one choice.

9/11 changed every­thing, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin tow­ers come crash­ing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remem­ber when the World Trade Cen­tre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the obser­va­tion deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to dupli­cate again today with­out a helicopter.

We were dev­as­tated by those attacks, fiendishly sim­ple, yet exe­cuted to max­i­mum effect. I remem­ber think­ing that this was the begin­ning of the end of west­ern civil­i­sa­tion and soon we would all be crawl­ing through noth­ing but rub­ble, drink­ing brack­ish water from pud­dles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a life­time ter­ror strike from a group whose suc­cess exceeded even their own expec­ta­tions. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so rad­i­cally as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keep­ing us secure became the num­ber one pri­or­ity, the cost being a dra­matic reduc­tion in our lib­erty and per­sonal free­doms. Any extreme, rad­i­cal action taken by a gov­ern­ment could and would be jus­ti­fied by tag­ging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to mon­i­tor all tele­phone calls and email mes­sages? No problem.

Do you need my bank­ing and credit his­tory before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all sim­ply adapted to these new real­i­ties, we made hardly a peep as our civil lib­er­ties were sys­tem­at­i­cally stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in Lon­don you prac­ti­cally can’t even take a pho­to­graph in a pub­lic place with­out the police swoop­ing down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scop­ing out another attack.

Think that’s good for busi­ness and tourism? Think again?

Ter­ror is not the only thing that’s been scar­ing us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any gov­ern­ment declar­ing war on cli­mate change, even though its prob­a­bly more of a threat to more peo­ple than ter­ror­ism could ever be.

The effects of cli­mate change are appar­ent to any­one who can be both­ered to look, yet there are peo­ple out there in the world who try to deny this inevitabil­ity. If you tried to deny the threat of ter­ror, you would be labelled a trai­tor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its prob­a­bly too late to slow down cli­mate change because we pissed away the last decade argu­ing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copen­hagen Cli­mate Sum­mit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, espe­cially the two major con­flicts insti­gated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was jus­ti­fied with false pre­tences and bla­tant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intel­li­gence avail­able to our lead­ers. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of non­sense any way.

I can remem­ber being the only idiot in the world who thought that Amer­ica and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I gen­uinely believed they had no grounds to ini­ti­ate a con­flict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launch­ing that ille­gal and point­less war.

George W (for War Crim­i­nal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sit­ting in prison cells in The Hague, await­ing their tri­als for crimes against human­ity, but no one has the fuck­ing balls to send them both there. The Inter­na­tional Court should have charged them already, even if extra­di­tion would never hap­pen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many inno­cent lives have been lost in that point­less war? Iraq was far from per­fect before the “allies” invaded, but the elec­tric­ity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an edu­cated, func­tional mid­dle class.

I’m not a Sad­dam Hus­sein apol­o­gist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repres­sive, iron fisted, unpleas­ant and vicious. But so what? Lots of coun­tries are lead by shit­bags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid rea­son for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Sad­dam Hus­sein got strung up in a hastily organ­ised hang­ing. There’s mobile phone video of it on the inter­net, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undig­ni­fied end for an odi­ous, hor­ri­ble man. Though back in the 1970s, Sad­dam was friendly with Amer­ica and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a dif­fer­ent shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the ter­ror bases and train­ing camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama some­thing or other.

They had the chance to cap­ture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the bor­der area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The prob­lem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fight­ing the Tal­iban. Big coun­tries like Amer­ica are crappy at fight­ing insur­gen­cies and guer­rilla wars, see Viet­nam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil con­flict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a law­less basket-case of a nation, with a cor­rupt, inef­fec­tual gov­ern­ment at its cen­tre and pow­er­ful war lords scat­tered through­out the country.

Pres­i­dent Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is end­ing with him announc­ing fur­ther deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speak­ing of America’s first black pres­i­dent, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stu­pid­ity, mis­takes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s poli­cies or not, hav­ing a mixed race pres­i­dent in Amer­ica is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my life­time, and like most peo­ple I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3–7 years, when he’s fin­ished and I’ll have enough infor­ma­tion to form an opin­ion. Clearly, I wasn’t a vot­ing mem­ber of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Per­son­ally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my par­ents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered mid­dle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diag­nosed with a stu­pid ill­ness and I had a sus­tained period of unem­ploy­ment while I was between jobs.

The ill­ness, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, is allegedly under con­trol and I did man­age to secure gain­ful employ­ment, for which I am very thank­ful, but nei­ther period was par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant for me.

The progress of tech­nol­ogy is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned cur­rently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the lat­est a 27” beast with a quad-core proces­sor that is light­en­ing fast, its like hav­ing a styl­ish super­com­puter parked on my desk.

By far, the most amaz­ing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gad­get of unri­valled beauty, power and use­ful­ness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s rev­o­lu­tionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imag­ined and its abil­i­ties just keep grow­ing with every app I install.

Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism came of age in the noughties, with web­sites sim­i­lar to this one spring­ing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are mil­lions of them.

Blog­ging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago dur­ing my dark and depress­ing period of unemployment.

Blog­ging gave me some­thing to do, some­thing to focus on, some­thing to make me feel like I was still a func­tion­ing mem­ber of soci­ety. I had a way to con­tribute, a way to par­tic­i­pate. Some­how, I still mat­tered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blog­ging may have saved my life. I would have con­tin­ued to sink deeper had I not dis­cov­ered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

With­out an audi­ence, blog­ging is a bit point­less and while I am still not and will prob­a­bly never be main­stream, I’ve had a level of sup­port and inter­est that still astounds me. I’m thank­ful for every vis­i­tor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

With­out all of you, I’d just be some guy writ­ing long­winded essays for my own amuse­ment. Ok, even with you all around, that state­ment is true, but its still bet­ter for hav­ing you all here.

Thanks very much for stop­ping by, you’ll always find a warm wel­come here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the hol­i­day sea­son. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Mag­a­zine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 min­utes long, so enjoy!

This video is extremely cool, it starts in Tibet and zooms out to the fur­thest reaches of the known uni­verse, putting it all into tem­po­ral and spa­tial rela­tion to Earth.

Play it in HD, play it full screen, sit back and mar­vel at how small you are and how lit­tle we really know about everything.

Have you ever won­dered where you come from and how you got here?

I have and con­tinue to do so, con­stantly. Some­times it dri­ves me kind of nuts.

And I don’t mean me, per­son­ally. I know how I got here. When a man loves a woman, they do the mummy and daddy dance and nine months later there you are, or a lit­tle less than eight months in my case.

No, I’m talk­ing about more than just me, or you or all of us or even our lit­tle blue planet, but all of exis­tence, the known uni­verse and beyond.

Not that much of the uni­verse is really known, very lit­tle in actual fact. Most of what we think we know about what’s out there in deep space is the­ory accepted as fact.

Did you know that we only found the first planet out­side of our solar sys­tem in 1995 and to date, only 407 of them have been iden­ti­fied? Wikipedia knows all.

Don’t you find that sur­pris­ing, when you’ve prob­a­bly been taught that the uni­verse is full of bil­lions of plan­ets. Again, the­ory accepted as fact. Remem­ber, its only 15 years ago since we found that first planet, prob­a­bly about as long as mobile phones have been in wide usage. That’s not very long at all.

The point is, they are using a the­ory to map out these plan­ets. They aren’t really map­ping them so much as pre­dict­ing and describ­ing what and where they think they are, based on sci­en­tific sup­po­si­tion. They haven’t seen a sin­gle one of them through a tele­scope, because one of such power is yet to exist.

I’m not try­ing to call any of this into ques­tion and one day I expect they will prove they’ve found plan­ets out­side of our solar sys­tem, but I am using it to illus­trate some­thing much more fun­da­men­tal; our knowl­edge of exis­tence is infin­i­tes­i­mally small and as a race we remain in our infancy.

If you think the uni­verse was cre­ated by some all know­ing, all pow­er­ful god and you’re ok with that, this piece prob­a­bly isn’t for you.

I wish it was that sim­ple, to just have faith that a high power put me here for some pur­pose, but I can’t buy into any of that.

If it works for you, great. may your life always be just as free of com­plex­ity and curios­ity. I cer­tainly wish mine was sometimes.

But its not, and I try to move beyond my ques­tions by accept­ing that these answers are unob­tain­able, by me, by you, by every human being who has ever existed or will exist and asked these questions.

Intel­lec­tu­ally I under­stand that these ques­tions won’t ever be answered to my sat­is­fac­tion, but I can’t help con­tin­u­ing to crave the answers. Our knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence is far too lim­ited and our brains far too tiny and use­less to come up with any plau­si­ble expla­na­tions for any­thing that matters.

Its not fair that we can ask these ques­tions, but are unable to ever know the answers. And that’s my pre­dic­tion, that for as long as our species exists, peo­ple will con­tinue to seek answers that will never, ever come.

Think about that, no mat­ter how many gen­er­a­tions fol­low ours, for how­ever many mil­len­nia, we won’t get the answers the most fun­da­men­tal ques­tions con­cern­ing the ori­gins and pur­pose of all of existence.

Now I am try­ing to move beyond accep­tance of these things I know I won’t know, to an even more basic view: All of exis­tence is utterly pointless.

I’ve believed for a long time that life is point­less, but then I see most things in a bleak and dreary light, so this shouldn’t sur­prise you. We go about our brief, tiny lives, flit­ting from here to there like insects, but unlike insects we fill our heads with thoughts of grandiose self-importance.

We think because we build, cre­ate, destroy, repro­duce, kill and dom­i­nate our domain that we’re so impor­tant, so wor­thy of every­thing we take for granted that we’ve missed just how insignif­i­cant we are in the scheme of the universe.

And if it turns out we are the most advanced liv­ing crea­tures in the uni­verse, then what does it say about that universe?

That it is just as insignif­i­cant as we are.

The uni­verse is big­ger and more diverse than any­one can ever imag­ine. I don’t think I can come up with a frac­tion small enough to express how much we know about it, but I can try.

We know this much:

1/100000000000000000000000000000000000000000^{100000000000000000000000000}

Even if you don’t under­stand frac­tions, or expo­nen­tial num­bers, I’m sure you can see that is an extremely small num­ber. It a chip off a fleck of dust above zero.

That’s how much we know.

We think we know a lot more.

By choos­ing to believe in the utter point­less­ness of all exis­tence and that any deeper under­stand­ing of all that exists is impos­si­ble with­out accept­ing the unprove­able, can be quite liberating.

If we let go of the unknow­able, then we can con­cen­trate on the things that mat­ter to us per­son­ally. Sure, you still have to play ball with soci­ety, pay your taxes, eat your veg­eta­bles and brush your teeth, but you’re doing all those things for your­self, with­out won­der­ing why you’re here.

Oh, who am I kid­ding, I’ll obsess about this crap for­ever, utter point­less­ness or not.

Nearly 5 years ago to this very day, I wrote a lit­tle some­thing here on the hippy that is one of my favourite posts ever. Back when I had a top-ten favourite list, this par­tic­u­lar post was fea­tured prominently.

Its called ASS BOMBS

Don’t worry if you can’t be both­ered to re-read it right now, I’ll sum­marise it for you: I spec­u­lated on the lengths future ter­ror­ists would have to go through to sneak explo­sive devices on to planes and the addi­tional secu­rity mea­sures that would have to be put in place to main­tain safety. This wasn’t long Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes.

I the­o­rised that a ter­ror­ists’ rec­tum would become a com­part­ment for hid­ing plas­tique and air­port secu­rity screen­ers would have to play proc­tol­o­gist to make sure all air trav­ellers were not car­ry­ing any­thing up their bot­toms. Instead of “take off your shoes and remove all metal objects”, their instruc­tion would be to “bend over and spread those cheeks.”

It would cer­tainly put fly­ing into a brand new per­spec­tive. Mak­ing sure you wear clean socks with­out any holes wouldn’t seem so impor­tant any more.

It turns out, I was par­tially right. An alleged Al Qaeda fanatic tried to blow up offi­cials at a meet­ing in Saudi Ara­bia with some TNT shoved up his ass, only the idiot left it stuck up there when it det­o­nated and it only killed the bomber. You’re sup­posed to take it out of your bot­tom before it goes off.

You can read the report here in The Sun news­pa­per, under their clever head­line; “Sui­cide Bum­mer”. Did you see what they did there?

Its unlikely as fuck that Al Qaeda visit my web­site, so they prob­a­bly worked this one out on their own. Now that this fright­en­ing and icky tech­nique is out there, how long before air­ports imple­ment new secu­rity pro­ce­dures? Not long is my guess.

Still, there’s an upside. If you’re going to have to dis­play your ring­piece in air­ports for all to see, anal bleach­ing is set to be the next big growth indus­try. They’ll even have a new slo­gan: “Anal Bleaching…its not just for porn stars any more!”

The pow­ers that be haven’t really sold us on the com­ing cli­mate apocalypse.

I’m not deny­ing its hap­pen­ing, I can clearly see its effects reg­u­larly on a world wide scale, I just don’t think our politi­cians and sci­en­tists have explained it to us very well.

“Cli­mate change” has a PR prob­lem, but don’t worry, I’m going to attempt to offer a sim­ple solution.

The planet Earth itself is not threatened.

There, I said it.

Cli­mate change is not going to destroy this rock we’re stuck on, regard­less of the atmos­pheric tem­per­a­ture, Earth will keep spin­ning through space for a very long time, prob­a­bly until our Sun turns into a Red Giant or Super­nova or what­ever it is stars do and that’s mil­lions of years away.

Cli­mate change might kill every liv­ing thing on the planet, or at least most of them. That should be a strong sell­ing point, only we don’t really care that much about liv­ing things other than humans.

And it seems we don’t care that much about all the humans any­way, only some of them. You know, the ones that look like us, dress like us, talk like us, ummmm, us.

Not them.

But most of all, we care about our­selves. Self-preservation is some­thing we all seem to have in common.

Tack­ling “cli­mate change” has to be about sav­ing one’s self from the com­ing Armaged­don. Fear is always an excel­lent sell­ing point.

Slow­ing cli­mate change will save your life and the lives of every­one you care about. Not slow­ing cli­mate change will prob­a­bly kill us all.

“All of us” includes you. You might really die from the effects of a warmer planet.

If the global tem­per­a­ture goes up, more peo­ple will die from heat-related ill­nesses. Remem­ber all those old French folks who died in the heat­wave in 2003? There’d be a lot more deaths like that.

Got air con­di­tion­ing? If the energy sup­pli­ers can’t keep up with demand, it won’t mat­ter and you’ll still fry.

Large, cur­rently heav­ily pop­u­lated areas of the planet will become unin­hab­it­able, poten­tially dis­plac­ing mil­lions. All those refugees will have to go some­where, which will increase crowd­ing in more tem­per­ate regions while stretch­ing dwin­dling resources beyond capac­ity. Life will become more dif­fi­cult to sustain.

Trop­i­cal dis­eases with­out known cures will spread out from the cur­rent hot zones to increas­ingly wider areas and even more peo­ple will die.

Food pro­duc­tion will be dis­rupted, prompt­ing star­va­tion on an unimag­in­able scale.

I’ve read that Lon­don has only a 48 hour food sup­ply at any given time, because of the way super­mar­ket stock is man­aged. Food prac­ti­cally goes from lorry to shelf with­out sit­ting long in the back room. Its a deliver-as-required system.

If your local super­mar­kets ran dry, how would you feed your­self and your fam­ily? Even if you stock­pile long-life meals, they’ll run out even­tu­ally. Think you can get a farm up and run­ning before it does? Assum­ing there’s still enough water and the sun’s not so hot that it fries your plants and live­stock before you have the chance to take the first tasty bite.

Unre­strained cli­mate change means death for you.

Its sim­ple math really, if we don’t do some­thing soon, we’re all gonna end up dead.

It won’t be the end of the planet, or the end of the world, but it will be the end of us.

And that includes you.

Sud­denly, those low energy light­bulbs don’t seem so bad and sep­a­rat­ing your recy­clable goods doesn’t seem like such a chore, does it?

A bunch of world lead­ers are head­ing to Copen­hagen this Decem­ber to go through the motions of a Cli­mate Change sum­mit. Per­haps, if they adopted the fol­low­ing slo­gan, peo­ple might finally start pay­ing attention:

Cli­mate Change = Death

And once everyone’s pay­ing atten­tion, per­haps we all can start tak­ing the right steps to slow down cli­mate change. The life you save just might be your own.

The National Health Ser­vice (NHS) here in the UK has been in the fir­ing line this week as Amer­i­cans “debate” over­haul­ing their health­care sys­tem in an attempt to extend access to their 50 mil­lion res­i­dents who have absolutely no cover or access to care.

Amer­i­cans are being led to believe that the free health­care avail­able to all of us in the UK is no good. This is so far from the truth that it would be funny, except for the fact that people’s lives hang in the balance.

The UK has a much higher life expectancy than the USA. Check your sta­tis­tics and see that I’m not lying. The UK also spends less on health­care per per­son than they do in the states, yet they yield bet­ter results.

Go fig­ure!

The Amer­i­can health­care sys­tem is run like a for-profit busi­ness. Think about that, some­one prof­its from your ill­ness and the per­cent­ages of profit are obscenely high.

Insur­ance com­pa­nies, drug com­pa­nies pri­vate hos­pi­tals, pri­vate doc­tors are all in the game to make money from your mis­ery. That can’t be right, can it? Every test ordered that you don’t really need, every over-prescription is money in the bank for someone.

Just ask Michael Jack­son if pri­vate health­care on demand is a good thing. Oh wait, you can’t because it killed him.

In Amer­ica, health­care is seen as a priv­i­lege, not a basic human right. Should one only be enti­tled to health­care on the basis of qual­i­fy­ing for insur­ance, rather than qual­i­fy­ing for need? Shouldn’t every­one have access to healthcare?

Of course they should!

Some of the scenes I’ve caught on tele­vi­sion, of the so-called town-hall meet­ings have been very amus­ing, well amus­ing in as much as the igno­rance fuelled anger is sim­ply surreal.

It seems to me, that the loud­est voices at these town-hall meet­ings are com­ing out of the mouths of peo­ple with the least infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject. These sad, twisted, igno­rant peo­ple have an unjus­ti­fi­able hatred of Pres­i­dent Obama that is prob­a­bly rooted in their inher­ent racism rather than any actual dis­like of a new health­care system.

All you need to do is lis­ten to what they say, their buzz words, like “social­ism” and “this isn’t the Amer­ica I know” to under­stand just how mis­guided and ill-informed these folks are on the subject.

Ok, any subject.

At the heart of all of this is FOX News, the biased and unfair pseudo news net­work owned by Rupert Mur­doch. FOX News pro­vide the stilted talk­ing points and their legions of view­ers turn up at town-hall meet­ings, par­rot­ing the same lame shit.

I can’t say I’ve looked into it, but I am guess­ing a wealthy guy like Mur­doch must have busi­ness inter­ests out­side the media world, say per­haps insur­ance or drug com­pa­nies. In other words, he may have a vested finan­cial inter­est in how this debate plays out. And if not him, then some of his rich robber-baron mates have got invest­ments in the med­ical field. There’s a lot of profit to be protected.

Its funny how SKY News, the sis­ter sta­tion of FOX News, under the News­Corp cor­po­rate umbrella is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent tack here, right­eously defend­ing the NHS against the FOX News inspired attacks. Does one hand not know what the other is doing? Or is SKY sim­ply pan­der­ing to their UK-based subscribers?

I think we both know the answer to that one.

I’m in a fairly unique posi­tion, hav­ing lived con­sid­er­able lengths of time under both health­care sys­tems. Nei­ther the US or UK sys­tems are per­fect, both excel at some things and lack in oth­ers, but over­all, I know which sys­tem I would choose, if I had to…

The NHS all the way!

In the UK, I’ve never had any con­cerns about insur­ance, access to the med­ical sys­tem or being able to afford the costs. I’ve for the most part, had excel­lent care of a world class stan­dard cour­tesy of the NHS.

In Amer­ica I’ve been charged one hun­dred bucks for a wooden tongue depresser — you know what I’m talk­ing about, a wide wooden pop­si­cle stick.

Open your mouth and say “ahhh fuck, you just charged me a Ben­jamin to do that!”

In my world, life is usu­ally quite sim­ple and this unhealthy debate is no dif­fer­ent. What it boils down to is this: “I’ve already got mine, so screw you if you don’t have yours!” It all comes down to com­pas­sion and America’s appar­ent lack of it.

The Chris­t­ian right in Amer­ica preach some­thing known as “com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­vatism”, but sadly they don’t prac­tise it in any mean­ing­ful or tan­gi­ble way. Where’s the com­pas­sion? What would that guy Jesus do?

Jesus would move to the UK, sign on to the dole and get those holes in his hands and feet looked at for free, same for that nasty stab wound in his side.

Uni­ver­sal health­care is an unde­ni­able right, yet 50 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are being denied it. Any com­pas­sion­ate per­son would recog­nise the inequal­ity in the cur­rent sys­tem and want to do all they could to change it.

Where are all the com­pas­sion­ate folks in Amer­ica? Don’t they care about their fel­low man? Maybe if there are any, they could go to those silly town-hall meet­ings and shout down all the igno­rant idiots that are mak­ing Amer­ica look so stupid.

Oh and while I’m at it, lay off the NHS. Ill-informed opin­ion does not make a debate, it just makes you look even more like morons to the rest of the (bet­ter informed) world.