I predict a riot!

"Burmese riot police attack monks"
26th September 2007

Just another example of the unnecessary brutality exerted on peaceful protesters by a bunch of wannabe soldiers. It's events like this that make me wonder just why people join the police force, and try to get onto the Riot Squad. They can and will beat the shit out of anyone who looks at them a bit funny. The thing is, it's happening more and more often. The cops beat the crap out of someone, and claim that they were resisting arrest or being hostile. And the government takes their side too. That's what I don't get. Hell, maybe we should give them something to justify. I think the tables would be turned if everyone turned up at a demonstration armed with petrol bombs and automatic weapons.

Fuck the police.

Sesame Street All-Stars.

Hur hur hur. If only Sesame Street was like this back in the day.

1945, the Brave New World wakes up.

"They knew that the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says 'Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds'. I suppose we all felt that, one way or another."
Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb says these words and wipes a tear from his eye. The Alamogordo experiment marked the beginning of a new era for mankind. The US now had the potential to end millions of lives in one single instant, and so they did.
No, to say that the Brave New World began on the day the US tested the first ever nuclear weapon would be a lie. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima tragedy marked the day when the world suddenly woke up to a bloody start. The definition of political power shifted. No longer could you win a war through intelligence and tactics; instead it was simply a matter of who had the biggest gun.
They call the type of Atom Bomb dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima 'The Fat Man', a name oh so appropriate for such a device. In society, it's the fat man sitting behind his desk who has the potential to decide whether a nation rises or a nation falls. And oh, how Japan fell that day. 110 000 people suddenly ceased to exist in the space of a few seconds. Following that hundreds and thousands of Japanese citizens died from the after effects by the end of 1945.
But the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were more than just acts of war; they were experiments. After the Trinity test in Alamogordo, the military fat cats were interested in seeing what the nuke would do to people. What better way to satisfy their morbid curiosity than to use such a device on their enemies? It worked astoundingly efficiently. No one was really expecting Japan to surrender though. You could say that the Fat Man surpassed all of their expectations. But what kind of world is this when innocent people are used as lab-rats in this morbid experiment? What kind of world is this when we treat our fellow man like a confused animal?
Had the atom bomb never been created, the second world war may have stretched on for decades. In retrospect, the death of thousands helped prevent the death of millions. I think this is what Oppenheimer had in mind when he helped create it. Perhaps he assumed that the US would only use the bomb as a threat? Only he knows.

One thing is for certain though, what little sanity the world had left shattered. A new era of violence came in. One that was only hinted at with the arrival of Industrialisation. While the First World War showed us all what man was capable of doing, 1945 showed us all that man was more than willing to do it. We began to fear what we didn't understand, and later that fear became hate. We fought fire with fire, violence with violence. The latest example is of course the response to 9/11. Thousands of people died during the attack on the WTC, and we felt the need to 'return the favor', this time killing thousands of Iraqi citizens with our bombs. An eye for the eye makes the world blind. Blind to the political machinations that rustle and murmur behind the scenes. Blind to the corruption and the willingness to screw and snort and kill your way to the top. Blind to human nature itself.
This is what separates us from the rest of the animals (for we, too are beasts), we're different from the rest because what we do has nothing to do with instinct. What we do is down to malicious intent, the need to be the best, to have the last laugh. And it is this way of thinking that will end up killing every man, woman and child on this planet. Well, every man, woman and child except those responsible for the whole mess in the first place; the fat cats, the greedy politicians. Can we really call them human? Of course we can. They are the embodiment of human nature.

Peace

'Just Business'

A reminder not to lose your head over the stock market.

And today's thought: 'It takes many men to move a mountain but one to destroy an economy'

Police State 2007

2007 is the age of the Surveillance Camera. Orwell's dream of Big Brother has finally been realized, and I don't mean in the form of a tacky overdone TV program, either.
The use of CCTV to monitor the comings and goings of the public is a particularly heated issue in the UK at the moment. Britain now has hundreds of surveillance cameras operating in each city; each records our every move and there's even one city that has decided to put speakers on the cameras, so that the person monitoring the area can reprimand someone if they commit an offense. This and the ever-increasing police presence in the streets of Britain help us all to remember that we can't go anywhere or do anything without being watched. And that's the whole point; to take away our freedom. When we're not being watched, we feel free to do anything that we want.
That's the only positive thing about crime, I think. At least we used to be able to make a conscious choice of whether or not to commit a crime. Now, with all the police and cameras watching our every step, that choice has been thrown out of the window. And let's be fair, if you decide to mug someone when there's a copper a couple of meters away, then you're an idiot.
Ever notice how the rise in surveillance crept up on us all? During the Post 9/11 era, up until maybe the July bombings in '05, surveillance was never really an issue, and the number of CCTV cameras and armed police was certainly smaller than it is today. Then, all of a sudden, BOOM! There was a massive explosion of CCTV and armed police on the streets.
I have my own theories as to how we didn't notice rise until it was too late. Personally, I think that to some extent the media was manipulated by the government, therefore they didn't report the rise in surveillance technology. Think, when was the last time you heard about CCTV on the BBC? I sure as heck can't remember when.

Along with our privacy it seems that freedom of speech has gone out of the window too. We can't speak out against the government these days for fear of being arrested.
I heard a while back, though I'm not sure if it's true or not, that the government were trying to (or already had) pass a law that prohibited someone for joking about 9/11 or saying that they could understand what the hijackers were trying to do. If that's true, then we're pretty much screwed. A country where we can't disagree with our government is getting closer and closer to Orwell's Europa or if you want to go into a real example, Hitler's Nazi Germany.
One great example is one that I'm sure the majority of you have heard of: that of a Mr. Walter Wolfgang. Mr. Wolfgang is a 90 year old man (88 at the time of the story I'm about to tell you) who was a prisoner in Nazi Germany during the 40s and he's also a peace activist.
Now, in 2005 during the annual Labour Party Conference, our old friend Jack Straw (wink wink, nudge nudge) was in the middle of discussing Iraq. Now, he said, and I quote "We are in Iraq for one reason only: to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation". Now, if you've any sense in you, you'd have done what Walter did next. He shouted "Rubbish!" out at Jack Straw. A perfectly ordinary comment, and one that I think is quite justified.
Bearing in mind that this is an 82 year-old peace activist (and I must underline this point. A PEACE ACTIVIST), Straw's hired chimps pushed and shoved their way to Walter, whereupon they manhandled him out of the room. Also a Mr. Steve Forrest was thrown out of the room because he objected to Mr. Wolfgang's treatment.
But it doesn't stop there. Oh no. Mr Wolfgang, remember our 82 year old peace activist was then arrested and held under Section 44 of the Prevention of Terrorism act which reads like so:
"
Authorisations
(1) An authorisation under this subsection authorises any constable in uniform to stop a vehicle in an area or at a place specified in the authorisation and to search—
(a) the vehicle;

(b) the driver of the vehicle;

(c) a passenger in the vehicle;

(d) anything in or on the vehicle or carried by the driver or a passenger.
"
Now, more interestingly, there is also another part of this act, in section 45 which reads:

"
Exercise of power

(1) The power conferred by an authorisation under section 44(1) or (2)—

(a) may be exercised only for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism, and

(b) may be exercised whether or not the constable has grounds for suspecting the presence of articles of that kind.
"

So basically this enables any officer of the law to stop and search you for no reason at all. It's Section 45,1b which sticks out like a sore thumb. He can stop you for no reason at all. I don't see how this fits in with terrorism.

More on the Terrorism Act later.

So ask yourself this: if the police are willing and authorized to stop and search an 82 year old peace activist, where do their limits lie? I envision them stopping toddlers in the street searching them for bombs, using deadly force on a man just because he 'looked suspicious' (then again, they already did that) or maybe even arresting completely innocent people and deporting them to god-knows-where.
It's closer than you think. The police are given some ridiculous rights, all of which encroach on our freedom of expression and freedom of speech.
I've even heard stories of people arrested for wearing T-Shirts critical of Tony Blair. It's insanity. In essence, what the government wants us to do is to stay home, watch TV and buy things, all while they're telling us that everything is Hunky Dory in the Land of the Magic Roundabout. They're telling us what to think.
'You don't want to be critical of your government! Come, come. We know what's best for you. We know you better than you know yourselves!'

Which brings me onto the next subject in this orgy of insanity and corruption:Bio-Information.
Now, the whole idea of Bio-Information is pretty simple: the government takes our DNA and biological data and adds it all to a big database in the Tower of Death. That way if someone commits a crime, they can easily identify any forensic evidence and compare it with that of the suspect. It actually sounds quite appealing in principle, but there are so many ways that this can go wrong.
The first and foremost is cyber-hacking. We've entered a world controlled by Information Technology, and wherever you have a computer, you'll have someone who tries to hack that computer, more so if the computer belongs to the government. What happens if someone does gain access to this database with all of our personal information on it? Identity theft is not the worst case scenario. Imagine the hacker in question decides to change some of the information, maybe cross a couple of files.
Now picture this; you're sleeping in bed next to your significant other when all of a sudden fifty heavily armed police officers kick the door down and arrest you. Turns out they found evidence at a murder scene which corresponds to some of the data found in your biometric file. You know you didn't do it, but you can't prove otherwise.
And again, it's proof that we are slowly slipping into a police-state, a place where the government knows everything about us. Doesn't anyone else find this slightly disconcerting? The problem is, with these new laws in place, people are afraid to speak up, lest they be arrested. In effect, we're playing right into the government's hands. This is the reason they put these laws here; to keep us scared and to keep us quiet. Already we've seen people arrested for writing critical comments about Blair on internet forums!
We can't stay quiet, this can't go unnoticed. We're slowly slipping into an imitation of Fascism.

Stay aware, stay yourself.

Peace.

Tipper Gore: Promoting Fascism for the Younger Generation?

It's no secret that Tipper Gore, creator of the infamous "Tipper Sticker" isn't particularly loved by the artistic community. Then again, is it any surprise? Her name is shoved on millions of album covers each year because they contain what she calls 'explicit content', the very definition of which changes according to each individual.

So just what IS 'explicit content' by her standards? As with most right-wing Christians these days, it would appear that explicit content is anything that offends their precious moral values, which seem to be so fragile that even sneezing on them would break them, sending Tipper and her minions into a frothed jabber-frenzy about how we're promoting violence, promiscuity and drug addiction to our children, who have been coddled and bubble-wrapped until they're so alienated from modern culture that they can't make it in the real world when they leave home.
One could argue that the Tipper Sticker has now become the new Yellow Star, a-la Nazi Germany era. But instead of the Jewish community bearing the brunt of alienation and hatred, it's Snoop-Doggy-Diddle or Icey-Tea. Book burning has been replaced by Wal-Mart casually slapping a Parental Advisory sticker on the album cover, so that the fundamentalist Christian far-right, gay hating, liberal bashing monkey-people can keep their kids away from it, lest their ears should shatter like they were made out of expensive china.

I think in a world where we have innocent people dying in bloody and highly illegal wars overseas, offending our children (They are our future, dontchaknow) should be the least of our worries. In any case, we're just trying to prevent the inevitable. They're going to come into contact with these things sooner or later, so why not at an early age? At least when they leave home to become real people they're prepared for the real world. And what are they prepared for? The horrors of life.

"I'm a strong believer in the First Amendment," says Mrs. Gore. This is a lie. She's doing all that she can to castrate freedom of speech.

It's not often I say this, but I'm actually somewhat thankful that Bush cheated his way into office. Already, Gore uses her husband's status as a senator to pass these ridiculous legislations that that would have banned the sale of albums with warning labels to anyone younger than 18. Now, think how much more leverage she would have been given if Gore had become president? She could try and pass virtually anything she wanted, making it a bona fide law if it had passed.
What next? It wouldn't surprise me if she tried to pass legislations enabling her to send so-called "controversial" artists to Concentration Camps sponsored by Nike and Barbie, where Icey-Tea and William Murderface spent some time with their new camp counsellor Barney the Dino-Sore and learned how to be good little boys and girls, and coming out with those Ritalin-Grins plastered all over their faces. Where lyrics about drugs and pimping once stood, they're now writing songs about how Jesus was a white man, and how we should all bow down to the almighty consumer market. God bless America and fuck anyone else who says different.
It's the invasion of the body-snatchers for the new millennium! No. It's invasion of Neo-Baptist Democrats. Ask yourself, which sounds more menacing?

But disregard all that you have read here. Just remember that if you say anything deemed too 'controversial', Tipper and her Pharmasmile Cronies may come a-knocking on your door.

Peace

"Silenced Revolution"

The corrupted government does all that they can
To kill the thoughts and ideas of the free thinking man
It's been like this ever since civilization began
Just like the NRA, and the Ku Klux Klan
Hating and demonstrating against the black man
The individual is silenced, the masses diminished
The freedom fighters are crushed, the revolution is finished
And the meaning of liberty is redefined
We're all assigned a name, rank and serial number
Until the individuals are the ones outnumbered
And the populace is overencumbered
There ain't no free thought any more, it's been replaced by TV
Watching CNN and teenage kids go on killing sprees
Try to imagine a world without organized creed
Where the preacher man's word isn't motivated by greed
And as we sit in our homes and eat our three square meals
And as we watch television with no artistic appeal
I can't help but wonder if the government steal
All of our souls, while they secure their arms deal
And if you choose to ignore this slice of truth that i'm spittin'
That's fine with me, cuz you don't know what you're missing
One day they'll come for you, to exact their final solution
They'll round up all the free thinkers, rewrite the constitution
And exterminate us, through electrocution
The revolution is silenced, the masses diminished
There ain't no hope for us now, we're as good as finished

'What am I, Fucking Noddy?!'