The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘society’ Category

I bet having a recipe as my top post confused a lot of my new visitors and that was the case until I posted this particularly unplanned foray into sharing my thoughts.

This is not a food blog. A recipe is something out of the ordinary. Normal service has now resumed.

As I sit here, typing away, we are around 9 hours from the expected Apple Tablet announcement. Its pretty big news so I expect you’ve already heard all about it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about it too much.

I’ve got 2 predictions, one is an easy one that’s probably true, the other is a long shot.

Prediction one: It will be a premium product with a premium price for early adopters. Yes, I mean it will be very expensive, but will be cheaper in a year.

Prediction two: It will be called ‘iBook”, which used to be the name of one of their best selling laptops. They already own it, so it would be an easy yet inventive choice. I am far less certain of this one and will be pleasantly surprised if I am right. I’ll also brag a lot about it too.

I’ve wanted something like what’s expected today for years. Yes, I will buy one as soon as they are available though I am guessing it will be like the original iPhone, sold is the USA exclusively for 6 months, then launched in the UK. That will be frustrating!

Today isn’t just tablet day. Had my mother still been alive, today would have been her 80th birthday, but she missed it by around 13 months. I miss her, a lot.

At least Apple were nice enough to schedule their announcement on the same date as my mother’s birthday, its a welcome distraction.

So roll on 18:00gmt, when the big show starts in California. I’ll be online, following the announcement live as best I can and I’ll be tweeting my impressions as well. That is, assuming the entire internet doesn’t come crashing down to a screeching halt under the weight of all that Apple Tablet hype.

Oh yes, that’s my last prediction, Twitter is going to crash like Oceanic Air 815 as soon as Steve Jobs takes the stage. Maybe I should just plan on tweeting again tomorrow.

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!

There are only 3 acceptable popular xmas songs, Darlene Love’s “Christmas Baby (Please Come Home)” from the Phil Spector Christmas album, Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and this one, also from the Boss, his cover of “Merry Christmas, Baby!”

Go on, get all funky and festive and check out this recent video of Bruce performing it live on tv:

Weird things happen around the holidays, often unexpected and not always pleasant.

I don’t know what got me on the subject in my head, I was thinking about duck and before I knew it, my crazy brain started remembering weird shit from my childhood.

The duck connection: I am cooking a small three-bird roast for xmas dinner.

For those of you who’ve never heard of such a concoction, it is quite simply, a whole boneless duck, stuffed with a whole boneless turkey, then inside the turkey is an entire, boneless pheasant. Larger versions start with a goose, but I’m not serving enough people to make that sensible.

I’m not sure how the farmers get the birds to grow inside the other birds without bones, but getting the feathers off must be a bitch. I guess it has to do with genetic engineering, by I digress. I want to talk about duck.

When I was very young, an elderly relative lived with us for many years, my Aunt Gertie, short for Gertrude. She lived to be 95, died in the mid 1970s and was part of the foster family that raised my orphaned father.

Yeah, I know, get out the violins.

Aunt Gertie lived in our house for four or five years, until her personal care became too much for my mother. Up to that point, her presence meant we didn’t do very much outside of the house, as she needed fairly constant supervision, even more so when she started falling down frequently.

After my parents took the difficult decision to place Aunt Gertie into a rest home, things changed for us and we had some freedom again. The very first night she was gone, my father took the family out to a fancy restaurant for dinner. This would have been around autumn 1972, so I would have been nearly 9 years old.

Now, here’s the fowl connection, that night in the nice restaurant, I ordered Duck l’Orange for the first time in my life and it was the most amazing thing I’d ever eaten. It was a half duck, still on the bone and the wait staff actually helped me strip the delicious meat from the bone.

Its a fairly vivid memory, and I can still remember the four of us, me, my parents and my younger brother all feeling slightly guilty that we were able to enjoy such a fine meal, only because Gertie was in a care home.

Aunt Gertie lived for several years in that care home, slowly, gradually losing her mind. Up to that point, she was scarily sharp and didn’t miss anything and it was only in the last year or two that she started to become confused about things. She passed away just a couple of weeks before xmas, at the same time my half-brother’s wife was delivering her first child in the same hospital.

The last time I saw Gertie in the hospital was about 10 minutes before I saw my nephew for the first time. Even at the age of nearly twelve, I realised there was a weird connection between new life and death.

Gertie died the next day, two weeks before xmas.

But that wasn’t the only death to darken a family xmas, a year or two before, my father’s foster brother, my Uncle Jack, died unexpectedly on xmas. I was probably around 10 years old.

I always liked Uncle Jack, he was very much an outdoorsman, he liked to fish and hunt, which are the sort of cool things that impress a young lad like me. He died on xmas eve, my father woke up to the news on xmas day.

Again, I have vivid memories of that morning. My brother and I burst downstairs, ready to attack a pile of presents left by santa, with enthusiasm, but our mother’s face told a different story.

We both immediately knew something was wrong before she told us about Uncle Jack. She explained how upset my father was, he had not come out of their bedroom yet. I’m sure it was silly early in the morning, my brother and I were both children and probably didn’t sleep a wink the night before.

It was one of the few times I saw my father with real tears in his eyes. He was a strong, imposing man, think Hemmingway without the booze and it shocked me. My dad wasn’t supposed to cry, ever!

It was a very low key xmas that year.

All of this is reminding me of the scene in the movie Gremlins, when Phoebe Cates character explains why she hates xmas and tells the story of her father dressing up like santa and getting caught in the chimney. They find him still there, dead, a couple weeks later. Talk about a holiday downer, I bet the stench would put you off your dinner.

Last xmas was easily one of the worst of my life, my beloved mother passed away unexpectedly.

I was at work, ready for a long holiday run of nightshifts when I got the bad news. I found out at 6am on xmas eve that she died.

The thing about deaths around the holidays is that it doesn’t just bring down the relatives of the deceased, it has an effect on those around you too. It distracts others away from their enjoyment of the season. My sudden, grieving absence from work had an impact on many people and that upset me even more.

Last year’s xmas was very depressing. That’s an understatement, it was devastating. You get the idea.

When you sit down for your big turkey (or 3 bird roast!) dinner on xmas day, spare a thought for all the people whose holidays have been blighted by unexpected bad news and whose future holidays may be coloured by these events.

More importantly, I sincerely hope its not you and yours who is the recipient of anything untoward. However, if it is you who draws the short draw and catches something unpleasant, know that you’re not alone, it can happen to anyone.

And if it is your turn, just remember that it will get better and I hope you have plenty more festive seasons awaiting you that might in some ways, make up for it.

From everyone here at the northlondonhippy, we wish you nothing but the very best of the holidays.

Oh wait, its just me here on my own, but the sentiment very much remains the same!

The Climate Change Summit opens up in Copenhagen on Monday, where a bunch of world leaders will add to the problem by producing a lot of hot air, but probably no viable solution to this very real problem.

Yep, I believe the climate is changing. I can see it and feel it and have done for a while now. Here in the UK, the winters seem milder and though last summer wasn’t one of the hottest on record, it was hot enough. I’ve seen what’s happening to the polar ice caps, not first hand, but computer graphics aren’t that good, so the footage has to be real.

Is it just a normal cycle? Maybe. Is human activity contributing or accelerating the process? How could it not? We live in a closed ecosystem, our atmosphere is sealed tight against the vacuum of space. The more greenhouse gasses we pump into this sealed bubble, the hotter it will get.

I don’t want to be a hypocrite, I want to do my part to help prevent climate change. I use low energy light bulbs, which aren’t as bright as the old incandescent style. I recycle as much as I can, which is messy and time consuming. And I don’t take unnecessary car journeys, which means riding the bus and tube with unwashed strangers.

I know its not much, but its something. I’d like to do more.

That got me thinking, what more could I do to help slow down climate change? Then it hit me, there’s something we all could do that would have an instant, immediate and measurable effect on the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the environment.

All living things exhale carbon dioxide, or CO2 as its known. Humans are the only living creatures to understand this and to be able to adjust their own output.

I’m proposing that every human being who is physically able, should hold their breath for at least one minute per day. You could do it all in one go, or you can do two 30 second periods. You could even go longer if you like, but I can’t be held liable if you pass out, fall down and hit your head. I only suggested a minute a day.

If everyone held their breath for one minute daily, that would have a huge impact on the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere annually. These things add up quickly and if I were a scientist I could estimate how much CO2 would be saved, but I’m not, so I can’t. So we’ll stick to “a lot.”

Look man, if we don’t do something and pretty goddamn soon, breathing won’t be an issue that most of us will need to worry about any more.

So I’ll be holding my breath, and not just for one minute every day. I’ll be holding it while our leaders meet this month to work out whether they can save the human race. If they do come up with a solution, I’ll certainly be surprised, but I’ll also finally be able to exhale.

You don’t want me to turn blue, do you?

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.

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!